Monthly Archive:: February 2005

"Mad Echidna" has posted an article about his migration from a Linux based PC to an old iMac in this article. My Take: My reply to his annoyances:

yellowTAB is pleased to announce that it will unveil version 1.0 of its flagship product, the Zeta Operating System, at Cebit 2005. Zeta 1.0 will incorporate many fixes over previous versions, as well as some new exciting features.

StanaPhone is the first free telephone with real US phone numbers, and a Skype competitor.

Apple Chief Financial Officer Peter Oppenheimer was a featured presenter on Thursday at the Goldman Sachs Technology Investment Symposium, held at the Arizona Biltmore Resort & Spa in Phoeniz, Ariz. During the half-hour session, Oppenheimer answered questions about the iPod's "Halo" effect, the importance of the Mac mini, Apple's continued retail efforts and other issues facing the company.

Tuxmachines.org has a mini-Slackware 10.1 review, and some screenshots.

In many embedded systems, memory is severely constrained. RAM sizes on the order of a few hundreds of bytes or less is very common. Full multithreading may not be an option because of the memory required for thread stacks. For such systems, the newly released Protothreads Library provides a very lightweight alternative: protothreads are a stackless type of threads with only two bytes of RAM overhead per protothread. The library is implemented in pure C without any machine specific code. Protothreads are currently used in the Contiki OS and will be used in the upcoming version of the uIP embedded TCP/IP stack.

Sun has recently released Solaris 10. It is currently free, as in beer, and most of it is promised to be released under an OSI approved license in the second quarter of 2005. Most everyone reading this probably knows all of that. The release and subsequent open sourcing of Solaris 10 has caused quite an uproar in the Open Source community and the IT industry as a whole. Read the review here.

Microsoft is alerting customers that it will soon start delivering Windows XP Service Pack 2 to all customers using Automatic Update, whether they want it or not.

Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo has notified on the Lua mailing list that a paper in PDF format on the implementation of Lua 5.0 is now available for downloading: The Implementation of Lua 5.0 - Roberto Ierusalimschy, Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo, Waldemar Celes. Reccommended to anyone interested in the internals of Lua.

Opera 8 Beta2 is now available with a host of new features, including security fixes, and UI enhancements. Would be nice to see an Opera version for PocketPCs too, not just for Smartphones.

In December 2004, the NetBSD Project released the feature-rich NetBSD 2.0. Even after such a masterpiece, developers kept working on improvements, new features, and new ports following the new development roadmap. Federico Biancuzzi recently interviewed them to find out what they are working on and how they plan to promote their project in the near future.

Customers who find themselves reinstalling Windows XP should be ready for a headache: Microsoft will no longer support activating the product over the Internet.

I've started a project in anticipation of the upcoming release of OpenSolaris called ZoneBSD. The goal of the project will be to factor as much code from OpenSolaris as necessary into FreeBSD in order to support running FreeBSD from within a Solaris Zone, allowing virtualized FreeBSD instances to be run atop a host instance of Solaris.

Carly Fiorina's undoing was her inability to capitalise on the 2002 HP-Compaq merger, seen as her bet-the-company move. HP is on shaky ground at the moment because its product portfolio has become too large and diversified to manage, and lacks organisation-wide synergy. The printing and imaging business account for a disproportionate share of the profits, while its enterprise divisions lag. The options that stand before HP's board range from organisational restructuring, to a complete split of the company. Which of the many strategies is eventually adopted depends on the identity that HP decides to create for itself.