Monthly Archive:: April 2007

This article examines aspects of threading and synchronization that an implementation of the Real-time Specification for Java (RTSJ) must support.

"Amid falling sales of its bread-and-butter servers and mounting pressure on Schwartz to cut more jobs and boost a stock price that's dropped more than 22%, to USD 5.26, since early February, Sun is considering its most radical open-source move yet: releasing Solaris under the love-it-or-hate-it GPL. The move could reinvigorate Sun by putting one of its crown jewels into the thick of the open-source movement - or it could diminish the worth of one of Sun's most valuable pieces of intellectual property."

The developers behind Etoile have discussed their future plans for the project recently, and have provided a summary of the discussion on the mailing list. The Etoile live CD project will be transferred from Nicolas (due to a lack of time) to Quentin; he says: "I will recreate an environment for building the LiveCD from scratch (will now be built on Ubuntu Feisty Fawn LiveCD). To help in this process, Nicolas sent me the current LiveCD scripts. I hope to succeed in two or three weeks." On Etoile itself: "Focus will be put on core elements like System, MenuServer, Azalea, AZDock etc. rather than polished applications for this release. We don't have enough manpower for now and it's better to have a stable foundation to begin with." The next release is now planned for the coming three weeks.

As promised, Amiga Inc. has released the specifications of the low end Amiga machine which will be available this summer. It will have the Flex-ATX form factor, with a Freescale PC8349E SoC (400MHz to 667MHz depending on requirements and price target), one DDR2 DIMM slot for a maximum of 1GB of memory, and more. It will cost USD 489. Manufacturing partner and final ship schedule will be following soon. The device is supposed to run AmigaOS 4, but the recent developments may interfere with that.

"LinuxDevices.com's survey results consistently show Debian to be the most popular distribution among device developers. For example, our 2007 survey indicated that Debian was used in device-related projects by 13 percent of the survey's 932 participants, roughly double the score of MontaVista, the most popular strictly-embedded distribution. In addition to Debian's 13 percent score, Ubuntu, which is based on Debian packages, jumped to 6 percent this year, its first year in our survey. In contrast, Red Hat, achieved a 5 percent score and Fedora came in at 6 percent, while SUSE scored just 2 percent. The complete results and analysis are here. Why do device developers prefer Debian?"

Amiga, Inc. has terminated the contract with Hyperion and Eyetech on 20th December, and has sued Hyperion for copyright infringement on 26th April. Discussion about this trademark suit can be read on AmigaWorld; maybe the community can clear up what is going on here, because I lost track long ago. Update: A detailed description of the suit has appeared. Amiga Inc. is accusing Hyperion of trademark infringement, but also of breach of the agreement the companies signed among one another. According to Amiga Inc., the agreement said that Hyperion would exercise its 'best efforts' to release AmigaOS 4 by March 1st, 2002. They obviously failed that date (AOS4 was released 24th December 2006), and hence Amiga Inc. says the contract was broken. Exhibits included.

OLPC Talks has several transcripts from the OLPC presentations (where we learned that Windows can run on the OLPC). Walter Bender talks about giving each child a Gmail account for storage, Red Hat's Christopher Blizzard talks about it's unique software installation, and more.

"It's out love for Ubuntu that I'm being so harsh in this review. Look where we're at -- 7.04, a number of significant releases since 4.10 Warty three years ago -- and it still can't manage the display properly. I had great expectations for 7.04, and unfortunately they're not all met. If you're a fanboy, don't read on, because I'll shatter your fragile world." More at APCMag.

"Dell today leaked a memo to the press, hoping to prove that it's serious about making a strong comeback. CEO Michael Dell penned the memo that went out first to employees and then shortly thereafter to the Wall Street Journal, once Dell's PR team gave the all clear. The e-mail made ample use of broad statements and rhetoric to rally troops around the Dell 2.0 concept, which has a revitalized Dell trying new things like being nice to consumers to get back in the hardware game. In particular, Dell will work to make its management, manufacturing, supply chain and customer service more efficient, CEO Dell said in the memo."

"Wireless networking on Linux is entering a new era. An era of bliss and ease; where users and network administrators have abundant time for relaxing lie-abouts on sunny warm hills because their wireless systems are humming along contentedly, instead of being vexing and unreliable. OK, so maybe it's not going to be quite that Utopian, but things are definitely looking up, thanks to a lot of hard work by a lot of talented developers. So what's going to be different? A brand-new wireless LAN kernel stack, which is going to reduce the current WLAN herd-of-cats approach to a single unified subsystem that supports all wireless drivers."

A review of Minimo, the Mozilla-bazed browser for Windows Mobile devices. "I was very impressed with Minimo. Actually, using Minimo showed me that mobile net access might just work. Everyone has been predicting the mobile revolution but I never thought it would happen simply because the screen are too small and the interfaces cramped. Somehow, Minimo sidesteps all these and made a convert of me."

This article describes techniques you can use to create new levels of usefulness in your dynamically generated charts with Perl and GD. Cook up some automatically generated graphs for your organizational meetings or live enterprise directory data. Annotate the charts with readable text that delivers more information than the standard pie chart. Using the power of GD and Perl, you can link various data and images together to create sophisticated charts that will help bring visual interest to your applications.

"A core tenet of the SDL is to take and incorporate lessons learned when we issue a security update, and there is a great deal to learn from the recent animated cursor bug, MS07-017, so I want to spend a few minutes to go over some of the things we have learned from this bug."

"One of the oldest virtualization products, Win4Lin, is starting to show signs of aging. Win4Lin flourished in 2000, when competition was sparse and expensive. But seven years on, not only are there several virtualization products, but almost half a dozen are available for free. With no visible improvements over its previous version, Win4Lin Pro Desktop 4.0 is now outdated and outclassed."