Monthly Archive:: January 2005

Dell has released a 24 MB ROM upgrade for its x50/x50v range of handhels with fixes in many drivers, including faster 2D/3D performance and read-from-memory-cards performance. The x50v has been greeted as the most full-featured PDA of its class, selling for less than $420 and including a 624 Mhz CPU, 16 MB Intel 3D card (!), gorgeous 640x480 3.7" screen, CF and SD slots, 64 MB RAM, 128 MB ROM, WiFi+Bluetooth and more. My Take: I recently got one of these babies, and it's indeed a tech marvel. Only two peeves: no camera and 3.5 hours battery life (double battery life: available as extra, for $99 - sold with a free 256 MB SD card for a limited time). 128 MBs of RAM would have been nicer too.

This article is a quick roundup of "best picks" for Linux Live CD's.

BSDNexus forums has an interview with DragonFly lead developer Matthew Dillon. They discuss a wide array of topics ranging from recent VFS work to SSI clustering.

Apple has anounced faster Powerbooks. The 12" gets up to 1.5GHz with a 64Meg GeForce 5200 and the 15" and 17" get an upgrade to 1.67 with a Radeon 9700 with 64Meg for the 15" and 128 for the 17". They all now come with 512 MBs of RAM, a laptop-drop sensorand a scrolling trackpad. For almost a year now *Book users used SideTrack's solution for scrolling, read how this new Apple announcement affects their company. Regarding the new Powerbooks, the screen resolutions have remained the same throughout the board. Elsewhere, the WashingtonPost reviews the Mac Mini.

I like Slackware, it's simple, it's robust, it's fast. But I always felt there was some lacking in Slackware when it came to desktop use--I was never able to put my finger on it exactly, but using Slackware for a desktop, although it works just fine, seemed like it (or I) was out of place.

In the survey of almost 2,000 ad executives, brand managers and academics by online magazine Brandchannel, Apple ousted search engine Google from last year's top spot as the fifth most influential brand. However, Apple was not always a success though: MLAgazine have compiled 10 of the most notable products released by Apple or its comrades that failed.

Win4Lin has added a low-cost version of Win4Lin to their offerings. The "Win4Lin Home" version is targeted at home users, and costs $29.95. Read the full press release for more information.

As data storage requirements increase and computing needs change, flexibility within server configurations and in storage configurations becomes more important. Find out how the HP Smart Array controller provides the tools you need in this chapter.

Refactoring software by hand can be a real pain. So why not just automate the process? In this chapter, Joshua Kerievsky explains the whys and hows of refactoring, and why you shouldn't trust that automated refactoring program.

Widgets are the building blocks of java user interfaces. Learn all about them in this chapter from SWT: The Standard Widget Toolkit, Volume 1.

Howl is a cross platform implementation of the Zeroconf zero configuration networking standard. It includes daemons and a client side SDK for registering, browsing, and resolving network services, and assigning link local IP addresses without a DHCP server. On Windows 2000/XP, it includes a sidebar in Internet Explorer that allows users to browse zeroconf-enabled Web and FTP servers. This release fixes a broken Makefile.am and a compilation error on FreeBSD. Elsewhere, Apple has recently released Technology Preview 3 of Rendezvous for Windows.

A patent watchdog group is raising questions about the legal language behind Sun Microsystems' recent open source offering called OpenSolaris. The Public Patent Foundation (PUBPAT) is criticizing Sun and its CEO Scott McNealy for potentially misleading developers into thinking Sun's latest open source contribution is free of any legal land mines.

A Russian security company claims it found a way to beat a security measure in Microsoft's Windows XP Service Pack 2, a major update aimed at securing customers' PCs.

Robert Szeleney has just released the long-awaited beta8.3 to the SkyOS beta team. This release includes major upgrades to the operating system as a whole; including important ports such as FireFox and ThunderBird.