Thom Holwerda – OSnews

Java Dethrones C++ As King of SourceForge

Submitted by carbon-12 2005-11-25 Java 94 Comments

"It's official. Java has taken the top spot away from C++ to become the top language on SourceForge. Mats Henricson points out in his blog that as of yesterday, Java has 16738 projects on SourceForge, compared to the 16731 of C++."

Reducing Firefox’s Memory Use

Submitted by Francis 2005-11-25 Mozilla, Gecko 52 Comments

Many people have complained about Firefox's memory use. Federico Mena-Quintero has a proposal for reducing the amount of memory used to store images, which, in his proof of concept code, "reduced the cumulative memory usage by a factor of 5.5."

Windows: a Family History

Thom Holwerda 2005-11-25 Windows 20 Comments

"Windows has seen many changes in its 20-year career. Here, we look at those versions which have evolved directly from the very first version, see how we got here from there - and what thrilled and chilled along the way."

FSF Keeps Pushing for Microsoft Server Protocols

Thom Holwerda 2005-11-25 Legal 68 Comments

Microsoft argues that revealing its server protocols would violate its intellectual property rights, but the Free Software Foundation Europe believes that the software giant's 'secret' information is just a messy implementation of standard technologies.

The Microsoft Covenant Reexamined

Submitted by Andy Updegrove 2005-11-25 Office 1 Comment

"Last time I compared the Microsoft covenant not to sue implementers of its XML Reference Schema to Sun's commitment in support of ODF, and found Microsoft's commitment to be less effective. But when compared to its previous LML license terms, Microsoft has made a huge jump. Here's how this comparison comes out, and what it all means to someone deciding which alternative to support."

Create Graphics the Smart Way with PHP

Thom Holwerda 2005-11-25 General Development 2 Comments

This article shows how to build an object-oriented graphics layer in PHP. Using object-oriented systems can make building complex graphics much easier than building the graphics using the primitives in the standard PHP library. Plus, you have the option of rendering to any size or type of image you like and the longer-term ability to use the same code to render to different types of media, such as SVG, PDF, Flash, and others.

Interview: Nessus’ Ron Gula

Thom Holwerda 2005-11-24 Privacy, Security 11 Comments

Here is an interview with Ron Gula, to get a glimpse of Tenable's free Nessus 3 vulnerability scanner. The interview discusses license changes, community involvement, daemon security, GPL open-source versus free, and more.

osFree Publishes First Screenshot

Thom Holwerda 2005-11-24 OS/2 58 Comments

The osFree project has published its first screenshot. "osFree is an open source free (non-commercial) software development project. Goals of the projects are to replace all (or most) of OS/2's subsystems with open-source analogues. The base compatibility system is OS/2 Warp 4 (Merlin), but that doesn't mean we won't be supporting features of newer versions of OS/2 like OS/2 WarpServer for e-business and eComStation by Serenity Systems."

Maxell To Offer 300GB Holographic Discs ‘Late 2006’

Thom Holwerda 2005-11-24 Hardware 42 Comments

Maxell will ship its first holographic storage system late next year, the company has pledged. The storage specialist will initially offer a removable system based on 300GB media and capable of transfering data at a rate of 20MBps, Maxell said. However, the company said the technology, designed by InPhase Technologies, is capable of achieving 1.6TB per disk - and that's uncompressed capacity - with a 120MBps bandwidth.

Browser Developers Agree on Common Security Features

Thom Holwerda 2005-11-24 Internet 30 Comments

In a historic agreement, the makers of Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera, and Konqueror have agreed on a common set of security features that will be implemented into future versions of their respective browsers. The developers of the four applications had been in discussion for some time over ways in which they could make browsing safer by making it more obvious to users when a site is trying to pull a fast one on them.

Desktop Linux for Small Business

Submitted by sebFlyte 2005-11-24 Linux 119 Comments

"As desktop Linux becomes ever more professional, and with Microsoft still a year away from shipping its new Vista version of Windows, could now be the time to go open-source on the desktop? Of course, circumstances will vary from company to company, but if you're ready to make the move, there's a good crop of Linux distributions ready to accommodate your needs."

NICTA Embedded OS Framework Released

Submitted by navlrac 2005-11-24 OS News 2 Comments

Iguana and NICTA::Pistachio-embedded (yes, the two together), a new open-source operating system for mobile phones and embedded devices has been released by the ERTOS group of NICTA and adopted by Qualcomm for some of their phones. Iguana is a small and secure OS which runs on top of the L4 microkernel. It also runs Linux as an application alongside trusted programs, giving backward compatibility with legacy software. The system currently works on ARM, x86, and MIPS64.

AROS for PPC, AmigaOS-68k, More

Thom Holwerda 2005-11-23 Amiga & AROS 17 Comments

AROS has seen a lot of under-the-hood work lately. Firstly, Joe Fenton has been able to run AROS PPC on his iMac using Fedora Core 4. Joe and Markuss Weiss are working hard on them, in order to give us a PPC version of AROS. Secondly, Bernd Roesch has compiled an AmigaOS-68k hosted version of AROS called AfA (AROS for AmigaOS): "AfA OS is a way to use AROS source without changes and compile them on every AmigaOS based operating system. It can run and be build hosted on every AmigaOS compatible system and provides a compatible API to all systems."

Fedora Core 5 Test 1 Released

Thom Holwerda 2005-11-23 Fedora Core 109 Comments

"The Fedora Project announces the first release of the Fedora Core 5 development cycle, available for the i386, x86_64, and PPC/PPC64 architectures." This first test release includes modular Xorg, GNOME 2.12, KDE 3.4.92, a Xen 3.0 snapshot, better OSS Java support, and much more. Download torrents here, .iso's here. Update: here are a few first impressions on this release, screenshots.

Microsoft Releases Vista Build 5259 to Vendors, Testers

Submitted by mcduck 2005-11-23 Windows 67 Comments

Microsoft has released a new build of Windows Vista to Vendors and Beta Testers. The build is 5259, and was compiled on November 17 2005. Screenshots of 5259 started appearing on forums yesterday (more here). 5259 contains new versions of Media Center, Internet Explorer 7 and Windows Media Player 11, but little new when it comes to GUI. Microsoft Antispyware has also been fully integrated in this build. There is more on Vista's new fonts here, and more on TCP/IP here. Update: more, high-res this time, screenshots here.

Preview of Visopsys OS 0.6 Is Online

Submitted by Andy McLaughlin 2005-11-23 OS News 22 Comments

There's now a preview release of Visopsys 0.6 online at the Visopsys website. This upcoming version will introduce an array of new features that have been in development over the past year. As always, you can demo this hobby OS from a floppy disk or live CD image. See the changelog for details, and you can download here. Update: screenshots.

The Reasons Behind My Love for the iBook

Submitted by Berislav 2005-11-23 Apple 68 Comments

"In this article I will try to share my experience with the best piece of hardware I ever used - a 12.1-inch iBook G4. I focused the article on giving my comments on different aspects of the iBook - software, hardware and the overall appearance. The article is accompanied by screenshots, photos and a small video."

Low Prices, Windows Capture Server Market

Thom Holwerda 2005-11-23 Windows 18 Comments

Microsoft Windows captured the lead for the first time in server operating systems during the third quarter, boosted by continued demand for inexpensive servers selling for less than $25000 (EUR 21190), according to a new report.

Linux User’s Perspective on Installing FreeBSD 6.0

Submitted by Dhanesh 2005-11-23 FreeBSD 48 Comments

"I have been a Linux user way back from the first time I was introduced to an alternate OS than windows. Even though I was aware of other Unixes like FreeBSD and Solaris, I hadn't come around to installing them on my machine. Two days back, things changed when I downloaded the latest FreeBSD version 6.0 from their official website."

Microsoft Covenant Not to Sue Misses by a Mile

Submitted by Andy Updegrove 2005-11-23 Office 35 Comments

"Microsoft dropped a bomb on ODF with its Ecma announcement. Today, it just bombed with the release of its promised 'covenant not to sue,' which it publicly posted just a few minutes ago. I was able to get an advance copy and do a line-by-line legal analysis, as well as a direct comparison to the covenant Sun gave to OASIS in support of ODF. There's no comparison."

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