Thom Holwerda Archive

Apple has phased out its 15" PowerBook G4. The PowerPC-based notebook has been removed from the company's online stores in the UK and the US, Europe and Asia-Pacific, even as the first Intel-based 15" MacBook Pro machines began to be delivered to buyers.

John Sculley was instrumental in Apple's rise and fall during the late eighties and early nineties. By 1990, Apple was the largest PC manufacturer in the world, but at the same time, the company was hemorrhaging research money. After a power struggle that started almost as soon as Steve Jobs left the company in 1985, he was deposed in favor of his trusted aid, Michael Spindler. Read more.

"ATI's R5xx line was first released back in October 2005. The initial launch covered the X1800 and X1300 series, with the X1600 series following suit in November. Last month we saw the release of the new X1900 series too. Now, let me count the months from October to February; it is 5 months, right? Well, believe it or not, that's the number of months the new X1000 series is out in the market without Linux support. If you are unfortunate enough to own such a card, all you have is Matthew Tippett's statement in Phoronix."

"This website will provide you with lessons and quality material to learn basics of C language programming in just a few days. All you have to do read trough my lessons. You will notice I'm putting new lessons up every day or two. It would be practical if you had Visual Studio installed on your computer and used it parallel to these lessons, but it isn't neccessary."

"With today's release of the Windows Vista February CTP, Microsoft has publicly passed a key milestone on the road to launching its new operating system. This release of Vista is 'feature-complete', the company says, meaning that all of the fundamental capabilities that Vista will eventually offer are now baked in." Lots of screenshots included, so go ahead and praise halleluja or declare end of days, boys and girls.

"Parallels today announced the availability of Parallels Workstation 2.1 Beta2. In addition to the numerous enhancements and new features included in Parallels Workstation 2.1 Beta1, this upgraded version of Parallels' desktop virtualization solution includes a completely new user interface, faster virtual machine performance, better stability and stronger isolation, more advanced USB support that enables users to access a broader range of popular USB devices like cameras, flash drives and PDAs directly in virtual machines."

"What would happen if the beginning of file systems embedded a driver for accessing the disk? If the driver was in some sort of neutral format (similar to the X Windows drivers), then any OS could access the file system! While this concept was exciting in of itself, it didn't even begin to scratch the surface of what was possible. It wasn't long before I considered the fact that a file system is nothing more than a hierarchical database. There's nothing inherently special about it, so why can't the file system payload be replaced with some sort of other data? As long as the embedded driver can read the format and produce some sort of usable data structure, there's no reason why the concept could be extended for all types of data!"

This is your daily IT Lawsuit News Feeder. Groklaw reports that IBM has subpoenad Microsoft in its enduring legal battle with SCO. IBM is demanding Microsoft delivers all communications between Microsoft and SCO, since June 28th 2002, including conversations Darl McBride may have had with Steve Ballmer. But no worries, that ain't all! IBM, Red Hat, Sun, and Real have filed a complaint with the European Commission because Microsoft unfairly scotches competition. That was your daily IT Lawsuit News Feeder, end transmission.

Times Square has seen the largest Windows error message ever. One of the many machines controlling one of the many electronic billboards crashed, displaying a large DirectX error message. The billboard is two stories high. Adam Gaffin happened to be at Times Square and took some pictures of the world's largest error message.

"Apple special events are nothing new. The company will send out an invitation, rumor sites will post images of the invite, Mac users everywhere will speculate about what's going to happen and what Apple will announce, and on the day of the event, news sites faithfully report on the special event. Apple has just such an event planned for the last day of February, but with a twist: in invitations sent out to journalists, the company says journalists are invited to 'come see some fun new products from Apple' without giving hints as to what they might be."

OliveBSD is a live CD based on OpenBSD 3.8. It uses IceWM as its desktop environment (using ROX-Filer as file manager), and comes with the usual suspects when it comes to software. Firefox, Thunderbird, GIMP, Gaim, Xmms; they require no introduction. There are enough screenshots in there, boys and girls, so enjoy.

ReactOS released news today regarding the project's status, recent confusion and future development. The news item is slightly confusing in itself though, but the the gist is this: there is no code inside the ReactOS SVN repository that has been directly pasted from Windows source code. However, it might be that some people had access to Windows source code and used it as inspiration-- these developers should mark their code as 'dangerous', and these sections will then be audited by a 'clean' person. Currently, 15% has been audited and can be declared 'clean'.

"The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 6.1-BETA2 and FreeBSD 5.5-BETA2. Both FreeBSD 6.1 and FreeBSD 5.5 are meant to be a refinement of their respective branches with few dramatic changes. A lot of bugfixes have been made, some drivers have been updated, and some areas have been tweaked for better performance, etc. but no large changes have been made to the basic architecture." Download from one of the mirrors.

", we reported on a Trojan horse for Mac OS X that is just like the entry for Earth in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy in that it is mostly harmless. A new vulnerability targeted at Apple's home-grown web browser, Safari, is another matter entirely. A German security firm appears to have been the first to discover the Safari flaw, which allows for shell scripts to be executed after clicking a link."