Monthly Archive:: March 2005

If you weren't able to attend Brainshare but are interested in seeing what the big N is up to, the keynote speech is online. Some topics discussed: Linux solving high performance problems, virtualization technologies via Xen, capabilities of the Linux desktop including transparency, graphics and animation effects and demos of mono applications doing amazing feats.

Thomas Hazlett, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, looks at the various competitive pressures (Apple, Firefox) facing Microsoft and wonders whether its era of dominance might be on the wane in an editorial at the Financial Times.

Although the hard disk is much slower than RAM, it is also much cheaper and users always have a lot more hard disk space than RAM. So, Windows and other OSes are designed to create this pseudo-RAM or in Microsoft's terms - Virtual Memory, to make up for the shortfall in RAM when running memory-intensive programs.

While XQuery was designed for querying large document bases, it serves as a fine tool for transforming simple documents as well. Whether simplifying complex pages for display on small screens, or extracting elements from multiple pages to aggregate them together on a home-grown portal, or simply extracting data from Web pages because there's no other programmatic way to get the data. This article shows how XQuery offers a fast and easy way to scrape HTML pages for the data you need.

Microsoft has provided a version of the March 2005 Indigo and Avalon Community Technology Previews for the general public. .NET luminaries discuss themselves, their technology expertise, and whatever else comes to mind, released twice a month.

A Foxborough, Mass., company has developed technology that plugs a human brain into a desktop computer, the Chicago Sun-Times reported.

Virus and Trojan warnings have been coming fast and furious from anti-virus researchers, but some say the market for cell phone anti-virus software does not yet exist.

AnandTech investigates the advantages and disadvantages of the new market trend: multi-core CPUs. Will dual core enhance your gaming experience? Tim Sweeney, the leading developer behind the Unreal 3 engine, was kind to answer their questions about multi-threaded development with concise answers.

Wishful thinking? Yes, but let's consider the possibilities. The last couple years have seen significant advances in hardware production and design. One of the more interesting (and potentially revolutionary) developments to take place this past year is the announcement of a new CPU, the STI (Sony, Toshiba, IBM) Cell processor.

The new Treo smartphone is GNU/Linux compatible and comes with Bluetooth connectivity--here's how you can set it up for your network.

It took Red Hat 16 months to produce the newest version of its premium Linux product, which went on sale in February for as much as $2,499 per computer per year. It took a group of programmers less than two weeks to release a free clone. But the move could help Red Hat as much as it appears to hurt it.

This is a partial list of new features & systems for OpenBSD 3.7, scheduled to be released in May.

After a seemingly quiet period of little to no activity concerning IronPython IronPython 0.7 has been released and is available here. From the IronPython list, by Jim Hugunin himself: "This is the release that I should have made about 2 months after IronPython 0.6 and joining MS". Elsewhere, Nemerle released a preview before 0.3.0, which is planned in a month or so. It brings a total rewrite of the type inference engine and the parser (which is about half of the compiler).

Seth Nickell posted some screenshots and videos showing the experimental Luminocity window manager & Cairo which enable a XOrg-based desktop to get accelerated GL eye candy graphics. update: more here.