Thom Holwerda Archive

"It's no secret that WinFS was a great idea without a killer application. Microsoft had to go to great lengths in their demos and evangelism to get people to picture what would be capable with a WinFS application. Microsoft also had problems recruiting for their 'killer app' because those job openings posted on the WinFS blog were actually first posted on the Microsoft website in February and still unfilled in May. iView's Media Pro application is the perfect killer app for WinFS/SQL Server codename 'Katmai'. It relies heavily on a database for it's features."

The third issue of the quarterly OS2eCS eZine has been released. In this issue: covering the updated JFS/LVM and Lucide; writing NetRexx programs using Java Swing; using the AMD Geode CPU to run OS/2 and eComStation; using a D-Link DFE-690TXD Fast Ethernet cardbus card with eComStation; and more.

Following a beta release on June 9, Nokia has released a highly anticipated Linux operating system update for the 770 Internet Tablet. The Tablet OS 2006 update is now available for download by 770 owners on Nokia's website. The Tablet OS 2006 upgrade apparently completely wipes out all Tablet OS 2005 applications. Specifically, the Nokia 770 upgrade page states, "Installed applications designed for OS 2005 will not be compatible with OS 2006 edition and will not be restored even from backup."

"We are very pleased to announce this release, the first major update to cairo since the original 1.0 release 10 months ago. Compared to cairo 1.0, the 1.2 release doubles the number of supported backends, adding PDF, PostScript & SVG backends to the previous xlib/win32, and image backends."

NeoSmart has a review of the just released Internet Explorer 7 and screenshots to match. The review focuses on the user interface, security, and compatibility of Internet Explorer 7 compared to IE6, Opera, and Firefox. They conclude: "The world of online browsing has finally reached a point where, by-and-large, it doesn't matter what browser a user chooses or how they decide to browse the web, for the most part pages will display the way they should, the users will be secure, and malware needs to find a new venue. This latest build of Internet Explorer 7 only strengthened our opinion."

Callisto, an effort from Eclipse Foundation, which bundles ten projects in order to ease the integration with Eclipse, has been released. "Callisto is about improving the productivity of the developers working on top of Eclipse frameworks by providing a more transparent and predictable development cycle. By releasing 10 projects at the same time, the goal is to eliminate uncertainty about version compatibility and make it easier to incorporate multiple projects into your environment."

CodeWeavers is in early testing with CrossOver Office for Mac now and plans to release a final version of the software in July or August. Wine is a compatibility layer, not a true emulator, so it works with only some Windows programs. Developers at CodeWeavers and others on the open-source Wine effort have to work on each program they want to make compatible.

A computer user is suing Microsoft over the company's Windows Genuine Advantage anti-piracy tool, alleging that it violates laws against spyware. The suit by Los Angeles resident Brian Johnson, filed this week in U.S. District Court in Seattle, seeks class-action status for claims that Microsoft didn't adequately disclose details of the tool when it was delivered to PC users through the company's Automatic Update system.

"Git is the open source revision control software that Linus Torvalds developed to help manage Linux kernel development. You can download it yourself and use it for your own kernel hacking - or for software projects of your own. This article shows you how to get started hacking Linux with the Git tools."

In a mail to the FreeBSD hackers mailing-list, a very detailed request is made from Christian Zander at Nvidia, concerning several missing features in the FreeBSD kernel. In order for Nvidia to provide improved OpenGL performance and SLI support in the future for FreeBSD/i386 and FreeBSD/amd64, several important tasks needs to be completed.

Office 2007 is running late. Microsoft officials acknowledged on June 29 that the company will not meet the October 2006 business-availability target to which it committed in March of 2006. At that time, Microsoft officials said to expect retail availability of Office 2007 to be some time in January 2007, so as to coincide with the Vista launch. But on June 29, Microsoft revised its schedule. Now Microsoft is promising that Office 2007 will be available to volume licensees "by the end of year 2006", with retail availability in "early 2007". This does not stop MS from pondering about Vista's successor, though.

OpenOffice.org 2.0.3 has been released. It contains performance improvements, improved compatibility with Microsoft Office formats, support for Intel MAcs, and much more. Release notes, download page.

"The last time I tried Opera, it was still advertisement supported, and offered me no real reason to choose their ad-free option for the money being asked. A number of people used to feel that Opera's ads were off-topic and more annoying than anything. I should be clear in saying that I support companies with a strong privacy policy using ads should they choose to. I just did not see the value in adding them to a browser that offered very little that other browsers did not. Today, this has changed. Opera is now ad free, and they have added some cool new functionality." On a related note, Microsoft has released the 3rd beta version of IE7 for Windows XP/2003.

Microsoft released a new version of Windows Genuine Advantage Notifications on Tuesday and detailed how to remove the controversial antipiracy software. "Our customers have told us that they were disappointed with their WGA Notifications experience, and we have made an effort to improve that with this update," a Microsoft representative said.