Eugenia Loli Archive

"Mirror, mirror on the wall/ Who's the prettiest suite of them all?" Suddenly it seems, the fierce contests to find the most popular computer `Office suite' ? a combo-pack of softwares to perform common tasks like word processing, spread sheeting, presentation and e-mailing ? are to be replayed all over again, a decade after the first shakeout. Read the article at The Hindu. In other office news, Gobe now sells GobeProductive for a low price, while it seems that the new AppleWorks 6.2.7 is available for purchasing. Update: Native Abiword port for Mac OS X abandoned.

With Opteron now officially set to debut at 1.6 and 1.8 GHz clockspeeds (and no 2 GHz model as initially hoped) discussions have resurfaced as to how well AMD is able to scale the Hammer architecture. 1.8 GHz, after all, is nothing new for the AthlonXP? AMD reached this speed nine months ago with the nuclear-furnace original-model 2200+ and shot nimbly past that speed once AMD revised their .13 micron process and cut their heat dissipation." Read the article at The Inquirer. Athlon64 benchmarks here.

LinuxWorld takes a closer look at the technological considerations behind one of the biggest issues for software-installation: shared libraries. A similar interesting article, a guide to how and why to make incompatible versions of libraries and development tools install in parallel, can be found here.

After six months of bug-fixing and development of new features, SkyOS 3.9.7 is now available to download. There is a new installer, automatic device mounting, VMWare 3/4 support, a media player, SkyKruzer the web browser and more. The OS can be installed on the hard drive or can be used with the ISO "live" CD (29 MB).

MadPenguin features a review of Xandros Desktop accompanied by screenshots.

"C# and Java are both nice languages. They reach similar goals through similar means, although C# adds some syntactical touches to Java, such as the foreach keyword and a more pleasant extends/implements construct. Unfortunately, the improvements are outweighed by the instances of regression. In this article, I'll compare the languages, while trying to avoid dipping to the JVM and CLR level." Read the article at Builder.com. Update: A similar comparison article, about security.

The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce that release 1.6.1 of the NetBSD operating system is now available. NetBSD 1.6.1 is a maintenance release for users of NetBSD 1.6 which provides the following updates relative to 1.6:

It seems that the SMP 1.25 & 1.42 GHz Apple PowerMacs came by default with a NEC USB 2.0 controller and no one knew about it. A Korean site broke the news that while these Macs are currently sold as "USB 1.1", in reality they are USB 2.0-capable, missing only the drivers needed to function as such. Some users claim that these drivers work fine with that NEC chipset, as USB 2.0. Caution: Installation on other Mac models could render the system inoperable.

Novell is to investigate whether it can give customers the option of a Windows kernel for its Netware operating system. Earlier this week the company said it will offer customers the choice between a Netware and Linux kernel for Netware 7, which is due next autumn, but the company also plans to research whether it can offer a Windows kernel option.

The final BlueEyedOS demo CD that we reported recently, is out and about and ready to get downloaded. The CD weighs 106 MB and it requires an XFree86 supported graphics card at 1024x768.

ZDNet's David Coursey talks with Microsoft Research about a new technology that uses simple hand gestures to control a personal computer. The video requires Real or Windows Media.

Sun Microsystems announced another milestone in its x86 computing strategy with support from leading independent software companies for the Sun Solaris 9 OS, x86 Platform Edition. Brooks Automation, Check Point, MatrixOne, RSA Security, and SunGard joined the growing list of Sun iForce(SM) partners such as Sybase supporting Solaris-based x86 platforms.

The open-source project's leader says the unused portion of a $2.3 million grant has been withdrawn due to concerns that it was mainly funding foreign researchers. OpenBSD would have 60 developers flying in from around the world (they bought their own tickets, non-refundable) for a Hackathon May 8 - 20, which is a major part of OpenBSD's development cycle. Follow the discussion here.

"Two of the most critical parts of a kernel are the memory subsystem and the scheduler. This is because they influence the design and affect the performance of almost every other part of the kernel and the OS. That is also why you would want to get them absolutely right and optimize their performance. The Linux kernel is used right from small embedded devices, scaling up to large mainframes. Designing is scheduler is at best a black art." Read the article at LinuxGazette.