David Adams Archive

Amiga.org Interviews Ben Hermans: Status of OS4

Submitted by Kees Witteveen 2003-08-31 Amiga & AROS 17 Comments

Amiga.org has interviewed Ben Hermans of Hyperion Entertainment. Hyperion is responsible for the upcoming release of the new Amiga Operating system, AmigaOS4.Update: The 18th Q&A session with Amiga CTO Fleecy Moss is now available at the AmigaWorld.net portal.

TechTV May Be Sold

Submitted by Anonymous 2003-08-30 Multimedia, AV 52 Comments

According to Leo Laporte of TechTV, Paul Allen (co-founder of Microsoft) is considering selling his technology television channel which he bought it from Ziff-Davis in 2000. Two candidates are Viacom or Sony. Some people who think this is a bad idea have set up a petition at Petition Online.com.

MIcrosoft: Linux = Threat Pictographs

Submitted by Aquiles Cohen 2003-08-30 Humor 63 Comments

On Microsoft's Protect Your PC page, there are some graphical representations of firewalls and virus protection, and the icon that they're using to represent external threats is a familiar-looking curly-cue that Debian GNU/Linux fans might recognize. Coincidence?

Get An MIT Education For Free

David Adams 2003-08-30 In the News 23 Comments

Massachusetts Institute of Technology has made the bold step of offering most of its course information available, at no charge, on the internet for free. Anyone who wants to can now have access to an education (if not a degree) from one of the top schools in the world. The project is called OpenCourseWare and there are more details in a Wired article and at the OpenCourseWare web site.

My Wormy Weekend

David Adams 2003-08-30 Bugs & Viruses 41 Comments

I checked my email this morning. The tally: 80 spams, 65 emails asking me to "See the attached file for details," and 6 legitimate emails. This worm thing is getting ridiculous. Has anyone else noticed a big spike today?

Netcraft: Red Hat Poised to Lose Marketshare

David Adams 2003-08-27 Red Hat 42 Comments

Red Hat is making no secret of the fact that it's trying to focus on revenue-generating enterprise customers, even if that means losing throngs of small users who provide little to no revenue. Many of the largest hosting companies use Red Hat Linux, but as the company changes its focus, that may change, especially if Red Hat is slow to release important patches for non-paying customers, says a Netcraft report.

Mandrake 9.2 RC1

Submitted by William Ashley 2003-08-27 Mandriva, Mandrake, Lycoris 45 Comments

I started rsync'ing a Mandrake 9.2 beta 2 CD this morning and when I went to start the second CD this afternoon, I noticed that the beta 2 CDs were gone and there was a RC1 CD becoming available.

Windows Emulation on Mac Hits Snags

Submitted by Rob Potts 2003-08-27 macOS 82 Comments

Popular Intel-PC emulation software VirtualPC will not run on the G5 Powermacs. Microsoft, the new VirtualPC owner, says that compatability will have to wait until the next full version of the software, a year away. In other news, FWB, the makers of once VirtualPC-rival RealPC, will not be porting their product to Mac OS X. The current management decries the former management's hyping "vaporware" by promising a new version of RealPC.

Secure Programmer: Developing secure programs

David Adams 2003-08-27 General Development 13 Comments

This column explains how to write secure applications; it focuses on the Linux operating system, but many of the principles apply to any system. In today's networked world, software developers must know how to write secure programs, yet this information isn't widely known or taught. This first installment of the Secure programmer column introduces the basic ideas of how to write secure applications and discusses how to identify the security requirements for your specific application. Future installments will focus on different common vulnerabilities and how to prevent them.

Contiki Videos

Submitted by Paul Gallant 2003-08-27 OS News 20 Comments

Contiki is a usable (internet-enabled) OS for Commodore 64 hardware. System requirements for Contiki is about 20K RAM for the base functionality and about 50K for full functionality (desktop icons, web browser, web server, etc.) See the videos of Contiki in action.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 2.95 Beta (Taroon) Review

Submitted by Khoo Boon Kiat 2003-08-27 Red Hat 11 Comments

The latest beta version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, has some useful updates and is significantly more polished than the last beta, according to this review. The review has lots of screenshots.

Macintosh Browser Smackdown at Arstechnica.com

Submitted by Prognathous 2003-08-27 Internet 33 Comments

For an alternative OS to be a viable desktop contender, it must have a good web browser. Mac OS X's biggest stumbling block at its introduction was its limited selection of (slow) web browsers. Things have changed. Now there are more than 9 to choose from. Ars Technica has a head-to-head comparison. Gecko-based browsers stand out in speed and functionality, but look like ports, while Safari earns the top spot for just being well put together. In a similar vein Mac P2P outlines the various P2P options for Mac users.

Jupiter Research: No Longhorn Until 2006

David Adams 2003-08-26 Windows 68 Comments

Jupiter Research analyst Joe Wilcox believes that Microsoft's upcoming major OS release will not be generally available until 2006, a year later than what Microsoft is currently predicting. He believes that the changes planned are too far-sweeping to be rolled out quickly, when you take into account that developers need time to prepare their software.

GEOS for Apple II Officially Available Again

Submitted by Konstantin Meyer 2003-08-26 OS News 35 Comments

The GEOS operating system for the Apple II computer, once very much ahead of its time, has been officially re-released by its current owner, Breadbox Computer, LLC. You can now download it for free. I know it could already be downloaded from several dark corners of the Internet but I thought it might still be worth a note.

SciTech SNAP Graphics for Linux – 2.0-RC1 Released

Submitted by andrewb 2003-08-26 General Development 66 Comments

SciTech SNAP Graphics for Linux is a simple to use, easy to configure alternative to XFree86 Graphics Drivers. This latest release supports 125 graphics cards on multiple Linux distributions with full 2D acceleration and adds support for the latest hardware from ATI.

1st International DotGNU Collaborative Coding Competition

Submitted by Norbert Bollow 2003-08-26 General Development 23 Comments

The DotGNU project is holding an international competition in the area of collaboratively implementing the System.Windows.Forms namespace in the C# class libraries, a GUI framework that will allow developers and end users to run and develop applications on many different platforms, anything from GNU/Linux, MS Windows, OS X to even handhelds. Participants will have a chance of winning one of fifteen monetary prizes totalling US$ 4500. The full anouncement is here.

Apple switching from tcsh to bash

Submitted by Wontz 2003-08-26 macOS 62 Comments

According to MacNN, sources are reporting that the latest developer release of Mac OS X "Panther" has changed its default shell from tcsh to bash. From ISPs using both OSX and Linux, it's kind of good news. It seem that Linux's popularity gives some kind of "prefered shell" status to bash.

PHP 4.3.3 Released

Submitted by Banzai 2003-08-26 General Development 12 Comments

PHP developers have just released PHP 4.3.3. This release fixes a large number of bugs and all users of PHP are urged to upgrade. Full list of fixes can be found in the news file . Read the release announcement here

Report on the Future of Qt

Submitted by John Werner 2003-08-26 Qt 19 Comments

The dot is running a piece on a recent presentation given by Matthias Ettrich, director of Qt development, author of LyX, and founder of KDE, in the annual KDE Developer's Conference in Nove Hardy, Czech Republic. He details what will be new in Qt 4.0, which will be used as a base for the next major version of KDE after 3.2. New features will include much faster startup speed and memory usage as well as a general cleanup of Qt's architecture, including the splitting of GUI and non-GUI related classes in Qt.

Jobs to Speak at Apple Expo in Paris

David Adams 2003-08-26 Apple 17 Comments

Rumors have been flying about new 15" Powerbooks, and now we learn that Steve Jobs will be giving a keynote speech at Apple Expo 2003 in Paris on September 16. Though I'm sure it's being saved for one of Steve's "and one more thing" zingers at the end of the speech, it's pretty likely that new 15" Powerbooks (still with a G4, but with illuminated keyboard) will be released.