Monthly Archive:: February 2004

Before beginning, I must offer my profuse apologies to Shawn Gordon and the rest of theKompany crew. Shawn sent me the Black Adder software several months ago; however, my schedule ballooned beyond all believable bounds and has stubbornly maintained that ludicrous pace; unfortunately. I have not had an opportunity to write this review until recently, so I am sorry for my tardiness. And now to answer the most obvious question; what is Black Adder?

Here is a look at Virtual PC 2004's performace. It's put to the test by using the PassMark benchmark.

Believe it or not, Commodore 64 is still being used for commercial purposes. Analogik has discovered this truly rare occurrence at MYER Centre main bus station terminal - Brisbane, Australia. How reliable C64 is proves the fact that it is still being used to inform travelling people of 21st century.

Quality rant by Eric Raymond on the topic of bad user interface design in open source software, making some good points. The editorial was inspired by ESR's experience with CUPS.

Today's computers are the result of many decades of evolution of techniques and technologies. From this process new techniques and technologies have sprung forth and some of these are really just starting on their evolutionary journey, in time they will change the face of computing but there's a road bump to get over first.

http://codewars.osdever.net marks a new beginning in the OS Development Ring. A totally new idea of code wars? No, code wars aren't any new idea(Allegro SpeedHack) but coding an OS in such a short time? Even at all. OS development is a relatively new and growing hobby for programmers. Now you have a chance to openly develop OS code, have it judged, and win Challenges.

Solaris Express 02/04 is now available with exciting new features: partitioning a single Solaris instance into isolated application environments called "zones." It's a project similar to Linux Virtual Server (LVS).

Despite Microsoft's repeated denials, the company will indeed release an interim version of Windows XP that will bridge the gap between the initial XP release and Longhorn, which is currently due in late 2005 at the earliest. The interim XP version will ship as a new retail product that replaces existing retail boxed copies of XP and as a set of updates, called XP Reloaded, that existing XP users can install separately.

Metrowerks CodeWarrior for Windows is a C/C++ compiler with code-generation for SSE2 and 3DNow!. Support for GCC compiler extensions. Here are some of its updated features:

One of the most impressive aspects of even relatively modest PC hardware is its' ability to emulate a wide range of other platforms. Being a bit of an OS junkie myself, and lacking the space for a full computer room of weird and wonderful hardware, I emulate a range of systems from my humble desktop PC. In this article, I will describe the procedure through which you can run RISC OS 3.7 and others on a Windows-based PC and experience this classic OS (screenshots included).

"From a strictly technical standpoint, Red Hat ES isn't particularly noteworthy: It's a collection of software compiled and packaged up, given a few management tools of varying quality, and pushed out the door. We did not notice any functionality unique to this Linux distribution, and there are certainly others out there that could fill the role of "departmental server" with equal facility for a lower price." Read the review at ITManagement.

JSR 133, which has been active for nearly three years, has recently issued its public recommendation on what to do about the Java Memory Model (JMM). Several serious flaws were found in the original JMM, resulting in some surprisingly difficult semantics for concepts that were supposed to be simple, like volatile, final, and synchronized. In this installment of Java theory and practice, the author shows how the semantics of volatile and final will be strengthened in order to fix the JMM. Some of these changes have already been integrated in JDK 1.4; others are slated for inclusion in JDK 1.5. On other Java news, IBM urges Sun to make Java open source.

The new maintainer of the Linux Kernel 2.2, Marc-Christian Petersen announced the release of 2.2.26. The release includes several security fixes, including a fix for the mremap() bug. Alan Cox released the previous 2.2 kernel, 2.2.25 almost a year ago, in March 2003. In August of the same year he began a one year sabbatical to study for an MBA, handing over the maintainership to Marc-Christian.

Mepis Linux is a liveCD, debian based distro, with some additional features, which makes it an excellent introduction to debian. A recent review provided a good overview of the background and basis of Mepis, my review aims to focus more on the day to day use for a desktop user.