Monthly Archive:: September 2006

A new company called AIseek announced what it describes as the world's first dedicated processor for artificial intelligence. Called the Intia Processor, the AI chip would work in conjunction with optimized titles to improve nonplayer character AI. Similar to the way in which physics accelerators can make a game's environment look much more realistic, Intia would make the NPCs act more true to life. There goes yet another PCI slot.

Ambitious plans by Bergen (for the geography impaired: that's Norway) to move to an open source desktop environment have been suspended. Ole-Bjorn Tuftedal, special advisor on contracts and technology at Bergen, said on Monday that the desktop Linux migration would not happen for at least the next two years. Tuftedal, though, is still confident that the migration will happen eventually.

German technology website Heise.de reports that SGI will completely abandon its MIPS processor architecture, including its operating system Irix, in favour of Linux-powered Itanium workstations. SGI used MIPS and Irix in its products for almost 20 years, and with this switch to Intel, yet another major (historically speaking, that is) company abandons its architecture for the more common Intel one.

With the free Turbo Explorer line, Borland brings programming to the masses. Each of the four Turbo Explorer 'personalities' targets a different combination of programming language and platform: Turbo Delphi and Turbo C++ for Windows, and Turbo Delphi and Turbo C# for .NET. There are over 200 components for building programs, but the abundance of features may be overwhelming to new users.

Magnatune is the non-evil record label who gives away 128 kbps mp3s of all their artist's songs for free. You can then choose (or not) to purchase DRM-free higher quality versions at a price you set and they allow you to share their purchased songs with 3 friends. The label splits revenues 50/50 with their (carefully picked) signed artists, while these artists keep all of the rights to their music with a non-exclusive contract. Today, we are very happy to feature an interview with John Buckman, the founder and owner of Magnatune, to help us understand better their revolutionary business model.

The HaikuPodcast.com team has made a video entitled "The Introduction to Haiku", in high quality divx or low-quality m4v, to honour Haiku's 5th birthday. Of course you could always install and experience it first hand, but if that's not an option, this video may come in handy.

Marc G. Fournier has launched a new project with the intention to show hardware vendors that there in fact are a lot of BSD users out there. "We are trying to demonstrate to hardware and software vendors out there that BSD should be viewed as a serious operating system, not just as a hobbyist system, for support (i.e. hardware drivers) purposes."

"It is with great delight that I announce the first bulk shipment of free Linux disks from the Free Linux Disk project. This shipment will put Linux into the hands of people from around the world. This would not have been made possible without support from the contributors, the sponsors, and your donations. A huge thank you to everyone that continues to help and make the project a success. I would like to give special thank you to the project contributors. They have shipped over 1000 requests at their expense. They are a tremendous help to the project and their efforts are very much appreciated."

Geert Hendrickx has announced the availability of a second release candidate of NetBSD 3.1: Improvements over the first release candidate include: fixed the build of NetBSD-vax; fixed a buffer overflow in PPPoE/ISDN PPP; closed a socket leach in accept(2); removed references to sushi(8) from the afterboot(8) manpage; fixed an integer overflow in FreeType; disabled threading in named(8) to avoid a crash on sparc and sparc64, etc.

Microsoft is at a crossroads, and the operating system that follows Vista will likely mark a serious break from the past. That is, if Microsoft can figure out how to do things differently. Also, the 'MEDX' team shares desks, ideas on the look Microsoft wants.

"Can't wait to upgrade your Windows XP machines to Vista? eWEEK Labs tests show that a clean install is the faster, less-problematic, option. While our upgrade experience was fairly good, we recommend that administrators opt instead for a clean install, teamed perhaps with Vista's Windows Easy Transfer utility for carrying over files and settings from the previous install."

RISC OS cannot be saved by simply open sourcing it, said RISCOS Ltd boss Paul Middleton. He added that Castle's wish to open source RISC OS "would have no effect on RISCOS Ltd's products". Paul told subscribers over the weekend: "Making RISC OS open source, or free as some people want, is not the panacea for suddenly taking RISC OS forward. No operating system can be developed solely for free."

On many systems, a large portion of boot time goes into providing legacy support for MS-DOS. Various projects, including LinuxBIOS and Open Firmware, are trying to replace the proprietary BIOS systems with streamlined pieces of code able to do only what is necessary to get a Linux kernel loaded and running. This article gives a brief overview of the field.

The SkyOS team has released build 6179 of SkyOS. Highlights: "Mono 1.1.13.8 and updated MWF (System.Windows.Forms) port; embedded Gecko widget; remote command interface for applications; binary image caching; inital DDK [ed. note: trust me, Robert's making a lot of people happy with this one)." This new build also includes new ports, such as Quake III, Python, SDL with OpenGL support, and much more. You can find details in the changelog.