Monthly Archive:: January 2007

"Novell signed a business agreement with Microsoft last year, and many in the open source community started taking shots at Novell. Others in the community are now jabbing at each other, with the rhetoric level rising. The latest rumble began with words from Mark Shuttleworth, founder of the Ubuntu Linux project, lobbing some criticism at some of his for-profit competitors in the Linux distribution arena."

"What if you were able to discover potential problems in your code prior to building it? Interestingly enough, there are Eclipse plugins for tools such as JDepend and CheckStyle that can help you discover problems before they are manifested in software. In this installment of Automation for the people, automation expert Paul Duvall provides examples of installing, configuring, and using these static analysis plugins in Eclipse so that you can prevent problems early in the development life cycle."

Linux, the free operating system, has gone from an intriguing experiment to a mainstream technology in corporate data centers, helped by the backing of major technology companies like IBM, Intel, and HP, which sponsored industry consortiums to promote its adoption. Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, with the system's penguin symbol, will assist the Linux Foundation. Those same companies have decided that the time has come to consolidate their collaborative support into a new group, the Linux Foundation, which is being announced today. And the mission of the new organization is help Linux, the leading example of the open-source model of software development, to compete more effectively against Microsoft, the world's largest software company.

In the conclusion of his parallel programming series, David Chisnall looks at using threads. Threads are not a traditional way of achieving parallelism on UNIX platforms, but the newer POSIX standards come with a comprehensive set of functions to support them.

After more than two years of development, Xfce 4.4.0 has just been released. Xfce 4.4 features new tools such as the much awaited Thunar file manager as well as several improvements in its core components. Benedikt Meurer had also prepared a tour for the newcomers.

Apple is distributing a new pre-release version of its next-generation server operating system software that packs significant boosts to flexibility and stability, but also carries enough problems to put off any expectations of a near-term release. Testers experienced with this latest version said that its changes are more substantial than those of its mainstream sibling and revolve around substantial reworkings of the workgroup import process and Server Admin utilities, amongst other enhancements.

The New York Times has taken a look at Microsoft Office 2007. "After a radical redesign, Word, Excel and PowerPoint are almost totally new programs. There are no more floating toolbars; very few tasks require opening dialog boxes, and even the menu bar itself is gone. (Evidently, even Microsoft saw the need for a major feature purge. 'We had some options in there that literally did nothing,' said Paul Coleman, a product manager.)"

"Francois Revol, a.k.a. mmu_man, commited this Saturday to the Haiku's source tree his GoogleFS, a project he started working on about 2 to 3 years ago. GoogleFS is basically a queries bookmark, meaning you can search Google right from your Desktop, be it Haiku or ZETA, and the results are displayed like a regular query you run nowadays."

PCLinuxOS 2007 Test 1 is now available for download. It is reviewed at Tuxmachines: "This release is all new, rebuilt from the ground up. Gcc is now version 4.1.1, Xorg is version 7.1.1, and they are using a 2.6.18 kernel. KDE is the newly tagged 3.5.6. This system is faster than ever on my hardware and what's more, it's still incredibly stable."

The Alloy Analyzer is a tool developed by MIT for analyzing models written in Alloy, a simple structural modeling language based on first-order logic. Alloy can be used to detect conceptual mistakes in the model before the coding starts. Scientific American has published an article about it.

Castle and RISC OS Open discuss there plans for the gradual unveiling of an open source RISC OS over the next twelve months. They explain their reasoning behind some of the source code restrictions in their licence. "Castle's Jack Lillingston opened the presentation with a brief run through of his company's products before outlining the shared source initiative - which is designed to get the source code to RISC OS 5 out into the open for free, and encourage third party developers to improve it. Steve then took over to explain more about how the project will be organised, and how they need donations to keep going."

Work by Microsoft's R&D group played a part in revamping Windows, a researcher said Friday, but not all the toil made it into Vista. Microsoft Research contributed to the SuperFetch effort, a feature within Vista that predicts which applications are used when, then pre-loads them so that they're instantly available. "As part of a long term set of projects, we want to teach the computer to learn from users to make the machine more proactive," says Eric Horvitz, a principal researcher with Microsoft's R&D as well as the president-elect of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence. "We want to use the system's idle time to make things punchier."

Novell has begun a new element of a years-long effort to coax people away from Windows and toward Linux. It unveiled a Web site Friday that touts purported advantages that Novell's Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 has over Windows Vista. The site includes a white paper making the case, a variety of customers who have opted to use the software, and a video arguing that SLED has good usability and a built-in office suite but not Windows' lock-in and high licensing costs.

"SeaMonkey 1.1 is now available. Powered by the same engine as Firefox 2 and the upcoming Thunderbird 2, SeaMonkey 1.1 includes numerous enhancements including more visible security indicators in the browser and enhanced phishing detection for e-mail, a new tagging system for e-mail that supersedes labels, support for multi-line tooltips in web pages, and previews images in tab tooltips. Other changes include inline spell checking in the browser, an updated version of ChatZilla, and a significantly improved startup script on Linux. See the release notes for a complete list of changes."