Monthly Archive:: March 2006

Today, we have something special on OSNews, something that's actually a first-timer on OSNews. Already common on other websites, we today hand the microphone to you, so you can ask questions to someone from the tech industry. Read on for the details!

GeekPatrol uses their GeekBench tool to compare Windows XP and OSX, both running on MacBook Pros. "Overall, there are areas where the Windows XP MacBook Pro was faster, areas where the Mac OS X MacBook Pro was faster, and areas where they were both roughly the same. Looking at these results, it’s hard to say which configuration comes out on top, although I think you could make a convincing argument for Windows XP (with Visual C++) being a bit faster overall than Mac OS X (with GCC)."

The European Commission said on Wednesday it told Microsoft that it had competition worries about the firm's new operating system, Vista, another antitrust concern that the software giant must answer in Europe. "We are concerned about the possibility that the next Vista operating system will include various elements which are currently available separately from Microsoft or other companies," Commission spokesman Jonathan Todd said. More here. My take: Enough already. Seriously.

Bill Atkinson was Apple Computer's main developer of the user interface that first appeared on the Lisa and later on the Mac. A passionate photographer, Atkinson had the foresight in the late '70s and early '80s to document his UI work for Apple in a series of Polaroids. The photos were published by another Mac pioneer, Andy Hertzfeld, in his book 'Revolution in the Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made'. Through Hertzfeld, Atkinson permitted CNET News.com to reprint the photos. Similar shots here.

Ars takes a quick look at GNOME 2.14. "The GNOME team recently announced another excellent release. GNOME 2.14 includes a variety of spiffy enhancements, bug fixes, improvements, and new features that make it the best GNOME desktop environment ever. Already available in Ubuntu Dapper and the recently released Fedora Core 5, GNOME 2.14 awaits your use and abuse. I've poked and prodded it and now I'm ready to talk about it."

In a stunning move, BAPCo, the industry-standard Windows benchmarking consortium, announced that Apple Computer has joined up as a member. BAPCo is responsible for the SYSmark 2004SE and MobileMark benchmark suites we use at PC Magazine Labs for testing PCs. BAPCo also produces the webserver test WEBmark. BAPCo members include AMD, Intel, Transmeta, ATI, nVidia, Microsoft, Ziff Davis Media, CNET, Dell, HP, Toshiba, Seagate, VNU, Atheros, and ARCintuition.

"Over 500 million people use the Internet, and over a billion computers are deployed around the world. It has become impossible to ignore the issue of content management and access. Call it Digital Rights Management if you will, or call it working out how to manage copying in the digital realm. We need to solve the problem of how digital information will be shared, and an equally important need to set open and wide reaching standards. It has been more than ten years since computers and the Internet really started to take off, and there is still no coherent approach to restricted (or unrestricted) information sharing. This is a serious problem."

"Even if you don't use OpenBSD, you're likely to be benefiting from it unknowingly. If you're using Solaris, SCO UnixWare, OS X, SUSE Linux, or Red Hat Enterprise Linux, chances are you're using the OpenBSD-developed OpenSSH for secure shell access to remote machines. If so many are using this software, why are so few paying for it? Official responses (and non-responses) from Sun Microsystems, IBM, Novell, and Red Hat are below, but if you're one of the freeloaders who hasn't contributed to OpenBSD or OpenSSH, what's your excuse?"

Red Hat is going through a growth spurt as companies become more comfortable with its software as an alternative to Windows and profits fuel the expansion, executives with the developer of open source software said Tuesday. Profitability expanded even as Red Hat grew to more than 1200 employees.

"Here are my few suggestions to make better desktop (making it simple but powerful). Most of them are for GNOME and related applications but for other desktop environments and applications could be also useful. This suggestions are not of type make it faster (what is also important) but of type make it more useful. Some of them are my own thoughts but some suggestions are inspired by existing programs. And even some are not real suggestions." Note that English isn't his native tongue.

"Theo de Raadt is the project leader for OpenBSD, a Unix-like operating system. We spoke with Theo about the upcoming release of OpenBSD, 3.9, the financial state of the project, and about companies that profit from free software without contributing back."

Microsoft has delayed until early 2007 an update for Microsoft Virtual Server, a technology that lets a computer run multiple incarnations of Windows simultaneously. The SP1 update to Virtual Server 2005 R2 will include support for two chip features, Intel's Virtualization and AMD's Virtualization, that ease the task. Previously it had been scheduled to arrive in the fourth quarter, but a Microsoft representative confirmed the slip on Tuesday.

Over the last two weeks, Debian developer Martin Michlmayr compiled the whole Debian archive on a quad-core MIPS machine donated by Broadcom using GCC 4.1. The aim was to find problems in GCC 4.1 itself and bugs in free software projects exhibited by GCC's increased standards conformance (in particular regarding C++ code). Read more for the details.

Google is contemplating a move to join the Eclipse Foundation in some capacity. Greg Stein, an engineering manager in the open-source group at Google and chairman of the Apache Software Foundation, told eWEEK that Google has considered joining Eclipse and has talked with Eclipse's executive director, Mike Milinkovich, about the possibility.