Monthly Archive:: April 2007

In a nod toward the RTOS market that founder Jim Ready pioneered, MontaVista is shipping a new version of its commercial embedded Linux distribution said to offer true real-time performance along with a very small footprint. MontaVista Linux Professional Edition Version 5.0 boasts enhanced real-time performance and lower resource usage.

A lot of things have happened in the past few days concerning Zeta, BeOS, and Haiku. In order to create some order in the chaos, Eugenia and I have created a rough timeline of what happened the past 6-7 years. Read on for the timeline and some more thoughts on the matter. Update: Magnusoft ceases distribution of Zeta. Update II: Access answered the questions posed in the article.

This was Stallman's first talk since the release of draft 3. He explains how the 'tivoisation' clause was narrowed to encourage wider adoption, how the Novell-MS deal is tackled in two directions, and why the Additional Requirements section was dismantled, among other things. Possibly an interesting sidenote is an interview he gave straight after the talk.

"Hey Folks - this is Mike Reavey. We're all glad that MS07-017 - the Security Bulletin that fixes the vulnerability in Animated Cursor Handling - has been released, helping to block attacks on that vulnerability. While we released it within 5 days of being notified of attacks, we have received questions from customers about why it took us 3 months to develop and release the fix for this vulnerability. I wanted to provide some insight into the history of this vulnerability, and while doing so, hopefully provide insight into the overall security update lifecycle, including testing, which consumes the greatest amount of time."

Apple has upgraded its Mac Pro desktop with a pair of 3GHz quad-core Intel Xeon processors. It can have up to 16 GB of RAM, although it isn't cheap. Apple has already published benchmarks.

The startup ZenZui is introducing a zooming user interface to facilitate web browsing on mobile phones. The company is commercializing technology that it licensed from Microsoft, in particular the AppLens and LaunchTile interfaces developed by ZenZui's founders while they were at Microsoft Research.

For the first time in its 7 years of existence, some decent statement has been released concering the legality of Zeta. Access, the current owner of Be, Inc.'s IP, states: "We have sent 'cease and desist' letters to YellowTab on a number of occasions, which have been uniformly ignored. If Herr Korz feels that he holds a legitimate license to the BeOS code he's been using, we're completely unaware of it, and I'd be fascinated to see him produce any substantiation for that claim." Update: Bernd Korz has replied on his blog.

"Sun's CEO Jonathan Schwartz loves to splatter the media with the line that Windows, Red Hat Linux and Solaris stand as the only operating systems of significance in the server kingdom. We've spent the last few years struggling to appreciate the seriousness of that claim. Sun's declining system sales failed to inspire much optimism about the company conquering the data centers of tomorrow with a deflating 'venerable' OS. A couple of recent items, however, have tweaked our view of Schwartz's favored claim. It could well be that Solaris - of all things - provides the 'iPod moment' Sun seeks." In the meantime, Sun upped the speed of some of its SPARC chips.

A NetSurf coder has sparked debate over the future of the web browser by suggesting ways in which JavaScript support and other features can be developed. In tentative plans sketched out by John-Mark Bell, which are to be discussed with fellow programmers, he suggested that version 2.0 of NetSurf could feature JavaScript support.

"We are very pleased to announce that Access, the current holders of the BeOS intellectual property, has responded positively to our request for permission to reproduce the BeBook and all the Be Newsletters. As a result, we will be able to release these BeOS legacy documents under a Creative Commons license."

Version 0.67 of Visopsys was released today, with all the usual bug fixes and tweaks plus two focus areas of improvement: the IDE/ATA disk driver has been 'modernized' with PCI, DMA, and 48-bit addressing support, resulting in a raw I/O performance increase of up to 700%; additionally the Disk Manager (Partition Logic) has been re-engineered and modularized to support the later addition of new disk label types, as well as improved support for MS-DOS logical partitions (moving, creating out-of-order, etc.). Downloads are here, and the change log is here.

"The Free Software Foundation has published a third draft of the GPL3 license. The FSF had indicated leading up to this draft that it would be addressing some concerns it had with the Novell-Microsoft agreements in the draft. Here's Novell’s position on the new draft."

"Unlike previous Microsoft operating systems, Windows Vista is pretty streamlined right out of the box. It makes terrific use of a system's resources, but it's built as much for pretty looks and increased stability and security as it is for horsepower. It's time now for a course of action that will take the ball and chain off this baby and let it fly. The ink on Windows Vista's EULA is barely dry, so it's very likely that more speed tips, registry hacks, and deep settings will be revealed in the weeks, months, and years to come. For now, here's our set of tweaks that can help you turn up the throttle on your new operating system."

The POWER5 processor is a 64-bit workhorse used in a variety of settings. Starting with this introduction to assembly language concepts and the PowerPC instruction set, this series of articles introduces assembly language in general and specifically for the POWER5. Read more for links to all the parts in the series.