Thom Holwerda Archive

Yes, it has been 10 years since Palm Computing launched its first product, the Pilot 1000. The handheld pioneer has had a checkered decade of bad management decisions, botched acquisitions and increasing competition from phone companies. However, Palm said a new relationship with Microsoft, a focus on smart phones and a future of software partnerships have put the company back on track.

While the X86 world hops from one to two processing cores, startup Azul Systems plans to integrate 48 cores on its second-generation Vega chip, expected next year. The first-generation Vega processor it designed has 24 cores but the firm expects to double that level of integration in systems generally available next year with the Vega 2, built on TSMC's 90nm process and squeezing in 812 million transistors. The progress means that Azul's Compute Appliances will offer up to 768-way symmetric multiprocessing.

IsComputerOn (back from some downtime) has previewed the latest ZETA 1.2, still in beta testing, soon to be available to the general public. "Well, this is not the final 1.2 version, but so far my experience with this beta (and the previous ones) has been very pleasant. Stability issues have been (mostly) solved, speed has increased and the overall look has improved as well (the new buttons, tabs, the default decor has been improved too), making this a good experience throughout the beta testing." Many screenshots included, boys and girls. Expect a review of a 1.2 beta on OSNews too, soon.

Fresh on the heels of a delay in broad availability of Windows Vista, Microsoft confirmed late Thursday that it is also pushing the mainstream launch of Office 2007 to next year. As with Vista, Microsoft hopes to finish the code for Office 2007 this year. The company said work will be completed by October, when it will make Office 2007 available to business customers that have signed up for Microsoft's volume-licensing program. And, again like Vista, Microsoft plans to ship retail and original equipment manufacturer versions of the product in January. UPDATE: Microsoft has joined a committee that has a key role in the ratification of the OpenDocument format as an international standard.

"In what must have seemed to many as a bold move, Sun Microsystems last week announced that it would released the source code for its UltraSparc T1 processor under the GPL, supported by a new organization that it calls OpenSPARC.net. But to those that have been around for a while, the announcement had an eerily familiar sound to it, and that sound was the echo of an organization called SPARC International. Formed 18 years ago to license the SPARC chip design to multiple vendors to ensure second sourcing for the hardware vendors that Sun hoped would adopt it, SPARC International seemed to be every bit as revolutionary for its time as Sun's new initiative does today. SPARC International's site, looking very retro and neglected, can still be seen - at least for now."

"See the process of porting the Berkeley curses library from UNIX to eCos, picking up a few fragments of the Berkeley C library extensions along the way - and learn about some general issues of porting from UNIX to eCos."

It was a nice departure last week, to write about not so serious matters, in order to make fun of everything and everyone (including myself). Today, however, it's back to more serious matters (if you can call computer matters 'serious', of course): Amiga OS4. Or how it will fail utterly if Hyperion/Amiga Inc. don't get their heads out of the sand. Note: Sunday Eve Column.

The SkyOS team has released Build 5550 to beta testers. Highlights of this release: improved login and installer including progress bar; MMX/SSE and improved MTRR support which results in better VESA perfomance; Factory (utility used for building/porting software); support for Mono; Apache, APR, VLC, Perl, etc.; VMWare tools service; new Software Store; WebServer service; many improvements for developers; 206 fixed bugs since last beta; and much more.

"In this tutorial I will describe how to set up a highly available NFS server that can be used as storage solution for other high-availability services like, for example, a cluster of web servers that are being loadbalanced. If you have a web server cluster with two or more nodes that serve the same web site(s), than these nodes must access the same pool of data so that every node serves the same data, no matter if the loadbalancer directs the user to node 1 or node n. This can be achieved with an NFS share on an NFS server that all web server nodes (the NFS clients) can access."

The heartland turned vicious this week when an Oklahoma town threatened to call in the FBI because its web site was hacked by Linux maker Cent OS. Problem is CentOS didn't hack Tuttle's web site at all. The city's hosting provider had simply botched a web server. This tale kicked off yesterday when Tuttle's city manager Jerry Taylor fired off an angry message to the CentOS staff. Taylor had popped onto the city's web site and found the standard Apache server configuration boilerplate that appears with a new web server installation. Taylor seemed to confuse this with a potential hack attack on the bustling town's IT infrastructure.

"Recently, Coverity presented their first results in their scanning technology that hunts for defects in source code. One of the addressed projects was Firebird. After Roman Rokytskyy reviewed the results, he concluded the failures are in two areas."

"Get an introduction to the embedded Rich Client Platform. Learn about the various components that make up eRCP and get some examples on how to use them in your applications. The embedded Rich Client Platform came about as a way to bring the advancements of the Eclipse Rich Client Platform and apply it to the embedded space. The eRCP is made up of the following components: Standard Widget Toolkit, eJFace, eWorkbench, and eUpdate. We will discuss each of these components and use code examples where appropriate."

"Free open source software is making slow in-roads into the world of big box retail. This article is the first of a series of two Mad Penguin articles which take a detailed look inside the world of retail as Tux is experiencing it. Today, in Section One Mad Penguin goes shopping to see what can be seen in four retail big box stores in the San Francisco Bay Area, complete with short videos inside some of those stores for the purpose of providing a wee bit of context."

"The 770 is not for everybody. If you want something for practical day-to-day use, you're better off buying a PDA or smart phone. And a word to Nokia: make nice with Microsoft. I would love to be able to run Windows Mobile 2005 on this device in place of your version of Linux. It's both fast and complete. Trying to impress the Linux geek crowd is not a good business plan, nor is trying to shoe-horn Linux onto this type of platform. Using Windows Mobile 2005 would make this a far better, and far more successful, mobile device." And part II, one month later: "Right now, I feel like I've pretty much wasted $380 on the 770. I continue to work with it the hope I'll find some hidden feature or application I've missed so far."