Adam Scheinberg Archive

Normally I would never link to my own blog from OSNews, however, a few people have asked me to share this particular post, so I decided to make an exception. After playing with popular online photo sharing services Flickr and Picasa Web Albums, I wrote a review of these photo sharing sites. Feel free to post your thoughts in the comments.

FreeDos has been declared dead, and the homepage been moved to Sourceforge. From the FreeDos.org site: "On 28 June 1994, the project that became FreeDOS was announced to the world. It's 12 years later, we still haven't reached "1.0", and there's no sign of getting there anytime soon. I have given up. I've stopped waiting for "1.0". FreeDOS is dead." You can still see the message if your DNS servers haven't been updated yet.

Many people who have called Apple to complain about excessive heat coming from their newly purchased computers have been told that the MacBook and the MacBook Pro are in fact Notebook computers and not Laptop computers. This article details why they are totally full of it.

At its core, OSNews is a site driven by interesting content about alternative Operating Systems. As such, we're introducing "OSNews Alternative OS Contest," a contest aimed at getting back to our roots and generating interest and publicity in alternative Operating Systems. Read on for the rules & prizes.

The inevitable flood of Vista Beta 2 reviews are starting, and today there are two prominent reviews. Tom's Harware UK has spent 500 hours with Vista and given it a general thumbs up in its screenshot heavy review. Ars Technica also takes a look at the progress of Vista, but trivializes some larger Vista features, such as the completely rewritten Windows Mail.

Starter Toolkit for DB2 on Rails is a set of tools that enables rapid building of Web applications with Ruby on Rails and DB2. It comes with a unique, one-click installer for pre-tested and reconfigured installation of not only Ruby and Rails, but a complete DB2 Express - C solution. Several Demos available showcasing the toolkit.

From eWeek: "Symantec Corp. has admitted to using a rootkit-type feature in Norton SystemWorks that could provide the perfect hiding place for attackers to place malicious files on computers. The anti-virus vendor acknowledged that it was hiding a directory from Windows APIs as a feature to stop customers from accidentally deleting files but, prompted by warnings from security experts, the company shipped a SystemWorks update to eliminate the risk."

Remote Python Call (RPyC) is a python library providing transparent and symmetric IPC/RPC and distributed computing. It supports both synchronous and asynchronous operations. It works by giving you transparent control over a remote python interpreter: you can import remote modules, access remote classes, functions, and instances, just as you would do locally. Typical use cases are remote administration, distributed testing, resource sharing, and tunneling. Version 2.60 was released last week, adding supports for secure (TLS) connections.

Remember Yoper? Yoper is working towards version 3.0 of their Linux distro. For those of you that want to help with the beta testing, a download is now available. Yoper is optimized for i686 processors and speed. You can also find a short review of Yoper 3.0 beta over at Tuxmachines.

Some Friday fun: OSDir has some sweet screencaps of Ubuntu 6.06 RC, Kubuntu 6.06 RC, Xubuntu 6.06 RC, and Edubuntu 6.06 RC. Along with Fedora Core 5 and SuSE 10.1, this generation of desktop Linux distros has really stepped up the polish. Updated by AS: Added Xubuntu and Edubuntu links.

Google Labs has released Picasa for Linux, ported using Wine by CodeWeavers. The free Picasa download is available now. My Take: The software requirements are fairly hefty in that some features require cutting edge programs like HAL and a 2.6+ kernel, but this is fantastic news for Linux users. Picasa is an excellent program that rivals iPhoto. Update by AS : Google ported Picasa using Wine, but it was still a LOT of work and the result was completely effective. Please read more on the WineHQ mailing list. Update 2: You do not need Wine installed to run this - it's a self-contained Wine lib. Also, the Picasa download apparently doesn't work from all countries. Update by TH: Here's a review.

As a Macbook Pro owner myself, I'm somewhat reluctant to admit that the first generation of Macbooks suffer from an annoying and constant whine and an unaccpetable amount of heat output. Therefore, I will be one of the many calling Apple Support on May 20. May 20th, it's been reported, is "the day the whining ends." OSX86Project has more.

"More and more people are buying and loving Macs. To make this choice simply irresistible, Apple will include technology in the next major release of Mac OS X, Leopard, that lets you install and run the Windows XP operating system on your Mac. Called Boot Camp (for now), you can download a public beta today." My Take: Is this possible? We've been talking about virtualization on Leopard for a few days now, but did anyone see this coming?

A bill has been introduced in Minnesota that would require all Executive branch agencies to "use open standards in situations where the other requirements of a project do not make it technically impossible to do this." The text of the bill is focused specifically on "open data formats." While the amendment does not refer to open source software, the definition of "open standards" that it contains would be conducive to open source implementations of open standards.