Thom Holwerda Archive

Apple Computer on Tuesday released Mac OS X 10.4.7, a maintenance and security update to its Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger operating system. The update is recommended for all users and includes general operating system fixes, as well as specific fixes for applications and technologies.

Marvell Technology Group and Intel Corporation have signed an agreement for Intel to sell its communications and application processor business to Marvell for a purchase price of USD 600 million plus the assumption by Marvell of certain liabilities. Intel's communications and application processor business develops and sells processors for handheld devices including smartphones and PDAs.

"When DirectX 10 rocks your PC with the release of Windows Vista early next year, it will come courtesy of a trio of forces: The graphics card companies obviously play a huge role, as do the game developers, but DirectX is Microsoft's baby. Ultimately it is up to Microsoft engineers to work together with IHVs and game developers to define the API. We managed to sneak some time into the busy schedules of two key Microsofties to find out what makes DX10 tick, and why they think you're going to want to migrate to a DX10-capable computer for the best experience the PC has to offer."

The European Commission is ready to impose a fine of 2m Euros ($2.5m; £1.4m) a day on Microsoft. The Commission is expected to rule that Microsoft has failed to fully implement its 2004 antitrust decision. Under the ruling, Microsoft had to supply rivals with information about its Windows operating system.

CNN made a top 10 list of people who do not matter anymore in the tech industry. Among them, Steve Ballmer, Linus Torvalds, Jonathan Schwartz, Rob Malda from Slashdot, and Ken Kutaragi (responsible for the Playstation). This list is actually a by-product from their top 50 list of people who do matter; which containts, among others, Steve Jobs.

Microsoft Australia will try to prod businesses into upgrading to its planned Windows Vista and Office 2007 products with a set of sweetheart loan deals. The loans will come from the Microsoft Financing operation, which kicked off in Australia in March and offers credit for technology upgrades that include services, hardware and Microsoft software. The aim of the loan products would be to make it easier to tempt businesses into buying the new operating system and Office upgrade along with the hardware necessary to run it.

IBM Rational Team API is a unified, client-side Java API for ClearCase, ClearQuest, and Requisite Pro. In order to use this Eclipse based API, customers must have installed Version 7.0.0 of Rational ClearQuest client, ClearCase Web server, or RequistePro client.

Paul Thurrot, Microsoft Apple Microsoft supporter, reviews the new Vista build: "Little more than a month after issuing a bug-laden Windows Vista Beta 2, Microsoft has shipped its first post-Beta 2 interim build of the next Windows and it makes up a lot of lost ground. Indeed, it's hard not to view this build and not believe that Microsoft is absolutely back on track." Another reviewer also states that performance has increased since the previous build.

Server makers are lining up a host of new and enhanced systems armed with Intel's new 'Woodcrest' Xeon processor, a chip built on a new architecture that promises better performance coupled with greater energy efficiency. Intel initially said the Xeon 5100 family - based on Intel's new Core microarchitecture - would be released in the third quarter. However, earlier this month the giant chip maker pushed up the date to June 26 in an attempt to take back momentum from rival AMD. Ars' Hannibal gives his view on the new processors.

Sun today released Solaris 10 6/06, which provides a host of improvements; most notably, this is the first release to support ZFS. Download it from Sun's Solaris website. A short summary of the new features is also available. Other new features besides ZFS: UDP and TCP/IP improvements, PCI Express support on x86 (including hotplugging), predictive self healing for x64 systems, and much more.

30 student development teams from seven countries converged on Microsoft's campus June 23-25, to compete in the third annual Windows Embedded Student ChallengE based on the theme, "Preserving, protecting, and enhancing the environment." Five winning teams collectively were awarded $24000 in cash. The entries included some clever ideas (listed in the article).

"Ruby on Rails is an open source Web framework causing a lot of excitement among Web developers. By supporting agile development techniques and a philosophy of "convention over configuration," it has enabled many developers to radically reduce the time and pain involved in creating Web applications. Because Rails emerged from the open source world, until recently you had to use MySQL or PostgreSQL to work with it. Now that IBM has released a DB2 adapter for Rails, it's possible to write efficient Web applications on top of your existing DB2 database investment. This article highlights some of the things that makes Rails exceptional, explains how to get going with Rails and DB2, and leads you through your first Web application in Rails."

"If you are a Cocoa developer, you already know that the dynamic nature of Objective-C and Cocoa is what makes them so flexible and powerful. In terms of development tools, the power of a dynamic object-oriented environment like Cocoa translates into original tools like Interface Builder or F-Script, an open source project that is presented in this article. F-Script is an integrated set of tools that makes it possible to interactively explore and manipulate Cocoa objects as well as script them using new high-level programming techniques. This article shows you how to use some of its most impressive features and demonstrates how it can be a useful addition to your developer toolkit."

User are realizing that applications such as business intelligence, specialized workflow systems and even traditional customer relationship management applications will not be necessary in the future as organizations tie into 'people-ready' business solutions, according to Microsoft.