Thom Holwerda Archive

Everyone's favourite perpetual beta operating system, SkyOS, has introduced a concept of an interesting new feature, whose inspiration came from a feature on the Playstation 3. The feature is kind of like an always-accessible (even during the boot process) version of Front Row, which you can access using a mouse gesture or a shortcut. It then allows you to access and play all your media files. "So whenever you want to quickly listen to music you don't have to open a dedicated music player. Simply enter crossbar, select your song and return to the desktop. Crossbar has been designed to make this as fast and as straight forward as possible." Click read more for a video.

With the recent surge in WebKit adoption, many have stated to question the usefulness of Mozilla's Gecko browsing engine, claiming that WebKit is far superior. Some even go as far as saying that Firefox should ditch Gecko in favour of WebKit. Ars Technica's Ryan Paul explains why that is utter, utter bogus. "From a technical perspective, Gecko is now very solid and no longer lags behind WebKit. A testament to the rate at which Gecko has been improving is its newfound viability in the mobile space, where it was practically considered a nonstarter not too long ago. Mozilla clearly has the resources, developer expertise, and community support to take Gecko anywhere that WebKit can go."

The US patent might be a bit daft, especially when it comes to software, but it does offer some interesting insights into what crazy things the big companies might be working on for future products. One such patent emerged today: Microsoft applied in 2005 (and was granted in 2008) a patent which describes how different windows may be coloured differently, or that they may have different transparency settings. This sounds a bit weird, but it may actually prove to be quite useful.

With all the recent hype surrounding Google's Chrome, it's refreshing to see someone taking a few steps back and looking at the bigger picture. Superlatives were abound about Chrome (I personally really like it), but some people really took it overboard - take TechCrunch for instance: "Chrome is nothing less than a full on desktop operating system that will compete head on with Windows." Seeing my nationality, I know a tulip mania when I see one. So does Ted Dziuba.

Probably one of the most hated parts of Windows are its anti-piracy measures - product activation and Windows Genuine Advantage. While most people acknowledge Microsoft's right to implement these measures, many have also been bitten by the measures' shortcomings, such as server outages or false positives. Microsoft blogger Ed Bott has been monitoring WGA since its inception, and in 2006 and 2007 he didn't give a passing grade to WGA ("a big fat F"). This year, the situation has improved somewhat, earning Microsoft a passing grade - barely.

Late June this year, the MorphOS team released the long-awaited MorphOS 2.0 release. It delivered a lot of needed new features, such as 3D support and a network stack. Despite the long list of new features, criticism was abound, mostly due to the high price (EUR 150), and the fact that it only ran on Pegasos and Efika hardware. Today, the MorphOS team released the first update to 2.0, aptly named MorphOS 2.1. Apart from that, there's news on the Mac Mini port of MorphOS.

Chrome's process model is extremely sophisticated. The default behavior has been examined before, but you can configure Chrome to manage processes differently: one process per web site, or one process per group of connected tabs, or one process for everything. Marc explains how this all works in Google's new browser. Update: 'Read more' fixed - made a reading comprehension boo-boo there.

KDE's Aaron Seigo has published a blog post in which he details how Nepomuk and the semantic desktop can be beneficial to users. He introduces the concepts of "context" and "context switches" - possible states are "writing an OSNews news item", or "posting a blog entry", or "editing your MySpace page". When you switch from one of these contexts to another, it's called a context switch, according to Seigo. "What happens with the rest of the software running on your computer when you switch contexts?" Seigo answers his own question. "Pretty much nothing. At least not automatically."

The next Ubuntu release is already around the corner. Only two more months, and the next tidal wave of brown 2 paragraph reviews will be upon us. PolishLinux decided that they'd be ahead of the pack, by taking a look at what Ubuntu 8.10 looks like right now, and what new features it brings. Of course, many of these features come from upstream, and will find their way into other distributions as well - or are already there.

Over at one of IBM's many developer websites, there's an article on new features of the Korn Shell. "New features of the Korn Shell provide system administrators and management with the ability to monitor, track, record, and audit every command executed by any user of a system. This is different from the normal shell history, and provides detailed information that includes date, time, tty, user, and the command. This information can be stored locally or transmitted in real time to a remote logging system."

With a preview version slated for November 2008 and beta versions as early as 2009, Microsoft's newest DirectX will be here sooner than you think. ExtremeTech's Loyd Case digs deep into DirectX 11 and discusses its new features and how it differs from DX10. While improved graphics are expected out of the new release, DX11 hopes to improve upon crunching complex graphics with the GPU through hardware tessellation, which many people hoped to see in DX10.

Hadoop is a software platform for processing huge amounts of data. It consists of the Hadoop Distributed FileSystem which is capable of storing petabytes of data across thousands of nodes. HDFS ensures that data is always available, even if underlying nodes get corrupted or fail. Hadoop also includes Map/Reduce, a programming model for breaking the data into smaller chunks of work and distributing that work across the nodes in the cluster.

"In 2005, AT&T CEO Ed Whitacre famously told BusinessWeek, "What they would like to do is to use my pipes free. But I ain't going to let them do that... Why should they be allowed to use my pipes?" The story of how the Internet is structured economically is not so much a story about net neutrality, but rather it's a story about how ISPs actually do use AT&T's pipes for free, and about why AT&T actually wants them to do so. These inter-ISP sharing arrangements are known as 'peering' or 'transit', and they are the two mechanisms that underlie the interconnection of networks that form the Internet. In this article, I'll to take a look at the economics of peering of transit in order to give you a better sense of how traffic flows from point A to point B on the Internet, and how it does so mostly without problems, despite the fact that the Internet is a patchwork quilt of networks run by companies, schools, and governments."

"One of the most frequently used Cocoa classes is NSImage which, as the name suggests, is all about displaying and manipulating image data. The imageNamed: method of this class retrieves an image reference for you - provided that you know the name of the image you're after. Many of the images that can be retrieved via the imageNamed: method have well documented names, but there's a lot of stuff in there that's not well-known. It's those images - including some for Windows - that I'll be digging into here. I shall also give you source code to a little utility that uses an entirely different mechanism to retrieve images used by OS X."