Thom Holwerda Archive

"ActiveState has announced the end of engineering support for Visual Perl, Visual Python, and Visual XSLT, effective immediately. The plug-ins will not be updated for Visual Studio 2005, and there will be no further maintenance on the Visual Studio 2003- and 2002-compatible versions. Due to the necessary inclusion of Visual Studio integration code in Visual Perl, Visual Python, and Visual XSLT, the plug-ins will not be open-sourced."

DarwinPorts 1.2 has been released. "The DarwinPorts Project's main goal is to provide an easy way to install various open-source software products on the Darwin OS family (OpenDarwin, Mac OS X and Darwin). There are currently about 3038 completed and usable ports, with more being added on a regular basis."

A new study on the major players in the Unix server market has declared IBM the clear customer favorite and brought to light some serious issues with Sun Microsystems' product line. Most alarmingly for Sun, the company appears to have lost its cachet as the dominant Unix player and done so while alienating customers. Sun finished last in almost every one of the Gabriel Consulting Group survey's categories, spanning technology performance, customer satisfaction and software tools.

"Unlike a lot of people, I get very excited when a new beta of Ubuntu/Kubuntu is released. It's amazing how Ubuntu has taken the Linux community by storm over the past couple of years. Finally, Linux is stepping up to be a real contender on the desktop." Here is a first look at Ubuntu, and here at Kubuntu.

The Amanith Framework is a cross-platform (Linux, Win32, MacOS X, FreeBSD and IRIX) open source C++ framework for vector graphics. The new 0.2 release adds support for MacOS X Tiger (XCode 2.2) and implements a new drawboard in OpenVG/SVG style, built on top of OpenGL. Version 0.2 has been released today.

It's been a long, strange trip for the personal computer over 30 years. Ars takes a look back at the comings and goings of players in the PC market, from Altair to Zeta OS, to see how we got where we are today. "When you step back and look at the big picture, the overall dominance of the PC becomes clear. However, this was not always the case, and in fact it wasn't until 1986 that the PC platform first surpassed 50% market share. This was more than a decade after the first personal computer was sold."

The first version of the Mozilla Foundation's Thunderbird was a serviceable e-mail client; the latest version may be a great one. At first, Thunderbird Version 1.0 made a good impression. On a longer acquaintance, however, problems such as poor search functionality and memory leaks tarnished its reputation. Now, with Thunderbird 1.5 Release Candidate Two in hand, the program stands poised to regain its good name and far, far more.

Bob Sutor from IBM, Alan Yates from Microsoft, Bill Sproull from Sun, Peter Quinn, MA CIO, and others sat elbow to elbow in the Massachusetts Senate Reading Room today and answered questions to a crowd of legislators, press and industry representatives about ODF and Microsoft's XML Reference Schema. Here's an unelaborated report of who said what, transcribed in real time as they said it, and a link to the full audio tape as well.

The gospel according to LUA (least-privileged user account) took center stage at Microsoft's Security Summit East here with a pair of Redmond consultants pitching the idea of a well-funded security deployment repository to help developers create applications for non-admin users. The LUA principle, which promotes the use of accounts with fewer access rights than Administrator accounts, has been largely ignored by end users, but if Aaron Margosis and Shelly Bird have their way, code writers will have a central place to get tools and training to create least-privilege applications.

Yonah, a dual-core notebook chip based on a new design, will be released in January, said Keith Kresslin, director of mobile platforms marketing at Intel. It is expected to provide around 68 percent better performance than current Intel notebook chips, which sport one processing core. Computers with Yonah will also be better than PCs today at running many applications at once, he said.

"Charles recently caught up with seasoned Niner, Larry Osterman, an SDE and 20 year Microsoft veteran, and Elliot H Omiya, a Software Architect and audio guru, to dig into the innerworkings of Vista's updated Audio Stack and new user mode API. Much of the guts of Windows audio have been moved up into the land of the user and this has consequences for both Windows audio developers at the API level and for Windows at the general programmability, reliability and stability levels."

"It's all a gush in Sun Microsystems' low-end SPARC server business with code-names flowing toward El Reg at speed. Last week, we brought you the details on Niagara II, and this week we bring you Michigan and Huron. The 1U Michigan box will replace the 1U Erie system and boast twice as much memory support - up to 64GB. Huron will be the 2U replacement for Ontario and also double the memory support, stretching up to 128GB." Sun also released the open-source Java database.

"On the weekend of December 10th and 11th, a small group of nine KDE contributors met in Hamburg to work on quality assurance checks for KDE's code base. This not only covered C++ sourcecode but also other aspects such as checking the state of the API documentation, looking for common errors in KDE's manuals and evaluating the usability of KDE applications. Read on for the full report."

Because of the amount of controversy its review of Aperture received, Ars Technica have posted a follow-up to address some of the issues which were raised by readers. It includes a side-by-side comparison of Apple's RAW importer with those of Capture One Pro and Adobe, which illustrates the difference in quality.