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Monthly Archive:: July 2008

Can Nokia-Led Nonprofit Save Symbian?

InfoWorld's Tom Yager speculates on the road ahead for Symbian now that Nokia has established the Symbian Foundation to lead the OS into its open source era. The Foundation -- which includes five Symbian licensees, three major wireless carriers, and two embedded semiconductor manufacturers -- is certainly a motley crew, yet, as Yager writes, 'If Foundation members could agree on a set of objectives, it might be able to drive a new device from concept to wireless network deployment in a fraction of the time it takes today.'

IBM Tightens Stranglehold Over Mainframe Market

Build a High Performance Telephony System

Building Telephony Systems with OpenSER is a new book from Packt, which acts as a step-by-step guide to building a high performance Telephony System. Written by Flavio E. Goncalves, this book teaches users how to develop a fast and flexible SIP server using OpenSER, an open-source VoIP server based on the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), an application-layer control (or signaling) protocol for creating, modifying, and terminating sessions with one or more participants, including internet telephone calls, multimedia distribution, and multimedia conferences. This book is a well illustrated, step-by-step guide to building a SIP based network using OpenSER.

Making Desktop Linux Work for Business

We've been talking about desktop Linux in the business world for years. in 2008, it seems, a lot has changed and improved, and a lot has stayed the same. A Computerworld article takes a look at the state of desktop Linux in the enterprise, and examines the benefits and the pitfalls, looks at the various vendors and their offerings, and talks about how to work well with Windows and other commonly-used platforms and applications.

The Critics are Wrong: KDE 4 Doesn’t Need a Fork

"After the recent release KDE 4.1 beta 2 and openSUSE 11 with KDE 4.0.4, some critics have been especially vocal in expressing their displeasure with the KDE 4 user interface paradigms. The debate has grown increasingly caustic as critics and supporters engage in a war of words over the technology. The controversy has escalated to the point where some users are now advocating a fork in order to move forward the old KDE 3.5 UI paradigms. As an observer who has closely studied each new release of KDE 4, I'm convinced that the fork rhetoric is an absurdly unproductive direction for this debate."

Snow Leopard: Apple’s Secret Business Weapon?

It appears that Snow Leopard, the new Mac OS X, will be aimed at business and enterprise users, signaling Apple's push to take Windows head on outside the consumer and education markets. Slated for availability six months prior to Windows 7, Snow Leopard will not only improve performance but also bring Microsoft Exchange Synchronization into the OS itself — evidence that Apple is targeting the enterprise, seeking to capitalize on corporate disappointment with the Vista transition.

BeOS’ ProcessController for Windows

It is no secret that us OSNews editors - Eugenia and I, mostly - have fond memories of the BeOS. So, whenever a handy BeOS feature makes its way into other operating systems, I zealously point it out in the articles or comments I write about them. Call it a harmless little compulsion. Anyway, a few days ago, while hanging around in Haiku's irc channel, a link to a screenshot showed an interesting little piece of BeOS legacy which had found its way to Windows.

ReactOS 0.3.5 Released

The ReactOS project has released version 0.3.5 of their ambitious operating system. ReactOS aims to be a "ground-up implementation of a Microsoft Windows XP compatible operating system. ReactOS aims to achieve complete binary compatibility with both applications and device drivers meant for NT and XP operating systems, by using a similar architecture and providing a complete and equivalent public interface." This new version comes packed with improvements.