Monthly Archive:: January 2006

A Dutch company has released an Alpha emulator for Windows XP (what's with the buzz around Alpha lately, people?). From their website: "The PersonalAlpha software lets you run your Alpha/OpenVMS software on a standard Personal Computer. Imagine running your VMS- programs on your office PC, notebook or computer at home. Develop, test and run Alpha/OpenVMS applications wherever you are. This product proves that Alpha-virtualization in software is possible and commercially available. PersonalAlpha is the 32-bit prelude to a suite of 64-bit VirtualAlpha software products that Emulators International soon will release. These solutions allow you to replace your Alpha computers without changing the applications."

"Elements of Microsoft's next-generation Web browsing software have been posted on a Windows-related blog site, including screen shots of what the application may look like and a link to some of its code. While the links to the build code for what appears to be a beta version of Internet Explorer 7 have since been yanked off the JCXP.net Windows forum, the site is still showing off roughly 14 screen shots of the browser. The person who originally posted the links and photos to the site has since removed the ability for users to click through to the code sample, reportedly at Microsoft's request. However, JCXP.net indicated that before removing the code it was downloaded as many as 12000 times."

Apple's decision to unleash Intel-based Mac systems six months ahead of schedule is proving less successful than the company anticipated. Two weeks following the Macworld Expo San Francisco keynote, sources report that sales of the Intel-based iMac are lower than Apple expected, even taking into account the seasonal post-holiday sales dip, suggesting the 2006 transition to Intel is going to be more difficult than the company has expressed. UPDATE: Good news for our Mac friends: new data now made available suggest that the iMac actually sells well.

Microsoft Tuesday released new previews of its upcoming tools for designers. Microsoft Interactive Designer is a product for building Avalon ('Windows Presentation Foundation' or WPF) user interfaces. These tools have been dubbed a Flash killer by some industry watchers, as it is expected to compete head-to-head with the Macromedia Flash product that was acquired by Adobe Systems last year.

"Samba 4 is the ambitious next version of the Samba suite that is being developed in parallel to the stable 3.0 series. The main emphasis in this branch is support for the Active Directory logon protocols used by Windows 2000 and above. With 3 years of development under our belt since Tridge first proposed a new Virtual File System layer for Samba3 (a project which eventually lead to our Active Directory efforts), it was felt that we should create something we could 'show off' to our users. This is a Technology Preview (TP), aimed at allowing users, managers and developers to see how we have progressed, and to invite feedback and support."

Yesterday, we reported on an article about the demise of the Alpha. That article was the first part in a series about the future of processor design. Today, part II has been published: "In terms of the architecture itself, AMD's Athlon 64 platform, at the stage it is at right now, does not offer that much of a performance advantage, and AMD should not be resting on its laurels. This is because on the desktop, interconnects as such play less of a role. It's on servers and multi-processing systems that you can take advantage of scaling, and that's where interconnects such as HyperTransport have a role. But when you talk about a single-chip desktop system, whether it's one, two or four cores, the efficiency of the chipset still plays a very important role."

"Of all the various Acorn hardware emulators out there, two in particular are supplied with source code: ArcEm and Arculator, plus its new cousin RPCemu. Being a RiscPC emulator with source code gives an interesting insight into the task of reverse engineering the legacy Acorn computer, which Tom had to go through and without access to the various relevant datasheets. Although VirtualRiscPC successfully emulates a RiscPC environment on PCs, its internals are rightfully protected as being commercially sensitive."

Corel bills its WordPerfect Office software as 'the world's leading alternative to Microsoft Office'. But when it comes to US retail sales, Corel lost the no. 2 spot in 2005 to a somewhat unlikely competitor: Apple Computer's iWork. According to market researcher NPD, Apple grabbed a 2.7 percent unit share, while Corel had a 1.6 percent share. Microsoft maintained its dominance with nearly 95 percent of unit sales.

"Coming home after a hard day at work after staring at the monitor continuously for hours on end, the last thing I want to do many days is sit in front of the computer again. At times though, I have this urge to grab a book and do some light reading but often the strain on my eyes dissuades me in pursuing this thought any further. This is where this very nice utility called Festival comes into the picture. Festival is a text-to-speech synthesiser developed by the Centre for Speech Technology Research at the University of Edinburgh. It is shipped with most Linux distributions and has been released under an X11-type licence allowing unrestricted commercial and non-commercial use alike."

Serenity Systems has released a German version of their eComStation live-CD. This is the third language supported; a Dutch and English version already were released. In addition, an update to their beta program for eCs 2.0 has also been released, just a day after they announced the opening of the beta program.

"DRM is a lie. When an agenda driven DRM infection peddler gets on a soapbox and blathers about how it is necessary to protect the BMW payments of a producer who leeches off the talented, rest assured, they are lying to you. DRM has absolutely nothing to do with protecting content, it is about protecting the wallets of major corporations. The funny thing is they aren't protecting it from you, they are protecting it from each other."

"Within the next few weeks, Microsoft will be releasing beta 2 of Windows Vista. The actual ship date of Vista hasn't been announced, but Microsoft's new OS is likely to ship sometime this Fall. Since Windows Vista was announced, some of the bleeding-edge features have been scaled back. For example, WinFS, a file system built using relational database concepts, won't be included in the final release. But it's likely that the Windows Vista's feature list is now stable enough that we can predict what kind of system you'll need to build today to accommodate the new OS."

Following news that Google refused to comply with a subpoena requiring the company to turn over search records from its database, much speculation swirled about the response from rivals MSN and Yahoo. MSN has broken its silence and now acknowledges that it did share search data, but no personal information. The subpoena was handed down by the US Department of Justice last summer, and was reportedly issued to gather data to support a child protection law that was struck down two years ago by the Supreme Court. Under that law, the government could punish pornography sites that made content easily accessible to minors.

"To the outside observer, improvements in PC architecture are evolutionary but logical. Processors advance inevitably in speed and performance, in happy accordance with Moore's Law. For Nebojsa Novakovic, a consultant in high-end computing systems, that's hardly the case. The demise of the DEC Alpha processor is a case in point. A performance leader was killed off by corporate whim."