Monthly Archive:: April 2007

Haiku enthusiast umccullough has posted two very interesting screenshots of Haiku. In the first screenshot, you see Haiku serving a web page using RobinHood, where the second one shows an XP box browsing said web page. The Haiku groupies axe murderers users and developers in #haiku explained, however, that people should not get the wrong picture; Haiku is not ready, in any way, for public consumption, nor is it capable of serving a web page for a prolonged period of time. Just so you know. Update: And another screenshot showing BeShare running on Haiku.

"This article, the first in a five-part series on real-time Java, describes the key challenges to using the Java language to develop systems that meet real-time performance requirements. It presents a broad overview of what real-time application development means and how runtime systems must be engineered to meet the requirements of real-time applications. The authors introduce an implementation that addresses real-time Java challenges through a combination of standards-based technologies."

NewsForge reviews NeoOffice 2.1 and concludes: "All in all, NeoOffice 2.1 is an incremental improvement over NeoOffice 2.0 Beta 3. Microsoft Office OpenXML compatibility is still a weak point, and if you are looking for help, you are better off avoiding the inconsistent and outdated documentation on the wiki and heading directly to the discussion forum. Nevertheless, NeoOffice remains far superior to the X11-based Mac builds of OpenOffice.org. The OS integration work is impressive, and the new features make the suite as a whole all the more indispensable."

"We're now more than a decade later than the moment when I judged the open source to have gained a decisive momentum - 1996-1997, when Slackware was the reference, Red Hat was 'the other choice', KDE and GNOME were just emerging, Walnut Creek was selling CD-ROMs, and SunSITE mirrors were the home of most of the relevant software. The worst thing that happened was that Yggdrasil Linux died. But the Earth kept spinning..." Read the rest of the editorial at TheJemReport.

""Microsoft is dead", wrote Paul Graham late last week in one of the silliest columns I've seen in a while. Graham is a smart guy, and probably the one most responsible for you not getting entirely inundated by spam. His 'A plan for spam' outlined the method now used by most anti-spam software. In this latest message, 'Microsoft Is Dead', Graham argues that the Redmond giant was killed by Google, which showed people that the desktop wasn't nearly as important in the age of Web-based applications. Plain and simple, Graham is wrong. There's no way anyone could argue that Microsoft is dead. Just look at the numbers. When a software runs more than 90% of the desktops on the planet - and will for the foreseeable future - it's simply not dead." Update: Paul Graham has clarified some of his statements and explicitly has stated that Microsoft is not in danger of going out of business.

"For much of its history, Debian has been the major noncommercial, philosophically free distribution. Now, as Debian developers and users have deserted the distro for Ubuntu, does Debian have a purpose any more? Debian 4.0, which was released this week, represents a collective effort to answer that question. The philosophy behind the release is best summarized on the home page for the Debian on the Desktop subproject, which states, 'We will do everything we can to make things very easy for the novice, while allowing the expert to tweak things'."