Monthly Archive:: September 2001

"Windows XP is more than just a pretty face. This top-to-bottom overhaul of the Windows operating system has something for everyone from families to business users." Read the whole of the exhaustive review of Microsoft's new product over at ZDNet.

A new beta of Gnome 1.4.1 has just been released. Mostly bug and security fixes have been added for this release. Get the betas here or here. In the meantime, work for Gnome 2.0 is going strong and it is planned to be released sometime next year, having full versions for both Linux and Sun Solaris 9 among other platforms.

VMWare today announced the availability of a Beta release of VMware Workstation 3.0, the latest generation of its award-winning desktop software for technical professionals. Workstation 3.0 delivers significant performance and usability improvements over previous releases, the company says. Workstation 3.0 provides support for the latest operating systems including WindowsXP and the latest Linux distributions, supports additional peripheral devices, and provides significant enhancements in networking and better overall performance. VMware will ship Workstation 3.0 in the fourth quarter of 2001. New features include: Host and guest OS support for WindowsXP Pro and Home Edition, USB device support, DVD-ROM support, CD-R/RW support, CD-ROM ISO image support, generic SCSI device support -- makes devices available directly to the guest OS, large virtual disk support, now up to 128 GB per IDE virtual disk and 256 GB per SCSI virtual disk, improved CPU, networking, disk and interactive performance, completely new Windows style user interface (Windows host version), built-in NAT for easy connection to networks, more flexible and easier to configure virtual networking, improved support for laptops and more. Our Take: No word for BeOS support as a Guest OS. Update: I downloaded the latest beta version and BeOS loads this time, without crashing. While it is loading very fast in the beginning, when it is going to graphics mode, because the VMWare virtual graphics device does not expose the VESA standard, the performance falls so much that hits the disk pretty hard. Normal BeOS boot time is 12 seconds when launched natively, under VMWare it takes up to 5 minutes on a dual Celeron 533 under Win2000 and of course it is so slow (please remember that all this slowness is just because of the unsuported gfx subsystem that makes the rest of the launching process and the OS to be unresponsive) that it is completely unusable. Screenshot here.

"To many people, PostgreSQL and MySQL seem like similar, alternative databases. Both are quickly gaining popularity. Based on the track records of older versions, there's a lot of debate over the speed of PostgreSQL and the durability of MySQL. But times have changed and each database has progressed. On both counts, the two packages are the closest they've ever been, so when deciding which to use in a Web application, a developer doesn't always have a clear winner. If you're looking for a database to prop up a Weblog or portal, you'll find that many such packages rely on MySQL. It should be possible to port them to PostgreSQL, but if you're looking for a turnkey package, chances are you're not interested in doing too much porting work. If you're migrating from Oracle, Sybase, or Microsoft SQL Server, I suggest PostgreSQL. Like those databases, PostgreSQL has triggers, stored procedures, and a rich set of built-in functions (including many functions for date manipulation). Also, PostgreSQL procedural language is easy to learn if you're familiar with Oracle's PL/SQL and SQL Server's Transact-SQL." Read the whole shootout article over at WebTechniques.

FiringSquad takes a look at nVidia's first offering of motherboard chipsets, the nForce, which reportedly has some interesting features including 3D capabilities. The reviewer concludes that "Now that you've seen everything NVIDIA is offering with nForce, you see why we feel this is a groundbreaking product -- quite literally there isn't anything else on the market with such powerful features! Even if you don't like them, you've got to give NVIDIA a lot of respect With nForce, NVIDIA has turned itself into a powerful competitor in a little over a year!"

News.com is reporting that Microsoft will be announcing two new versions of its PocketPC OS in a few days. The new versions (a high-end and a low-end) will sport an XP-esque look, 802.11 drivers and VPN support. It's all part of Microsoft's strategy to beat Palm in a race to widespread adoption in large corporations.

He invented the C programming language. He is one of the co-creators of Unix. He has watched more than one multi-billion dollar industry evolve around his creations. And still, Dennis Ritchie shows up for work each day in the same Murray Hill, NJ office where he and Ken Thompson first ran Unix on a Digital Equipment Corp. PDP-7 back in 1969. Why? Well, it's not just any old company that employs Ritchie. This is Lucent's Bell Labs we're talking about ­ the home of the laser, the place where the transistor first saw life. It's a pretty exciting work environment, and, as Ritchie is fond of saying, it's nice to walk around your office and stumble into things like canisters of liquid helium. It was at his nondescript office, right next to where Unix was invented, that Ritchie met with Linux Magazine's Robert McMillan and Adam Goodman." More at Linux Magazine.

The sleepless KDE/QT developers have started work for KDE 3, the X graphics environment, planned to be released sometime next year. KDE 3 will be based on QT 3.0 and will also feature educational and other apps (like Kompare and KWinTV) as part of the default installation, support for extremely large files, new versions for KNode and KMail, email templates in KMail, advanced Web Shortcuts, S/MIME support, plugins for the KMenu, a graphical Regular Expression app (KRegExpEditor) and much more. A mailing list for the KDE3 users can be found here. Update: If you are an adventurous user, there is an alpha version of KDE 3 available.

A new version of Java 3D is now available on Sun's web site. The new version (1.2.1_03) is a bug fix release for Windows and Solaris. The Linux release is still at release 1.2.1_01.

The QNX RtP 6.1.0 microkernel (which also runs on PCs) and its Photon micro GUI have been ported to the Compaq PDA solution, the iPaq. The screenshots look very attractive indeed, we just hope that the QNX team add some more software in it, like a Calendar, Contacts or a Todo list which are undoubtly, very useful applications for a PDA.