InformationWeek via Google News Sci/Tech:
The pending launch of Windows Server 2003 will be a milestone not only for Microsoft, but for the other half of Wintel, too. It’s been eight years since Intel got into the server market and two years since it shipped a 64-bit processor, the Itanium. On April 24, a 64-bit version of Windows that takes advantage of Intel’s 64-bit design will become generally available.
Erik Hatcher keeps us up to date about what’s going on with Ant 1.6:
Ant 1.6 is trundling along, nobody is in a rush to ship anything, as Ant 1.5.x is good for most people’s needs. You can get on the developer mail list if you want to take part in the next generation of Ant.
Ant 1.6 will be different internally from Ant 1.5. It has reworked its classloading, parses big build files faster, and, by popular vote, will only run on Java1.2 or later. Supporting Java 1.1 was getting too painful: it was time to move on. You can still build Java 1.1 code using
<javac target="1.1">and setting up the classpaths to point at the appropriate runtime. Same for<java>; you can run on 1.1 by requesting a different JVM and pointing to the other version of Java 1.1.Ant1.6 in CVS has some experimental new features for big projects, an
<import>task to import build file fragments from other files, the nice feature being you can now use Ant properties to select the files to import. While<subant>is lining up to be a bulk means of calling a target in sub-project – imagineantwith fileset support.
I’ll admit it up front: I’m a moron.
Before leaving for work, I did an emerge system. I SSH’d in this afternoon to configure and make the kernel and do the other random stuff that must be done before the install is final. For the record, I chose metalog as my system logger and vcron as my cron package. Metalog looked a little more robust and higher performance than my other options. I chose vcron cause the docs told me to.
I chose GRUB, just because I have not had issues with GRUB and LILO and I have had issues in the past. (I managed to trash the family Pentium 60 a few times thanks to my ignorance and LILO. I was in middle school at the time, so cut me some slack.)
Everything is ready to rock, so I unmounted everything and rebooted. The machine didn’t come back up on the network. I spent about 30 minutes trying to figure out which part of the install went wrong, what I could have done wrong or set incorrectly.
Then it hit me: There’s a boot CD in the CD-ROM drive and the BIOS is set to boot from CD first. *SMACK* I (hopefully!) have a functional system on that hard drive, I just can’t get to it.
Someone really needs to come up with a remote remove CD from CD-ROM over SSH protocol.
Having been married for almost a week now, I am officially an expert on the subject.
Congrats.
According to Slashdot, 4 days after Duke3D was released as GPL, you can play it on Linux.
Rock, guys.
Ed Cone has the story:
Congressman Howard Coble has withdrawn as commencement speaker at his alma mater, Guilford College. The N&R reports that “about a third of the graduating class of about 160 students presented him with a petition Wednesday asking him not to speak at graduation.” Students were dismayed by Coble’s rationalization of the internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII, and also by his support of the war in Iraq, which some complain is at odds with Guilford’s Quaker traditions.
Mark:
This assumption gives us the willies, and the dangers of said assumption have been brought up in numerous meetings and have been the subject of numerous CYA memos, but for now we are simply going to proceed without worrying about it.
Murray Stokely announced today the availability of FreeBSD 4.8, following October’s 4.7 release [story] by 6 months. Included in 4.8 are “conservative updates” of a number of software programs from the base system, several known security fixes, initial Firewire support, HyperThreading support, and support of “other new hardware technologies“.
Murray notes, “This release does not include all of the new technologies that were introduced with FreeBSD 5.0 in January. FreeBSD 4.X releases offer a more conservative platform than FreeBSD 5.0 at this time.” In other words, 4.8 is currently considered to be the -stable production release, whereas 5.0 [story] remains the development or New Technology release, as reflected here. More information about 4.8 can be found in the release notes and known errata. Murray’s full announcement follows.
I booted up the 1U this evening.from the basic iso. I followed the install docs and have been bootstrapping a system that is optimized to my hardware.
Oh, here’s the great thing: After I got a few things in order, I hit up /etc/init.d/sshd and have been doing the vast majority of the install over SSH. No that I’ve been doing anything really. I haven’t touched it since I edited make.conf. It’s been humming in the background while I’ve been working on my Windows box.
I tried Gentoo shortly after it was announced an available for download, but I ended up getting frustrated at network configuration. I was quite happy to find that the correct modules were loaded and after a menu-driven network config script, everything just worked.
Thanks for all the hard work to make mybootstrapping and installation painless so far. I’m curious to see how zippy this system will end up.
I installed Red Hat 9 on the 1U server last night, though I think I’m going to try installing Gentoo from scratch just to do a little stress testing on the hardware.
Congrats to Steve Makofsky who is now part of the Microsoft XML Messaging Team.
Apple announced today their plans to put a new G4 Tablet Computer on the market. The unit will be very small, weighing in at just under 2 pounds, and will have a 10 inch screen. The unit will also contain an 80Gb hard drive, and 1Gig of RAM. Video on the unit will be powered by a GeForce4 with 128Mb of Video RAM. Pricing on the unit will run in the $500 to $1000 dollar range, much cheaper than current Windows based units.
Running Mac OS X the unit will have handwriting recognition based off the Inkwell technology. No tests have been done to see how this compares to Windows, but we should know within the month as Steve Jobs has promised to perform the tests himself. I’ve posted a picture of the unit in the discussion forum post for this news item. Overall the unit should be a real kicker; it will be interesting to see how this plays out. [8D]
If they can build this tablet with the specs mentioned above for 500 to 1000 bucks it is going to put some serious pressure on the tablet pc makers. But I’ll believe it when I see it.
Well, they do know their tablet stuff. I was expecting it to be posted on the first, but this looks like at least a legit rumor. I found a mention of it at geek.com on the first, though MacRumors posted about it on March 30.
In related news, the brushed metal look still sucks.
Brent had a scary referrer this afternoon:
http://homeland.fbi.gov/Watchlists/suspect/view.jsp?record=235270
According to Slashdot, the Mozilla roadmap has changed dramatically. They’re cutting the bloat and embracing the zippiness of Phoenix and Minotaur.
Here’s a great quote from the CNet article:
“Mozilla has become stable but bloated,” said Matt Croydon, an undergraduate in computer science at the University of Maryland. “Users wanted something that was extremely fast, extremely lightweight and stable. I’m glad to see that the Mozilla team is embracing the trend of lightweight and agile browsers. Mozilla is much better off embracing the trend rather than trying to compete with it. It will be interesting to see how this will affect the AOL/Netscape browser, as it builds in more features (bloat) than a default Mozilla install.”
Disclaimer: Of course I’m going to think that it’s a great quote, as it’s a quote by me. I’ll try not to be as long winded next time.
I am really psyched that Paul Festa sent me an IM this evening asking if I had anything to say on the new roadmap. He contacted me via IM once before to ask me about that Moblogging thing.
Are we at a tipping point? Reporters are going to webloggers and geeks in the trenches for the full story.
CNet:
Next-generation cell phone networks are arriving in Africa, a region some carriers view as an enormous business opportunity, despite widespread poverty.
This just in. The vast majority of phones in the US still suck.
Here are links to several RSS feeds from Dave:
I’m teetering on the edge of information overload, so I don’t know if I can afford to subscribe to any of these. When I started weblogging, I tried to get my hands on as many primary sources as possible (Currently monitoring 243 sources). I would filter out the drek and report to the world my findings. Nowadays I have to rely on other webloggers, most of them more intelligent than I, to filter through the drek and report back to me what they have found.
Finding the intersection of primary sources and intelligent analysis is key.
In a recent interview, Cape Clear CEO Annrai O’Toole criticizes appserver vendors for convincing people you need fancy orchestration and transaction mangement services (of an appplication server) to build service oriented architectures/web services. He also claims that javascript is all you need to maintaining workflow and transactional integrity.
That’s right kids. All you really need to host web services are a box and some free software. You can put together XML-RPC, SOAP, or REST services with Perl or Python through CGI. You can run Apache Axis on top of Tomcat or another free server. Things don’t need to be as thick or as complicated as you are making it. Take a step back and stop spending so much money.
Wired News reports on the iBox, a potential $250-$350 barebones Apple-compatible platform assembled from replacement motherboards. I’ve wanted a low-cost entry into OSX for some time now, but my 8500 doesn’t take it, I haven’t found an iMac cheap enough, and the G3/G4 towers are still a little too expensive for me.
The design of the box itself is very good. It almost looks like it was born at 1 Infinite Loop.
LWN:
In accordance with our errata support policy the Red Hat Linux 6.2 and Red Hat Linux 7 distributions have now reached their end-of-life for errata maintenance. This means that we will no longer be producing security, bugfix, or enhancement updates for these products.
Erik Hatcher on dress code:
Make your impressions with the code!