OS News Archive

As many people noticed, and quite a few emailed us about, the past couple of days OS News has been displaying a great number of pop-up ads. I'd like to take this opportunity to say that OS News thinks that pop-up ads are generally bad, and that we have stopped using the ad broker that was serving the pop-ups. They made arrangements to not display pop-ups at our request, but didn't follow through on their agreement, so we have yanked them until they do. We're sorry for putting our loyal readers through it, but rest assured that we're trying to balance our need to make a little money and maintaining a good experience for our beloved readers. You may still see the occasional pop-up, but we're determined to keep it to a minimum. By the way, if you'd like to provide support to OSNews, so we don't have to resort to pop-ups and other intrusive advertising, there are two easy ways to do it that won't cost you a cent: First, when you buy something--anything--from Amazon.com, use This Link and OSNews will get a small percentage of your purchase, without costing you more. Also, when you're in the market to buy anything, check OS News' Pricegrabber where we also get a little kick-back.

Breadbox Inc. has secured a limited number of NewDealOffice 2000 boxes and they are selling them out for $100 USD. Get more info about the GeOS-powered operating system at Breadbox's web pages.

InformIT features two interesting articles (free registration required), excerpts from the two books: Modern Operating Systems (again) & WindowsXP Unleashed. "The first general-purpose electronic computer, the ENIAC, had 18,000 vacuum tubes and consumed 140,000 watts of power. As a result, it ran up a nontrivial electricity bill. After the invention of the transistor, power usage dropped dramatically and the computer industry lost interest in power requirements. However, nowadays power management is back in the spotlight for several reasons, and the operating system is playing a role here." Read the rest of the excerpt article from Tanenbaum's book. "Microsoft’s Windows XP Professional and Home Editions can be made to perform faster than their default installed configurations by making a few modifications at the user level. Louis Columbus shows you the steps you need to take to increase Windows XP’s overall performance." Read the first out of ten articles regarding the optimization of WindowsXP.

"Imagine computers in a group providing disk storage for their users, transparently swapping files and optimizing their collective performance, all with no central administration. But the machines providing this pool of virtual storage dare not trust one another completely. Indeed, a hacker takes over one of them and ruthlessly begins attacking others in the group. But not to worry. Thanks to an experimental operating system technology called Byzantine fault-tolerant protocols, users and their data are protected." Interesting article at CNN, exploring the FarSite project that Microsoft Research and once again exploring the idea and the potential of Distributed Operating Systems.

"Operating systems will become highly distributed and self-healing and will collaborate with applications. Imagine computers in a group providing disk storage for their users, transparently swapping files and optimizing their collective performance, all with no central administration. But the machines providing this pool of virtual storage dare not trust one another completely. Indeed, a hacker takes over one of them and ruthlessly begins attacking others in the group." Read the rest of the story at ComputerWorld.

Last week InformIT had released two chapters from the bible of the operating systems books, "Modern Operating Systems" by Andrew Tanenbaum. This new excerpt from the book (free registration required) provides an introduction to the causes of OS deadlocks. Deadlock can be defined formally as follows: "A set of processes is deadlocked if each process in the set is waiting for an event that only another process in the set can cause."