Monthly Archive:: January 2006

"The buzzwords for the 2006 technology outlook fly thick and fast in nerd circles: high-definition DVD. A la carte TV shows from the Internet. Windows Vista. Most of these goodies will take time to reach the masses. One, however, has already arrived, six months ahead of schedule: Apple Computer's switch to Intel chips for its Macintosh computers."

Microsoft's C++/CLI Language Specification is an ECMA Standard (ECMA-372) and they are trying to fast track this document to be an ISO standard. The problem is that the language specified is very different from C++ and so is likely to create a great deal of confusion. Details can be found in the UK objections , which suggest that a name distinct from C++ be used for the proposed language.

A new version of DotGNU's Portable.NET and libjit (designed to be independent of any particular virtual machine bytecode format or language) has been released. There are a lot of new features, enhancements and bug fixes accompanying this release.

"Recently, there have been a couple of articles on errata making the rounds, the first on Intel, the second on AMD. They both make my head hurt. A lot. No, not the errata, but the explanations, and lack of understanding of some simple concepts. When the first one, Intel, came out, I was teetering on the verge of breaking out the cluestick, but thought the better of it. When the conspiracy theory second article came out, well time to spring into action, two days late as usual."

In a weblog entry, Sun's President Jonathan Schwartz has announced that Sun is looking into applying a dual-license scheme to OpenSolaris-- CDDL and GPL3. "We recognize that diversity and choice are important - which is why we've begun looking at the possibility of releasing Solaris (and potentially the entire Solaris Enterprise System), under dual open source licenses. CDDL (which allows customer IP to safely comingle with Solaris source code) and under the Free Software Foundation's GPL3."

Plan 9 from Bell Labs is still very much alive. They just got an updated website, with easier access to nightly builds. "Plan 9 from Bell Labs is a research system developed at Bell Labs starting in the late 1980s. Its original designers and authors were Ken Thompson, Rob Pike, Dave Presotto, and Phil Winterbottom. They were joined by many others as development continued throughout the 1990s to the present. Plan 9 demonstrates a new and often cleaner way to solve most systems problems. The system as a whole is likely to feel tantalizingly familiar to Unix users but at the same time quite foreign."

"Connect any USB 2.0 device to your notebook and lose more than one hour of battery time: Tom's Hardware Guide's tests of a Windows-based Intel Core Duo mobile processor platform revealed a serious power consumption issue that, according to Intel, is caused by a Microsoft driver bug - a bug that has been known by Microsoft for some time, but kept from the public eye until today."

"In this two-part series, Edd Dumbill examines the various ways forward for HTML that Web authors, browser developers, and standards bodies propose. This series covers the incremental approach embodied by the WHATWG specifications and the radical cleanup of XHTML proposed by the W3C. Additionally, the author gives an overview of the W3C's new Rich Client Activity. Here in Part 2, Edd focuses on the work in process at the W3C to specify the future of Web markup."

The Free Operating System Zoo provides ready-to-run disk images of free operating systems for use in the qemu processor emulator. Numerous Linux distributions, *BSDs, Darwin, Plan 9, and others are available. Nice for new users who want to try out other operating systems without installing them.

"I put up my review for iWeb, the newest part of iLife from Apple Computers. My enitre personal page was designed with iWeb and a few royalty free images I found scattered around the web to give it an atmosphere that I haven't been able to create before on my own. To be honest, I'm not big on web developing, so for anyone who wants to just build a small homepage, this is for you."

"There has been a lot of talk about possible tainted code in ReactOS and or developers that had access to leaked Microsoft source code. This has caused a lot of speculation about the future of the ReactOS Project. I'm going to try to put those fears to rest and explain what has been going on and where we are going to go from here. There was one issue that started this discussion and it related to clean-room reverse engineering of certain code in ReactOS."

Advanced Micro Devices is working to ensure that no platform change will be required to move from its next-generation dual-core processors to quad-core processors. When AMD rolls out dual-core processors with built-in virtualization hooks midyear, the company also aims to show that quad-core processors can also run on the same socket on that platform, said Marty Seyer, senior vice president of AMD's Commercial Business and Performance Computing, Microprocessor Solutions Sector unit.

Intel's forthcoming 'Montecito' member of the Itanium processor family will consume 100 watts, a significant drop from the 130 watts of current models and an advantage in an era when power consumption is a top enemy. Intel spokesman Scott McLaughlin confirmed the figure at an Itanium Solutions Alliance meeting here. The change means Itanium will have about 2.5 times the performance per watt of the current Itanium 2 9M model.

"The recent move by Apple Computer to begin shipping Macintosh computers that use microprocessors from Intel could open the door to more attacks against computers running the company's OS X operating system, security experts warn. The change could put more pressure on Apple to build security features into OS X, according to interviews conducted by eWEEK. Apple declined requests for interviews. In an e-mail statement, the company said that the security technologies and processes that have made Mac OS X secure for PowerPC remain the same for Intel-based Macs." Update: Here's a rebuttal.