Thom Holwerda Archive

Development for SUSE 10.2 is now officially under way with the release of the first alpha in what will probably be a long list of alpha and beta releases. Besides a list of known issues, I can tell you little about the release, so I guess if you want to know what's going on, you'll have to install it.

"Apple extended the courtesy of meeting with me one day after my column on the closing of the OS X x86 kernel source code was published online. To sum up Apple's objections, they felt I had given a year-old story a fresh coat of paint and sensationalized it for an audience that wasn't affected by it. Yet no story is more timely, or more broadly relevant, than this one." Tom Yager, who raised concerns over the closed-source Intel half of the MacOS, details why he was so concerned. "The kernel will open up again, this tempest will fade away, and I'll be glad for it. What will continue to concern me so deeply is that Apple thought it would be OK, that nobody would notice or care." Note: The 2nd link was incorrect, it is fixed now. Excusez-moi.

Microsoft has spelled out its strategy to make its Live Web services accessible to third-party developers, part of its push to capitalize on online services. Microsoft is seeking to enlist third-party developers to write mashup applications, which combine information from different sites.

Kevin Carmony is the president and CEO of Linspire. Kevin kindly agreed to answer a few questions, and talk about his new project: Freespire. "Starting with the Freespire release, yes, anyone can use APT to pull from all our repositories. However, Ubuntu and Debian users would also need to be careful doing that, just like Linspire users need to use caution when pulling from non-Linspire repositories ."

"Using a Limited account during your everyday work gives better protection against malicious software infection and accidental misconfiguration. But installing software or changing some system settings can be difficult in a low privileged environment. The sudoWn project can execute individual programs (or even a whole Windows shell) with temporary Administrator privileges under your user profile. This means you can use a low privileged environment and elevate your rights transitionally for software installation or systemwide configuration comfortably."

It's time for the Windows and Linux communities to drop the religious war and get together in a hurry to put the strengths of each operating system to best use, according to a nationally recognized authority on Windows Server. At the same time, Microsoft has been reaching out to the open-source community to try to find ways to overcome the incompatibilities between software distributed under the GNU General Public License and its own commercial software.

Sometimes, while browsing the net for news, I come accross things I just cannot not post. "Some enterprising Austrian Über-geeks a Telnet stream with, believe it or not, live ASCII footage of matches being played . Simply fire up a command prompt and type 'telnet ascii-wm.net 2006' and you'll find a live 'video' stream from 10 minutes before kick-off (or should that be boot-up?)." I also look forward to the Wimbledon version that resembles Pong.

"Each release of Mac OS X has brought increased support of 'Universal Access' for users with disabilities. Universal Access is Apple's collective name for the Mac OS X technologies, features, and components that provide users with disabilities with access to Macintosh computers. For Mac developers, making applications accessible to this audience is the smart thing to do, and it's easier now than ever before. This article will teach you how to fully implement support for accessibility through the VoiceOver interface in your Carbon application."

Xandros has announced pre-orders for the 4th version of their desktop Linux distribution, excitingly named 'Xandros 4'. The info page reveals little information beyond the usual marketing speak, which claims better wireless support, iPod syncing, NTFS read and write, all the usual suspects. Available 21st June.

Google has released a beta version of Google Earth 4, which runs on all the three major platforms. "We got so excited around here about the first anniversary of Google Earth that we decided to celebrate a bit early. Beginning today, you can download a brand new version, Google Earth 4. Running on OS X? Feel the love. Prefer Linux? Ditto. Yes, we're releasing simultaneously for PC, Mac (universal binary for full performance on both Intel and PowerPC based Macs) and for the first time ever, native support for popular Linux distributions." They have also seriously increased the amount of high-res images, so that now about 20% of the world's landmass is in high-res. Including my hometown, Warmenhuizen .

"There is something fundamentally wrong with the way we create software. Contrary to conventional wisdom, unreliability is not an essential characteristic of complex software programs. In this article, I will propose a silver bullet solution to the software reliability and productivity crisis. The solution will require a radical change in the way we program our computers. I will argue that the main reason that software is so unreliable and so hard to develop has to do with a custom that is as old as the computer: the practice of using the algorithm as the basis of software construction. I will argue further that moving to a signal-based, synchronous software model will not only result in an improvement of several orders of magnitude in productivity, but also in programs that are guaranteed free of defects, regardless of their complexity."

KernelTrap reports on an interesting discussion on the lkml. The specific topic is the legality of the ACX1xx wireless driver, which, according to Andrew Morton, will be included in the next kernel release (2.6.18). Jeff Garzik opened the discussion: "I've never had technical objections to merging this, just AFAIK it had a highly questionable origin, namely being reverse-engineered in a non-clean-room environment that might leave Linux legally vulnerable." Christopher Hellwig posed an interesting point: "Please don't let this reverse engineering idiocy hinder wireless driver adoption, we're already falling far behind OpenBSD who are very successfully reverse engineering lots of wireless chipsets."

Microsoft has taken another step in its effort to bring Windows in the world of supercomputing, having finished development of its computer cluster operating system. It has finalized the code for Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003, which is designed to allow multiple servers to work together to handle high-performance computing (HPC) tasks. Such work, long handled by systems from SGI and Cray, has increasingly been tackled by Linux clusters, though Microsoft has been planning its entry for some time.

BlogBeebe gives an overview of the Internet Tablet OS 2006 Edition Beta and concludes: "I find what Nokia is trying to do with the software intriguing. But it is definately beta software, and from my sampling it is very rough all over. If you've got a Bluetooth headset and services on either Google or Jabber, then you've got more features to explore and possibly use. The thumb keyboard is awful. It's slow, and attempts to bring it up causes other applications (such as the web browser) to crash. And if this is what is being shipped on new 770's, then those new owners are not going to be happy campers."