Thom Holwerda Archive

Various bits of news from the AmiZilla front. "Firstly, oli has finished his GTK->MUI AROS Bounty. Also, OS4 people have ported the the GTK->MUI emulation layer from AmigaOS3.1 to AmigaOS4." Other than that, the AmiZilla project will be recieving help from a group of students from King's College (London) as part of their practical coursework. "AmiZilla has been split up into individual projects for them- as we have five students, we have added in creating a GTK->Reaction layer to AmigaOS4, and maybe porting AmiZilla to MorphOS and AROS, as well as the AmigaOS 3.1 target."

"With the recent introduction of dual-core processors come more questions about system performance. Does a dual-core computer really perform better than a single-core CPU? How does it compare to a true multi-CPU system? What about Hyper-Threading Technology -- is it a thing of the past? Read on for an explanation of dual-core processors and symmetric multiprocessing and what it means to your computing experience."

The Iyonix desktop graphics acceleration package Geminus has been officially launched after last month's initial beta release. ArtWorks, Oregano 2, MessengerPro, PDF and similar applications will benefit from Geminus's ability to speed up graphics that are repeatedly drawn on the screen. It is understood there are early plans to make the acceleration available for the RiscPC and A9home platforms. Blueprints also include future support for digital DVI output and alleviating the need for physical modifications to be made to Iyonix video cards for them to work on RISC OS.

Raquel Velasco and Bill Buck have announced that there will be a new developer program similar to the one with the Open Desktop Workstation for the Open Server Workstation (dual 970MP) and the EFIKA 5k2 board. If you are interested to apply please send an email directly to Genesi.

Intel's chairman chided plans by rival AMD and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to build a $100 laptop for the developing world. At a press conference in Sri Lanka on Friday, Craig Barrett said that potential computer users would scoff at the computer's lack of features. Barrett also said the device isn't worthy of being called a laptop. "I think a more realistic title should be 'the $100 gadget'," he mused. "The problem is that gadgets have not been successful."

"These machines are the ultimate in small form factor, trading power and performance for size, portability and convenience. The navigation of this tradeoff is of paramount concern: give up too much power, and the device is useless; too little, and it'll be inconveniently large. I've taken a look at how two products, The BlackDog Pocket Linux Server and the Waysmall 200BT, navigate these waters."

"Mandriva Linux 2006, released last month, feels very much like a natural evolution of earlier Mandrake releases - in both good and bad ways. As I tested the PowerPack edition, I was disappointed to find many of the same rough edges that drove me away from Mandrake still present in this new incarnation."

International technology standards organization Ecma voted Thursday to approve the creation of a technical committee to begin looking into standardization of Microsoft Office's Open XML document format. The effort has been backed by Apple, Intel and Toshiba. The vote to create the committee would have been unanimous, however OpenDocument supporter IBM voted against the proposal while HP abstained. Critics outside of Ecma questioned the organization's move to standardize what they consider to be a proprietary format. Micorsoft submitted its new Office format to Ecma a few weeks ago.

As part of its monthly patching cycle, Microsoft plans to release on Tuesday two security bulletins with fixes for flaws in Windows. At least one of the alerts is deemed "critical", Microsoft's highest risk rating, the company said in a notice posted on its Web site on Thursday. Microsoft rates as critical any security threat that could allow a malicious Internet worm to spread without any action required on the part of the user.

Hard drive vendor LaCie has teamed up with Mandriva on a bus-powered USB 2.0 hard drive preloaded with desktop Linux. The "GlobeTrotter" boots Mandriva Linux LE 2005, and is available in 40GB and 80GB models priced at $140 and $199 , respectively. The GlobeTrotter drives feature an industrial design by F.A. Porsche. The devices have rubber feet, a passively cooled case design, and a low-power drive that, unlike most USB drives, requires no separate power adapter, instead pulling power through the host PC's USB port.

"OpenGrok in that sense is a true enabler for source code that is open source. It lets people easily and quickly find the source code, look at it, understand the history and changes made to the source. It certainly has made my life easy when I am looking for security holes in software."

If you thought Sun's chip division had already gone mad when they announced and built the Niagara (the UltraSPARC T1), you'll be happy to know that with the first Niagara servers out the door, they haven't exactly been resting on their laurels. Niagara II is on its way: like the T1, it has 8 cores, but now with 8 threads each instead of 4, adding up to a total of 64 threads (the T1 has 32, logically). And, instead of the much-critizised one floating point unit per processor, the Niagara II will feature one floating point unit per core. The chip is set to be released in 2007, at an initial speed of 1.4Ghz.

Microsoft postponed the introduction of the next test release of its Internet Explorer 7 Web browser until sometime in 2006, according to comments posted to the company's site for software developers. In a blog posting on the software giant's MSDN developer site, Dean Hachamovitch, product line manager for IE at Microsoft, said that the company will post an "updated pre-release build of IE 7 for Windows XP publicly" during the first calendar quarter of 2006. The IE team leader indicated that people interested in gaining access to the browser preview would not need to be members of the MSDN community. In related news, there's an exploit in Firefox 1.5 on Windows SP2.

"A first time poster to MacGeneration forums posted the contents of an email, which was originally sent to another website. The writer claims that Apple is reviving 'Yellow Box for Windows' - a development environment which promised Mac OS X developers the ability to develop and then deploy of both Mac OS X and Windows environments. The original plans for Yellow Box were promised during early developer sessions by Apple, but later killed. The letter claims that the project has been relaunched internally under the name 'Dharma'. Resultant applications will be true 'Universal Binaries', allowing developers to released their applications under the Windows environment also." Of course this is highly speculative, but interesting nonetheless. What is your opinion on this?