Monthly Archive:: September 2005

Jim Allchin, a senior Microsoft Corp. executive, walked into Bill Gates's office here one day in July last year to deliver a bombshell about the next generation of Microsoft Windows. "It's not going to work," Mr. Allchin says he told the Microsoft chairman. The new version, code-named Longhorn, was so complex its writers would never be able to make it run properly.

"Version 0.8.2 is now available, with some important bugfixes and changes. This update adds SMP support to the system, for our multi-processor friends, as well as fixing an issue with "mountroot", after performing an installation. Please see the changelog for a full description of the changes. People running 0.8.1 need not download the full ISO again, since the update to 0.8.2 is available as on Online Update, through the PC-BSD update manager." Read the release notes, and download here.

To respond to the somewhat alarmingly real threat of spyware, malware, and to a lesser extent viruses on the Windows platform, Microsoft used its recently-acquired security technology combined with its own in-house work to build Windows OneCare Live (codenamed Atlanta). Read here for a preview. Please note that the 'next' button is placed underneath the Google ads, almost invisible.

According to the Cola Coder, an upcoming update to ZETA 1.0 will enable booting from USB devices. This will not only allow installation of ZETA on laptops that do not have an optical drive, but it will also make it possible to install to and run ZETA from a USB memory stick.

Shed Skin is an experimental Python-to-C++ compiler. It can convert many Python programs into optimized C++ code, without any user intervention such as adding type declarations. Its main purpose is to optimize algorithmic-like Python code, by applying advanced global type inference techniques.

The Java programming language is powerful, but it has significant limitations for lightweight development. For certain problems, other programming languages such as Ruby may lead to better productivity. This article shows you what's important for productivity in an application's language.

Ubuntu Breezy Badger Colony CD 5 (what's in a name) has been released. This will most likely be the last test release before the final release. You can download it here.

Exigo is a new desktop environment project, being developed in Python and C++ using GTK+ as the GUI toolkit. The main aims of Exigo are usability, simplicity, and flexibility. Exigo also aims to introduce new concepts to the desktop, such as the use of tabs instead of standard windows. It mainly revolves around a desktop search engine, which indexes all your applications and files, and displays a list of matching files and apps when the user searches for something. See a mockup here, and read docs here. Please note that there is no release yet.

The 5th beta of FreeBSD 6.0 has been released to mirrors. There is no official announcement yet, however. Pick a mirror near you.

In a recent interview, ESR shocked a lot of people when he said, "We don't need the GPL anymore." Federico Biancuzzi recently contacted RMS, founder of the Free Software Movement and initial developer of the GNU system (the G in "GLAMP"), to talk about the past, the present, and the future of the GNU GPL. Among other things, they discussed the new clauses of the upcoming GPL version 3.

This simple guide will go over the basics of setting up and running KDE on MacOSX. You'll need at least Mac OS 10.3, Fink, and some experience with the command-line.

Powerscale4ppc (Power and Frequency Scaling for the IBM PowerPC 970) is an IBM free-trial emerging technology power management solution that demonstrates a power management implementation for the PPC970FX and CPC925 bridge chips on the Maple-D PC970FX evaluation platform running on Linux. This technology demonstrates how to dynamically scale the system’s operating frequency from F to F/2, in order to create a cooler, more power-efficient system.

As early as May 1995, three months before Netscape initial public offering sparked the dot-com boom, Microsoft executives were worried that the nascent WWW could one day become a significant threat to the Windows franchise. Another memo is also making the rounds. This internal memo, written in 2005, argues that Google threatens Microsoft and the company's crown jewel, Windows.

The wraps have been taken off of new Palm PDAs. The most notable one is the new Treo 700w: a 1.0 megapixel camera, EV-DO, Bluetooth, 64MB of memory, and, most notably, Windows Mobile 5.0. A new Zire (Z22) and Tungsten (TX) have also been revealed.