Thom Holwerda Archive

"Customers demanded it and now it's here. Sun is challenging Dell to a Benchmark Brawl. Up for contention are the titles for the server side Java benchmark. Floating point intensive calculation. Power consumption. And the jewel in the crown, price-performance. If Dell accepts, benchmarks will be conducted by a neutral, third-party lab running agreed upon industry-standard benchmarks. Dell has until January 31, 2006 to accept the challenge. Testing to be done using Sun Fire x4100 and X4200 servers and the corresponding Dell Xeon servers that are commercially shipping in volume."

At last week's launch of the first draft for the revised GNU General Public Licence, the Debian project was out in force. Besides Branden Robinson, the Debian Project Leader, Debian members at the meeting included Don Armstrong, Benjamin Mako Hill, Bruce Perens, and several Debian members from the Boston area. In the aftermath of the meeting, a consensus is still emerging, but Debian members seem to regard GPL3 generally favorably, although some have concerns about exact wording and the implications of some parts of the draft.

Genesi is pleased to announce the order period for evaluation systems for the High Density Blade and HDB Chassis is now open. The HDB can be deployed in a variety of configurations. The HDB features one or paired Freescale MPC7447, MPC7447A or MPC7448 PowerPC processor(s) and the Tundra Tsi109 host bridge.

Microsoft is to open up the source code behind its server communication protocols, in an attempt to get the European Commission off its back. The announcement covers the source code behind the communication protocols for Windows Workgroup Server and Windows Desktop. Microsoft already offers 12000 pages of technical documents and 500 hours of free technical support to anyone applying for a license. Companies making software which interacts with Microsoft servers use those licences to make their products work properly with Microsoft ones. Such license-holders will now also get to look at the source code, but will not have the right to publish the code or include it in their own products.

"Generally, file systems are not considered 'sexy'. When a young programmer wants to do something really cool, his or her first thought is generally not 'dude, two words... File system'. However, I am what is politely termed 'different'. I find file systems very interesting and they have seldom been more so than they are right now. Hans Reiser is working on getting Reiser4 integrated into the Linux kernel, the BSDs are working on getting a journaled file system together, and Sun Microsystems just recently released a beta of ZFS into OpenSolaris. This is an excellent time to be me. This article will be on file system design and specifically the new file systems that are just appearing. We will start with the basics, UFS/FFS, and then proceed to our first modern file system, XFS.

"Selling RISC OS to the general public is always going to be difficult; despite some software developements in the last few years, it still lacks features which have long since been ubiquitous on other platforms - especially what might be termed the big three - Windows (more relevantly, WinXP), Mac OS X and Linux. clearly has many problems to overcome before it can really gain any wider appeal. But instead of mentioning those in further detail once again, I'd like to cover a topic I hinted at in a earlier article - a ready to go RISC OS demo."