Monthly Archive:: October 2003

Among the technology industry's historic monuments sits Xerox PARC, the almost-legendary R&D facility nestled in the heart of Silicon Valley. Xerox also has a big research center in New York, and researchers from that facility and from PARC recently held a soiree in San Francisco to show some of the company's key research efforts. Read the article at PC Magazine.

While Microsoft execs at last have admitted publicly that Longhorn will ship in 2006, Microsoft works on Windows XP 64-Bit. The emulation technology in Windows XP 64-bit Edition will be crucial to the OS's success. Microsoft's Windows on Windows 64 emulation technology is a subsystem that will allow users to run 32-bit applications on a 64-bit OS without a reduction in performance, NewsFactor reports.

With the one year anniversary of Microsoft's Windows XP Tablet PC Edition operating system approaching in November, several PC makers have released or will soon release new tablet PC models designed around the OS.

Red Hat's Fedora Core test-3 is out and available for testing. Not all mirrors are synced yet, but this one is. BitTorrent link is available too.

Roderick W. Smith discusses how to resize and defrag the Linux filesystems.

It dances. It can hold a conversation. And in about a year, humanoid robot Qrio will be knocking on doors, if Sony's plans fall into place.

Richard Seibt, boss of the largest European offerer of Linux operating systems, the Suse Linux AG, expects: "I believe that Apple computers in the future, will run the Linux operating system". He said so (Google translation) in the "citizens of Berlin newspaper" (Monday issue). Seibt also said that Linux will make it "really big" by the year 2013.

Microsoft and Vodafone are joining forces to extend Web services standards to mobile devices, in an attempt to open up the potentially large & lucrative mobile net services market to Web services devs.

Apple is developing a distributed/parallel computing solution called Xgrid, according to ThinkSecret. Apple recently put up a mailing list, "xgrid-users". According to the page, the mailing list is for discussion regarding use and deployment of Xgrid. No archived messages exist. The page describes Xgrid as "Apple's solution for parallel and distributed high performance computing."

Microsoft spent a lot of effort tuning Active Directory in Windows Server 2003, to improve scalability and speed and to correct key deficiencies. In this sample chapter, you'll learn what's new, and how to take advantage of Active Directory's new features.

In a recent conference presentation, Google's Craig Nevill-Manning notes that cheap and fast hardware is the key to Google's success. The software, he says, is written to assume that the hardware will fail, and work around that. That way, the company can use commodity PC hardware and not worry when it fails--just replace it.

"The folks at Libranet were kind enough to provide me with a copy of their 2.8.1 release for a review. After downloading the latest and greatest from their ftp site a few nights ago, burning the cd's this morning, making an emergency trip to the vet during the second cd burn and eating a late breakfast, I was finally ready for the install." Read the review by Frank Merenda.

ReactOS 0.1.4 has been released. This release was created using a week-long branch for fixes only - followed up by several days of a code feeze for testing. The release itself features Plug n Play improvements, better GUI controls (especially scrollbars and static controls), better mouse button handling, the beginning of OpenGL support, extensive work on a PC Net driver as well as an improved NDIS driver, the serial mouse driver was almost rewritten and there is now partial support for the intellimouse along with better SCSI support (SCSI devices initialized using 3rd party drivers).

Zebra is open source TCP/IP routing software that is similar to Cisco's Internetworking Operating System (IOS). Flexible and powerful, it can handle routing protocols such as Routing Information Protocol (RIP), Open Shortest Path First (OSPF), Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), and all of their various flavors. This article shows you how to set up Zebra and used it to manage routes dynamically in conjunction with real Cisco hardware.