Thom Holwerda Archive

"Over the past month, community member 'mmadia' has been re-working the site for his extensive BeOS Boot Floppy/CD Collection. The goal of the site is to provide every combination of necessary boot-time patches, such as the AMD Athlon XP patch, RAM Limiter, IDE replacement drivers, and so forth. The site allows you to choose various options and then it creates a downloadable file with which you can burn onto a CD or write to a floppy diskette."

Not too long ago word came out that Sun was preparing the release of two new workstations, one Opteron and the other UltraSPARC, because it had published manuals and pricing. Now, the machines appear to be officially on sale, even though announcements have not been made yet. First of is the Sun Ultra 40, the bigger and badder brother of the Ultra 20. It can handle up to two dual-core Opteron processors, and 16GB of memory. Secondly, we have the Ultra 45, an UltraSPARC IIIi-based workhorse, holding two UltraSPARC IIIi processors at 1.6Ghz each, also capable of 16GB of RAM.

"We've have always wondered whether a professional card, such as the NVIDIA Quadro FX series, can let us play games with as much ease as its GeForce counterparts. The reason is that most of the games are designed for consumer-end cards, so it makes sense that if the very cards that design the games should be able to play those games as well."

"A conceptual understanding of file systems, especially data structure and related terms, will help you become a successful system administrator. I have seen many new Linux system administrator without any clue about file systems. The conceptual knowledge can be applied to restore file systems in an emergency situation."

The Amanith library is a cross-platform (Linux, Win32, MacOS X, FreeBSD and IRIX) open source C++ framework for vector graphics. The new 0.3 release adds a full SVG 1.2-compliant enhanced alpha compositing layer, supporting all 24 compositing operations (base and extended Porter-Duff) in pure OpenGL. This makes Amanith the first opensource and crossplatform library that supports all of them in hardware (15 of 24 are available also without fragment programs). In addition a full geometry caching system has been introduced to speed up all drawing tasks. Version 0.3 has been released today.

"Today's virtualization barely permits us to disregard what kind of resources we really have inside our servers. Companies like VMware, Microsoft, Xen, etc., are offering solutions to share (although still not in a dynamical way) CPU power, memory, storage and partially networking within a single server (or a cluster). Companies like Citrix, Microsoft, Sun, etc., are offering solutions to share applications within a single server (or a cluster). If you think these technologies could be just refined and nothing else, think again.

"On Wednesday morning, I met with Microsoft co-president Jim Allchin, the man most directly responsible for Windows Vista and Longhorn Server, the company's upcoming client and server operating system releases. Allchin is a soft-spoken, intelligent man with decades of industry experience, the last 15 years of which were spent at Microsoft. I've run into Mr. Allchin at various events throughout the years, but the last time I sat down with him for a one-on-one meeting was in August 2001, when we discussed the then-upcoming release of Windows XP. With Windows Vista on track for a late 2006 release, Allchin hit the road to meet with members of the technical press."

"The buzzwords for the 2006 technology outlook fly thick and fast in nerd circles: high-definition DVD. A la carte TV shows from the Internet. Windows Vista. Most of these goodies will take time to reach the masses. One, however, has already arrived, six months ahead of schedule: Apple Computer's switch to Intel chips for its Macintosh computers."

"This tutorial describes how to install and configure OpenSSH so that it will allow chrooted sessions for users. With this setup, you can give your users shell access without having to fear that they can see your whole system. Your users will be jailed in a specific directory which they will not be able to break out of."

"Recently, there have been a couple of articles on errata making the rounds, the first on Intel, the second on AMD. They both make my head hurt. A lot. No, not the errata, but the explanations, and lack of understanding of some simple concepts. When the first one, Intel, came out, I was teetering on the verge of breaking out the cluestick, but thought the better of it. When the conspiracy theory second article came out, well time to spring into action, two days late as usual."

In a weblog entry, Sun's President Jonathan Schwartz has announced that Sun is looking into applying a dual-license scheme to OpenSolaris-- CDDL and GPL3. "We recognize that diversity and choice are important - which is why we've begun looking at the possibility of releasing Solaris (and potentially the entire Solaris Enterprise System), under dual open source licenses. CDDL (which allows customer IP to safely comingle with Solaris source code) and under the Free Software Foundation's GPL3."

Plan 9 from Bell Labs is still very much alive. They just got an updated website, with easier access to nightly builds. "Plan 9 from Bell Labs is a research system developed at Bell Labs starting in the late 1980s. Its original designers and authors were Ken Thompson, Rob Pike, Dave Presotto, and Phil Winterbottom. They were joined by many others as development continued throughout the 1990s to the present. Plan 9 demonstrates a new and often cleaner way to solve most systems problems. The system as a whole is likely to feel tantalizingly familiar to Unix users but at the same time quite foreign."

"Connect any USB 2.0 device to your notebook and lose more than one hour of battery time: Tom's Hardware Guide's tests of a Windows-based Intel Core Duo mobile processor platform revealed a serious power consumption issue that, according to Intel, is caused by a Microsoft driver bug - a bug that has been known by Microsoft for some time, but kept from the public eye until today."

"In this two-part series, Edd Dumbill examines the various ways forward for HTML that Web authors, browser developers, and standards bodies propose. This series covers the incremental approach embodied by the WHATWG specifications and the radical cleanup of XHTML proposed by the W3C. Additionally, the author gives an overview of the W3C's new Rich Client Activity. Here in Part 2, Edd focuses on the work in process at the W3C to specify the future of Web markup."