Monthly Archive:: September 2005

The Mozilla Foundation plans to "shortly" release new versions of its Firefox and Mozilla Web browsers to address a recently disclosed serious security bug as well as several additional flaws, a representative said Wednesday.

Sun Microsystems is expected to revamp its core Unix server line on Tuesday with the debut of its high-end UltraSparc IV+ processor. The big UltraSparc IV+ improvement is the inclusion of 2MB of built-in high-speed cache memory where UltraSparc IV had none. The initial clock speed of the dual-core chip is expected to be 1.5GHz.

In his latest column,, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols argues that Microsoft Vista is going to be so expensive that it's going to make users think hard about switching to Linux instead. "Desktop Linux is never going to have a better chance than it will in the next eighteen months," he says. My take: He forgets two important factors: Vista can run with all the flashy graphics turned off, and seven editions of Vista? How many Linux distributions are there to choose from?

A consortium of Linux vendors created to promote the commercial use of the Debian GNU/Linux distribution has released its first product, and plans more. "The first preview release of DCC 3.0 PR1 was made available last week," Progeny chairman and Debian founder Ian Murdock wrote in his blog. He added that the next version was due late this week or early next week.

The latest release of Slackware, 10.2, was just released to the mirrors.

Again, a lot of news from the PDC. Microsoft unveiled its Expression Studio, which contains Acrylic, a vector and bitmap graphic editing and creation tool; Sparkle, a 2D and 3D animation tool; and Quartz, a design tool for page layouts and web sites. About Quartz: it does not require IE. In other news from the PDC: while at first look Microsoft Gadgets may appear a lot like Apple/Konfabulator Widgets, Microsoft has bigger plans for the technology.

Microsoft issued an update to its final Update Rollup for Windows 2000 on Tuesday, correcting issues with the initial release. While there seems to be yet more glitches still not fixed, the company says those will be addressed in individual patches.

Google has emerged as the poster child for a new wave of applications assembled from the piece-parts of several Web sites. No Windows necessary. Microsoft has its own ideas, of course. Gates sat down with CNET to talk about competitors old and new, why software hasn't fulfilled promises and the mixed blessing of controlling 90 percent of the world's PCs.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation last week won the right to unseal court documents related to Apple's efforts to subpoena the sources of online journalists. The documents, previously sealed by the Court and unavailable to the journalists and their attorneys, show that Apple moved to subpoena the reporters' sources before conducting a thorough investigation within the company.

The recent Blade.org announcement heralds that IBM and Intel are looking to standardize blade hardware designs, allowing blade systems from multiple vendors to work together. It's no surprise that Intel is interested in this -- its own ATX standard has been a massive success. This article looks at the history of ATX and some of the lessons learned about power supply and chassis standardization.

Never let it be said that Sun Microsystems, who are promoting their new Opteron-based "Galaxy" server line, are subtle. A recent post to the Sun website displays several "rejected" ads. Says the website, "At Sun, we're the radical engineers that build 'ass-whoopin' technology - we're not Miss Manners and we never want to be." Ads that did make the cut were revealed as well.

Support for mouse gesture recognition has been implemented. By using the System Manager "Gesture" plugin you can add, remove and configure your own mouse gestures. Whenever SkyOS recognizes a conigured mouse gesture, the desired action is performed. You can select from many pre-configured actions like: maximize/minimize window, close application, launch application, etc. The entire gesture recognition is fully intergrated into SkyOS/SkyGI as a service application which can easily be enabled/disabled. The obligatory screenshot.

"Another interesting announcement here at PDC is that Microsoft is creating a subset of their cool, fancy pants UI layer (formerly code-named Avalon, now WPF) on other platforms, including the Mac! In fact, one of the demos involved showing vector graphics rendered in Safari using a Microsoft plug-in."

Andy Hertzfeld is responsible for much of the development for the Macintosh in the early eighties. Since then, he's worked at several technology start ups, including General Magic and Eazell. Most recently, he signed on with Google. Read an interview with Andy about the future of the personal computer and network here.