Eugenia Loli Archive

Computerworld obtained a recent interim build of Windows Vista, Build 5472, that shows Microsoft is making progress in the areas of performance and installation time, has refined the User Account Control, updated the main Control Panel that manages networking access and settings, included mild design improvement to the Vista Basic video mode, and improved how Media Center works.

The Shared Source Device Emulator is a compressed archive of the source code to the Device Emulator V1.0, buildable using Microsoft Visual Studio 2005. The Device Emulator is a software simulation of an ARM CPU and motherboard, that runs the Windows CE and Windows Mobile operating systems. This source release can be used as an research and experimentation platform: the CPU emulator can be modified or replaced, as can the motherboard, peripheral devices, and emulator UI. If ported to Unix it will make easier the development, debugging and testing of ARM-compiled Qtopia and Linux-based applications for phones/PDAs.

Finally Linux has got full read-write open source NTFS support! Preliminary benchmarks show that the still unoptimized driver already sometimes twice as fast as ext3 and 20-50 faster than the commercial Paragon NTFS. Interestingly Captive NTFS, which uses the native Windows NTFS driver, fails all benchmarks with file loss.

Motorola's Linux-based Rokr E2 mobile phone looks ready to challenge Sony/Ericsson's Walkman phone in the hot emerging market for converged PMP phones (portable media player phones), according to this hands-on review. The phone uses the Chaemeleon API (enhanced Qt, no SDK available).

"In our last test, we tested the four major browsers on Mac OS X (Safari, FireFox, Camino, and OmniWeb). It has since become the most popular article on our site. Since then, there have been several improvements on almost all of the browsers, so we decided to test again." More here. Elsewhere, check a preview of Firefox 2.0 too.

"What is the world's most widely used operating system?" The answer is in an interesting Linux Insider piece about ITRON, 'a Japanese real-time kernel for small-scale embedded systems' that runs on a lot of "mobile phones, digital cameras, CD players and other electronic devices."

Mozilla Firefox 2 Beta 1 has been released. This milestone for developers and testers includes several new features including anti-phishing, browser session restore in case of a crash, support for client-side session and persistent storage, ability to re-open accidentally closed tabs, support for JavaScript 1.7, new Windows installer based on Nullsoft Scriptable Install System, new microsummaries feature for bookmarks, new search plugin manager and better support for previewing and subscribing to web feeds. Screenshots documenting the new features can be found here.

Symbian Limited has just announced a new version of its very widely used operating system for smartphones. The most significant new features in Symbian OS 9.3 are native support for Wi-Fi wireless networking and USB 2.0 on-the-go. It also offers shorter start-up times for phones and key applications as well as improved memory management, resulting in more responsive devices. For the most part, though, Symbian OS 9.3 is an incremental upgrade to the previous version with no major improvements.

The European Commission fined Microsoft 280.5 million euros ($357.3 million) on Wednesday to punish its failure to comply with a landmark 2004 antitrust ruling.

According to APC Magazine: Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 includes the most fully integrated desktop search we’ve seen on any operating system, which is a crowning achievement for Novell.

"Static analysis refers to a method of examining software that allows developers to discover dangerous programming practices, poor use of language features, or potential errors in source code, without actually running the code. If you use Xcode with C or Objective-C, you can gain real quality improvements by understanding the basics of static analysis techniques and by integrating these techniques into your development process. In this article, we show you how to use GCC to help verify C and Objective-C programs."

With its Linux desktop product, Xandros is focusing on short list of features to push Microsoft off the desktop. Microsoft is currently fighting a virtual game of king of the hill with OS competitors attempting to claw their way to the high ground. The latest challenger is Xandros, armed with its Linux-based desktop operating system Xandros Desktop Version 4 Home Edition Premium.

From Microsoft-Watch: "While Microsoft has been touting the Aero Glass interface as one of the main selling points for Windows Vista, there will be another new interface – one for users running Vista on less-powerful systems –too. Microsoft hasn't said much about its final plans for that interface until now. Microsoft has posted some screen shots of the non-Glass theme for Vista, which officials are currently calling the Standard or Basic theme. Vista experts have plenty to say about the Basic theme."

GLS³ is an open source semantic storage solution for GNU/Linux that indexes your data, extracts from it metadata and relevant information, allows you to organize it using queries and tags, an API to allow Developers to integrate searching and organization capabilities in their application, shared schemas between applications through an API, a pseudo file system for backward compatibility, a web interface, As-You-Type searching and more. Check their site for demonstration.