Thom Holwerda Archive

IBM has won a bid to build a supercomputer called Roadrunner that will include not just conventional Opteron chips but also the Cell processor used in the Sony PlayStation. The supercomputer, for the Los Alamos National Laboratory, will be the world's fastest machine and is designed to sustain a performance level of a 'petaflop', or 1 quadrillion calculations per second, said US Senator Pete Domenici earlier this year. I'd like to play Solitaire on that.

UNIX provides hundreds, if not thousands, of commands with which you can manipulate a large variety of resources available in the kernel and user space. Martin Streicher, Editor-in-Chief, Linux Magazine, looks at three essential UNIX utilities that deliver the entire Internet to your command line.

"Is Michael Robertson afraid of anything? The entrepreneur has a made a career - and a fortune - playing rough with giants. Now, though, he's turning up the volume: predicting an end to Apple's hold on digital music, shaking up the Linux community by looking to marry open source smarts with proprietary know-how, and talking trash about Microsoft's new Zune. Pay attention, because this is a guy who finds a way to win every time he mixes it up."

Microsoft announced on Tuesday US prices for Windows Vista, the long-awaited new version of the operating system that sits on more than 90 percent of the world's personal computers. The software maker set the retail price for Vista at between USD 100 and USD 259 for users upgrading from older versions of Windows. The prices range from the basic version of Vista to the top-end 'ultimate' edition. For consumers looking to buy Vista without an upgrade, the products will cost between USD 199 to USD 399, Microsoft said.

Microsoft researchers are experimenting with an automatic code zapper for the company's Internet Explorer Web browser. Researchers at the company have completed work on a prototype framework called BrowserShield that promises to allow IE to intercept and remove, on the fly, malicious code hidden on Web pages, instead showing users safe equivalents of those pages.

A new company called AIseek announced what it describes as the world's first dedicated processor for artificial intelligence. Called the Intia Processor, the AI chip would work in conjunction with optimized titles to improve nonplayer character AI. Similar to the way in which physics accelerators can make a game's environment look much more realistic, Intia would make the NPCs act more true to life. There goes yet another PCI slot.

The Amitlon Kernel Project has released new versions of its software. Amithlon is an emulation-based system allowing users to run AmigaOS 3.9 on regular x86 PC systems, without the overhead of having to load an underlying operating system, unlike WinUAE, UAE, Fellow, or AmigaXL.

German technology website Heise.de reports that SGI will completely abandon its MIPS processor architecture, including its operating system Irix, in favour of Linux-powered Itanium workstations. SGI used MIPS and Irix in its products for almost 20 years, and with this switch to Intel, yet another major (historically speaking, that is) company abandons its architecture for the more common Intel one.

During the past month the official software update sources for VectorLinux suffered from several long time downtime periods. As a result, users were unable to update or install new software. This article explains a possible fix using trusted mirrors.

The HaikuPodcast.com team has made a video entitled "The Introduction to Haiku", in high quality divx or low-quality m4v, to honour Haiku's 5th birthday. Of course you could always install and experience it first hand, but if that's not an option, this video may come in handy.

Marc G. Fournier has launched a new project with the intention to show hardware vendors that there in fact are a lot of BSD users out there. "We are trying to demonstrate to hardware and software vendors out there that BSD should be viewed as a serious operating system, not just as a hobbyist system, for support (i.e. hardware drivers) purposes."

"It is with great delight that I announce the first bulk shipment of free Linux disks from the Free Linux Disk project. This shipment will put Linux into the hands of people from around the world. This would not have been made possible without support from the contributors, the sponsors, and your donations. A huge thank you to everyone that continues to help and make the project a success. I would like to give special thank you to the project contributors. They have shipped over 1000 requests at their expense. They are a tremendous help to the project and their efforts are very much appreciated."

"Can't wait to upgrade your Windows XP machines to Vista? eWEEK Labs tests show that a clean install is the faster, less-problematic, option. While our upgrade experience was fairly good, we recommend that administrators opt instead for a clean install, teamed perhaps with Vista's Windows Easy Transfer utility for carrying over files and settings from the previous install."

RISC OS cannot be saved by simply open sourcing it, said RISCOS Ltd boss Paul Middleton. He added that Castle's wish to open source RISC OS "would have no effect on RISCOS Ltd's products". Paul told subscribers over the weekend: "Making RISC OS open source, or free as some people want, is not the panacea for suddenly taking RISC OS forward. No operating system can be developed solely for free."