David Adams Archive

The popular alternative web browser from Opera Software today reached version 7.20.

A few months back Jag wrote this article on OSNews about my travails in my first encounter with Linux. Now, that Jag has been using it for a while, he has written a new article detailing steps required to convert an out-of-the-box Red Hat 9 system to a working and useful desktop system. Linux veterans will probably not find anything surprising here, but for someone trying Linux for the first time, this should save a significant amount of time and effort.

Pat Volkerding has announced the release of Slackware 9.1 Release Candidate 1. The changelog has all the details.

At the launch of AMD's Athlon 64 processor, the 2GHz 3200+ Athlon XP and the 2.2GHz Athlon 64 FX51, Microsoft is announcing a beta version of its Windows OS for 64 bit processors, called "Windows XP 64-Bit Edition for 64-Bit Extended Systems." It's expected to be available to MSDN subscribers in the first half of 2004.

A Siliconvalley.com article notes that the application of networking technology in the home can be silly and frivilous, but if applied correctly, could really be beneficial. A refrigerator with a flat panel display on it to check your email in the kitchen is truly silly, but a home that can notify the out of town owner that there's been a power failure can prevent that owner from coming home to a fridge full of rotten food.

Within the next 90 days, Red Hat will release Enterprise Linux 3, "an open-source architecture for the enterprise," and an enhanced Red Hat Network with new management features aimed at the Enterprise market's needs.

Within three years, most bank machines that dispense cash will run on the Windows operating system, according to a study published last week.

A ZDNet article has figured out what to do with all that extra processing power that Moore's Law keeps giving us: use brute force to make our computers secure. Encrypting everything, between machines, and also between processes might do the trick. Of course, you can't keep your keys in software, so that's where hardware tricks like "Trusted Computing" come in. So let me get this straight, because we're all afraid of viruses and hackers now, we're going to get back on the processor upgrade treadmill and give up ultimate control over what's on our PC to our motherboard and OS vendors?

New York Times writer David Pogue recently wrote an article about the recent rash of computer viruses in which he stated the old maxim that most viruses target windows because it's the dominant platform. Welcome to the OS Wars, Pogue. In a follow-up column, he notes that he received quite an education on the subject from readers who emailed him in, and notes that he's learned that Unix-based/Unix-like OSes like OSX and Linux are inherently more virus-proof for several reasons.

Doug Englebart worked on a project for Stanford Research Institute to develop a manual method for manipulating data on a computer screen in 1963, with a grant from NASA. He'd been mulling over the idea since 1951. Bill English, who actually built the mouse (out of wood) based on Englebart's design, later moved to Xerox PARC, and refined the invention. It took a long time to catch on. Most people never heard of a computer mouse until Apple debuted the Macintosh in the 80's. And nobody can remember who first called it a "mouse."

FreeBSD Release Engineering team's Scott Long provides a status report for FreeBSD 4.9 and 5.x. He says that FreeBSD 4.9 Release will be pushed back a few weeks until instability reports are tracked down. FreeBSD 5-stable roadmap document received a major overhaul - among the highlights, KSE is progressing extremely well and is no longer a major source of concern for 5-stable. Stability is also at a very good level.

First it was MSN Messenger, now Yahoo Messenger is threatening to lock out 3rd party instant messaging apps like Trillian, Proteus, and Gaim. It's been an ironic and pleasant fact that users of alternative operating systems have had nice, multi-funtional instant messaging applications, while most Windows users didn't even know they could bypass the official clients. That era may be coming to an end, as the big IM services are starting to lock out the 3rd party apps. What will this mean for alternative platforms?

We've been thinking of printing up some OSNews T-shirts. We're going to print up a whole batch of them, and we wanted to get some feedback on what they should look like. Would you be interested in buying a shirt? What would you like it to look like?

Los Alamos National Laboratory has been a long-time supercomputer user, which they primarily use for models used to simulate nuclear explosions and estimate the health of America's aging arsenal. They're about to install one of the world's most powerful Linux clusters, a new 2,816-processor, 1,408 node system called Lightning, built by cluster company Linux Networx. The cluster will be using Mellanox's InfiniBand server interconnect technology to connect the nodes.