The Register reports on rumors of Apple wanting to buy Roxio:
Apple is in talks to buy Napster, Mac rumours site LoopRumors has claimed, citing “reliable sources”.
Well, not Napster per se but Roxio, the CD burning software specialist, which itself acquired Napster’s assets for $5 million after the peer-to-peer pioneer declared itself bankrupt last summer.
For the first time, networked storage accounted for more than half of worldwide storage revenue in a quarter, IDC said. The networked products took 53 percent of the $4.8 billion in storage sold during the first quarter. This compares to the 42 percent of the market owned by direct-attached systems.
Rick earlier this afternoon pointed to SharpPrivacy, an OpenPGP implementation in C# over at code project. It’s open source too!
Gizmodo (and Matt Raible before them) point to new PowerMac G5 rumors. I’m excited at the G5 possobilities, and I also recall that the G5’s will scale much better than G4’s.
Russ points to the new Java logo. I like it in a not-much-different kind of way. It reminds me of the recent UPS logo change: why?
It does look cool though.
It seems that Radio’s aggregator is only grabbing the title and description of Matt and Dave‘s RSS feeds. The ones that I’ve been subscribed to for a long time. The ones that used to let me read everything, not just a title. I’m not sure if this is a fluke with my Radio install, as the data is definately there in the feeds.
Did something change in the default feeds in the latest release of Roller? I just checked, and Matt’s feed still validates. That’s not the problem. It’s probably my Radio install, it’s on a funky machine that I’ve been too afraid to mess with.
The Samba Team is proud to announce the availability of the first beta release of the Samba 3.0.0 code base. While we are significantly closer to the final release, I will remind you that this is a non-production release provided for testing only.
Here’s a roundup of information for you:
The 3.x release is what Samba junkies everwhere have been waiting for. Props to the Samba team!
Gizmodo notes the release of Minola’s Dimage Xt:
Steve’s Digicams on Minolta’s update of the Dimage Xi, the Dimage Xt. The Xt is slightly smaller and lighter than the Xi, but has the same resolution (3.2 megapixels) and the same 3x optical zoom lens.
Actually, the zoom lens is still 3x zoom, but under the hood it’s slightly different. Both cameras have 9 elements in 8 groups, but the Xi (older model) has 5 aspheric elements while the Xt (newer model) only has 3.
I don’t know if this will translate into a visible difference in quality, but I would assume that more aspherical elements would be preferable to less.
Also note that the previous version sometimes had light falloff on the corners, I don’t know about the new one though
Just uploaded a terrific audio interview with Eric Newcomer (CTO of IONA) to the IT Conversations site. Stream or download this complete Transactions 101 from the guy who literally wrote the book: ACID, TP monitors, asynchronous messaging, loose coupling, SOAP, RPC vs. document models, orchestration, and the state and future of standards. (This is a preview. The site goes live on Monday.)
You can find more at Doug’s IT Conversations. I’m about 90% through Loosely Coupled but I’ve been distracted and had to put work in front of play. I hope to finish the book (which I have already learned a ton from) soon and post my thoughts on it.
Ingo has been playing with the latest new SOAP thing from Microsoft:
Within the previous weeks, I’ve been working with a future product from Microsoft. It was one of the coolest things I’ve seen in a long time. The only drawback was that I just couldn’t tell anyone as I’ve still been under NDA. Can you imagine how it feels, when you are part of a small group which has seen the best thing since sliced bread and you just want to shout it out but you aren’t allowed to?
I can’t wait until the rest of the world is allowed to play too!
Via freshmeat, RSS Mix Tape:
RSS Mix Tape reads items from specified RSS feeds and displays them in a list. Selected posts can be categorized and commented on, and an RSS feed is generated for each category. It also supports LiveJournal input whether or not you are a paid user.
In short, RSS In, RSS Out.
It runs with Python, PyQT, PyKDE, and xmlbase. Of course, OPML would probably be the format of choice for containing a list of feeds, though I understand the want for RIRO (RSS in, RSS out). I don’t know how easy it would be to have the commentary in OPML.
If anyone has an RSS mix tape feed that they update fairly frequently, I wouldn’t mind checking that out.
I found this article last night via the java.sun.com RSS feed:
Implementing an end-to-end J2ME application is no small feat, and the architecture and development of such a system can be quite complicated. This article uses Sun’s Java Blueprints showcase application, Java Smart Ticket, to show you how to design and implement a complex, end-to-end application based on MIDP and J2EE. We will discuss the design patterns, architecture, and implementation tricks used to create the application.
Matt Raible noted the release of Eclipse 3.0 M1 yesterday. Get it here.
I’ve always been more than impressed with the stability of the milestone releases. I was waiting for a 3.0 milestone before I upgraded, and here it is. Thanks again to the Eclipse team, y’all ROCK!
Jeremy points out many RSS feeds are available for the Yahoo Buzz index.
I’m also glad to see that he enjoyed 2 Fast 2 Furious.
Here’s a quote from the back cover of my freshly purchased copy of The Animatrix:
This DVD willl not work in a CD-ROM drive and the DVD-ROM features are not available on Apple Macintosh.
That’s kind of a bummer for Mac-based Matrix heads. DVD-ROM content usually sucks anyway, so hopefully you’re not missing out on too much.
A special note to the RIAA and MPAA:
I saw The Animatrix before Reloaded came out thanks to peer to peer file sharing technology. Last night I purchased The Animatrix because of p2p. You gained a sale, you didn’t loose one. I wasn’t quite sure if it was worth purchasing based on the four quicktime shorts that are on the net. I saw the whole thing and knew that I had to have it. Stuff like this happens more often than your statistics show.
That is all.
Via freshmeat, Clustered JDBC:
Clustered JDBC is to databases what RAID is for disks. C-JDBC provides transparent database clustering (partitioning, replication, etc.) to any Java application through JDBC. It works with any Java application without code modification and with any datase engine. C-JDBC has been successfully tested with Tomcat, JBoss, JOnAS, MySQL, PostgreSQL, HSQL, SAP DB, Oracle, and more.
OSNews learned that the Gentoo project is porting their software distribution system, Portage, to Mac OS X. This makes Gentoo the third project developing such a system for the Unix-based OSX, after Fink and Darwin Ports. The Gentoo project also plans to create a GUI for OSX at some point, there is no ETA for it so far.
Thanks to Russ and the guys at #mobitopia, here’s an Inquirer article on the JBoss fork/coup:
8:00 am — Seven consultants for The JBoss Group publicly announced the immediate termination of their contracts and the foundation of their new company, Core Developers Network. Their charter “is to provide a commercial infrastructure to enable open source contributors to deliver their professional expertise to the marketplace, independent of their contributions to open source projects”.
It’s all quite confusing. The Inquirer story is completely from the CDN point of view. No word yet from Fleury and what’s left of the JBoss team. I have a feeling that this fork is bad PR for JBoss, the CDN, and Open Source. The major app server vendors are going to use this fork/coup as proof that Open Source is volitile and that customers are better off with their closed solutions.
I wish the CDN luck, but it looks like they don’t need too much of it:
This means The JBoss Group is going to have a tough fight on their hands here in the States. Core Developers Network has a superior grasp on the CMP internals. They’ve got the entire Jetty crew. They’ve got the man who authored the distributed transaction manager and the JCA subsystem. Their early work heavily influenced the drive to AOP. They have an Apache Jakarta board member, which could make things very interesting. Their site indicates they’re expanding beyond the JBoss horizon to cover a broader spectrum of open source J2EE software. Finally, they’re driving home the distinction between “Business” and “Project”.
Honestly I’ve only ever tinkered around with JBoss. A major barrier for me was the fact that for anything beyond bare INSTALL information, you have to buy the book. How do I administer JBoss? Buy the book. How do I configure this thing the way I want it? Buy the book. That never thrilled me too much.
Update: This is really more of a coup than a fork. It’s a corporate fork, and not an open source one as far as I can tell. Here’s some more info from the CDN site:
We are committed to having the same level of involvement in our current projects that we have had in the past. This means that we will continue to work on the JBoss project itself. In addition, we will continue to support the JBoss project via the jboss-development and jboss-users mailing lists maintained by SourceForge.net, as well as any other open public forum. Unfortunately, the forums on jboss.org are a commercial venue for the JBoss Group LLC, and therefore we will not be participating in them.