Thom Holwerda Archive

Coming January, Windows 7 will make its big debut in the form of the first public beta release. However, just as with any other pre-final Windows build, it has already been leaked onto various torrent websites, and Paul Thurrot, everyone's favourite Microsoft zealot , has written a review of this new beta. He concludes: "In use, Windows 7 is fairly unexceptional in the sense that, yes, it has some nice improvements over Windows Vista, but, no, none of them are particularly major changes. In this sense, Windows 7 is much like your typical Microsoft Office release, a nicely tweaked version of the previous release. (Cue the obvious Steven Sinofsky anecdote here, I guess.) That said, Windows Vista is clearly in need of a spit-shine, not to mention a public execution, and Windows 7 will provide Microsoft with a way to do both."

A long time ago, when Windows was busy crashing into walls, when the Mac OS was running around naked in the woods looking for someone to protect its memory, and when Linux was frantically jumping up and down with a lollipop in its mouth, we were blessed with the BeOS. It was new, free of legacy nonsense, fast, and designed from the ground-up to make sense (which it didn't, but at least they tried). It could do all sorts of fancy stuff that the other operating systems could only dream of, but at the same time, trivial things like actually getting networking and the internet to work brought it to its knees. Sadly, it didn't make it because Windows and the Mac OS were bullying BeOS, and of course it didn't help that BeOS' parents didn't really know anything about the real world either. The community around BeOS, however, never really died out, and the central hub, BeBits, weathered all storms. It found a new owner today.

Windows PowerShell, Microsoft's extensible command-line shell and associated scripting language, has seen a new release. The PowerShell team announced the third CTP for PowerShell v2.0 on the project's blog. "This release brings, among other things, performance improvements ... things will be faster/more efficient than before. PowerShell remoting now allows implicit remoting where command execution appears to be local even though they are remote. We have added over 60 new cmdlets in this release ... cmdlets for adding/removing/renaming computers, cmdlets for event logs, cmdlets for WS-Man functionality and even a WS-Man provider. The 'graphical' host, Windows PowerShell ISE, now supports a graphical debugger, context sensitive F1 help and a programmable interface for you to party on." You may get the new release from Microsoft's download page.

Large multinational software companies like Apple, Microsoft, and Google, rarely - if ever - initiate patent infringement lawsuits against other software companies, probably because they themselves infringe on lots of patents too. However, they do get sued themselves by smaller companies. Even though the Christian part of the world is all about forgiveness and love and pink ponies during the holidays (or, at least, they ought to be), Apple, Google, and Microsoft have been struck by a patent infringement lawsuit started by Cygnus Systems.

"The Ruby web development community got a big surprise Tuesday when the programmers behind the Rails and Merb projects announced plans to join forces. Merb will be folded into Rails 3, the next major version of the open source web framework. This unexpected union will put an end to the rivalry between the two projects." If that doesn't make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside during Christmas, I don't know what will.

Last week, Phoronix' annual Linux Graphics Survey ended. There were over 14000 submissions this year to the eleven questions they asked pertaining to X.Org, Linux desktop usage, and graphics hardware. In this article are all of the results from this year's survey.

The creation and management of user-space processes in Linux have many principles in common with UNIX but also include several unique optimizations specific to Linux. Here, review the life cycle of Linux processes and explore the kernel internals for user process creation, memory management, scheduling, and death.

The legal back-and-forth between PsyStar and Apple is slowly but surely moving into the twilight zone. Not too long ago we had Apple going all black helicopter on PsyStar claiming people and/or companies other than PsyStar are involved in the clone maker's unlawful practices, even though Apple could so far not name any of them because, well, they don't know who they are yet. If that wasn't enough, PsyStar now claims that Apple's copyright on Mac OS X is invalid.

As part of its initiative to improve the usability of the Linux desktop, Canonical has made a proposal for a desktop notification system for both GNOME and KDE. Mark Shuttleworth announced the proposal on his blog earlier this week. The mockup video shows notification more or less like the 3d party Growl system for Mac OS X. Since we are talking Linux here, the meat is in the implementation details and cross-desktop compatibility.

Windows Vista has been out and about for a while now, and it has already been updated with a service pack, with a second service pack on its way. Vista's successor, Windows 7, is also getting closer and closer to release, but despite all that, Windows XP is still going strong, and demand for the operating system remains high. Because of that, Microsoft has yet again extended Windows XP's lifetime for OEMs and resellers.

The MorphOS development team is proud to announce the public release of MorphOS 2.2, a free update for users of MorphOS 2.1 and 2.0. In addition to numerous bug fixes, MorphOS 2.2 includes additional optimizations and new features such as Kryptos, a disk encryption suite.

A new version of MikeOS has been released. MikeOS is aiming to be the best documented hobby OS project; three Handbooks explain how to run the OS, write software for it and modify the internals, providing an easy entry point for those interested in OS development.

There's an interesting article over at FreeSoftwareMagazine.com about what you can do with the free time the coming holidays will likely present you with. This being an article at the Free Software Magazine, it focusses mainly on - you guessed it - Free software. The suggestions are interesting, but we have a few of our own to add.

Most of the attention has been going to Microsoft and its Internet Explorer web browser for having a severe zero-day security hole fixed, but Microsoft wasn't the only one hastily fixing its browser. Both Mozilla as well as Opera had to issue quick patches to fix several security flaws in their browsers.