Here is a short list of the things I totally loved this year. Use the comment section to tell us about your favorites too!Innovation/Great Idea of the year: Apple’s Expose (note: Longhorn and Gnome’s Storage have innovative concepts and ideas too, but they are not out yet).
Best Hobby OS: SkyOS. Robert, a single developer, has really put lots of work into it this year, outpacing in development OpenBeOS, MenuetOS and Syllable put together!
Best Desktop OS: Mac OS X 10.3 Panther (I just hope that Apple stops breaking application and driver compatibility with OSX versions that came out just last year).
Best Server OS: Windows Server 2003. Best. Windows. Ever. (Message to the ‘disturbed’ people in the comment’s section: deal with it).
OS with most overall potential: Linux. With the release of 2.6, Linux is sailing for doubling to ~2% of marketshare for 2004. Let’s hope that YellowTAB could develop and market its Zeta OS in a way that I could see more potential there too.
OS dissapointment of the year: FreeBSD. Don’t get me wrong, FreeBSD is one of my all-time favorites, but really, it just doesn’t evolve as fast as it should have
to compete with Linux. Another dissapointment was also eComStation 1.1, lots of installation problems and almost no notable advancements.
Best desktop environment: Luna or Aqua for me. Gnome did some great steps though and became my Unix DE of choice.
Most profound application of the year: I am torn between Photoshop CS and OpenOffice.org (while not as full featured as MS Office or even Star Office, it is free and so that compensates.)
System/Dev software that had huge evolutionary steps this year: Mono. It is getting there and it looks good.
Best Freeware game: Frozen-Bubble. It is so addictive, that it ain’t funny anymore.
Best consumer Camcorder: Canon Optura Xi.
Best Prosumer camera: Canon EOS 10D.
Best computer accessory: Apple iSight web camera.
Best upgrade: Memorex or Sony DVD/+-RW (dual format).
Life saver accessory (especially on Apple Cube computers): iMic USB sound card.
Best all-around photo printer: Epson Stylus C84
Best “cheap” film and generic scanner: Epson Perfection 3200 Photo.
Best… Action Figure: 12″ Rotocast NightCrawler. Isn’t this cute?
Probably I am forgetting a few things, I am sure… Please use the comment section to tell us about your favorites this past year!
Best waste of AA batteries: Microsoft Intellimouse Explorer for bluetooth
Best platform I refuse to admit is dead: Newton
Best reason not to use Windows for web serving: ASP.NET
Best OS I refuse to admit is dead: BeOS (I’m not the only one!)
Best online service: iTunes Music Store (DRM be damned)
Biggest shock in movie theaters: Pirates of the Caribbean (how did it manage to not be bad?)
Best software I heard about in 2004: OmniWeb 5 (I think I wet myself)
BeOS is the best OS! But i vote for WindowsXP:)
Win2003 is the best server:)
My PC is the best computer!
Linux suxx:)
best OS of the year: without question goes to
Mac OS X panther
To date nothing touches this OS. And thats a fact.
Yeah i agree with OSNEWS win2003 is a remarkable server, it’s rock solid and has loads of excellent features.
Best server OS: FreeBSD + Best DE: KDE = Best desktop OS
Best linux distro: Gentoo
Best browser: Opera
Biggest disappointment: the end of RHL
Best project: Apache (keeps kickin’ m$ butt)
Happy New Year to everybody!
Hi PeaceMaker!
>> 1) With Breadbox PC/GEOS -THE coolest- DOS-GUI EVER comes back to Earth !!!
>> http://www.breadbox.com”
> Man! I miss this one so bad! Is there a way to download the original one?
No, there are no illegal Downloads at the Net…
You wanna have the newest PC/GEOS – legal?
Look here:
http://www.devicelogics.com/store.html
http://www.sun2k.com/Software%20-%20Ensemble.htm
Download the free trial Version of “Breadbox Ensemble” (the new PC/GEOS) here:
ftp://ftp.breadbox.com/Ensemble%20Lite/enslite.zip
Wanna have cool Software for PC/GEOS, Nokia9000, MyTurn GlobalPC and other GEOS Products?
https://store.wsg.net/Merchant2/merchant.mv?Store_Code=BREADBOX
Wanna have cool Software (Free- & Shareware) for PC/GEOS? Look:
http://www.tvakatter.org
http://www.rbettsteller.de
http://www.mgroeber.de/
Wanna have German Infos for PC/GEOS? Look:
http://www.geos-infobase.de/INDEX.HTM
For C Programmers: Have you ever learned GOC ???
Write Software for a good Market: PC/GEOS.
With the SDK and Borland C
Infos and Download here:
http://www.geos-infobase.de/SDK/SDK2.HTM
Good Luck in 2004
PC/GEOS FOREVER!
Best Hobby OS: SkyOS. Robert, a single developer, has really put lots of work into it this year, outpacing in development OpenBeOS, MenuetOS and Syllable put together!
Fair enough that SkyOS development is impressive for one person, but outpacing Syllable? I believe we started 2003 behind SkyOS in a lot of places (We didn’t even have support for CD-ROMs until 0.4.4 which was released in May!), yet we’ve finished equal in most respects and we have SkyOS beat with our hardware support and media framework.
Still, there’ll be no question of it next year; Syllable is and will be the Best Hobby OS of 2004!
For the “OS with most overall potential” I’d have to say DragonFlyBSD myself. If you were to have said “OS with most commercial potential,” then yeah, I’d agree with an answer of “Linux.”
“Just gotta say how much I have enjoyed OSNews this year. Not only a wide range of useful articles but the many intelligent user comments.”
I agree with that. I have learnt quite a lot here.
Things that made 2003 for me:
1. a big collection of MP3s of Grigory Sokolov playing the piano, which somebody kindly sent me. Tremendous performances.
2. replaced my CD player and amplifier with much better ones made by Musical Fidelity (I got a second-hand bargain here)
3. read “The Horseman on the Roof” – a great book
Nothing much in the computer field got me excited, although the PPC 970 and 980 look promising.
If you find MS Windows Server 2003 so very good, which i do not doubt if you say so, i take it you’ll switch to a hosting company which’ll run MS Windows Server 2003?
Since you’ve always ran Linux
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph/?host=osnews.com
I mean, why run this Linux thing if you clearly find MS Windows Server 2003 much more better?
Nuance? Beyond our control? What’ll be it?
Flamebait is what it will be. 😉
Let me clarify my position regarding the “OS with most overall potential.” Also note that it is based on my current (probably flawed) understanding of the technology.
Matt lost his commit bit in FreeBSD land in early 2003 (late january of early february, I can’t remember). DragonFlyBSD was first announced on 16 July 2003 by Matt Dillon om the FreeBSD mailing lists. It was derived from FreeBSD 4.8 which was released on 3 Apr 2003 by the FreeBSD project.
After “destressing” for a few months, he says that he decided to implement one major subsystem ‘goal’ before announcing it. This initial subsystem was the Light weight kernel threading subsystem. This means that in the space of a few months, he nearly single-handedly wrote a brand new completely mutexless threading system for the kernel, as well as the beginings of the light weight ports/messaging system to go along with it. A number of former kernel processes (such as the pageout daemon) have been reimplemented entirely as threads, and under the LWKT system are free from both any process context, as well as from the Giant kernel lock.
The ports/messaging system will allow DragonFly to natively support clustering, without the need for a third party message passing system. The fact that each CPU in a system has it’s own self-comtained LWKT scheduler, and the fact that the threads are per-CPU, and are not preemptively moved from one processor to another except through the “asyncronous IPI messaging interface,” should allow the DragonFly kernel to scale much better than other OSs, as there is less “guessing” involved in thread migration operations among other things. I am told that the message passing system also (nearly) completely removes many situations where deadlocks could occur in various opperations.
Since becoming a public project, a few interesting new features (new to BSD if not to computer science in general) like Application Checkpointing, and Variant Symlinks, have been written, and ACPI, PAE and the ATAng frameworks have been imported from FreeBSD. There is a hack that allows the use of the FreeBSD ports collection until DragonFly gets it’s own based on either the Variant Symlinks or the forthcoming message based VFS framework. The nVidia drivers have been ported to the kernel. The conversion of numerous subsystems in the kernel to the new ports/messaging system is also seeing tremendous advancement.
This is a hell of a lot of progress for such a new project, to have occured in so short a time, and with so few people. Currently the project includes seven committers and a handful of people submitting patches.
DragonFly is still a development OS and is not claimed to be ready for production use, although in my own experiences, and in those of others, it seems that it is. It is fast (I’d REALLY like to perform the bulk.fefe.de/scalability tests on DragonFly ASAP!), and it seems every bit as stable as FreeBSD 4.8.
If indeed it proves to be as scalable, debuggable, maintainable and extensible as Matt Dillon believes that it will be (in the first few releases), than I can see DragonFly BSD giving both Linux and FreeBSD (as well as a number of other OSs for that matter) a run for their money, in other words, it is IMO the OS with the most potential.
http://slashdot.org/articles/03/02/03/239238.shtml?tid=122&tid=156
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2003-July/006889…
http://www.freebsd.org/releases/4.8R/announce.html
http://www.slashnet.org/forums/DragonflyBSD-20031009.html
http://www.dragonflybsd.org/Main/team.cgi
http://bulk.fefe.de/scalability/
Best Mainboard 2003: ABiT NF7-S Rev. 2.0
Best Hardware Innovation: AMD Athlon64
Best MP3 Portable Player: Apple iPod
Best Software Development: Linux Kernel 2.6
Hardly. Let’s compare:
1) Syllable has a graphical browser that works (Skykruzer just sits and spins, and spins, and spins).
2) It has support for multiple users (though doesn’t, yet, enforce permissions).
3) Has a fully functional media framework.
4) Syllable remembers your network settings between boots.
5) Has it’s own journalled filesyste (which, admittedly, has shown stability issues for some people, myself included).
6) Self-hosting (you can compile Syllable from within Syllable).
SkyOS:
1) Has a semifunctional browser (has any user gotten it to work properly?)
2) Single-user
3) Has a port of VLC.
4) Forgets network settings.
5) Uses fat partitions (and, as I understand it, ext2 partitions).
6) Requires windows+cygwin+djgpp to build drivers and applications according to the developers book.
How about hardware support, then?
Syllable:
Networ
1) Realtek 8139
2) NE2000
3) 3c90x
4) Intel Etherexpress Pro
5) AMD PCnet
USB
6) USB mass storage
7) USB mice + keyboards
Sound
8) SB Audigy
9) SB Live!
10) SoundBlaster PCI (es137x)
11) i810 ICH audio
12) VT82xx audio
13) SoundBlaster Pro
Video
14) Matrox G200/G400/G450
15) nVidia (every model?)
16) SiS 3xx
I know I’m missing some hardware, but this is all I could think of.
SkyOS:
Network
1) AMD PCnet
2) Realtek 8139
3) 3c509
Sound
4) SoundBlaster Pro
5) SoundBlaster PCI (es137x)
Video
6) Vesa only, at the moment (with Radeon and nVidia support on the way for 5.0)
USB
7) USB mice + keyboards
8) USB Mass storage (though is that available now, or only in 5.0?)
Missing anything?
There are, of course, some other hardware they both support that’s fairly common (PS/2 mice+keyboards, IDE+ATA support, etc).
In addition, Robert has said that there isn’t likely to be any network support (except for a loopback driver) in 5.0, and the SoundBlaster will be the only soundcard supported since he’s rewriting the driver interface. So there go a few more items when 5.0 comes out.
Now, none of this is mean to degrade Robert’s work. He has done an absolutely incredible job, and I’d love to see SkyOS go far, but to say that SkyOS is outpacing Syllable is just a tad bit delusional 🙂
Adam
I know I’m missing some hardware, but this is all I could think of.
Network
DEC Tulip
Via Rhine
3Com 3c509
In fact, almost all common cards are supported. The only one currently unsupported is the DP83815/SiS NIC
Sound
Via 82C686 (Seperate from the VT82xx at the moment)
Trident
A lot of the sound drivers support compatable chipsets E.g. the Trident & i810 drivers also support chipsets from SiS, ALi & nVidia.
Video
Matrox driver also supports older cards E.g. Millenium
nVidia support for everything from a TNT upto GeForceFX
S3 Virge DX/GX
Trident (VLB & PCI)
ATi Mach64
Savage IX/MX
A VMWare video driver is available but not yet in Syllable.
The nVidia, GeForceFX, SiS & Mach64 drivers support video overlays. Again it is almost easier to list common cards we do not currently support (Radeon, Intel Extreme, some Savage cards)
You can check http://azaka.nutus.com.ar for a list of “Known Good” hardware with Syllable, although it is not always upto date with the latest drivers & updates.
being “of the year” favorites, may be she wants to talking about improvements.
so i think Eugenia’s list is acceptable
I agree with the Epson Scanner. The 32xx and 24xx series are just wonderful. Fast, great quality, inexpensive.
However, the new Canon i series of printers (i860, etc.) ROCK.
Fast, EXCELLENT quality, all for about $0.04 a page b&w, and about $0.06 color.
I love my Epson/Canon combo.
Second, Firebird & Thunderbird are AWESOME. After a few weeks with each, you’ll begin to wonder how M$ “won” the browser wars. IE sucks.
Third, PIMEX is a great PIM. Simple, easy to learn and use. Inexpensive.
Just my 2 cents . . .
Chack out Ebay I picked brand new copy of NDO 97,which is almost identical to the old GEOS(no skipper,or Win95 look,Just the old GEOS desktop)there for about 10 bucks ,seems a guy up in Canada has a bunch of these he auctiond off there,and they are fully liscenced copys not reproductions on 4 floppies in the original evelope with the original book of docs,keep looking back there it’s advertised as DOS into point&click.,And while you are looking for an OS that runs on top of DOS check out SEAL it doesn’t do much yet but it sure looks nice,looks like MacOS X running on an X86,kinda all it has so far is a Media player for sound and Midi,Picture veiwer,a paintbrush,some simple games,a very basic tevt editor,a file manger and some development tools,ther’s not browser or internet stuff yet, but it’s agood start and it’s Open Source Freeware.I would like to see this go somewhere,it would be a really nice alternative on older slower boxes.
HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!!!
I bought a Lexmark E321 from Newegg when they were running their $50 rebate. A quality 20ppm laser for $208 shipped get my vote for best new laser printer of the year.
I also vote for the GeforceFX 5900 Non-Ultra as a winner for the year. ~$200 for performance within a few percent of its much more expensive bigger brothers (5900/5950 Ultra) and high-end ATI cards (9800-series).
Biggest Comp Business News of the year?
Ximian and SuSE being purchased by Novell
I’d have to disagree with the “Best Server OS” choice here. Windows 2003 is simply not it. Although new in 2003 and that might well have been the reason for being chosen here by Eugenia, but it is by no means the “Best Server OS” for 2003 or any other year, for that matter.
My favorite OS and server OS of choice is FreeBSD, but here I’ll have to choose Linux. Linux 2.6 is very promising and it also came out in 2003.
-3BSD
I don’t think that Windows 2003 is the best server OS …
I think that NetWare 6.5 is better than W2K3 and is really very good Server NOS product which offers J2EE server, PHP, MySQL, Jakarta-Tomcat, iFolder, iPrint, Virtual Office, NetStorage, eDirectory based administration of Apache2, AFP, CIFS and NFS support, etc. Yes – many of these components are part of the most of the Linux distributions but now they fit perfectly in NetWare 6.5 and they are supported by Novell.
The addition of SuSE LINUX to the Novell’s products is great as it will be possible many of the eDirectory based technologies to be available to Linux too.
I want to mention as a very good product for desktop management Novell’s ZENworks for Desktops 4. It manages now only Windows based PCs but with the acquisition of Ximian I hope that Novell will be able to add a lot of the functionality of ZENworks for Desktops to Linux in addition to the Red Carpet functionality.
Nterprice Linux Services which Novell relaesed soon looks very promising too:
http://www.novell.com/products/linux/index.html?sourceidint=nlshome…
I believe that 2004 will be very exciting year as I hope a lot of new functionality to be added to Linux and its adoption to continue to increase!
I’d have to agree. Windows 2003 is quite lame and incomplete when compared to Netware 6.5.
Eugenia, I’m curious why you chose Windows 2003 Server for the best server OS? There are obviously far superior server OS available (Netware, Solaris, HP-UX, and AIX spring readily to mind), wouldn’t you agree?
The best in 2003 was the fantastic an powerfull GUI PC/GEOS. What ever you want…
My personal favorites for the year 2003 (in no particular order or category):
Python 2.3
PostgreSQL
Apache
The GIMP 1.3
Enigma (The free puzzle game, not the encoding device)
Debian
OpenBSD 3.4
AMD Processors
Gnome
XFce4
The Lord of the Rings movies
Mozilla
C
BASH shell scripting
Zope
and probably many more…
Innovation/Idea: That I realized that I should be focusing on making art and music instead of wasting my time with computers. That certainly changed my life for the better.
Best computer hardware: STAudio DSP 3000! it works great, it sounds great and it’s fairly cheap. (Even though the DSP 2000 is a bit old it’s still a better low budget choice though).
Most annoying trend: USB gadgets, and USB devices in general. Some things just aren’t meant to be portable.
Biggest dissapointment: Zeta. It just keeps getting worse, and the company behind it scares me. AmigaOS 4 doesn’t look very promising either.
Best desktop environment: None. They are all both good and annoying. The least annoying to me is still BeOS, I think Luna or Gnome comes second.
Best development tool/language: REBOL! best way to develop internet-tools in no-time.
Coolest OS: Contiki
Application with most potential: Mozilla Firebird. After being a fan of opera for many years, this saddens me, but Firebird does provide a much nicer experience these days. Opera needs to work hard to clean up their UI or else they’ll have no future.
OS with most potential: I’d like to say OBOS but it’s too early, I’ll have to go with linux on this one.
Question of the year:
Oh, Vanders, what did you do that scared Kurt Skauen away?
Best HobbyOS: Visopsys. This one is really cool.
Best DesktopOS: Hmmm … I don’t care. Linux is good, windows is good.
Best ServerOS: I vote for Linux or any Unix; And, under all circumstances: Novell Netware.
Best Computer: ‘tough not tested yet, I’ve got a hankering for apples Dual G5.
Best Old Computer: Still the C64. *gg*
Most Promising OS: Syllable (famous Atheos fork) and SkyOS(famous self made os). Syllable team should apply some recent screenshots of the os. and anyway, what is kurt up to?
Best Books: Lord Of The Rings (& of course the 3 films!), the harry potter series
I worked there, you didn’t, so please leave your biases elsewhere.
Now young man, was there any need for that surliness and arrogance? no. Grow some maturity and actually argue on the facts rather than bringing in emotive and provocative language in the vein hope of receiving what has is commonly referred to as a “flame”.
If you have ever actually shared responsibility for an IT department of that scale, feel free to share your own experience. Until then, please don’t try to cover up an obvious avoidance of clear and rational thought with cultish slogans (“mission critical”) and fanboy enthusiasms.
Again, more use of emotive and derogatory language in the vein hope of puffing ones chest up and exclaiming that one is more experienced.
I owned a business and sold x86 servers and I know what they are and aren’t capable of doing. Unlike your original post, I am under no illusions that there are places where expensive SUN systems can be replaced, however, I also see places where SUN machines still play a major roll in the over all machinary of the business.
Managers care about reliability, but they care more about money. There’s no reason to spend money to achieve a level of reliability and performance that are not needed. If a business could operate successfully using a squadron of Sinclair QL machines, that’s exactly what they ought to do.
Yes, that is true, however you will find that although for you a certain configuration may be perfectly acceptable as the mean time of failure falls into the companies acceptable limits, another company may find that this mean time to failure is too high for the type of functions that are to be carried out using the equipment.
None of the servers in question — NT or those running Solaris — ran IIS. (There are other kinds of servers, you know, besides web servers.) We ran only a few web servers — Apache on the Sun’s and then Lotus servers when we ditched the Sun boxes for Wintel.
We found Sun support to be costly and inadequate. We found Sun hardware to be no more reliable than our Wintel boxes, and considerably more expensive to maintain. (Commodity hardware and peripherals were, by and large, unavailable for the Suns. If something broke, you paid Sun prices for Sun hardware. When your boss knows that a Sun hard drive costs 10 times as much as an equivalent Wintel drive, you won’t bew able to convince her that the Sun drive is worth cost.
You bring up figures such as “Sun hard drive costs 10 times as much as an equivalent Wintel drive” when in actual fact from my last contact with a sun machine, they use a standard Fujitsu SCSI hard disk that one can purchase from any third party vendor and 9/10, the only thing that SUN do get picky about is the use of non-certified third party memory modules. Since most new SUN machines now use standard PC modules, one can purchase certified modules from kingston and a few other memory vendors who are licensed to produced SUN certified modules.
Others may have had different experiences. In my case, the cost of Sun and Solaris weren’t commensurate with performance and reliability.
The experience you had was running Solaris on SPARC hardware. You lack of configuration details of these servers mearly re-enforces a number of other posters notions that you have no idea what you are talking about.
I’ve seen Solaris running just as reliably on x86 hardware as on SPARC, minus a few high end features, however, it seems to me that your organisation did not partake in due diligence and investigate all the options that were at their disposal. Not only is that reckless management but completely unacceptable in any organisation who demand accountability by all decision makers.
If the above senario is an example of the type of management that took place at your place of employment, I would question the competency of your management team and ability to analyse and make a decision based purely on the facts rather than emotive, vendor induced hyped.
We have some newer screenshots on http://syllable.sourceforge.net E.g
http://syllable.sourceforge.net/modules.php?op=modload&name=My_eGal…
http://syllable.sourceforge.net/modules.php?op=modload&name=My_eGal…
http://syllable.sourceforge.net/modules.php?op=modload&name=My_eGal…
Not much has changed that you could see since we did those. We’ll do some more once Syllable 0.5.2 is released.
AmigaOS Rules… 😉
What about a new Amiga platform ?
Best Desktop OS: Mac OS X 10.3
Best Server OS: Mac OS X Server 10.3
2nd Best Server OS: FreeBSD
Best Hobby OS: Darwin
Best Computer News Site: OsNews.com(thanks to the great team and the editor-in-chief)
Best new app: Safari
Biggest event in computer hardware: The Apple G5
Biggest event in computer software: release of iTunes for windows
Cool ideas: Expose from Apple and the design of Storage from GNOME team
Best gedget: iPod with iTrip
so you see now that I am a big apple fan… 🙂
Best Server OS: Linux
Best Linux Distro: Mandrake
Best Desktop OS: Mandrake
Best Desktop: Gnome
Best Application: Firebird
Best Office App: OO
Best Free SW App: Php[PM][gy]Admin
Best Movie: Lord of the Rings
Best Choice: Mine :-D.
Happy 2K4, Pals.