Thom Holwerda Archive

Microsoft's current plan for OpenGL on Windows Vista is to layer OpenGL over Direct3D in order to use OpenGL with a composited desktop to obtain the Aeroglass experience. This means that OpenGL performance will be significantly reduced - perhaps as much as 50%. It would be technically straightforward to provide an OpenGL ICD within the full Aeroglass experience without compromising the stability or the security of the operating system. Layering OpenGL over Direct3D is a policy more than a technical decision.

Researchers from a little-known security software company named Sunbelt Software have seemingly uncovered a criminal identity theft ring of massive proportions. According to one of their employees, Alex Eckelberry, during the course of one of their recent investigations into a particular Spyware application - rumored to be called CoolWebSearch - they've discovered that the personal information of those "infected" was being captured and uploaded to a server.

"The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 6.0-BETA2." A list of mirrors is available here.

Microsoft is planning to reissue the Windows 2000 Service Pack 4 Update rollup that it first launched in late June. While the company did not specify a reason for the planned reissue, a number of Windows 2000 users who have installed the download have complained of a variety of problems, ranging from incompatibility with third-party security applications to network-printing issues.

"One of the new additions of Fedora Core 4 is a natively compiled version of Eclipse. I took it for a spin to see if it is a suitable replacement for 'regular' Eclipse."

Lately, rumours had been popping up that Palm's new Treo 670 would be running Windows Mobile 5 --however, no hard evidence confirming these rumours ever appeared. Until now. This is a major blow to PalmSource. More pictures here. Note that this does not mean the device will ship with Windows Mobile 5 --it just means it can run it.

A new scripting tool targeted by a virus writer will not be part of Windows Vista, the next Windows client release, Microsoft announced Friday. Instead, the software maker is looking at delivering the command-line shell tool, code-named Monad, as part of its next major server operating system release, a Microsoft representative said. That release, code-named Longhorn Server, is due in 2007.

Bart Smaalders of Sun Microsystems has open sourced libmicro, a portable set of microbenchmarks designed to measure performance of basic system calls and library functions. This framework proved invaluable during Solaris 10 development as a way of identifying areas where performance was lagging behind other Operating Systems, as well regressions between Solaris builds. You can join the libmicro discussion at the OpenSolaris forums.

The big themes seem to be networking and minor annoyances, with a secondary focus on iChat and Mail, which always seem to have problems in the first release of a major Mac OS X version. It’s those changes—along with improvements to Tiger’s disk repair tools—that we’ll focus on during this inside look at Mac OS X 10.4.2.

There may not be fireworks. CIOs and IT directors may not be heaping their proprietary software on bonfires and dancing. Even so, the open source revolution is happening right now and will carry the day, said Bill Weinberg, open source architecture specialist and Linux evangelist for OSDL.

The news that Apple is going to switch to Intel processors shook up the computing world. Many users and developers were eager to publish their opinions on the switch. However, one group of people were totally neglected during all this: resellers. Today, we feature an interview with Wim Schermer, first Dutchman to own a Mac (in 1984), and co-founder of one of the biggest Apple retail stores in The Netherlands, MacSupport. We discuss the switch to Intel, and much more.

AppleInsider is reporting that Sony's PlayStation 3 gaming console will support Apple's Mac OS X Tiger operating system. "Sony is expected to offer optional hard drives for the PlayStation 3 with potential memory capacity of 80 or 120 GB. It remains to be decided whether the standard version of the PS3 will come complete with a hard drive. The operating system has also yet to be clarified. The integrated Cell processor will be able to support a variety of operating systems (such as Linux or Apple's Tiger)."

MontaVista Linux claims that is has narrowed the real-time gap for Linux. The embedded Linux maker announced that is has successfully developed native, hard, real-time developments for the Linux kernel.

"RealSoftware's REALBasic 2005 - the popular cross-platform interactive development environment for Mac OS X and Windows - is scheduled to debut for the Linux platform later this month, perhaps as early as the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo in San Francisco. For the past couple of weeks, I've been falling asleep each night to the glow of beta versions of REALBasic 2005 running happily on SUSE Pro 9.3 on my monitor."