Monthly Archive:: August 2006

Two editorials on Vista, from eWeek and Microsoft Watch. The former: "The looming choice for Windows users is either to stick with Windows XP (and older hardware) or take Windows Vista cold turkey. But Microsoft doesn't have to be so tough - Apple did it differently with the Mac OS X rollout." The latter: "How will Microsoft - and its business customers - cost-justify upgrading to Vista in the coming months/years? With Windows Vista, Microsoft needs to please at least two constituencies with very different sets of requirements."

Improvements: "New 3D desktop support (both with AIGLX and Xgl) and a new tool to configure it (drak3d); new 'One' CD with 3D desktop support (AIGLX and Xgl, both on KDE and GNOME, autodetection of the best 3D solution); new rpmdrake; more applications migrated to XDG menus; GNOME 2.16 RC1; kernel 2.6.17 (based on 2.6.17.8 with ALSA 1.0.12 rc2); KDE 3.5.4; new 'Ia Ora' Mandriva theme (still only included in GNOME); new VPN configuration tool (drakvpn); new firewall." Get it from the mirrors.

"Concurrent programming is difficult, yet many technologists predict the end of Moore's law will be answered with increasingly parallel computer architectures - multicore or chip multiprocessors. If we hope to achieve continued performance gains, programs must be able to exploit this parallelism. Automatic exploitation of parallelism in sequential programs, through either computer architecture techniques such as dynamic dispatch or automatic parallelization of sequential programs, offers one possible technical solution. However, many researchers agree that these automatic techniques have been pushed to their limits and can exploit only modest parallelism. Thus, programs themselves must become more concurrent."

Not only is Linux having trouble breaking market share for desktops, server shipments actually grew at a smaller rate than Windows server shipments. "Somewhat surprisingly, Linux seems to be running out of steam a little. After nearly four years of double-digit revenue growth, the Linux server sub-market accounted for only USD1.5 billion in sales in the second quarter of 2006, an increase of only 6.1 percent. IDC didn't say this, but it could be that the mainframe market has saturated itself with Linux and is no longer consuming Linux MIPS like it has for the past several years. Linux server shipments grew 9.7 percent in the quarter, and most of the revenue and shipments were on X86 and X64 servers. Windows-based server shipments increased by 11 percent."

"Mozilla released Beta 2 of its upcoming Firefox 2 browser for developer review Aug. 31, emphasizing that it is being made available for testing purposes only. The release contains a number of new features, as well as some enhancements to look and feel. "Firefox 2 Beta 2 is intended for Web application developers and our testing community," the team said on the Mozilla development website. "Current users of Firefox 1.x should not use Firefox 2 Beta 2 and expect all of their extensions and plugins to work properly."

"I am very pleased to announce that we have made a public beta of our upcoming CrossOver Mac product available for general download. What we are shipping today is our first beta release of CrossOver Mac. This release will give you a taste of the promise of CrossOver, but should be considered an early test release - we intend to make substantial further improvements before we ship a production version."

The 4th international GPLv3 conference is being held at Bangalore and Richard Stallman is one of the prominent delegates. This is a transcript of the interview with RMS where he is asked a couple of questions related to GPLv3 and free software in general.

"With an unexpected move Microsoft changed agreement terms of its virtualization products and allows anybody to freely redistribute them within proprietary applications. In particular Virtual Server 2005 R2 (both x86 and x64 editions) requires to sign a Redistrbution Rights licensing agreement, while Virtual PC 2004 automatically grants this right in the EULA. The upcoming Virtual PC 2007 will be redistributable as well."

Google has announced the release of the source of an old OCR software called Tesseract in source. "In a nutshell, we are all about making information available to users, and when this information is in a paper document, OCR is the process by which we can convert the pages of this document into text that can then be used for indexing."

Trolltech has released a second preview of Qt Jambi - a prototype version of Qt that allows Java programmers to use the popular cross-platform development framework. This second release incorporates the feedback of over 1700 beta testers, and features new additions like Web Start functionality, improved integration with Eclipse and single JAR file deployment for Qt Jambi-based applications. More information is available in the Qt Jambi product alert with tech details in the Qt Jambi Whitepaper. To try it out, sign up for the preview license and download.

Charles Hannum, co-founder of NetBSD posted to 3 major BSD lists saying that "The NetBSD Project has stagnated to the point of irrelevance. It has gotten to the point that being associated with the project is often more of a liability than an asset. I will attempt to explain how this happened, what the current state of affairs is, and what needs to be done to attempt to fix the situation."

Linuxlookup.com is reporting on the release of Gentoo Linux 2006.1. Building on the strengths of previous releases and featuring all of Gentoo's well-documented flexibility, performance and portability, this release is now available on all supported architectures. The most popular architectures now use GCC 4.1, glibc 2.4 and baselayout 1.12.1, as well as including a new profile layout, with seperate desktop and server profiles.

"Apple today announced that Dr. Eric Schmidt, chief executive officer of Google, was elected to Apple's board of directors at their meeting today. Eric also sits on Google's board of directors and Princeton University's board of trustees. "Eric is obviously doing a terrific job as CEO of Google, and we look forward to his contributions as a member of Apple's board of directors," said Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO. "Like Apple, Google is very focused on innovation and we think Eric's insights and experience will be very valuable in helping to guide Apple in the years ahead."

In the past, I've installed ReactOS to show my students a Microsoft alternative. The performance was slow and there was not much to do. This latest revision offers more! For my review, I used the freeware VMWare Player since I was using the company server. I'm the only one who knows how to use it.