Monthly Archive:: January 2008

"VIA's newly launched processor architecture, known for the last three years by its codename, "Isaiah," will keep the company's focus on cost and power intact while taking things in a substantially different direction. In short, this year will see something truly odd happen on the low end of the x86 market: VIA and Intel will, architecturally speaking, switch places. Intel will take a giant step down the power/performance ladder with the debut of Silverthorne/Diamondville, its first in-order x86 processor design since the original Pentium, while VIA will attempt to move up into Intel's territory with its first-ever out-of-order, fully buzzword-compliant processor, codenamed Isaiah. In this brief article, I'll give an overview of Isaiah and of what VIA hopes to accomplish with this new design. Most of the high-level details of Isaiah have been known since at least 2004, when VIA began publicizing the forthcoming processor's general feature list (i.e., 64-bit support, out-of-order execution, vector processing, memory disambiguation, and others). So I'll focus here on a recap of those features and on a broader look at the market that VIA is headed into."

Supposedly, we are looking at screenshots of Windows 7 here. Anyone who has ever looked at Vista will realise these are exactly the same - and that actually makes a lot of sense, so early in a development cycle. In any case, the version number in the winver screenshot actually corresponds to the version number supposedly assigned to the supposedly released M1 build of Windows 7 - but hey, that's just a Photoshop away. Do with this as you please.

The Firebird RDBMS 2008 Roadmap is now publicly available. During this year, Firebird users can expect two final releases (2.1 and 2.5) and the first alpha of FB 3. Many new features are planned, as described in the roadmap. In addition, RC1 of 2.1 has been released.

The KDE desktop environment is going cross-platform with support for the Windows and Mac OS X operating systems. In addition to porting the core KDE libraries and applications, developers are also porting popular KDE-based software like the Amarok audio player and the KOffice productivity suite.

The OpenJDK Porters Group approved by a unanimous vote the proposal submitted by the recently formed Haiku Java Team to port OpenJDK to Haiku. This makes Haiku the first OS platform to be sponsored by the Porters Group, and it means that the port is now officially part of the OpenJDK family of projects endorsed by Sun. The team already has a mailing list and a project home page; a mercurial repository is also on its way. Team lead Bryan Varner gives his latest update here on his blog.

PT_DENY_ATTACH is a non-standard ptrace() request type that prevents a debugger from attaching to the calling process. Adam Leventhal recently discovered that Leopard extends PT_DENY_ATTACH to prevent introspection into processes using dtrace. This article will cover disabling PT_DENY_ATTACH for all processes on Mac OS X 10.5. Over the previous few years, I've provided similar hacks for both Mac OS X 10.4, and 10.3.

On April 29, SCO will finally have its day in court, but not exactly in the way the Unix and Linux litigation company had planned. If things had gone the way SCO wanted, it would be facing IBM to see how much money it would get for IBM using Unix code in Linux. Instead of that fantasy coming true, SCO will be trying to hang on to what's left of its assets from Novell.

"Last week OpenSuSE 11.0 Alpha 1 was released, and in addition to including KDE 4.0, PulseAudio integration, and various package updates, Alpha 1 features improvements to the OpenSuSE installer. This installer uses Qt4 and is much improved, which warranted us taking a closer look."

The ReactOS team has released version 0.3.4 of its NT compatible operating system and discusses a new and improved release cycle and lists the huge number of updates and improvements since the last release. Some screenshots can been found here.

"In Dean's recent Internet Explorer 8 and Acid2: a Milestone post, he highlighted our responsibility to deliver both interoperability (web pages working well across different browsers) and backwards compatibility (web pages working well across different versions of IE). We need to do both, so that IE8 continues to work with the billions of pages on the web today that already work in IE6 and IE7 but also makes the development of the next billion pages (in an interoperable way) much easier. Continuing Dean's theme, I’d like to talk about some steps we are taking in IE8 to achieve these goals."

Does anyone remember GoBE Productive? The BeOS boys and girls among us will certainly do. Well, with money from India, they're back. "Backed by new investors, a new team and deeper pockets, GoBe Productive is now back with a vengeance promising to shake up the Office space. Blue Lotus Software Solutions, the new company founded by a clutch of new investors and with equity participation by GoBe Corporation, has launched the product again from India." They will initially offer a Windows version, but a Mac and Linux version (using Java) are on the horizon. There is a more interesting bit at the end of the article, though: "Blue Lotus is already planning for its next foray and is negotiating to buy out the BEOS operating system from the promoters of BE Inc, which was the original owner of GoBe Productive, but were driven to bankruptcy as they were unable to compete with Microsoft." In fact: "We are in discussions to acquire the BEOS and hope to close the deal soon." Since I ate eggs this morning for breakfast, my jar of salt is still on the kitchen top, and most likely for the better: someone should call these guys and tell them that most likely, no one will answer the phone in Menlo Park. Instant update: More on the re-launch of GoBE Productive. The GoBE website sees no updates. Update II: My remark concerning phone answering in Menlo Park may be off the mark: welcome the corporate promoter, which, in this case, could refer to Access.

IBM pretty much slammed the solid oak door on open sourcing os/2. "As stated in our response to your September 2005 letter we have considered the positioning of os/2 and open source several times in the past, and for a variety of business, technical, and legal reasons we have decided to not pursue any os/2 open source projects."

Ars reviews KDE 4.0.0: "KDE 4.0 was officially released last week after extensive development. The long-awaited 4.0 release ushers in a new era for the popular open-source desktop environment and adds many intriguing new features and technologies. Unfortunately, the release comes with almost as many new bugs as it does features, and there is much work to be done before it sparkles like the 3.5.x series." They were also at the KDE 4.0 release event.

Apple has added support for 64bit versions of Windows Vista to Boot Camp. "Apple has started quietly shipping 64-bit Windows Vista drivers (for Boot Camp) with the install disks of the latest Mac Pros which were just released earlier this month."