In the News Archive

As many OSNews readers forced to get by with ailing, slow computers at work may know, a stingy hardware upgrade cycle can have negagitve productivity effects. However, in this age of gigahertz processors, how often do businesses really need to upgrade? Every three to four years, a recent Gartner study recommends. Now, I'm sure Dell is happy to hear this news, but is it really necessary to upgrade that often?

Once the most aggressive users of IT, financial institutions have learned to make do with less. But few can go on cost-cutting indefinitely. Computer- and telecoms-makers could soon be feasting again. In most cases, IT systems have not been touched for more than a decade - "note the antiquated OS/2 operating system that runs many an IBM computer on tellers' desks", the Economist reports.

BIOS maker Phoenix Technologies said it is currently shopping a digital-rights-enabled BIOS system to top PC OEMs, the most aggressive use of DRM technology to date. On other DRM news, Microsoft has made available for download the first of several components of its forthcoming stable of rights-management software.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology has made the bold step of offering most of its course information available, at no charge, on the internet for free. Anyone who wants to can now have access to an education (if not a degree) from one of the top schools in the world. The project is called OpenCourseWare and there are more details in a Wired article and at the OpenCourseWare web site.

Most of the people in the United States and Canada should know about the crippling power outage that hit eastern North America yesterday, leaving New York, Toronto, Detroit, and other cities dark all afternoon and into the evening. When the outage hit, it was sometimes low-tech (or no-tech) devices that were the most useful, as trains stopped and mobile phone networks didn't work or became overloaded. Pay phones (now rare), pagers, and flashlights were the useful tech tools, and thousands were forced to walk home.

NeTraverse, today, announced the immediate availability of Win4Lin Terminal Server 2.5, based on the award-winning Win4Lin technology. Win4Lin Terminal Server allows an organization to dramatically lower costs by hosting and managing their Windows desktop sessions on low-cost, reliable and secure Linux servers. Read more for the rest of the press release.

The Embedded Linux Consortium (ELC) entered a new phase of its standardization activity today, as it launched three key new initiatives aimed at developing specifications covering user interfaces, real-time performance, and power management for embedded Linux based systems and devices.

Tao Group announced major enhancements and additions to its intent technology suite, and the launch of the intent 2 SDK. Technology components include: Qi (Brandable Control Center), iSS (intent Sound System), iVE (intent Visual Environment), Java solutions, and gaming.

The Fink, Gentoo, and DarwinPorts projects are pleased to announce the formation of a cooperative development alliance, MetaPKG, forged to facilitate delivery of freely available software to Mac OS X. While each project will continue to deliver software in their own way, the coordination between projects will: accelerate the development efforts of all projects, avoid unwanted duplication of effort, improve the consistency, quality, and responsiveness of ports.

Quark finally made available for pre-ordering their long-awaited QuarkXPress 6 after 2 years of porting it to Mac OS X. Our Take: The big surprise for me personally was when earlier today I browsed the comments at VersionTracker, the premier OSX software repository. The vast majority of these users seems to have already switched to Adobe InDesign. $200 bucks cheaper too.

"Is this the end of Netscape? So much for Netscape 8.0" C|net says. Where does that leave the Mozilla project? After Apple and Microsoft, Real and Amazon get into online music business. IBM launches Lotus admin Kit resources for Win/Linux/Mac. How-to animation in SDL. 3D UI for Windows Desktops. Revolution 2.0 development tool released. New Gnumeric screenshot. Review of Poseidon USB, a USB stack for Amiga/MorphOS, plus a benchmark of AmigaONE against Pegasos and AthlonXP.

Forget the $1 per year Steve Jobs got during his first year of return at Apple. According to Forbes, Steve Jobs is today the most well paid CEO in US with $116+ million for the previous year.

I just came back from the CeBIT, the anual fair in the Messehalle in Hannover Germany. It is one of the biggest computer and communications technology fairs in the world and certainly the biggest in Europe. Here's my mini report (which also includes information about YellowTAB's Zeta).

Safari Beta 0.64 was given to beta testers and it has some nice additions as ThinkSecret reports. Builder.com invited some current and former CNET developers to weigh in on the C# vs. Java debate. Big Blue is hitting back against SCO's charges that it misappropriated Unix trade secrets and used them in Linux. SuSE says it's "greatly disappointed" by SCO's actions. 'Browser Innovation, Gecko and the Mozilla Project' is the article Mitchell Baker of the Mozilla project posted. Blogger installs Lycoris on Dell Latitude CPi D266XT and writes down his experiences. Two new commercial releases for Linux: Moho 4.1 and the TextMaker word processor (works with FreeBSD 4.x when Linux ABI is installed). Update: A SCO editorial, this time from OfB: "Why SCO Needs to Go". Update 2: Mono 0.23 is out.