Recently I decided that it would be a good idea for me to convert several old home videos from VCR tape to a digital format. I knew enough about video capturing/editing to have a basic idea of the hardware requirements, but regarding software (editing/converting), I didn’t really know where to start. This article is for anyone who is interested in working with digital video, but isn’t sure how to get started.

Ending nearly a year of debate with its users, Sun made available on its Web site an early access version of its Solaris 9 operating system that runs on Intel Corp. compatible processors. This is a beta version and it costs $20 USD to download. If you happen to get your hands to the beta and you would like to write a review of Solaris 9-x86, please do so, we will be happy to post it for you on OSNews.

A new version of an existing distribution doesn't generate near the fanfare of a new distribution from a new company. Or a near new distribution from said new company. The first release from Xandros Inc., Xandros Desktop 1.0, is the descendent of the excellent Corel Linux (Corel 2.0?). Read more for a review, a mini-usability test and screenshots.

AMD has written some things lately, as well as Intel has in the past, pointing out that the difference between RISC and CISC no longer matter (in fact, modern x86 CPUs are largely RISC these days, except the memory interface). That CISC is catching up and surpassing RISC. iGeek looks at the facts.

"I have tried for the last three weeks to generate a review of Mandrake 9.0 without much success. Not that I have ever been accused of being at a loss for words, but this particular release has left me speechless. I can't think of much to say about this release that hasn't already been said about several other Linux distributions." Read the review at LinuxLookup. In other news, both MandrakeSoft and SuSE have new CEOs since today.

"Scalability enhancements, as well, will add to the appeal of the latest kernel, Version 2.6, for enterprise customers, according to Linus Torvalds, the creator and top programmer for the Linux kernel, in an e-mail exchange last week with eWeek. While he would like the 2.6 kernel to be ready early next year, Torvalds said, "It's just too hard to predict, and it does end up depending a lot on how good the vendors are at trying to calm things down through stability fixing."" Read the report at eWeek.

"Be afraid. Microsoft thinks it knows what's best for you. Microsoft Senior Vice President Craig Mundie recently suggested that in the name of security, it may be appropriate to force you to install Microsoft patches or updates, and if that breaks your existing applications, well, it's for your own good." Read the editorial at Wired.

From GNU-Friends: "A new image of GNU (also known as GNU/Hurd) for the Bochs i386 emulator has been available for download since yesterday. It seems to work quite well (as well a Hurd-based system gets). Network, Xfree86 and the new console server are installed and configured, although there are some problems with X. Anyone interested on trying it out should read the included mini-FAQ first."

"IBM WebSphere 5.0 features SOAP parsing, UDDI repository, Java and a number of open source technologies that IBM claims speeds performance of Web services and lowers integration costs. The application server also simplifies management through features IBM claimed are part of its nascent autonomic computing strategy for self-healing of systems. These features include ability to detect and correct faults and automated server clustering." Read the report at TheRegister.

Boa is a single-tasking HTTP server. Boa does not fork a copy of itself or spawn a thread to handle each incoming connection, but rather internally multiplexes the connections. Boa only forks for CGI programs, automatic directory generation, and automatic file gunzipping, each of which must be a separate process. The primary design goals of Boa are speed and security, in the sense of "can't be subverted by a malicious user", not "fine grained access control and encrypted communications". Boa is not intended as a feature-packed server; if you want one of those, Boa is probably not the right choice.

Intel released its version 7.0 compiler suite for Linux and Windows, for the x86 and Itanium1/2 architectures. Optimizations include support for SSE2 in the Pentium 4 CPU and software pipelining in the Itanium1/2 CPUs. Inter-procedural optimization (IPO) and profile-guided optimization (PGO) can provide greater application performance. Intel Compilers support multi-threaded code development and optimization through the Auto-Parallelism feature and OpenMP 2.0 support. Intel claims that the new version of their compilers are now much more compatible with Linux code (including the GCC C++ ABI) and that they also outperform GCC 3.2 by 30% at the produced executables. There is a 30-day evaluation version for everyone to try out.

Active Data Recovery Software has released the NTFS Reader for DOS, a DOS-interfaced freeware application for reading NTFS volumes from MS-DOS or Windows 9x environments.

AMD said on Tuesday that it would embrace a strategy of developing processors for a wider range of products outside computers and called on the industry to focus on user needs rather than creating "technology for technology's sake." Our Take: In the last year it has been made clear that AMD could no longer outpace Intel in the MHz, speed and power consumption race of PC CPUs. Even the highest end models of the new AMD Opteron and its desktop version, Athlon64, which are to have a modern 64-bit core, according to SPEC benchmarks they will not be the speed leaders by the time they will come out (Q2 2003), bringing AMD to yet another race against Intel's Xeons/P4s. Oh well, shift happens.

BeOS 5 PE Max Edition is based on the original BeOS 5 PE with an additional number of drivers, add-ons, AthlonXP/Pentium4 patches and more software. It includes new development tools from the OpenBeOS team but you will also be able to select the old tools. This is an ideal way to install BeOS 5 off a bootable CD image, for all those who wanted to try out BeOS but they were unable to do so because of the bugs/drivers and patches BeOS 5 PE needs to have applied into it before it successfully run on or support most modern PCs.