Monthly Archive:: February 2005

With the latest crop of iPods, Apple is no longer including a FireWire cable in the box. The music players will still work with FireWire, if a cord is purchased separately, but only a USB 2.0 cable comes with the device. The move is part of a gradual shift on Apple's part to standardize the iPod on USB, which is far more common in the Windows world. Nonetheless, some Mac owners were rankled by the move, saying that as recently as a year or two ago many Macs didn't include a USB 2.0 port. My Take: Just bought (a previous generation for cheap) iPod Mini yesterday. It's a truly nicely done product. The FW option seems better than the USB on my 2 year old Powerbook, as it has USB 1.1 instead of 2.0.

IBM has quietly added a new option to the suddenly vogue market for "hypervisor" software that lets a computer run multiple operating systems simultaneously, CNET News.com has learned.

Part III of Desktop Linux - The Hard Truth is published. In it retired World Bank CTO W. McDonald Buck looks at what the CTO needs to consider in making a realistic desktop switch to Linux (-after- having switched to OS software on Windows & Linux in the server room) in a big company and how to avoid ending up toasted.

Handling exceptions in C++ has a few implicit restrictions at the language level, but you can get around them in some instances. Learn ways to make exceptions work for you so you can produce more reliable applications.

When I joined OSNews in 2001, I did it with a great excitment because of my love for... messing around with many operating systems in order to explore news ways of doing things. Back in the '80s and the '90s there were a lot of OS projects that would draw the attention of the computer users of the time. But in this decade, it seems that other than Windows, OSX, Linux and a very few other much smaller OSes, the scene is sterile. And it's only getting worse.

The new Javolution 3.0 (open source library) allows your objects to be preallocated at start-up and transparently recycled during execution.

Here's a comparison by a BSD user between FreeBSD and NetBSD. Elsewhere, the FreeBSD logo competition has just kicked out, officially this time.

This article explains how I’m able to use an aging but still capable Mac for database development in a company that develops commercial decision support software for hospitals. I wrote this article because I think the results of the search I made for software that allows me to work productively on this machine may be of use to others.

Minimo, the Mozilla browser for mobile devices, is poised to move beyond Linux PDAs and onto Windows CE devices, according to the Mozilla Foundation. Screenshot here (mobile version of OSNews is showing). Elsewhere, the Mozilla chairman Mitch Kapor speaks out.

Here is a two-part article on security and Mono.

A number of new OpenZaurus users are having problems getting up and running with OZ. Here is my basic Getting Started guide for OpenZaurus 3.5.2.

I'd better start by admitting that I'm a fan of KDE. It's not because it works like Windows, but for the quality of the tools available. However, a GUI is just a way of doing something and I think I've been a bit dismissive of the Gnome desktop up to now. I read a few reviews of Ubuntu, looked at their web site and decided to have a look. I wanted a general purpose (desktop) distribution and an opportunity to get to know the Gnome utilities.

Rasterman talks about other's opinions. As he says, E17 has several of the tecnoologies gnome and others are searching. He adds two videos as a proof with animate backgrounds and other things.Perhaps it's time for the linux desktop world to stop reinventing the wheel and collaborate one with each other. Gnome has things like accesibility and lots of apps, enlightenment has a very powerful rendering engine. It'd be a shame to see people reinventing the wheel.

Query support has been implemented into SkyOS. Queries can be initiated through either the Viewer, or directly through the command line.