Thom Holwerda Archive

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.

SkyOS Beta 8.5 has just been released. New features include the Indexing Service, an SQL based file attribute and content index service which makes it possible to find your files in a fraction of a second, better developer support, and a lot of bug fixes. NVU has also been ported and is available in this release. You can read the changelog here. Update: Screenshots gallery by OSDir.

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.

More details are leaking out about the Debian Core Consortium, which will be announced at next week's LinuxWorld Conference & Expo. The public relations manager of desktop Linux vendor Linspire, Heather MacKenzie, revealed that the "the DCC's official name is the Debian Common Core Alliance."

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.

In the last few days, KDE developers have been actively discussing usability issues for KDE 4. Here are some thoughts, and some more are here. What do you think?

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.

So, you are not sure what makes a Linux distribution a good desktop Linux but you know it when you see it, right? Perhaps but perhaps not. So, what does it take to be a good desktop Linux distribution?

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.

UIMA 1.1 is a pure Java SDK that supports the implementation, composition, and deployment of applications working with unstructured information on Linux. Version 1.1 has been incorporated into IBM's enterprise search product, WebSphere Information Integrator OmniFind Edition, Version 8.2.2. UIMA Annotators can now be deployed into WebSphere II OmniFind for semantic search solutions. Here's a helpful user guide.

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)."

In a recent blog posting, Internet Explorer's lead program manager Chris Wilson revealed many of the technical improvements that Microsoft will add to IE 7.0 for its final release. Almost all the improvements are related to bugs in IE's implementation of CSS. Many of these bugs aren't fixed in the currently available IE 7.0 Beta release. Wilson's post raises some serious questions about IE 7.0.

"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."

It is no secret that the competition for global domination in the operating system market has moved from the desktop to the living room couch. The Olive Symphony, a Linux-powered hi-fi wi-fi stereo hub, stands a decent chance for a prime position before the living room throne.