Thom Holwerda Archive

More information is trickling out about the new Amiga hardware. In an email to Amiga dealers, Bill McEwen, CEO of Amiga, Inc., writes: "As mentioned in the press release we are in the final stages with the design of new hardware and getting them into production. Something that will be different than what happened with the AmigaOne is that we will be purchasing these new machines in the more than 1,000 units per order. This will allow us to get better pricing and quality for all of you. The specs for the sub 500.00 machines will be out on Monday and the more expensive machine the following week. Production will begin soon and they will be ready this summer."

George Ou compares Microsoft Office 2007 to OpenOffice 2.2 in memory and CPU usage using the OOXML and ODF file formats. The conclusion according to Ou: "We can see that the OpenOffice.org ODF XML parser (while vastly improved) is still about 5 times slower than Microsoft's OOXML parser. OpenOffice.org also seems to consume nearly 4 times the amount of RAM to hold the same data. While OpenOffice.org continues to have fewer features than Microsoft Office, it continues to consume far more resources than Microsoft."

"At APC we've been running the Beta 2 edition of Windows Home Server for the past two months and it's acquitted itself surprisingly well - no doubt a reflection on the time this 'server for the rest of us' spent in the Redmond skunkworks. There's still some 'fit and finish' to appear before it hits the Release Candidate milestone around Q3, prior to the platform's debut towards the end of this year - but from what we've seen so far, we'd rate Windows Home Server as one of Microsoft's most polished and most impressive 1.0 releases to date. Here's a walkthrough gallery of screenshots from the Beta 2 build of Windows Home Server." There's also a screenshot gallery for Longhorn Server Beta 3.

"RISC OS is said to be used in set top boxes scattered across the world, and a mobile phone developer reportedly bought up a load of RISC OS 5 kit. But some applications of ROS are much closer to home. Martin Hansen reports on the growing use of RISC OS in the timber frame housing industry."

Despite all the anti-malware roadblocks built into Windows Vista, a senior Microsoft official is lowering the security expectations, warning that viruses, password-stealing Trojans and rootkits will continue to thrive as malware authors adapt to the new operating system. "There is no guarantee that malware can't hijack the elevation process or compromise an elevated application," Russinovich said after providing a blow-by-blow description of how UAC works in tandem with Internet Explorer (with Protected Mode) to limit the damage from malicious files. Even in a standard user world, he stressed that malware can still read all the user's data; can still hide with user-mode rootkits; and can still control which applications (anti-virus scanners) the user can access.

Microsoft plans to make some of the security improvements and features it built into Office 2007 available for Office 2003. Service Pack 3 for Office 2003 will be focused on security, said Joshua Edwards, a technical product manager for Office at Microsoft.