Thom Holwerda Archive

French Lawmakers OK Online Copyright Bill

French lawmakers approved an online copyright bill Tuesday that would require Apple to break open the exclusive format behind its market-leading iTunes music store and iPod players. The draft law - which also sets new penalties for music pirates - would force Apple, Sony, and others to share proprietary copy-protection technologies so that rivals can offer compatible services and players. An analyst expects that Apple is more likely to leave the French market, than to open its format in France. My take: Just buy CDs. They play in every CD player, and have no weird restrictions. In case you forgot, CDs look like this.

An Inside Look at Windows Vista

"The new OS is designed to offer a shiny new user interface, better security, improved data organization and near-instantaneous search. It will be a major gaming platform release because it includes DirectX 10, an upgraded and rebuilt collection of application programming interfaces that, according to Microsoft, will offer six to eight times the graphics performance of DirectX 9.0. We're opening our series of Windows Vista features with a look at the most striking feature of Vista, the 3D desktop and the new Aero interface."

Sun Expands OpenSPARC Program

A month after releasing the architecture specifications and hypervisor APIs for its UltraSPARC T1 processor to the open-source community, Sun is putting out more information on the chip. Sun on March 21 will publish the hardware design for the T1 - formerly codenamed Niagara - and the Solaris operating system simulation specifications for the chip. The move is the latest in the company's OpenSPARC project, designed to enable hardware and software developers to build atop the new chip's architecture. The goal is to build an ecosystem around the processor that will expand the reach of the SPARC platform. In addition, Sun's grid will finally launch this week.

Novell Focuses on Open Sources

Novell will support its NetWare network operating system at least until 2015. However, its focus will be open source. "While not abandoning its current NetWare users, Novell officials on Monday made it clear that the company's focus is on open-source and open-standards computing. Kicking off the annual BrainShare conference at the Salt Palace, Novell Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Jack Messman and others praised how open source and open standards - and Novell products based on them - can help businesses work more efficiently, provide them flexibility and agility and save them money."

Review: Fedora Core 5

Lunapark reviews Fedora Core 5, and concludes: "I would only recommend FC5 to people who do not own Nvidia video cards or do not mind tweaking a lot default settings to get things working. Otherwise stay with what you are using and wait for SUSE 10.1 or Ubuntu’s Dapper. But if you do stick with FC 5 and get past the quirks, it is quite impressive and I am already eagerly awaiting FC 6."

Open Sourcing RISC OS by Stealth

"Of the 344 functions in the Castle Shared C Library, Graham Shaw has so far managed to implement 200 in his alternative module. A hundred of those have been fully tested, and this is after six weeks of development. By Graham's reckoning, his target is to recreate the official SCL's 48 base functions, 185 C library functions, and 111 functions related to 64bit support, the C99 standard and other bits and pieces. The module is an open source affair, but will allow applications to use it without repercussions, such as requiring proprietary program authors to reveal their own source code. Developers can, it's expected, choose to use their own choice of 'stubs' library, as provided by the Castle C/C++ compiler kit, RISCOS Ltd's StubsG or with the GCCSDK."

OpenBSD Asks for Donations; Pre-Order OpenBSD 3.9

OpenBSD has asked for donations: "To fulfill most development goals OpenBSD should be generating about $100K USD. With that amount of money the project can finance 1 large and 4 small hackathons per year. Pay the bills and a part-time developer to mind the shop when Theo isn't around. In an ideal world we would have a sponsor per hackathon and the CD sales would be paying for other expenses." On a very related note, pre-orders for OpenBSD 3.9 are now available.

Building a JNI Universal Application with Xcode

"The Java Native Interface lets developers mix Java code with C or C++ source code. It provides access to platform-specific features that Java does not provide, so that Java applications on Mac OS X can take advantage of the wide range of powerful Apple-only technologies to provide the best possible user experience. Using the JNI, your Java application can access a user's Address Book, make Spotlight queries, take advantage of Core Image and Core Video, and leverage many other rich features unique to Mac OS X. This step-by-step tutorial explains how to use the JNI to integrate Java and C code using a single Xcode project with multiple targets."

Haiku: Where Are We At, Pt II

Studio33 has released part II in its series of articles looking at the current state of Haiku. "In the previous part I talked about the achievements of the Haiku Team since the project was first started, this time I will go deeper into the work that has been done lately and which parts need serious attention in the coming months." Screenshots o'plenty, boys and girls.

If Switching, Timing Is Everything

"Apple have shown some absolutely stellar benchmarks with the Core solo and Core Duo processors outperforming their G4 based predecessors by quite a considerable margin in most areas, heavily vectorised applications are seemingly the only exception. The story is not quite so clear with the G5 based iMac but there is a difference even there. These benchmarks can be considered no doubt as justification for the decision to switch to x86 processors. However, in typical Apple style there is some slight of hand, in particular as regards timing of the switch. Making the transition 6 months early is no mistake, it was absolutely critical to get those benchmarks."

Linux 2.6.16 Released

Linus Torvalds has released Linux 2.6.16 today. "Not a lot of changes since -rc6, but there's various random one-liners here and there (a number of Coverity bugs found, for example), and there are small MIPS and PowerPC updates. It looks like both Fedora and SuSE end up using a kernel that is pretty close to this 2.6.16 release, so let's all hope it's good. Give it a good testing, please."

Reports From PyCON 2006

"Recurring themes at this year's PyCON2006 Python conference, in Dallas, Texas, included quality control techniques for Python, and interoperable content management systems. Guido van Rossum presented some previews of features to be expected in Python 2.5, and Jim Fulton presented the 'State of Zope', with some musings on where to go from here with Zope 2 and Zope 3. Also starring at this conference was the S5 based on the Python docutils package - most of this year's talks were presented with this package, and one of the talks presented the S5 package itself."