Thom Holwerda Archive

Intel, happy with its success launching the Centrino brand, on Wednesday introduced a new brand called VIIV for entertainment PCs. One feature of VIIV will be automatic transcoding--ensuring that audio or video encoded in one format can be translated into one the user's computer can actually handle without user intervention. Another feature will be instant shutdown and start-up that will work as fast as it does in consumer electronic devices such as DVD players.

The MorphOS team has released MorphOS 1.4.5 PowerUp for Commodore A1200, A3000 and A4000 computers equipped with PowerPC accelerator cards by phase5 & DCE. The MorphOS team does not provide any support, but community support is here.

Google has launched an instant-messaging (IM) program that allows text chat and computer-to-computer voice connections, a move that highlights the search giant's increasing competition with Yahoo, Microsoft and America Online. You can download Google Talk here. Google also makes it very clear that you do not need Google Talk to use their service, and they provide detailed instructions on using other IM clients to connect to Google Talk. Update: Micheal Robertson announces partnership with Google to promote the use of open standards in VoIP/IM.

Mandriva Linux 2006 Beta 3 was quietly released on Tuesday. No mention of the release is as of yet posted at MandrivaLinux, but a 3 ISO set and a Mini CD are available for download. You can read the changelog, and there's also a review available (screenshots included).

OpenOffice.org receives most of the attention among FOSS office suites, but users shouldn't forget that free software includes at least two other word processors: AbiWord, and KWord, part of the KOffice suite. From their inception, both have been playing catch-up with OpenOffice.org's Writer. But now, after several years of development, AbiWord and KWord are both reaching early maturity. How do Writer, AbiWord, and KWord compare?

Intel said that it plans later this year to offer test versions of software tools aimed at allowing Mac developers to improve the performance of programs that run on its chips. The software maker said that later this year it will offer beta versions of both its compiler and its performance libraries, which contain code optimised for both digital media and scientific computing tasks.

Vector programming doesn't stop with PowerPC. Learn how to do SIMD vector programming for MacOS X for Intel. This page provides an overview of the hardware and programming interfaces involved, and provides detailed translation help information for leveraging your investment in AltiVec forward to the SSE world.

When Apple Computer announced in June that it planned to move to Intel chips, one of the companies left in the lurch was Terra Soft Solutions. This week, Terra Soft is announcing it has filled some of the void created by Apple's move. Under a new deal, Terra Soft will resell PowerPC-based servers from Mercury Computer Systems. Mercury's XR9 systems use the same G5 chip as Xserve, but at 2.4GHz, the chips are slightly faster than those used in Apple's servers.

In Tiger, Apple introduced a new system startup program called launchd. The launchd daemon takes over many tasks from cron, xinetd, mach_init, and init, which are UNIX programs that traditionally have handled system initialization and prepared the system for the user. These venerable programs are widely used by system adminstrators, open source developers, managers of web services, even consumers who want to use cron to manage iCal scheduling, and they can still be called with launchd.

It seems that a free Linspire clone has hit the ftp mirrors. DistroWatch reports: "Freespire is a new Linux distribution, a free edition of Linspire with all proprietary components and trademarks removed. The distribution comes with a free repository of over 1,500 packages available via apt-get and Synaptic. This initial release functions as a live CD only and serves as a proof of concept. It certainly looks like an interesting idea: combining the benefits of Linspire's excellent usability and hardware auto-configuration with a free repository of Debian packages." Review.

Sun Microsystems, weighing in on the fractious issue of protecting copyrighted digital content, on Sunday announced a project it calls the Open Media Commons initiative aimed at creating an open-source, royalty-free digital-rights management standard.

Linux founder Linus Torvalds is defending protection of the Linux trademark and insists that sublicensing is a loss-making operation. He explained that the "cease-and-desist or sublicense the mark" letters are a requirement of maintaining a trademark. "Not only do I not get a cent of the trademark money, but even the Linux Mark Institute has so far historically always lost money on it."

The K Desktop Environment was pleased to see its users recently at the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo. Users were excited to learn about KDE 4.0, some of the hot new stuff in KDE 3.5, and thousands of Linux users got out of the house for a change.

At its upcoming Professional Developers Conference next month, Microsoft is set to shed more details on its developer-oriented graphics tool, code-named Sparkle. Sparkle will be one element of the upcoming Expression Studio suite of design and developer tools for the Windows Presentation Foundation, formerly known as Avalon. Expression Studio also is expected to be unveiled at the PDC, sources said.