Thom Holwerda Archive

Freespire Tampering with DistroWatch Statistics?

  Submitted by deanlinkous Linspire 141 Comments
DistroWatch has brought to light an apparant fraud by Freespire. "Several readers have emailed us to let us know that Linspire has launched what can only be classified as an attempt to tamper with our page hit ranking statistics by trying to artificially inflate the page hit ranking figures for its new community distribution - Freespire. Upon investigation, it turned out that both linspire.com and nvu.com had been deceivingly redirecting visitors to the Freespire page on DistroWatch and that the default home page of Firefox in the latest build of Freespire had also been set to the same page." A thread on the Freespire forums about this issue is quite heated.
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Open BIOSes for Linux

  Submitted by anonymous Linux 11 Comments
On many systems, a large portion of boot time goes into providing legacy support for MS-DOS. Various projects, including LinuxBIOS and Open Firmware, are trying to replace the proprietary BIOS systems with streamlined pieces of code able to do only what is necessary to get a Linux kernel loaded and running. This article gives a brief overview of the field.
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SkyOS Beta Build 6179 Released

  Submitted by Tomasz Dominikowski SkyOS 32 Comments
The SkyOS team has released build 6179 of SkyOS. Highlights: "Mono 1.1.13.8 and updated MWF (System.Windows.Forms) port; embedded Gecko widget; remote command interface for applications; binary image caching; inital DDK [ed. note: trust me, Robert's making a lot of people happy with this one)." This new build also includes new ports, such as Quake III, Python, SDL with OpenGL support, and much more. You can find details in the changelog.
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Microsoft Hits Vista RC1

Windows 57 Comments
Microsoft's Windows Vista RC 1 is done. Now it's up to the estimated 6 million testers to which the company is planning to release the code to determine if it really is ready for prime time. Microsoft has posted the RC 1 build, Number 5600, on its TechBeta Web sites for select technical beta testers, including TAP partners, on September 1. Microsoft is planning to broaden the beta to include up to six million participants, total, some time next week, according to industry sources. Cnet has a video introduction to Vista RC1. Elsewhere, people are going bonkers over Vista's... Start up sound. Major Tom to ground control?
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Ubuntu Edgy Eft Knot 2 Released

Ubuntu 39 Comments
The Ubuntu team has released the 2nd alpha release en route to Edgy Eft. "The primary changes from Knot 1 have been implementations of feature goals as listed on this page. Common to all variants, we have upgraded Xorg to the 7.1 release. In Ubuntu, GNOME has been updated to 2.16.0 Release Candidate 1. Other notable changes are listed on here. KDE has been updated to 3.5.4. Other notable Kubuntu changes are listed on here."
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Apple Issues New Build of Leopard Preview

macOS 4 Comments
Apple on Thursday evening offered developers testing its next-generation Leopard operating system the first update to the software since it was released privately last month. "This Software Update delivers improved reliability and compatibility for Mac OS X Leopard Developer Preview and is recommended for all users," Apple said of the update, distributed over Leopard's Mac OS X Software Update mechanism.
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Review: Gentoo Linux 2006.1

  Submitted by Valour Gentoo 15 Comments
Another review of Gentoo 2006.1. In one respect, Gentoo Linux 2006.1 is the same as it's always been, except with newer software on the installation media. Beginning with version 2006.0, though, a graphical environment was added to the live CD along with an installation program that rarely worked properly. The good news is, the installer works reasonably well in Gentoo 2006.1; the bad news is, it's still quicker and easier to install by hand via the command line.
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Apple III Chaos

  Submitted by Joshua Coventry Apple 10 Comments
"The Apple III was meant to be Apple's bold entry into the business market; it ended as Apple's first commercial failure and put the company into financial uncertainty. It was also responsible for sprouting both the Lisa and Macintosh projects, efforts that would save Apple."
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AJAX Interoperability Demo for WS-RT/WS-RP

  Submitted by Rachel Zelal Internet 1 Comment
This free interoperability demo introduces users to the simplicity with which the newly converged WS-RT and WS-RP specifications and existent OASIS specification standards will be able to interoperate with each other. It includes an online demonstration hosted on alphaWorks with an AJAX Web service client, a tool for interoperability testing, which sends SOAP messages to a WS-RT/WS-RP Web service.
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How Microsoft is Losing to GNU/Linux

  Submitted by Moulinneuf Linux 90 Comments
It's that time of the year again. "If 'a year of GNU/Linux on the desktop' is defined as a year when GNU/Linux has finally started its steady encroachment to the desktop then 2006 is the year. A lot of users have started using GNU/Linux on their desktops long before, but it is 2006 which marked the two probably biggest GNU/Linux desktop releases to date, Ubuntu Dapper and Novell SuSE 10. It is 2006 which marks the biggest opportunity for GNU/Linux to steal the desktop market share from Windows due to the bad reputation behind the pending Windows Vista release. And the eyes and focus of both the GNU/Linux community and major GNU/Linux corporations such as Novell are fixed on that opportunity. Novell marketing is true: 'Your Linux is ready'."
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Comparing the PowerPC 970 Pricing

  Submitted by rangnar IBM 19 Comments
PPCNUX-Team member Arno found a source that posts prices of the PowerPC970 (G5) CPUs. They conclude that that could not be the reason that there's no Apple machines running on PowerPC anymore. "G5 Quads for everbody! Thanks to IBM's pricing policy, the open-armed Power.org community, and Genesi's sustained commitment to the Power Architecture this could become a truely realistic option in the not-so-far future..."
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Vista’s Transition, Cost Justification

Windows 59 Comments
Two editorials on Vista, from eWeek and Microsoft Watch. The former: "The looming choice for Windows users is either to stick with Windows XP (and older hardware) or take Windows Vista cold turkey. But Microsoft doesn't have to be so tough - Apple did it differently with the Mac OS X rollout." The latter: "How will Microsoft - and its business customers - cost-justify upgrading to Vista in the coming months/years? With Windows Vista, Microsoft needs to please at least two constituencies with very different sets of requirements."
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Mandriva Linux 2007 Beta 3 Released

Mandriva, Mandrake, Lycoris 16 Comments
Improvements: "New 3D desktop support (both with AIGLX and Xgl) and a new tool to configure it (drak3d); new 'One' CD with 3D desktop support (AIGLX and Xgl, both on KDE and GNOME, autodetection of the best 3D solution); new rpmdrake; more applications migrated to XDG menus; GNOME 2.16 RC1; kernel 2.6.17 (based on 2.6.17.8 with ALSA 1.0.12 rc2); KDE 3.5.4; new 'Ia Ora' Mandriva theme (still only included in GNOME); new VPN configuration tool (drakvpn); new firewall." Get it from the mirrors.
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Sun Scraps Low-End ‘Serrano’ Sparc Chip

Oracle and SUN 12 Comments
Sun Microsystems has canceled its lower-end UltraSparc IIIi+ 'Serrano' processor, choosing instead to focus its priorities on alternatives including its more radical 'Niagara' chip family. Sun had planned to introduce the UltraSparc IIIi+ chips in three servers, the V215, V245 and V445, models that likely will be announced at a Sun event Sept. 13. But the company chose to scrap the chip, John Fowler, Sun's executive vice president of systems, said in an interview Thursday.
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The Problem with Threads

General Development 33 Comments
"Concurrent programming is difficult, yet many technologists predict the end of Moore's law will be answered with increasingly parallel computer architectures - multicore or chip multiprocessors. If we hope to achieve continued performance gains, programs must be able to exploit this parallelism. Automatic exploitation of parallelism in sequential programs, through either computer architecture techniques such as dynamic dispatch or automatic parallelization of sequential programs, offers one possible technical solution. However, many researchers agree that these automatic techniques have been pushed to their limits and can exploit only modest parallelism. Thus, programs themselves must become more concurrent."
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Linux Running Out of Steam?

  Submitted by NotParker Linux 33 Comments
Not only is Linux having trouble breaking market share for desktops, server shipments actually grew at a smaller rate than Windows server shipments. "Somewhat surprisingly, Linux seems to be running out of steam a little. After nearly four years of double-digit revenue growth, the Linux server sub-market accounted for only USD1.5 billion in sales in the second quarter of 2006, an increase of only 6.1 percent. IDC didn't say this, but it could be that the mainframe market has saturated itself with Linux and is no longer consuming Linux MIPS like it has for the past several years. Linux server shipments grew 9.7 percent in the quarter, and most of the revenue and shipments were on X86 and X64 servers. Windows-based server shipments increased by 11 percent."
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