Thom Holwerda Archive

This article describes in detail what to expect from Sun when it comes to the SPARC platform. The 8-core Niagara chip, now planned for early 2006, is the most impressive: "In practical terms, what Niagara delivers is a chip that consumes about 56 watts that has about the same performance on infrastructure workloads as a four-way SMP rig of Xeon processors or a two-way setup using dual-core Xeons. These Xeon setups will consume hundreds of watts per processor."

Mad Penguin's Adam Doxtater reviews Slackware Linux 10.1: "It's stable, fast, and has a reputation for the most excellent quality control in the business."

With the uptake of IP telephony continuing apace and the proliferation of IP devices in general, has the time finally arrived for an old concept – power over Ethernet (PoE)? For certain deployments of IP based technology, PoE is not only cost effective but arguably essential.

I've always been a huge fan of BeOS. However, there was no denying the fact that the BeOS was getting old. As many other BeOS fans, I closely followed two projects: Haiku, and yellowTAB's Zeta. The latter released 1.0 a few weeks ago. Here are the findings of an old BeOS user.

SCO's CEO Darl McBride was told that the Linux kernel contained no SCO copyright code six months before the company issued its first lawsuit, a memo reveals. An outside consultant Bob Swartz conducted the audit, and on August 13 2002 Caldera's Michael Davidson reported the results.

The new version of Cacao called "Tomclipse" relesed. This GPL-licensed JVM uses GNU Classpath 0.16 as its class library. You can find it here and here are some screenshots. Also, JTree of GNU Classpath made good progress. Have a look here.

This is the first of a new series of articles that keeps you informed of what's happening in KDE development. The hottest new features to hit SVN every month will be tested and sneak preview screenshots posted. Current issues are available from June and July.

Stefan Stuntz has released a MUI 4 Alpha version for MorphOS. Important changes include: all MUI programs react in realtime on preference changes; new and much improved background & frame requesters; new color requester with many options; new image browser and much more. Download here.

Are there too many Linux distributions currently available? Can there be too many? This article explores the effect of the large number of distros out right now and suggests that progress could possibly be made through a consolidation.

Apple Computer on Wednesday reported the financial results of its third fiscal quarter, characterizing the numbers as "the highest revenue and earnings in the company's history." The halo effect seems to be confirmed, as Macintosh unit sales grew by 35%.

Sunday night saw the release of several screenshots of Longhorn Build 5203. Many questions arose, in particular on Microsoft's Longhorn newsgroups. Mike Brannigan from Microsoft has taken the liberty to have tried to answer everyone's questions, questions often repeatedly asked.

"I read with some interest about the GNOME startup bounty. As Stephen O'Grady pointed out, this problem is indeed perfect for DTrace. To get a feel for the problem, I wrote a very simple D script." Read more...

I've been using Linux for four years, with the majority of that time spent using Red Hat distributions. I liked Fedora Core 1, but I was not impressed by Fedora Core 2 and its annoying bugs. Fedora Core 3 made up for the shortcomings of its predecessor. Now Fedora Core 4 is out, and unfortunately, it's a mixed bag.

Sun Microsystems' chief information officer (CIO) has backed the vendor’s embrace of corporate blogging, despite difficulties such as ensuring senior executives don’t post comments that affect the stock price and the occasional posting that makes the company’s lawyers "pull their hair out".