Thom Holwerda Archive

Taiwan's parliament has voted to end its dependence on Microsoft software, demanding that the government reduce purchases from the software giant by 25 percent this year. The resolution, passed on Friday, is an attempt by the island's law-making body to end the near monopoly Microsoft has with local government offices, a legislative aide said.

When Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, Micheal Dell was asked what he would do to fix Apple. Dell replied: "What would I do? I'd shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders." Following Friday's news that Apple had surpassed Dell's value of $71.97 billion, Jobs wrote an email to his staff: "Team, it turned out that Michael Dell wasn't perfect at predicting the future. Based on today's stock market close, Apple is worth more than Dell. Stocks go up and down, and things may be different tomorrow, but I thought it was worth a moment of reflection today." Who said capitalism is humourless?

GNU Classpath 0.20 has been released. "New StAX pull parser and SAX-over-StAX driver. Full XMLEncoder implementation. The packages javax.sound.sampled, javax.print.attribute and javax.print.event have been implemented. Lots of new datatransfer, print, swing and swing.text work. Performance improvements in the painting/layout mechanism. Additional 1.5 support, including (separate) generic branch release. SecurityManager cleanups and start of review of all Permission checks. Buildable on cygwin. Fully buildable as 'in-workspace' library-plus-vm inside (native) Eclipse. Real world Free Swing and CORBA example added." There is also a Roadmap paper available.

The Mozilla Corporation has set a March launch date for a version of its Firefox Web browser that will run on Apple's Intel version of Mac OS X. "We are targeting the official release of Firefox for Intel Mac OS X in late March with the Firefox 1.5.0.2 update," Mozilla software engineer Josh Aas told ZDNet. Demand for the browser on Apple's new CPU platform is expected to rocket as the PC vendor last week started selling the first Macs based on CPUs from Intel. However, an unofficial build can be found here.

"One of the biggest issues involved with becoming a web publisher is the question of hosting. With an internet clogged with false hosting review sites, hosting companies trying to rip you off, and hosting companies run by 14 year olds, the majority of web publishers are at the mercy of random chance when it comes to finding a quality host. To solve this huge problem and to grant freedom to all, we have come up with 75 extremely specific steps that will get you up and running with a *nix box (running FreeBSD), along with the most recent versions of Apache, Perl, PHP, and MySQL."

"When that high-profile project just ain't gonna happen, how can you ensure that your head isn't on the chopping block? Matt Heusser provides some practical suggestions for passing on the bad news without just passing the blame."

Dell's Chief Executive Kevin Rollins said on Thursday that he is open to selling computers that run on AMD chips. Dell, the world's biggest manufacturer of personal computers, currently only uses Intel chips, and is Intel's biggest customer. Rollins said that Dell was always open to change: "We want the very best technology for our customers."

The first public draft of GNU General Public License 3.0 will be released at an event at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Monday, and open-source software advocates are hoping that effective provisions for software patents as well as GPL compatibility with other licenses will be prominent in the draft. There is much optimism among those in the free and open-source community that GPL 3.0, the next version of the license that governs much software, including the Linux kernel, will provide a stable licensing environment for the foreseeable future.

For the fourth consecutive year a group of KDE PIM developers followed the gracious invitation of Intevation GmbH to meet at their headquarters in Osnabrueck, Germany on the first weekend in January. As in the past years, the face-time proved very productive especially since everyone felt that with KDE 4 the time for more fundamental changes has come. By the end of the meeting the group had agreed on a vision and initial architecture for a unified, extensible storage service for PIM data and metadata, allowing all applications on the desktop fast and reliable access as well as powerful search capabilities. This service, codenamed 'Akonadi', together with intiatives like Plasma and Solid will form the basis of an exciting KDE 4 experience.

Sun and Oracle have established a new strategic partnership in an attempt to challenge Microsoft with what Oracle CEO Larry Ellison calls 'standards-based systems.' According to Ellison and McNealy, their mutual goal is the production of a complete Java-centric enterprise datacenter architecture that leverages Solaris 10 and Oracle's Fusion middleware. Designed specifically as an alternative to Microsoft's .NET technology stack, the new platform is competitively priced and based on robust frameworks.

"Recently at a Linux show, John Littler saw a preview of a new version of KDE running on a KDE developer's laptop. The interface looked cleaner than before, and apparently there was a whole raft of new stuff under the hood. John recently interviewed KDE developer Aaron J. Seigo about the forthcoming KDE 4 (due in the fall) and also a little about the recent controversy surrounding the porting of KDE to operating systems other than Linux."

"Over the years, RISC OS 4 and 5 have continued to move forward, however separate their paths. Despite reams of column inches covering on-going developments, it would appear that there is no up to date list of all the RISC OS features for either stream; instead details of new releases are strewn across various months old web pages and articles, some of which written in fairly technical and programmer oriented language. Here, we present our best attempt at summing up all the main features for both RISC OS 4.39 and RISC OS 5.09 under one friendly roof, so to speak, for both current users, those new to the platform and those curiously peeking in."