Monthly Archive:: August 2004

DistroWatch reports that a new development version of Mandrakelinux 10.1, PPC edition, is now available. Highlights: Linux kernel 2.6.8rc2; NPTL support; X11R6.7.0, GNOME 2.6, KDE 3.2.3, etc.

Despite the impressive list of achievements of open source software, it can be argued that there have not been any world-class games created under the open source banner. Sure, several old games like Doom and Quake have been gifted to the open source community, but there are no comparable original creations in this area. One should not expect this situation to change anytime soon, because the open source development model does not make sense for game development.

Sun Microsystems will begin compensating its sales staff for Solaris deals that involve hardware from other manufacturers, as part of the company's efforts to fend off competition from low-cost servers running Linux.

While many applaud the timely release of Avalon & Indigo and MS' decision to "stop dreaming and wake up," others warn the company that it is eroding its credibility and letting Linux make usability gains.

Apple unveiled the new G5-based iMac, an all-in-one computer with 17/20" LCD screens. My Take: The product looks good visually, but I would have preferred if the bottom border of the screen wasn't as long compared to the other three, slicker, border sides (mockup). To customers, I would recommend the middle model: 17" LCD, 1.8 GHz G5, Superdrive, for $1499 US (just add Bluetooth). Good value.

The primary focus of Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1 Service Pack 1 (SP1) is improved security. In addition, the service pack includes roll-ups of all reported customer issues found after the release of the Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1. Of particular note, SP1 provides better support for consuming WSDL documents, Data Execution prevention and protection from security issues such as buffer overruns. XP version, 2003 Server version.

Interested in building plug-ins, but not sure where to start? In this first article in a four-part series, you'll learn how to put together a simple authentication plug-in for a project in C#.

After nearly two years on the market, makers of tablet PCs based on Windows XP Tablet PC Edition have yet to prove that the pen is mightier than the keyboard.

About a third of businesses plan to migrate at least some Windows machines to Linux, according to a recent survey, but adoption will continue to slow and cautious, as companies evaluate a maze of economic factors.

FreeBSD 5.3-BETA2 is now available directly or via ISO images. Release notes have changed little since BETA1 but several showstopping bugs have now been swatted. Much of the recent work has centered around the network and filesystem layers, ACPI and testing of the ULE scheduler which will become the default in 5.3. Elsewhere, Open For Business, Ed Hurst has another in a series of articles introductory articles describes describing FreeBSD; for email (part 5) purposes.

FreeBSD is the most popular BSD flavor, however, it is not as popular as Debian/RH/Fedora/SuSE are even individually. Vote below to give us your take as to where do you pinpoint the roots of this fact.

I have just written an entry in my O'Reilly Weblog about the similarities between people with similar technical interests. Why do these patterns occur and what is it about certain people that binds them to certain technologies?

The ccache tool improves the build performance by caching the incorporation of header files into source files and therefore speeds the build time by reducing the time required to add in header files with each compilation stage. In this article, learn how to build and install ccache, how to use it with your existing environment, and how to improve the build times in group development projects.

The Device Emulator contains the emulator technologies featured in Windows CE 5.0. By using the Device Emulator, you can run emulated-based images created by Windows CE 5.0 without installing Platform Builder, its platform development tool.