Eugenia Loli Archive

Sun Microsystems launches its annual JavaOne conference with a new determination to reverse its fortune. For all its hype and popularity, Java has made more money in direct software sales for competitors than for the company that invented it. "As Sun Microsystems' chief claim to fame in the software world, Java began seven years ago as a bold assault on the company's sworn enemy, Microsoft." The article is at ZDNews. "At the JavaOne conference in San Francisco this week, Java software makers will attempt to regain ground lost to Microsoft in the emerging market for Web services development tools and technologies." This article also at ZDNews. "Sun Microsystems Inc. is pushing Java further into the Web services realm with a new version of its Java 2 Enterprise Edition under development. In addition, the company will broadly release this week a beta of its next-generation Java virtual machine for handhelds." This article is at ExtremeTech.

"Microsoft Windows XP Embedded offers developers a componentized version of the Windows XP operating system. Developers can pick and choose exactly those components required to fulfill their design requirements, resulting in a reduced footprint that is specifically tailored for their design. This article presents a technical overview of security considerations in the componentized environment offered by Windows XP Embedded." Read the article at MSDN. "A component, the most basic element of a Microsoft Windows XP Embedded configuration, is an indivisible unit of functionality that can be included in an embedded run-time image. The next level of complexity is a macro component, which bundles several individual components. Macro components make it possible for multiple components to be included, or instantiated, in the configuration by instantiating only the macro component." Read the article at MSDN."

"This is Part 1 in a two-part series on system panics. In this column, Michael Lucas talks about how to prepare a FreeBSD system in case of a panic. In the next column, he'll talk about what to do when the worst happens." Read the article at ONLamp.com.

"IBM's first 32-bit version of its advanced PC operating system was released 10 years ago this month. It was better than anything around, yet it failed. Its hopes were pinned on many of the same things we hope today will bring Linux to the forefront. What lessons are to be learned? Will we learn them? A glimpse of a sorry chapter in computing history." Read the editorial at LinuxAndMain.

On March 13, a special report published on News.com site described the revival of an old Microsoft initiative. That News.com report said: "Microsoft is replacing the plumbing of its Windows operating system with technology borrowed from its SQL Server database software. Currently, documents, Web pages, e-mail files, spreadsheets and other information are stored in separate, mostly incompatible software. The new technology will unify storage in a single database built into Windows that's more easily searchable, more reliable, and accessible across corporate networks and the Internet."

ActiveWin got their hands on a beta version of the third service pack for Windows 2000. They report that the update will be released very soon. Here is the bug fix list for the SP3.

"James Gosling, a Sun fellow, is the lead engineer and architect of the Java programming language and platform. Gosling has been involved in distributed computing since his arrival at Sun Microsystems Inc. in 1984. One of his major recent projects has been the Real Time Specification for Java, which became final in November. Before joining Sun, in Palo Alto, Calif., he built a multiprocessor version of Unix, the original Andrew window system and tool kit, and several compilers and mail systems. He earned his bachelor's degree at the University of Calgary and his doctorate at Carnegie Mellon University. He was interviewed by eWeek Technology Editor Peter Coffee." Read the interview at eWeek.

"Microsoft has reshuffled its roadmaps once again, and begun briefing partners and customers to expect an interim upgrade to Windows XP, dubbed XP "SE", in the first quarter of next year. This buys more time for the Longhorn team to complete the complex task of implementing a native database file store, which Jon Honeyball first revealed to the world at The Register here, last August. In January we exclusively confirmed that the native, SQL Server-derived database would go in Longhorn, with the Blackcomb release - originally earmarked for the transition - pushed out to 2004." Read the exclusive report at TheRegister.

"To what extent did alleged pressures from Microsoft Corp. deter PC makers from bundling Linux on desktops and servers? According to Michael Tiemann, chief technology officer at Red Hat Inc., the pressure had a lot to do with the lack of Linux penetration among OEMs." Read the rest of the report at ExtremeTech. Red Hat's claims are similar to Be's.

"In this whitepaper on Linux Scheduler Latency, Clark Williams of Red Hat Inc. compares the performance of two popular ways to improve kernel Linux preemption latency -- the preemption patch pioneered by MontaVista and the low-latency patch pioneered by Ingo Molnar -- and discovers that the best approach might be a combination of both." Read the long article with some benchmarking information at LinuxDevices.

"Sun is railing at Microsoft, but maybe it should be hiring coders rather than lawyers. Sun boss Scott McNealy is an entertaining act, with a nice line in puns. For example, Microsoft's .net becomes ".not", Intel's Itanium is the "Itanic", and IBM's Regatta server is "Regretta". As comedians, Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are not in the same league." Yet another editorial on the web about Sun's lawsuit against Microsoft, this time on CW360. We wrote about this too.

Wil Wheaton is not like most of the rest of the actors. He admits that he is a true geek, running Linux, enjoying programming, playing lots of computer games. Many of you will remember Wil portraying "Wesley Crusher" in "Star Trek: The Next Generation" TV series some years ago. Wil will reprise his role as Wesley in the "Star Trek X: Nemesis" movie, the tenth installment of the Star Trek movies, which is set to be released two days after the second "Lord of the Rings" movie, at the end of this year. In the interview following, Wil talks about his favorite computer games, the computers used on TNG, the future of computing in AI, his favorite Linux distros, PHP and more.

"Microsoft .NET Framework Service Pack 1 provides the latest updates to the .NET Framework. Service Pack 1 is highly recommended for all users of the .NET Framework, including customers of Visual Studio .NET." Download the Service Pack at Microsoft.com. On related news "the Microsoft Visual J# .NET Redistributable Package includes everything you need to run your Visual J# .NET applications on a machine that already has the .NET Framework installed. The Visual J# .NET Redistributable Package is not intended to run applications written with other Java-language development tools. Applications and services built with Visual J# .NET will run only on the .NET Framework; they will not run on any Java virtual machine."

Where did he come from, and what are his plans for 2.4? Marcelo Tosatti opens up to Robert McMillan about the joy, the fear, the challenges, and the rewards of being the Linux kernel maintainer. He also talks about his favorite hack. Stepping into Alan Cox's shoes is no mean feat, even for the most accomplished of hackers, but that is just what a little-known, 18-year-old Brazilian hacker named Marcelo Tosatti did this fall when Linus Torvalds handed over maintenance of the Linux 2.4 kernel tree to Tosatti instead of Cox. According to all parties involved, Cox wanted more time to pursue other projects, and after having maintained the 2.0 and 2.2 trees, it was time for someone else to do the job. Since taking over the job, Tosatti has managed three kernel releases, starting with 2.4.16; has answered, according to one account, close to 700 press queries; and has given the tersest Slashdot interview in history. IBM developerWorks caught up with Tosatti to ask him about his first four months on the job.