Archive
With the release of Solaris 10, Sun Microsystems is attempting to revive some of the strength that the Solaris name once carried in the world of unix workstations and servers. At one point, Sun was the dominant name in commercial unix hardware and software. Then came the crash of the dot-com marketplace, so many of whom had heavy investment into Sun in both the hardware & software market.
Guest post by Greg Cornell
2005-05-10
Hardware
Updated - Microsoft has officially released the new 64 bit version of windows. This has been available in Beta for well over a year to allow software and hardware manufacturers to be ready for the release.
I have written an
editorial/analysis about the spatial metaphor and surrounding debate. My perspective is one I've not seen represented much in the debate so far.
When I read the article on Slashdot & OSNews that Linare was putting out a sub-$500 notebook, I immediately jumped on the deal. I purchased a laptop directly from Linare in early February. Their site stated that I would receive the laptop in 2-4 weeks. I waited in anticipation.
Ubuntu Down Under (UDU) was the third Ubuntu conference and was held in Sydney, Australia. The first was held in Oxford, United Kingdom and the second one in Barcelona, Spain. The conference went for a whole week, starting on Monday 25th of April.
PC-BSD is a new FreeBSD 5.3 distribution, with a graphical installer and KDE 3.4 as its desktop. A new beta version was just released, and though I can't say I have much experience with FreeBSD, or any *BSD for that matter, I was curious enough to try it. And I'm glad I did. From a desktop user's point of view, completely oblivious to the many virtues and sound foundation of all things BSD, all I really ever wanted was an OS that is solid, easy to install and, well ... fun to work with.
So, with WinHEC coming to a close, the biggest talk was of course the newest release of Microsoft (R) Windows (R) Codename Longhorn, now at build 5048. With nearly one year since the previous release (build 4074) build 5048 sports some new features and lacks some others. Recently, the talk was centered around the lack of WinFS, the new futuristic Windows File system. However, we'll get to all that a little later.
In this article I take a look at Fedora Core 4 Test 2. This review is only intended to preview the change from Fedora Core 3.
What can we do to make the Windows desktop GUI more efficient? I admit that I'm addicted to "tweaking", which is what I consider to be finding new ways to make myself most efficient with standard tools from Microsoft.
Wow! With Solaris 10, Sun Microsystems has done a marvelous job of bringing Solaris fully into the x86 world. Gone are the days when Solaris only runs on Sun hardware or when it only runs well on Sun hardware. Solaris 10 comes with greatly expanded off-the-shelf x86 hardware compatibility and a license that is hard to beat. It's a binary right to use and Open Solaris, the open source version is soon to come. IT Managers that have been wanting to bring a stable, scalable Operating Environment into their network infrastructures, but who have been unwilling to commit to the Sun hardware platform, for various reasons, are now free, pun intended, to bring Solaris on board and to run it on the hardware of their choice.
This could be a decisive moment for the software market. Microsoft's big cash cow is the Windows/Office combo. If you look through the company's
financial reports, you'll see that profits come mainly from Windows and Office. This means that Windows sales support the existence of other products and services. An unexpected drop in demand of Windows could cause a domino effect. At the moment this seems highly improbable because Windows desktop market share is over 90%, even though there is an increasing interest in MacOS X and Linux.
Welcome back to another issue of my reviews of Linux distributions. Not really surprisingly, this time I decided to take a close look at the second version of the most popular Debian offshoot,
Ubuntu Linux. Ubuntu's performance probably was the biggest surprise that 2004 had in store for Linux users. Just 9 months ago, almost noone even knew that there was a new project underway, but then things went really fast: after a preview version in mid-September,
Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, released version 4.10 in October. Being based on Debian, Ubuntu has a solid base and, despite not being supported officially, all the (18.000) Debian packages available. Ubuntu 4.10 proved to be a decent operating system (especially for a first try) and had overall pretty positive reviews
(here's mine).
This is a response to the
previous article on global menubars and why they are the preferred way to present menus as opposed to attaching them to floating windows.
What's the best way to: a. Improve usability in software applications? b. Review usability of existing software? c. Generate, encourage and review new ideas on software UI design? d. Make all this research work freely available to everyone (open source, proprietary, etc.)? e. Connect with all developer groups and individuals out there to share this work with them? Read more to find out.
I have written (and continue to write) an application called
Desktop Manager for OS X. It provides virtual desktops to those refugees from Unix like myself :). Recently it became apparent that it would no longer work under Apple's forthcoming Tiger release of OS X. This proved a little bit of a problem for me since I have no copy of Tiger to test with and don't wish to risk Apple's wrath by obtaining a less-than-legitimate copy. Instead I have relied on a network of people I correspond with via my
blog to tell me when things break. It also means I have to attempt to reverse engineer something I don't have in front of me. I am indebted to these people and would like to thank them for their hard work.
We today face the risk of software patents being approved in the EU because not enough parliamentary members will be showing up to vote. Due to this it is important for those of us who oppose software patents to make sure EU parliament members see the damage software patents cause, so they realize it is important to be there to vote providing the needed absolute majority. But sending out a clear message is also important for the process of patent reform in the US and other places who have fallen into the trap of introducing them.
Guest post by Steve [no more info was sent]
2005-04-17
Graphics
I've always found Global menu bars (ala Mac) to be bad usability-wise. They have numerous problems. I've always found that having a single menu bar at the top of the screen as Macs are both confusing and inefficient. Menu bars like that are leftovers from when Mac OS was primarily a single process operating system, and it should have been ditched long ago.
Chesky records, a small record label, produces what is called audiophile friendly music. To learn how to create music with this high detail and how to play it right, just read some of their
articles. There is a lot of talk there on tube amps and stereo mics and horn speakers etc. Forget the high-end gear, there is one complete article on how to set up your
power supply for best audio experience. But mere mortals like us listen to the music on our PCs. Though it does not even begin to compare with all that exotic gear out there, it can be set up to deliver a surprisinlgy good quality sound.
This is a report on the third and final day of USENIX 2005. You might want to start at my report on
Day one and then move to
Day two. Day three of USENIX 2005 has come and is now almost gone. When you get to a conference, it always seems like the days will stretch on forever. Then before you know it, everything is all over and you are on your way home. Its kind of like summer camp, I guess.
Some Trolltech programmers are doing some
optimization work in the x.org RENDER extension. RENDER has been used with COMPOSITE to make "transparency" and "shadow" effects, and its slowness has stopped it from being widely adopted. Hopefully, this optimization work will make things better, although it's not clear in the email if this addresses the "XAA sucks, someone needs to take KAA to x.org" problem which is often said to be the real problem of render slowness. RENDER is also often used to do more things, like AA fonts, so this will be good for X desktop
in general.
