Eugenia Loli Archive

"When someone mentions "Microsoft Windows", most experienced computer users have an idea of what the operating system does. Whether it's Windows 95/98, ME, 2000 or XP, Microsoft has managed to maintain an identity for their OS that has translated into a monopoly-sized chunk of the desktop business and home market. Maintaining the look and feel of their desktop OS over several revisions and upgrades, Microsoft has established a standard for most desktop computer users." Read the editorial at LinuxOrbit.

The days of defending Linux momentum in the enterprise may rapidly be coming to a close. Red Hat executive Mark de Visser gets to the heart of the matter with SearchEnterpriseLinux.com, pointing out that moving from a proprietary Unix system to Linux on Intel results in "10x price-performance improvements" in many cases. De Visser covers more in this question-and-answer interview, specifically the inhibitors to Linux adoption in the enterprise, Red Hat's focus on certain vertical markets, customer demands and the maturation of the open-source platform.

Rational's open, industry-standard tools for developers can improve the speed, quality, and predictability of application development on J2EE, .NET, Linux, and other platforms. Rational Software is a founding member of Eclipse and has taken a leadership role in the growth of Eclipse as the Open Source standard. Take a look at the new resource center for Rational software, and what they are creating for the Open Source community.

Real Software announces the availability of REALbasic 5 for Macintosh. This new version builds smaller applications, improves support for Jaguar (including drawers, brushed-metal windows and toolbars), adds new Internet capabilities, better Unicode support and new server development option.

Mono 0.20 has been released, major architectural chunks that were missing, or were mis-implemented have been fixed in this release. Changelog here.

Apple's Safari web browser will soon be equipped with a tabbed browsing feature, the notoriously precise Think Secret has confirmed. New pre-release betas that are being tested include this capability (after activating it from a debug menu), which is one of the most anticipated additions to the upstart browser.

Red Hat is the undisputed commercial leader when it comes to Linux distros. A few years ago more distros were sharing the Linux market/userbase, but these days Red Hat has overcome its competitors in impressions, sales and popularity. Popularity doesn't always mean quality though (look at Windows9x for example), so after our world's first review of Red Hat 8.0 a few months ago, I wanted to check out the new product, Red Hat 8.1, destined to be released sometime in the next one or two months. I downloaded and installed the third beta of 8.1, codenamed Phoebe, and gave it a whirl. We will be featuring a full review when the final version becomes available, but here is a preliminary report on the current status, accompanied by three screenshots. Update: Added one more screenshot.

As reported by KernelTrap, CVS version of the yet to be released GCC 3.4 is reaching parity with ICC on floating point performance according to SPECFP2000. SPECINT still isn't as good however when compared to ICC.

Teenager programmer Wim Cools from the Netherlands released two new screenshots of his upcoming v0.0.3 hobby OS, TriangleOS.

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates recently sat down with The Seattle Times to talk about the company and its future.

Attendees of the Desktop Linux Summit have spent the past two days reveling in the growing number of games, PCs, software applications, and peripherals that are now compatible with the underdog operating system. Designed to spread the word about Linux on the desktop and to teach the almost 550 attendees about the open-source operating system, the show also served as a platform for new product announcements, including several from the show's host, Lindows.com. Read the report at PCWorld.

Andrew from SciTech writes: "SciTech SNAP Graphics now supports 180 different graphic chipsets. With that said we have been hearing that we now support too many different cards. So OSNews faithful, how many graphics cards should we support and which cards should make the cut in the next release?" And to add to this question, which OSes SciTech should add support for?

Redmond's Tim McDonough says Mac lovers have no need to fret over the giant's purchase of the cross-platform franchise from Connectix. Read the interview at BusinessWeek.

"It’s one of those rare situations where Microsoft is David, not Goliath; .NET is a displacement ploy targeted squarely against Java and J2EE, which has gained significant momentum amongst customers since its debut. As in J2EE, .NET applications go through a number of stages between source code and application. These stages are designed to liberate the source code from dependencies on the underlying software platform, although in .NET’s case there are many operating system hooks available when necessary." Read the article at ZDNews.