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Monthly Archive:: April 2005

Will D-Day be led by a Tiger?

This could be a decisive moment for the software market. Microsoft's big cash cow is the Windows/Office combo. If you look through the company's financial reports, you'll see that profits come mainly from Windows and Office. This means that Windows sales support the existence of other products and services. An unexpected drop in demand of Windows could cause a domino effect. At the moment this seems highly improbable because Windows desktop market share is over 90%, even though there is an increasing interest in MacOS X and Linux.

First look at Transactional NTFS

Transactional NTFS, coming in Longhorn, allows developers to group filesystem operations into transactions, and make those changes atomically. Changes made by transactions are isolated from each other, so that one transaction can 'see' a different set of files compared to another transaction. Transactions can also be used to view a frozen version of a file, fixed at a point in time, while another task updates the same file.

PC-BSD – a user-friendly desktop-oriented BSD system

Have you ever wondered why there is no easy-to-install desktop BSD operating system with automatic hardware detection and setup? If so, you'll be pleased to learn that things are about to change in this respect - courtesy of PC-BSD. Designed as an "easy-to-install-and-use operating system", this FreeBSD-based system comes with a graphical installer and automatic hardware detection - features that have never been seen in the BSD world!

Ubuntu 5.04 Review

Welcome back to another issue of my reviews of Linux distributions. Not really surprisingly, this time I decided to take a close look at the second version of the most popular Debian offshoot, Ubuntu Linux. Ubuntu's performance probably was the biggest surprise that 2004 had in store for Linux users. Just 9 months ago, almost noone even knew that there was a new project underway, but then things went really fast: after a preview version in mid-September, Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, released version 4.10 in October. Being based on Debian, Ubuntu has a solid base and, despite not being supported officially, all the (18.000) Debian packages available. Ubuntu 4.10 proved to be a decent operating system (especially for a first try) and had overall pretty positive reviews (here's mine).

Windows Enters Its Third Decade; Microsoft Longhorn Build 5048

Microsoft Group VP Jim Allchin discusses the shift to a new era of 64-bit computing as he looks back on earlier chapters of Windows history and looks ahead to the future with "Longhorn." Bill Gates has a spin to it too. Elsewhere, Winbeta gives an overview of the latest version of Microsoft Longhorn 5048. The article includes a lot of information and many screenshots from this latest release.

RISC OS Memory Protection

Memory ProtectionOne common complaint or feature request for RISC OS improvement is to add "memory protection". This is largely a result of the relative ease of which single programs can take out the entire operating system, combined with a misunderstanding of what precisely memory protection is. In this article, Peter Naulls will try and cover some of the issues around memory protection, and why RISC OS is often so susceptible to breakage and some of the measures which can be taken to improve the situation.