Monthly Archive:: June 2004

The antitrust penalties that the EU laid down on Microsoft a few months ago will not be implemented until an appeals court has a chance to decide whether the penalties should be suspended for the entire length of the appeal, which is expected to be several years. Had this step not been taken, the penalties would have gone into effect today.

Speaking in Australia, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates stressed that more widespread use of firewalls would solve some of the Internet's security problems. He also stressed that his company needs to reduce the frequency with which major security updates are released. He also noted that while most OSes can turn around a security fix in 60-90 days, "we have it down to less than 48 hours." He stressed the importance of using the Window auto-update feature and noted that SP2 defaults the auto-update and firewall to on.

Matt Dillon has announced the availability of DragonFly BSD's 1.0 Release Candidate #1. Changes and features include: variant symbolic links, UDF support, lightweight kernel threads, message passing, GCC 3.4 in the tree, binutils 2.14, Kernighan's awk 2004-02-07, BIND 9.2.4 rc4, CVS 1.12.8, libpcap 0.8.3, tcpdump 3.8.3, less 381, MMX/XMM kernel optimizations are now on by default, greatly improving bcopy/bzero/copyin/copyout performance for large (>4K) buffers, XIO, acpica5, new AC'97 codec support, network stack revamping, long standing bug fixes for wide variety of support and stability issues, and more. A final is expected in two weeks.

Microsoft is eliminating many restrictions on the use of the "shared source" license for its Windows CE operating system. Significantly, ror the first time, any developer, anywhere in the world will be allowed to include modified Windows CE code within commercial products without having to sublicense the modifications back to Microsoft. The change, which accompanies the impending full release of Windows CE 5.0, will counter competition from Linux and is likely to expand Microsoft's slice of the roughly $1B embedded OS market pie.

Learn how to deal with objects: creating them, reading their values and changing them, and calling their methods. Also learn how to cast objects from one class to another, cast to and from primitive data types and classes, and take advantage of automatic conversions through autoboxing and unboxing.

The European Commission has temporarily suspended an order requiring Microsoft to sell a version of Windows without media player software, just before it would have taken effect, a source familiar with the situation said Sunday.

Sun announced the availability of the source code for the Java 3D API on java.net.

Peter Johansson, a compsci student at the Chalmers University in Sweden has written an article about the differences of corporations and the Open Source community in today's software world.

"Based on Open Source Technology" is used by more than one proprietary software company as a marketing boast. Even Microsoft, everybody's favorite symbol of software proprietarism, now boasts about releasing software under an open source license. Obviously, the phrase "Open Source" is now considered a plus when trying to sell software. Will this lead to more open source contributions by companies trying to associate themselves with this "movement" or will it lead to the death of open source as we know it?

Here is a preview of the upcoming KDE 3.3 and here is a review of KDE 3.2.1.

Novell has just released version 1.0-RC1 of Mono. Get the files here and begin testing!

Jace from ZetaNews and BeUnited has written a review of the recent WalterCon about Haiku.

According to the Eclipse web site, version 3.0 is now available for public consumption.

An article on the idea behind dtrace and what exactly can it do in the upcoming Solaris 10 releases.