OSnews - Exploring the Future of Computing

GoBe Productive 3.0 == New Apple Office Suite?

Adam Scheinberg 2003-01-15 macOS 32 Comments

Matthias Schonder writes "Check out this article. Maybe Gobe for OS X is closer than we think". I don't know if the momentum of OpenOffice.org can be stopped, but how could anyone not welcome Productive to their suite of tools?

Microsoft to Reveal Source Code to Governments

Guest post by Mike Bouma 2003-01-15 Microsoft 23 Comments

Microsoft Corp. has stated that the company will open its source code to governments and international organizations worldwide. This move follows various government requests and government announcements of adopting open source strategies, mainly for security and integration reasons. Update: The Register also posted an interesting article regarding this announcement.

Intel Adds Punch to Notebook Chips

Guest post by Kevin Adams 2003-01-15 Intel 7 Comments

"Intel introduced six new chips for notebooks on Tuesday, not long after cutting prices on its mobile processors. The chipmaker, which slashed prices on its mobile Pentium 4 and Celeron chips on Sunday, launched a new flagship 2.4GHz Pentium 4-M chip for notebooks. The chipmaker also boosted the clock speed of its mobile Celeron processor, issuing a new 2GHz mobile Celeron." Read more at ZDNet. On other CPU news, Transmeta is embedding security in its new chips.

Future of Operating Systems: Simplicity

Eugenia Loli 2003-01-14 OS News 55 Comments

"Today's operating systems are conceptually upside-down. They developed the hard way, gradually struggling upwards from the machinery (processors, memory, disks and displays) toward the user. In the future, operating systems and information management tools will grow top-down." Read the editorial at ComputerWorld by David Gelernter (CS professor at Yale and chief scientist at ScopeWare).

MandrakeSoft Mulls Chapter 11 Style Escape, Says Email

Eugenia Loli 2003-01-14 Mandriva, Mandrake, Lycoris 46 Comments

MandrakeSoft is looking at a Chapter 11-style bankruptcy, to solve its financial difficulties, according to a leaked email from one of its executives. New MandrakeSoft CEO Francois Bancilhon says the liabilities total about €2 million, but that he's weighing all possible choices for resolving the problems. The leaked email, however, paints a different picture. It describes specific plans to go with either Chapter 11 or its French equivalent. TheRegister has the story and NewsForge as well.

WaterRace Source Code Released

Eugenia Loli 2003-01-14 Games 15 Comments

One of the coolest 3D OpenGL games written for the Mac 8.x/9.x, WaterRace, is now GPL and it would be great if developers would port it to other platforms that support GL.

Why Automatic Information Management is Doomed to Fail

Submitted by Jared White 2003-01-14 General Development 8 Comments

There has been a growing movement in the computer industry as of late towards exploration of more database-like filesystem paradigms - the reason being that today's filesystems are primitive, scattered, and cannot efficiently manage the immense amount of information that computer users have to work with on a regular basis every day.

SCO to Seek Fees from Linux Users

Eugenia Loli 2003-01-14 SCO 28 Comments

SCO Group, the struggling company that holds the copyright to the Unix operating system, plans to boost its revenue by charging fees to some customers that have moved from its products to Linux.

Poll: My Favorite MacOSX Graphical Web Browser

Eugenia Loli 2003-01-14 Internet 112 Comments

My husband and I made it back from Europe just last night (after an adventurous trip back) so today I was finally having access to my G4 Cube in order to test Safari, the new Apple browser based on KHTML. I like what I saw on Safari. The browser is simple (I like simplicity) and indeed loads the web pages fast (even faster than Gecko browsers on my PC) by using some techniques on rendering the page almost immediately after receiving the data from the web. With Safari, MacOSX has now seven "native" graphical browsers. Read more and vote for your favorite OSX browser! Update: A relevant article is posted on News.com regarding the reasons Apple chose KHTML and not Gecko.

Graffiti is Dead; Long Live Graffiti (2)

Eugenia Loli 2003-01-14 Wireless 17 Comments

PalmSource has licensed CIC's Jot character recognition system for its new handwriting system, replacing Graffiti for all devices, and added a unified soft Graffiti area.

Hyper-Threading Speeds Up Linux

Eugenia Loli 2003-01-14 Linux 25 Comments

The Intel Xeon processor introduces a new technology called Hyper-Threading (HT) that makes a single processor behave like two logical processors. The technology allows the processor to execute multiple threads simultaneously, which can yield significant performance improvement. But, exactly how much improvement can you expect to see? This article gives the results the investigation into the effects of Hyper-Threading (HT) on the Linux SMP kernel. It compares the performance of a Linux SMP kernel that was aware of Hyper-Threading to one that was not.

AmigaOS4 Feature Set: Release 1

Guest post by Mike Bouma 2003-01-13 Amiga & AROS 63 Comments

Amiga Inc has revealed more details on the new Amiga Operating System: "Amiga is pleased to publish this first version of the feature set of the up and coming AmigaOS4.0. The document will undergo revision in subsequent issues but because of the massive demand for information made by the public, we have decided to release it in its current state." The official launch of the PPC based AmigaOne platform together with AmigaOS4.0 is sheduled for March at the upcoming CeBit tradeshow in Germany.

Programming Languages Will Become OSes (But Are Not Quite Yet)

Guest post by Steven Haryanto 2003-01-13 General Development 29 Comments

A couple of months ago, at the Lightweight Languages Workshop 2002, Matthew Flat made a premise in his talk: Operating system and programming language are the same thing (at least "mathematically speaking"). I find this interesting and has a lot of truth in it. Both OS and PL are platforms on which other programs run. Both are virtualizing machines. Both make it easier for people to write applications (by providing API, abtractions, frameworks, etc.)

Check YellowTab’s New Zeta Screenshots

Eugenia Loli 2003-01-13 Zeta 118 Comments

Bernd from YellowTab sent us a number of screenshots of their upcoming Zeta operating system which is based on BeOS R5 and Dano versions. First screenshot, second. And here are a shot of ToDoIt application for Zeta (still under heavy development), which is a personal organizer and more.

How to Turn Apples into Ferraris

Eugenia Loli 2003-01-13 Apple 89 Comments

"As some Apple defenders have noted (and I implied with my Bang & Olufsen comparison), there are lots of niche players who make loads of money selling higher priced, but high quality products. The problem, however, is that software lacks the natural levels of compatibility found in other markets. Bang & Olufsen stereos can play the same radio stations and CDs as the lower-priced offerings from Aiwa. That isn't the case with operating systems, and really can't be so long as developers have different ideas about API design." Read the editorial at ZDNews.

Are Spy Chips Set to Go Commercial?

Eugenia Loli 2003-01-13 Privacy, Security 8 Comments

"Could we be constantly tracked through our clothes, shoes or even our cash in the future? I'm not talking about having a microchip surgically implanted beneath your skin, which is what Applied Digital Systems of Palm Beach, Fla., would like to do. Nor am I talking about John Poindexter's creepy Total Information Awareness spy-veillance system, which I wrote about last week. Instead, in the future, we could be tracked because we'll be wearing, eating and carrying objects that are carefully designed to do so." Read the interesting editorial at ZDNews.

Mono 0.18 is Released

Eugenia Loli 2003-01-13 Mono 58 Comments

From the announcement: "The Mono team is proud to release Mono 0.18, with plenty of bug fixes and improvements. If you are a happy 0.17 user, this release is a happiness extension release. Many bugs in the runtime, class libraries and C# compiler have been fixed." Additionally, Qt# (a C# language binding for the Qt toolkit) 0.6 was released too.

Windows CE Update Set for mid-2003 Release

Eugenia Loli 2003-01-13 Windows No Comments

The next update to Microsoft's Windows CE .Net OS, which has been given the code name McKendric, will ship before the middle of 2003 and include several new features, a company executive said at the Microsoft Embedded DevCon 2003 conference.

Solaris 9 for x86 Now Available

Adam Scheinberg 2003-01-13 Solaris 20 Comments

John Mahala writes "Over the weekend, Sun released Solaris 9 for x86. You can check it out here. The cost is $20 to download, and there is no offering (yet) to purchase a Media Kit."

OpenBeOS Supports BeOS Executables

Adam Scheinberg 2003-01-13 Haiku 28 Comments

Bruno G. Albuquerque was the first to submit the big news on OpenBeOS. According to the OpenBeOS website, "With the latest round of changes made to the runtime linker, the startup code, and libroot.so, we are now finally able to load and run native BeOS applications. Of course, only simple one will work right now (since we only have (most of the) parts of libroot.so implemented), but I was able to run the same application under BeOS and OpenBeOS simultaneously. We can now make our first tests to prove binary and functional compatibility between both operating systems."