Monthly Archive:: October 2005

Herb Sutter, a software architect from Microsoft, gave a speech yesterday at In-Stat/MDR's Fall Processor Forum. Addressing a crowd mostly consisting of hardware engineers, he talked about how the software world was ill-prepared to make use of the new multicore CPUs coming from Intel and AMD.

"During the last month, we conducted a survey of readers who use Linux. We asked them why they switched to Linux and received a plethora of answers. Surprisingly, anti-Microsoft sentiment had less to do with the choice than one might imagine. Linux stands on its own as a user preference."

Linus has released kernel 2.6.14 after two months of development. There's a big amount of changes: new features like HostAP, FUSE, the linux port of the plan9's 9P protocol, netlink connector, relayfs, securityfs, centrino's wireless drivers, support for DCCP (currently a RFC draft, PPTP, full 4 page-table support for ppc64, numa-aware slab allocator, lock-free descriptor lookup and many other things. Read the comprehensible changelog or the full changelog.

"There have been a few recent PowerPC announcements that have caused the Mac Faithful to wonder anew about The Switch and the "real" reasons behind it. First, there was the 970FX announcement, which clearly showed that IBM is capable of putting out a 970 processor that compares quite well with the Pentium M in performance/watt. And then there's the 970MP, which Apple has used to make a monster of a quad-processor 64-bit RISC workstation. To make matters even more interesting, P.A. Semi has just announced a dual-core 64-bit PowerPC processor SoC that, if the specs and numbers are to be believed, could take PowerPC to a whole new performance/watt level."

Forget all I said about handbrake turns, OpenOpenOffice is here: "OpenOpenOffice OpenDocument support to Microsoft Office users. More importantly, it is a simple and elegant solution that can be implemented in weeks instead of months or years, solving the most pressing needs of Office users."

Novell layoff rumors swirled this week, but analysts were quick to dismiss any doomsday scenarios involving the SuSE Linux operating system. Current users of SuSE should not panic even if the 20% workforce cuts cited in recent news reports come to fruition, said Charles King, principal analyst for Pundit-IT Research, Hayward, California.

"It seems that the recent announcement about the release of open source software from yellowTAB was quite missunderstood. That announcement started quite a lot of trolling in the community. I didn't feel there was much to buzz about though; it was just an official release of source code from applications being in ZETA. Nothing more, nothing less. I saw comments saying "They have to because of the GPL" or "They are trying to make PR to cover them not respecting the GPL for 2 years..." Obviously some people talk about things they don't know."

SymphonyOS has reached beta stage-- well, sort of. They released the first preview release of the first beta (are they trying to beat this?). The stability of the Mezzo dektop environment and Orchestra rendering has been improved, various applications have been updated, and much more. Download here.

When Microsoft releases its SQL Server 2005 database on Nov. 7, it will have been five years since the last version debuted. If Windows Vista arrives as scheduled next fall, it too will follow its predecessor by five years. That's a pretty long time to make customers wait for a new release. Too long, concedes Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. "We just can't make our customers wait three or four years for the things which should have been on more interim cycles." Elsewhere, Bill Gates said that even though Google is Microsoft's biggest competitor, MS is not afraid of Google.

Red Hat is shying away from taking "control" of its relationship with customers and instead hopes to become a thought leader that champions innovation through freedom of the community. Matthew Szulik, Red Hat chief executive, chairman and president, said Wednesday it was wrong to think companies like Red Hat could control what the open source community builds and that it's important to stay true to the premise of the Gnu General Public License.

"Blackberry killer. That's Microsoft's hope for its new ActiveSync Direct Push Technology in Exchange 2003 Service Pack 2 for Windows Mobile 5.0." And elsewhere: "Accoding to research firm Canalys, global shipments of smart mobile devices is up 75% year-on-year in Q3 2005, with handheld shipments falling 18%, while converged devices more than double in volume."

"After using Smoothwall Express 2.0 for years and now testing out v3.0 alpha I can conclude that this product is shaping up to become even more fantastic than I ever thought it could be. It gives power to the end user, allows them to decide how to control their network and makes it easy to do so. The new GUI (web based interface) is much clearer, easier to read, and provides more information about what is going on."

Ever since networking came out, one important issue, to a various extent over the time, has been how to give the legitimate users the right access - authentication, which is one of the three basic elements in security: authentication, authorization and access control.

The first in a new series of development builds of GNOME has been released. You can compile GNOME 2.13.1 by using these jhbuild modulesets. Planned features can be found here.