Monthly Archive:: May 2006

AMD may be looking to buy graphics company ATI Technologies, a move that would benefit the overall graphics industry, according to RBC Capital Markets. "The synergies of this seem consistent with the recent announcements by AMD to significantly increase capacity over the next few-years," wrote analyst Apjit Walia in a note to investors Wednesday. "We believe ATI is a rare-buy in the semiconductor space right now given the near-term tie-up dynamics."

Novell's OpenSUSE 10.1 is a solid, multipurpose Linux-based operating system that - in addition to being a very good distribution in its own right - offers an early peek at the SUSE Enterprise Linux Desktop product that Novell is set to ship this summer. What has always (and still does) set SUSE apart is the measure of management homogeneity that the distribution brings to this diverse set of components - mostly through its Yast system configuration framework. Overall, eWEEK Labs appreciated the ambitious scope of OpenSUSE 10.1's configuration tools, but we also ran into some areas in which Yast's reach frustratingly exceeded its grasp.

"The next version of Firefox will come out of the virtual box with Google's anti-phishing tools built in. While the Googlified security services have been available through use of the Google Toolbar for either Firefox or IE6 for quite some time already, this marks the first default installation. And we all know how much Google values the defaults."

Newcastle-based Jade Integration will launch one of the smallest thin-client computers available in the UK to date, the Jack PC, next month. Containing all the electronics needed to run as a low- to medium-power PC, the Jack PC, as its name suggests, will fit into a standard size wall socket. The entire PC sits on two layered circuitboards. It contains an AMD RISC processor to help reduce power consumption and heat output. The Jack PC thin client fits into a wall socket and is so energy-efficient it can get its power over Ethernet.

The latest bug fix release of GNOME is here: GNOME 2.14.2. You can get release notes and download links from here. Please note that both libxml2 and libxslt tarballs need a patch and that the libxml2 tarball also needs a second patch.

Because of Ubuntu's big release tomorrow, a review of the latest release candidate. It concludes: "To sum up my experience with Ubuntu’s Dapper I will say that it is easily the most impressive Linux distribution I have used to date. The combination of speed, stability, ease of use and the excellant apt-get package manager, makes it the Linux distro to beat. The 5 years of upgrades is another incentive to try out Dapper as well. This would be the first time I would recommend a Linux distro to any computer user (including Windows users) and feel confident they would like the system, as well as be able to use the system proficiently shortly after testing out the system."

"Games under GNU/Linux have usually been a lacklustre affair. For every Tux Racer, there are a hundred sub-standard Pac-man clones you'd be embarrassed to advocate. For every commercial version of Quake, there's a hundred other worthy games the publisher elected not to port to GNU/Linux. Without good games, there's no market, and without the market, no effort is spared. And so the cycle continues. In this article, I will look at two of the areas in which GNU/Linux games have succeeded, and a new device that combines them both, which could help expose GNU/Linux to the populous."

Thiago Macieira says in his blog: "With commit 546830, KDE says good-bye to one of its longest friends: DCOP. The technology has served us well for 6 years, to the point that has become one of our most proeminent features." From now on, the KDE 4 tree will use DBUS. Due to the very extensive use of DCOP in KDE, this is a big jump for DBUS, "probably bring more applications into D-BUS in one go than there currently are".

"Tables are cluttered with laptops, servers, switches, cables and cords as the 2006 OpenBSD hackathon continues in Calgary, Canada. Small groups of developers talk and debate around LCD screens, while others work individually on their own projects. Behind the scenes, a donated 10 megabit wireless connection provides Internet access to all. IP addresses and DNS are provided by stock bind and dhcpd processes running on an OpenBSD server."

"In the previous article in this series, you discovered a whole world of messages that the .NET Framework doesn't even capture. These messages can signal all kinds of events, request changes, and even can end your application. Unfortunately, the techniques described in that article only work for messages that the CLR passes to your application. Sometimes, you want to track messages that the CLR doesn't support."

Dell and its business model has been the focus of a lot of comment on Apple oriented forums in recent months. The Dell model is said to be unviable, and Dell's recent news is said to prove this. A limited endorsement of sorts for the so called "end to end model" in music has been published by Walt Mossberg in the WSJ. Recently a real sky-is-falling article with this theme has appeared here. This is a subject that matters. If the advocates of the so-called "end to end model" are right, it implies that the industry structure which allows us all to source hardware from wherever we want, and run a variety of OSs on it, is in danger.

When it comes to Windows Vista, there are bugs - and then there are bugs. There is no doubt that people will find glitches in Beta 2 of the oft-delayed operating system. The question is whether there are any show-stoppers. Microsoft has time to squish some bugs, but it needs to avoid any significant headaches, if it is to make its revised goal of finishing the code by November and launching the product in January. In the meantime, ExtremeTech tests Vista's gaming performance.

"It's a sight that will stun many users. To run RISC OS on a PDA is something we've been crying out for. Here, RISC OS can be seen running on a PocketPC PDA, with no Microsoft software in sight. The Pocket Loox computer even uses a 520MHz ARM-compatible XScale processor. However, the break through came about after Jan Rinze Peterzon ported the open source RiscPC emulator RPCemu to Windows CE. The screenshots show the standard RISC OS 3.7 desktop running in a 480x640 in 32,000 colour screen mode. Draw can be seen in action, drawing lines in a new document, on the Fujitsu Siemens hand-held device."

"Flow control is usually straightforward: sequence, selection, iteration. And many programmers, having been raised on these primary control structures, have a difficult time seeing what other kinds of flow control might be necessary. This article introduces continuations and teaches you to think about flow control in radically new ways."