Miscellaneous OS-Related News

The new AMD CPUs won’t be specified by its clock speed anymore. Future Athlons will be specified by ‘MODEL’ numbers not by Mhz. For instance, a Palomino-Athlon that runs at 1.4 GHz will be MODEL 1600, because AMD considers Palomino 1.4 GHz to be at least as fast as a Pentium 4 1.6 GHz. The printing on the chip will be ‘A1600 …..’, even though its a 1400 MHz part only, Tom’s Hardware is reporting.
An interesting interview with the Sun developers who are working on Gnome for Solaris 9, can be found here.
A new version of KDE’s Office, KOffice ver 1.1, was made available for download yesterday.
And speaking about office suites, Gobe Software today announced Gobe Productive 3 for the Windows and Linux OSes, and that it will be available this fall. The app will be selling for $124.95 USD, while existing BeOS users will be able to upgrade for less than $40. Gobe will also be introducing the Family License scheme, allowing owners to install Gobe Productive on every computer in their home, as well on one computer where they work.
In the meantime, Apacabar emailed us with more information about their BeOS sellout: “This offer is exclusively available from the retailers called SoftLine in France for everybody interested in the world. As our webmaster is on holidays, the web site has not been updated with new prices. Meanwhile, we suggest you to order quickly by email, by contacting Mr Sylvain Todeschini who’s in charge of International Sales”.
An interesting clarification (Editor’s note: and also an affirmation of my personal opinion as to why Palm purchased Be’s IP) is now clear: Palm bought Be for the (brilliant indeed) engineering force and not so much for the BeOS/BeIA technology (some elements from the Be technology may appear in the new PalmOS though). The interview is with the David Nagel, the CEO of the new software subsidiary that Palm will be creating after the Be engineers join them (and where Steve Sakoman will be the CTO).
Also, a very interesting chat topic regarding multithreading being BeOS’ sore spot (a result from BeOS messaging system) has popped up. If you are a BeOS developer, it is a must read.