Monthly Archive:: October 2005

"With the release of StarOffice 8 and OpenOffice.org, and the rumors about MS Office 12, office suites are making their rounds in the press again. Microsoft's office suite is certainly the most popular on Windows, but there are competing suites from Corel and IBM. On GNU/Linux we have KOffice, GNOME Office, OpenOffice.org, StarOffice, and more. But no matter if they are free or proprietary, expensive or cheap, and regardless of what platforms they run on, the one thing that all software suites have in common is that they suck."

Corel apparantly did an impressive handbrake turn yesterday, because it confirmed it will support ODF-- an obvious shift in position seeing it only a week ago said it wouldn't. But that is not all on the ODF front today. Microsoft yesterday also opened the door to supporting ODF just a bit more. "Microsoft is working with a French company on translators to determine the scope of the problem in exporting Office documents to ODF. It sounds to me that support for "Save As" ODF in Office is a when, not an if." Andy Updegrove, who recently critized Corel heavily for not supporting ODF, replies.

"I couldn't help but make a joke with the title, because it's seemingly right on the money. You see, Google is getting ready to take the wraps off of a new service called Google Base. If it can be posted online, it would appear that they would, in fact, prefer it belong to them. At least, they'll store it for you and make it searchable."

Sun has big plans for its Java Desktop System and on Tuesday announced a new program that will allow its desktop Linux variant to run on all major Linux distributions. While Sun remains fully committed to the JDS on both the Solaris and Sun Ray environments, it seeks to address the Linux space going forward and offer customers choice in this regard. In addition, Sun on Wednesday is expected to announce that its Java Enterprise System server software now supports Microsoft's Windows and Hewlett-Packard's UX operating systems.

Actually, there's more on processors today, but the processor in this article is so out-of-the-ordinary, that it deserves its own item. "Niagara has eight processing engines - called cores - each able to simultaneously execute four instruction sequences called threads. It's neither the first multicore processor nor the first to employ multithreading, but it embraces both ideas more aggressively than competing chips from IBM, Intel and AMD."

Some newsbits from the world of processors. First, IBM detailed power-saving techniques in the new PowerPC 907MP (the dual-core G5). Secondly, "Fujitsu's Sparc64 VI+ processor, code-named Jupiter and due for release in 2008, is a four-core processor with clock speeds of at least 2.7GHz, the company said Tuesday." And to complement today's batch of processor news, IBM unveiled the Xbox 360 processor.

Real Interfaces Visualizer (river) technology is an easy-to-use GUI multi-platform system for Java programmers to assemble and manage complex, interaction-enabled, three-dimensional user interfaces. The core of River is built upon Java3D, which is a Java API specification for 3D scene-based graphics programming.

"Scientists at UC Irvine have completed the world's highest-resolution grid-based display for visualizing and manipulating massive data sets. The Highly Interactive Parallelized Display Wall (HIPerWall) is a room-sized display that measures nearly 23x9ft (7x2.7m). The HIPerWall system, consisting of 50 flat-panel tiles, provides a total resolution of 200 million pixels (2x that of the 2nd best), bringing to life terabyte-sized data sets. Each panel, with a resolution of 2560x1600 pixels, is powered by a dual-processor 2.7GHz G5 node, with nVIDIA 6800 Ultra DDL graphics, that has access to an initial storage capacity of 10 terabytes."

After being broken in Haiku for quite a while, Axel Dorfler has fixed SMP: "Our SMP configuration is pretty weak right now - it only supports virtual-wire mode which is only one of two possible modes every compatible IA-32 MP system should support." There's even a screenshot to prove it.

As scheduled, Wine has officially entered the beta stage today. "This is release 0.9 of Wine, a free implementation of Windows on Unix. After 12 years of development, this release marks the beginning of the beta testing phase." In related news, CrossOver Office 5 has been released, with support for Office 2003 and 'bottles' (multiple Windows environments).

"As the Internet has grown in popularity so too have threats against computer users; making it critical for individuals and companies to employ effective security strategies to protect their critical information. Microsoft created the Microsoft Security Response Centre (MSRC) to investigate, fix and learn about security vulnerabilities and to help keep customers protected from malicious attacks." So, did it fair well?

"Bounty Source is a progressive step in project management for Free Open Source Software communities. In addition to the standard tools needed for managing an active community, we allow people to "put their money where their mouth" is by offering monetary rewards (bounties) toward the development of solutions to bug reports and feature requests. The end result of the bounty system is the creation of a catalyst that will increase development activity throughout all projects that choose to take advantage of Bounty Source."

Sun Microsystems plans to release the first update to Solaris 10 by the end of the year, adding an overhauled start-up process, software update feature and performance improvements.

Mac OS X 10.4.3 will weigh in at around 100MB and include more than 550 fixes and improvements, although unconfirmed reports have pegged this number at more than 1,000 when smaller, undocumented changes are included in the count. The latest seed added tweaks to CoreGraphics, CoreImage, and OpenGL, as well as iChat and WebKit, among other improvements.