Thom Holwerda Archive

CoolTechZone claims that Microsoft has bought Opera. "In a recent conversation with one of our insiders at Microsoft, the source revealed that Microsoft has acquired Opera Software, makers of the Opera browser. The insider reported that both Microsoft and Google were trying to bid on Opera, but in the end, the software maker took the lead. At the moment, the deal is almost through with Microsoft and Opera planning on locations for the browser’s research and development centers throughout the world." Update: Opera has officially denied the rumours (thanks to Nemesis11).

Some five months after Google announced plans to open a product research and development center in China, and said it was appointing former Microsoft vice president Kai-Fu Lee to head the operation, the parties have settled the matter. In a brief statement released late Thursday, Microsoft spokesman Jack Evans said the parties had entered into a private agreement that resolved all issues to their mutual satisfaction.

"I have already written about configuring my FreeBSD IPsec gateway and workstations. In this article I will show how I configured my Windows XP box to use the same gateway. You might ask why I'm writing about Windows XP on a website about FreeBSD? My terse answer is because I can. My realistic answer is because it will help people. It's something I did, with my FreeBSD gateway. I use XP on a regular basis. Use the right tool for the job. Sometimes that's XP. Sometimes it's FreeBSD."

"The ReactOS Team is pleased to announce version 0.2.9 of its operating system, designed to be binary compatible with Windows drivers and applications. This release brings improvements to the network model allowing applications such as firefox to run, significant improvements in Plug and Play support now provide a basic working model able to detect and load drivers, plus many other feature additions and bug fixes. We also now provide vmware player images on our download page. The full changelog can be found here, and screenshots are available here."

Tim Berners-Lee, the man behind HTML, the first web server (running on a NeXT cube), and the first web browser, has started his own weblog. From the first entry: "In 1989 one of the main objectives of the WWW was to be a space for sharing information. It seemed evident that it should be a space in which anyone could be creative, to which anyone could contribute. The first browser was actually a browser/editor, which allowed one to edit any page, and save it back to the web if one had access rights. Strangely enough, the web took off very much as a publishing medium, in which people edited offline. Now in 2005, we have blogs and wikis, and the fact that they are so popular makes me feel I wasn't crazy to think people needed a creative space."

The Cairo vector-based graphics library now has a BeOS port, courtesy of Christian 'biesi' Biesinger. The Cairo library is used in Gecko 1.8 - the engine behind Firefox 1.5 and Seamonkey 1.0 - for SVG and CANVAS tag support, although future plans involve it receiving heavier use for general rendering, and is also receiving increasing use within GTK+, with 2.8 having inital support for it. The availability of this library on BeOS should aid the native porting of GTK+ in the future as well as ensuring that Mozilla products have a future on the platform, and its almost certain to see wider adoption in the future.

eComStation 2.0 beta 1 is available for eCS Software Subscribers. The most significant updates on this beta version are: SNAP/ENT, the special licensed version of SNAP by Serenity is in there, we boot SNAP directly from CD-ROM; bootable JFS, this version is able to install on bootable JFS volumes; ACPI, this version installs and detects ACPI.

The European Commission has threatened to fine Microsoft up to 2m euros a day until it gives rivals more access to its systems. Brussels said the software giant had failed to supply adequate information about its server programs. Microsoft has five weeks to provide improved documentation before the daily penalties are imposed. But the company pledged to contest the EU's "unjustified" demands by whatever means possible. Update: Microsoft contests.

"The current Win32-based Windows UI graphics subsystem, found in Windows XP, has been around for nearly 20 years. It's aging and limited, and as a result, user interface development has been somewhat, well, constrained at best. The Windows Presentation Foundation, which is built on the .NET Framework, provides new techniques for developing applications, and makes better use of current hardware and technologies. In this article, we'll show you 10 of the most significant advances that make WPF superior to its Win32 forebears." In related news, here are shots of Vista server.

Sun has released the 1/06 update for the Solaris 10. You can check out what's new (whatever happened to ye good ol' changelog?) or download it (here I was going to put something about whatever happened to ye good ol' direct download, but nevermind).

Gil Amelio had been on Apple's board for less than a year before he was tapped to be Michael Spindler's successor. As CEO, he would transform Apple from the inside out, and set it up for Steve Jobs's triumphant return. Read an account of Gil Amelio's 500 days as CEO of Apple Computer here.

"QEMU version 0.8.0 is out. New features include: support for ARM Integrator/CP board system emulation; support for MIPS R4K system emulation; initial SMP support on x86 (up to 255 CPUs); many new audio emulation features; initial USB support; new networking options for VLAN support between several QEMU instances." The changelog is here, downloads are here.

Those who hope Sun will open-source all of its software products anytime soon are in for a big disappointment. Sun executives, including president Jonathan Schwartz and John Loiacono, the executive vice president for software, have all repeatedly said that the company intends to open-source its entire software stack over time. However, they have not been specific about the time frame for that, which has left the impression that it is imminent. But Simon Phipps, Sun's chief open-source officer, said in an interview that this process is not going to be rushed and will not happen quickly.

"With a recent flurry of releases and announcements from yellowTAB, I decided that it was time to talk to Bernd Korz about where he hopes to take ZETA. He was kind enough to go through these plans at length with me, and at the same time gave valuable personal insights into the man behind the public face of yellowTAB."