In the News Archive

"Bruce Horn, one of the members of the original Macintosh team and the person who designed and implemented (along with Steve Capps) the Finder, is still a Mac user and Mac fan. He's also developing new projects, including iFile under the banner of his Ingenuity Software company. iFile is an information management system that runs under Mac OS X. Although still in development, Horn thinks that, when it's completed, it could someday offer "a nice alternative to the Finder." A new public release is slated for the spring." Read the rest of the article at MacMinute.

The French government will install open source software on the desktop as part of Project ADELE, a plan to computerize much of the country's administration by 2007, a government official says. The administration will migrate a significant number of its desktops to open source operating systems and application software, Jacques Sauret, director of the French Agency for the Development of the Electronic Administration, said at a recent meeting of the French IT and Telecoms Press Club.

VMware's CEO, Diane Greene, gives an interesting interview to IT-Director regarding the recently acquired company.

According to recently-released market data, retail software sales have decreased by 4%, or by 10% by units sold. That difference in numbers is a telling fact. Though demand is slackening, prices are rising. And this does not include mail order or download sales. Should it be any surprise that people are not buying software at their local Wal-Marts anymore? And the growing disaffection with the upgrade treadmill and the increasing availablity of free alternatives may be having an effect too.

Like any statistics, market share figures are subject to many factors that can affect the resulting pattern. Some are coincidental; others may be intentional. Are they tracking sales or users? New orders or existing user base? Servers or desktops? Domestic or worldwide? Read the article at eCommerceTimes.

Software industry executives sparred at Harvard Business School this weekend over open source procurement policies being adopted by some governments that could leave Microsoft in the cold. These key open source advocates also pointed to databases, security and storage as the next big categories ripe for commoditization.

Intel and Microsoft are gearing up to move toward the first major overhaul of the innermost workings of the personal computer--the boundary where software and hardware meet--during 2004.

Data-storage giant EMC Corp. will buy VMware for $635 million. VMWare is the leading vendor of "virtual hardware infrastructure," which allows data center managers to partition servers (and desktops) into seperately-managed parts. VMWare is also important for the OS community because it helps a user run several OSes simultaneously on one machine. EMC's acquisition will certainly steer the product even more toward the enterprise space. Wonder what will happen to the workstation product?

Microsoft founder and chairman Bill Gates and his wife Melinda are the most generous charitable donors in America, Business Week magazine said this week, as the couple gave away or pledged a staggering $23 billion -- more than half of their net worth.

Sun refugee Bill Joy talks about greedy markets, reckless science, and runaway technology. He goes on to describe his new love of Apple's OS X by stating that "For kids who are 20 years younger than me, Linux is a great way to cut your teeth. It's a cultural phenomenon and a business phenomenon. Mac OS X is a rock-solid system that's beautifully designed. I much prefer it to Linux."

"One of the biggest barriers has been that there is no standard way to authenticate and identify the various players in the delivery chain," Sun group business manager Sai Allavarpu told TechNewsWorld. "All of this is done in a privacy-friendly manner because it is baked right into the specs."

Software is collapsing under the weight of its own complexity. Charles Simonyi’s solution? Programming tools that are so simple that even laypeople can use them.

SciTech has announced an agreement with ATI, which will enable advanced multi-OS (Linux X11, Qt/Embedded, OS/2, Athene, Amiga, SMX, and more) support for ATI's mobile, desktop and embedded visual processors in future versions of SciTech SNAP Graphics IES and ENT versions.

PC makers usually use the holiday season to tout the greatest and latest desktops and notebooks, but this year they will be hawking something different: consumer electronics, says C|Net News. Also, OSViews posted an editorial discussing "misconceptions of PC users regarding the Mac prices".