Monthly Archive:: February 2002

"Dell Computer Corp. has discontinued its Itanium-based workstation due to weak demand, marking another setback in Intel Corp.'s efforts to promote its 64-bit chip released eight months ago." Read the rest of the report at ExtremeTech. Our Take: It is astonishing (and truly disapointing) to see a super-chip (a real wonder in the CPU design), like Itanium is, not being able to sell well, mostly because sysadmins not wanting to give up on x86. I think, now I understand better when software companies choose to support legacy code, even if it bloats their product. It seems to be a necessary reason to commercially succeed, no matter what we geeks say about clean designs and speed. Let's see what the new Intel 64-bit CPU McKinley can do in the marketplace. The failure of Itanium so far also caused Intel to try competing with AMD Hammer in the x86-64 bit area.

"AppleScript is a built-in Macintosh automation tool that gives users the ability to control the operating system and several of their favorite applications. While this powerful scripting system has always had a loyal following of Macintosh aficionados and publishing professionals, the release of Mac OS X 10.1.2 may mean AppleScript is ready to strut its stuff in front of a wider audience. Here are some of the exciting AppleScript developments on MacOSX..." Read the rest of the article at OReillyNet.

No more hours of downloading for the four FreeBSD ISO CDs. FreeBSD Services has officially begun to distribute FreeBSD on DVD. You can pre-order the FreeBSD 4.5-RELEASE DVD here.

From the press release: "Sun Microsystems has embraced the Linux operating system, rolling out a multipart program that will significantly broaden the offerings of Linux on low-end Sun servers and commit new resources to the ongoing development of the Open Source operating system." Our Take: I am very concerned as to what this may mean for Solaris. Was this the real reason behind the Sun decision to drop support for the x86 Solaris? Did Sun took marketing/strategy lessons from IBM regarding Linux and its accompanied hype? Because technically speaking, Solaris is a far more advanced server operating system (in its core) than Linux is.

"What advocates of 'theme' or 'skinning' software fail to realize is that OS consistency is only truly realized when an entire platform is universally similar. As computers continue to dominate an increasing number of daily activities, it is ever more important that operating systems adopt the most idealistic standards to allow their users to be as productive as possible. In the world of user interface design, consistency is king. A consistent user interface not only can make a product more intuitive, but also can help users be significantly more productive. Unfortunately, the latest trend in 'user-friendliness' is allowing users to modify the interface of an operating system extensively by applying 'skins' or 'themes.'" Read the interesting analysis on the phenomenon of skinning at OSOpinion.

"I can only infer that Steve Jobs has a vision for the future of Apple Computer. I say this because after spending more than an hour with the Apple CEO recently, I walked away knowing more about what Apple won't do than what it will do. Here's an example of what Apple won't do: Steve says Apple will not get into the home entertainment business--not during the next 24 months, anyway. You won't find Apple doing a personal video recorder, à la TiVo or Replay, or an advanced set-top box, à la Moxie. According to Jobs, those devices have yet to catch on, a fact perhaps best borne out by Microsoft's recent staff cuts and reorganization of its UltimateTV unit. TiVo has had its problems, too." Read the rest of the editorial at ZDNet AnchorDesk.

"The operating systems debate tends to run on religious lines. In an attempt to shed some light on the issue, we assembled a panel drawn from various parts of the IT community (systems administration, systems integrators, market analysts, academia, and recruitment) and asked them to discuss the advantages and disadvantages of various systems for different network services: mail serving, web serving, database serving, file/Print serving, application serving, network services, staffing issues." So, which operating system is good for what exactly? Read what these professionals have to say at ZDNet Australia.

Today nVidia launches two new graphics chips and 3 new cards for each, making it six new products. While the GeForce4 Ti series of cards will be using the new high-end chip with the code name 'NV25', the GeForce4 MX value series (the chip used in the new PowerMacs) will be based on nVidia's new low-cost (and comperatively much slower) solution 'NV17'. Get the rest of the scoop & benchmarks at Tom's Hardware. On Monday both ATi and nVidia launched new versions of the ATi Radeon 8500 and the GeForce3 Ti-200 respectively, with 128 MB of RAM. Benchmarks showed that more RAM did not bring more speed and that such a purchase is not justifiable until the new games have such requirements. Update: Anandtech has some interesting benchmarks.

Borland on Friday will ship a new software development tool for C++ programmers. The new version, Borland C++ Builder 6, features support for Web services, allowing developers to build software that is accessible over the Internet via PCs, cell phones and other handheld devices. The cost is $2,999 for the enterprise edition, $999 for the professional edition and $69 for the personal edition. In other development news, Rational Software on Tuesday introduced a new software development tool that is compatible with software from Microsoft, IBM and Sun Microsystems. The software company, which has worked mostly with Microsoft in the past, announced Tuesday that its new XDE Professional v2002 product will work with Microsoft's Visual Studio.Net development tools and IBM's rival WebSphere Studio development tools. The XDE, or extended development environment product, has also been designed to support IBM's Eclipse IDE, software based on Sun's Java technology.

Halcyon Software announced the beta release of its iNET technology, the first commercially available Java-based implementation of the Microsoft .NET framework. The iNET technology offers Microsoft VisualStudio.NET developers an immediate solution to deploy their Client/Server applications and Web Services to any platform. "Develop in .NET, deploy anywhere," Don Hsi, Halcyon's President & CEO explained, "is what iNET delivers to the Microsoft .NET developers." He went on to say, "Our customers need a seamless solution to accommodate their commitment to both J2EE and Microsoft .NET architecture."

Last week InformIT had released two chapters from the bible of the operating systems books, "Modern Operating Systems" by Andrew Tanenbaum. This new excerpt from the book (free registration required) provides an introduction to the causes of OS deadlocks. Deadlock can be defined formally as follows: "A set of processes is deadlocked if each process in the set is waiting for an event that only another process in the set can cause."

From the press release: "In a move to dramatically broaden the market for handhelds and smart phones, PalmSource, Inc., the Palm OS subsidiary of Palm, Inc., today previewed the Palm OS 5 beta and announced that final delivery of the new operating system to Palm OS licensees is scheduled for early summer. Palm OS 5 will be the foundation to build a new class of devices that will help make mobile computing ubiquitous. Palm OS 5 will bring the flexibility, innovation and ease of use of the Palm OS to powerful ARM-compliant processors. Licensees can choose from a full range of processors, starting with the ARM 7 CPU and scaling to the highest-performance ARM chips from Intel, Motorola and Texas Instruments. In addition, the operating system will deliver enhanced performance, data security, multimedia and wireless networking, as well as compatibility with existing Palm OS software programs ." ZDNews also has an article about it: "The new OS will feature only a modest influence from Palm's acquisition of the assets of Be. Palm executives said future versions of the OS will use more Be technology, although Palm is not continuing development of the Be operating system."

From the press release: "Sleepycat Software, Inc. today announced the release of version 4.0 of the award-winning data management system, Berkeley DB. Version 4.0 delivers new services and significant performance enhancements for high-end mission critical applications. Berkeley DB 4.0 provides a new feature required by developers building mission-critical applications: High Availability. Designed for applications that must run around the clock, High Availability uses a technique called "replication" to keep multiple copies of a database, stored in different places, up to date. In the event of a hardware or application crash that causes one of the copies to fail, applications can use the remaining copies to continue operating without interruption. Application developers can also use the copies to answer queries during normal operation. As a result, applications can support more users more reliably than ever before."

Ramesh writes: "I came upon this kernel Benchmark article at Byte, via Slashdot. Very good data on different kernels. The author has done testing on different kernels with input from Alan Cox and Andrea Arcangeli."