Thom Holwerda Archive

Another pre-release build of Mac OS X 10.4.3 was among the software seeds reportedly released by . Now at build 8F31, the third maintenance release to Tiger is is approaching 110MB in size and includes well over 500 minor fixes and enhancements. The frequency in which Apple has released new builds of the update indicates that a release is on tap for the first half of October.

"Today's another exciting day as we move closer to Beta 1. We are just wrapping up the MVP summit here in Redmond and we've finally announced another piece of functionality I've wanted to talk about for a long time now. This afternoon Steven Sinofsky announced to our MVPs that we will build in native support for the PDF format in Office 12."

"Sun Microsystems must have figured digital rights management never sounded so good when it recently announced a call for partners in its quest to use open source DRM to "compensate rights holders and stimulate innovation," but Sun's open DReaM (DRM everywhere available) Project is as scary as any other content control nightmare to open source and digital freedom proponents."

"No matter what strides the new generation of open-source companies make, they all owe a big debt to Torvalds. In 1991 the Finnish programmer started Linux as a project at the University of Helsinki. Fourteen years later the reverberations are still being felt." In this email interview Torvalds discusses his thoughts on where open source is heading and the challenges the Linux community faces.

Triavid is a web implementation of a TriangleOS VFDBS system. The service will eventually be fully integrated in TriangleOS, allowing users to use the web-disk as just any other drive. All objects stored on the web-disk can be viewed from any PC with an internet connection. The web-disk can also be accessed with by a browser, by using a user interface similar to that of the the TriangleOS GUI.

At PrepCom3, a dramatic last-minute deal drawn up by the EU may mark the end of the US government's control of the internet. In essence, a new version of the current overseeing body ICANN and an end to the US government's overall control of the DNS. The US was scathing about the proposals, within minutes telling delegates that it "can't in any way allow any changes" that would prevent it from having overall control of the internet. Other countries, like Brazil, China, Iran and Cuba support the proposal. Brazil's ambassador outlined: "It is not a question of being anti-ICANN, it's about having a very clear and open and democratic and inclusive mechanism of overview of certain functions that today are performed by ICANN with no kind of supervision."

A recent report by market research firm IDC gives Apple high marks for its efforts in the Enterprise storage and server markets. While Apple is best known for its iPod and Macintosh product lines, IDC analysts say the competition is taking interest in what Apple is doing in the Enterprise market, as well.

"The experience of installing Debian can vary widely depending on your hardware and requirements. There simply isn't room here to provide a comprehensive installation guide. Instead, you'll find an outline of the major points of the installation process, and plenty of information about where to go and what to do when things don't work as expected." In related news, work is under way to provide a gtk+ front-end to the Debian installer.

Knowing a little bit about how the Linux 2.6 scheduler treats CPU affinity can help you design better userspace applications. Soft affinity means that processes do not frequently migrate between processors, whereas hard affinity means that processes run on processors you specify.

Motorola's CEO Ed Zander added fuel to persistent speculation about Apple's interest in producing its own phone. "And we know that they are going to build a smart phone - it's only a matter of time."

Sun has released a beta edition of the upcoming version 5 of NetBeans. The most notable feature in this new release is the Matisse GUI Builder (demo) which makes it significantly easier to develop Swing GUIs. Other improvements include more refactoring tools, better CVS integration, support for more application servers, better support for web-development, and small tweaks to the editor.

SUSE's 10.0 release announcmeent has barely hit all four corners of the globe, but development for 10.1 is already underway, and alpha 1 is now available. The biggest changes since 10.0 are a new kernel (2.6.13.2) and KDE 3.5 Beta 1. Download locations can be found in the release announcement.

MEPIS recently released the latest beta of its lightweight Linux distribution MEPISLite 3.3.2-test01, thus making it the first vendor to release a Linux based on the Debian Common Core.

"The standard Unix permissions scheme works fine if you have simple needs, but juggling groups and users can grow unwieldy very quickly. FreeBSD's Access Control Lists give you more control over who can access files and directories. Dru Lavigne explains how to understand and use them."