* Windows 7 vs. Snow Leopard: Why 7 Is More Substantial

With Snow Leopard finally been given a release date and a price, the comparisons with Windows 7 are starting to pop up all over the place, especially focussing on the price aspect of things. While Apple's move to price Snow Leopard at 29 USD for Leopard owners is a very welcome one, the move doesn't mean that Microsoft is getting a price beating from Apple.
##CONTINUE##
No soup for you!
There are a few very important aspects to this whole pricing issue that many seem to overlook. The most important one is that the 29 USD will get you an upgrade copy. Not a full version. If Apple's past behaviour with its Up-to-Date program is anything to go by, this means that you will need Leopard installed before you can install your copy of Snow Leopard, and that if you want to perform a clean install, you'll need to install Leopard first, and Snow Leopard second.

In addition, Apple still hasn't made anything known about a possible full retail version of Snow Leopard, and its possible price tag. This is an issue for users for Mac OS X Tiger, since they will not be able to buy Snow Leopard for 29 USD; instead, Apple suggests Tiger users buy a box set which includes iWork and iLife, which comes in at 169 USD.

While this 169 gives you some good value for your money, this price is actually not lowered at all - previous box sets, with Leopard and Tiger as the operating system, also went for 169 USD. This means that Tiger users will not benefit at all from the 29 USD price tag for Leopard. On top of that, what if you don't want or need newer versions of iLife and iWork? What if you already have them? What if you don't care about them at all? Apple is punishing Tiger users for not having upgraded to Leopard.

On the Windows 7 side, things look much, much brighter. Windows XP users are also eligible for the Windows 7 upgrade sets, so that people who bought their operating system in 2001 (!) are still eligible for the upgrade; that means 8 years of Windows purchases covered, versus only 2 (!) years of Mac OS X purchases covered.

Then there's the issue of hardware cut-off points. Both Snow Leopard and Windows 7 went on a diet compared to their predecessors, and will see performance improvements on the same hardware. However, Windows 7 has a major advantage in that it can run on hardware that's even as old as 7 years - my Pentium 4 2.8Ghz with 2GB of RAM from 2002 does its job as a Windows 7 media centre outstandingly, inlcudig instant sleep/hibernate/wake cycles, full HD playback, and all the bells and whistles.

Snow Leopard, on the other hand, will only run on Intel Macs, meaning that high-end machines still sold in August 2006 (PowerMac G5), with pretty hefty price tags, are now left in the cold. In other words, it is much more likely that Windows users will be able to run Windows 7 without having to invest in new hardware than Mac users do with Snow Leopard.

On top of all this comes the fact that the 29 USD price for Snow Leopard doesn't even compete with Windows 7's prices. As said, the 29 USD is for Leopard owners only, meaning that the price is utterly irrelevant when talking about switchers; they simply don't benefit one bit from this pricing.

All in all, the 29 USD price is nothing but a (very welcome) gift to loyal Apple users who diligently emptied their wallets every time Apple asked them to, while the Windows 7 upgrade prices benefit even the most non-loyal Microsoft customers, even those who punished Microsoft for the abysmal Vista fiasco by, well, not buying into Vista. Seen in this light, Microsoft's upgrade prices - which are still not confirmed, but will probably be round and about 50-70 for Windows 7 Home Premium, and 100-120 for Professional, seem a lot more useful to a lot more people.

Which is the better upgrade?
This is a really intriguing question. Which of the two operating system upgrades provide more value for your money? The problem with this one is that it includes a comparison to their predecessors, making it a little bit more complicated.

Snow Leopard is truly a release where the under-the-hood stuff is more important than user-visible changes. OpenCL, Grand Central, removal of PowerPC code, fully 64bit, they all aid in making Snow Leopard faster and leaner. There are also some interface tweaks, but they are small (but useful!), and certinaly don't draw that much attention.

Windows 7 is a completely different story. Microsoft has made the operating system perform better than Windows Vista (and every report confirms that), with some even claiming performance on par with Windows XP, especially on more recent hardware. It could very well be that Snow Leopard gives a more substantial improvement in this area, but Snow Leopard has it easy; only very recent and powerful 64bit machines will see this benefit. Windows 7's (possibly) more modest performance gains over Vista will benefit machines that are much older and/or much less powerful. For instance, both that old Pentium 4 box as well as my low-spec Acer Aspire One perform better with Windows 7 than with Vista. Similarly aged and/or specced Macs can't even run Snow Leopard at all!

However, where the difference really becomes obvious is the interface changes Windows 7 introduces, and all the pulling-together of frameworks and features introduced with Windows Vista, and exposing them to users in much more useful ways than Vista did. The best example of this is Homegroup, which pulls together various technologies and features introduced with Windows Vista, and presents them in a way that makes managing your network and shared files (especially in combination with the Libraries feature) completely painless. Another example is that various driver upgrades no longer require a restart, such as graphics drivers.

The interface of Windows itself has also been massively cleaned up compared to Vista. It really takes some intensive usage to reveal just how much of the interface has been cleaned up, made more consistent, and overall prettified without losing functionality. My personal favourite is Windows 7's Explorer file manager, which is such joy to use now, while the Vista one was a busy and clumsy mess. Of course, there are still trouble spots, such as the overly crowded Control Panel.

Snow Leopard simply doesn't bring these kinds of massive interface improvements.

Conclusion
Overall though, while Snow Leopard certainly is a nicely priced upgrade to Leopard, and I'm sure going to buy the Family Pack to upgrade my parents' iMac and my own Mac, it just doesn't compare very favouribly to Windows 7 as an upgrade, in a multitude of aspects: supported machines, previous releases still eligible, and the number of people who are actually able to benefit from the upgrade. On top of that, I believe Windows 7 is a far more substantial upgrade than Snow Leopard, but I'm sure many will disagree with me on that specific one.

-----------------------------
BY Thom Holwerda
Source：OSNews

© 1997-2009 OSNews LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Timeline: 40 years of OS milestones

The biggest desktop OS moments since Unix made its debut

Lordy, lordy, look who's 40! Happy birthday, Unix -- you're looking great for your age. You certainly weren't the first operating system on any platform, but you managed to stride from the minicomputer era into the microcomputer era and the personal computer era, winning fans wherever you went. How many other operating systems can make the same boast?
##CONTINUE##
With your birth as our starting point, then, let's look at the biggest desktop OS milestones of the past 40 years.

1969
Unix was brought to life on a spare DEC PDP-7 at AT&T Bell Labs. When AT&T decided to abandon the Multics (Multiplexed Information and Computing Service) operating system on its minicomputers, Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie cobbled together an operating system so they could continue to play a space travel game that Thompson had developed. A colleague gave the system a jokey name based on Multics -- UNICS, the Uniplexed Information and Computing Service, which morphed into UNIX or Unix.

1976
Intergalactic Digital Research's maverick brain Gary Kildall creates CP/M, a simple microcomputer operating system for simple microcomputers. It would be the model for command-line DOS variations for two decades.

1977
The godfather of open source is born when the Computer Systems Research Group at UC Berkeley releases a variant on Unix called the Berkeley Software Distribution. BSD will ultimately spawn alternatives to some commercial microcomputer operating systems -- and form the core of at least one major commercial operating system, Mac OS X.

Tandy/Radio Shack introduces a line of affordable home computers, and debuts a family-friendly operating system called TRS-DOS with such Rated-M-for-Mature commands as KILL. Other companies' versions of DOS substitute the less menacing DEL command, for Delete.

1978
Apple DOS 3.1 debuts; it will run the Apple II series of computers for the next five years.

1981
The IBM PC is born, and so are PC-DOS and its alter ego, MS-DOS.

1983
Free software advocate Richard Stallman announces the plan for GNU, a Unix-like operating system that contains no proprietary software. Twenty-six years later, GNU's official kernel, GNU Hurd, will still be incomplete.

1984
During the Super Bowl, Apple airs a commercial in which a female athlete throws a sledgehammer through a huge screen displaying a stern Big Brother-like visage. In the ensuing chaos, people forget that there are more than two computing platforms and concentrate on the epic battle between DOS and the Macintosh.

1985
Microsoft Windows 1.01 retails, at a list price of $99. It's marketed as a graphical user interface that extends the DOS operating system and lets users run several programs at the same time and freely switch among them. But it's not touted as an actual operating system until a decade later.

The Atari ST appears, running a color graphical user interface: GEM, from Digital Research, the people who brought us CP/M. Like Windows, GEM runs on top of a less attractive, command-line-driven operating system. It becomes a popular graphics and digital music platform, which gives Apple a few ideas to explore later.

A few months later, the Amiga appears. Its operating system is built on a kernel that handles preemptive multitasking, so it starts with an advantage. The OS also contains a disk operating system, an API layer called Intuition, and a graphical user interface called Workbench. People can choose at will between a command line and the Workbench graphical interface and seem pretty happy about it. It becomes a popular video platform, which gives Apple a few ideas to explore later.

1986
GEOS appears, and gives Apple and Microsoft a few ideas to explore later.

1987
OS/2 first makes news when Microsoft announces its Operating System/2, MS OS/2, developed to harness the power of Intel's 80286 and 80386 microprocessors. As IBM and Microsoft's joint operating agreement falls apart, OS/2 becomes an IBM product, and Microsoft gives its graphical operating system a different name -- Windows NT. Years of confusion ensue as people try to figure out which Windows is actually Windows.

1988
IBM OS/2 1.1 appears in November, with a graphical user interface and no real acknowledgment that one of its parents is Microsoft.

1989
Four years after being "encouraged" to leave Apple and founding NeXT Inc., Steve Jobs takes his career to the next level with the release of NeXTStep. The new operating system builds a beautiful graphical layer on top of BSD, adds an object-oriented development tool kit, and secures Jobs' eventual return to Apple. He holds onto that capital X in NeXT so he can slap it on Apple's next operating system.

1990
Windows 3.0 becomes the first Microsoft Windows with a shot at a mainstream audience, but it's still just a DOS-based operating environment and not a true operating system. Over the next few years, Microsoft introduces Windows 3.1, a bug-fix-and-enhancement release that meets with widespread approval, and the Windows for Workgroups 3.1 and 3.11 extensions, which add and improve native networking support. But it's still not a real OS.

1991
Norse OS god Linus Torvalds releases an open-source, Unix-like OS kernel that sort of bears his name. Linux is officially pronounced "leen-ooks" to reflect its Finnish origins. The Linux kernel will subsequently be combined with GNU software to create an array of open-source operating systems known as Linux distributions.

1993
Windows NT appears, and everyone assumes the NT stands for New Technology. Microsoft later denies this, but it can't deny that NT is the love child of its union with IBM, and half-brother to OS/2.

1995
Windows 95 appears, to great fanfare. It spawns a new line of Microsoft operating systems with one foot in the 32-bit world and another stuck in the mud with not-yet-obsolete 16-bit software. Who'd have thunk it that it would take six years to wave goodbye to all that? But Windows 98, 1999's 98 Second Edition, and 2000's Windows Me had to pass before Windows could move on.

To slightly less fanfare, BeOS arrives for the PowerPC platform. It carries high hopes of taking the digital media world by storm and replacing Mac OS classic. Eventually, talks with Apple flounder, and BeOS loses out to OpenStep as the foundation for the new Mac OS.

1996
The arrival of Macintosh System 7.6 heralds a new name -- Mac OS -- and a new game called Waiting for Copland. In the end, we abandon the wait for Copland when Apple buys NeXT and adapts its operating system instead.

2001
Apple abandons its old OS core and introduces Mac OS X. The X is the Roman numeral for 10, but some think it's a nod to X Window (which is in there) and the NeXT operating system (which is also in there). Either way, X marks the spot where Apple moved away from 1984 and into a brave new world.

The Windows XP family is born. It begins with Windows XP, and increases every two years with a new -- but not necessarily a full -- release:

* 2002: XP Service Pack 1
* 2004: XP Service Pack 2
* 2006: Windows Vista
* 2008: Vista Service Pack 1 and XP Service Pack 3

... and the rest isn't history. Yet.

-----------------------------
BY Matt Lake
Source：COMPUTERWORLD

Freelance writer Matt Lake's first operating system came on a 5¼-inch floppy disk. His most recent would only fit on a dual-layer DVD. His biggest regret is that he missed out on the cassette-tape computing era, because that level of propeller-headedness would really impress his colleagues.

Copyright © 1994 - 2009 Computerworld Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission of
Computerworld Inc. is prohibited. Computerworld and Computerworld.com and the respective logos are trademarks of International Data Group Inc.

Is OpenSolaris Ready for Admin Desktops?

OpenSolaris is essentially GNU-Solaris. When talking about the user experience, one could say that since the GNOME desktop is used, running OpenSolaris is no different from running Linux. For the casual Web, e-mail, and office applications user this may be true. For us network and systems administrators, however, we need to be more careful about jumping ships.
##CONTINUE##
This article will explore some not-so-obvious considerations we must pay attention to if we expect to switch desktops and remain productive.

Installing Packages

A robust package manager backed by a large open source software repository is useful for more than just convenience. It allows the user to test software they may have not previously heard of. Being able to quickly install a piece of software you’ve heard about to give it a test is extremely useful.

We also need to have the ability to test things that may end up on production systems. Ruby or Perl modules, for example, are often needed when developing automation scripts. Of course, this often leads to frustration if we aren’t careful. Say a fancy new Perl module is available via CPAN, so we install it and start to depend on it. Then when it come time to run the new script on production server, which probably don’t use CPAN, we find out that the module isn’t available as a package.

In addition to writing scripts, it is also a good idea to ensure your desktop is running the same OS version as your production servers so that you can test other configuration aspects as well. Unless, of course, it is easy enough to run virtual machines; more on that in a bit.

The OpenSolaris software repository has almost doubled in size in the last year. At over 25,000 packages, it is beginning to rival the package count of many Linux distributions.

Dealing With Java

Unfortunately, a large majority of management interfaces require Java. Storage arrays, blade servers, servers’ lights-out management, application server administrative interfaces; the list is endless. The bright side is that OpenSolaris is from Sun, and its Firefox ships with Java working. The not-so-bright side it is often necessary to have an old version of Java lying around to run older applications. In the end, this comes down to package management.

There is only one Java available in the OpenSolaris repositories at this time. That means you will need to manually install older versions of Java or run VMs with older OS versions to connect to those aging management consoles.

Networking Utilities

We often need to implement some fancy networking tricks in order to test or administer services. The two most often used advanced networking features are: 802.1q tagging and VPNs.

Using 802.1q VLAN tagging allows you to configure your machine to live on multiple VLANs with only one physical link. This is extremely useful for testing, where you need to ensure everything works on various networks. Plopping your desktop on a management network also allows you to access management interfaces without resorting to VPN or adjusting firewall rules. OpenSolaris does support 802.1q tagging, but only on a subset of network cards. You will need to ensure your network card driver supports tagging if you wish to use this feature.

Connecting to VPNs is often necessary to gain access to management networks or other secure networks you need to administer. Connecting to the various types of VPN technologies is not as easy in Solaris as it is in Linux, but it is possible. Solaris supports everything from IPIP tunnels to IPSEC VPNs, and recently someone even ported the Linux PPTP client (for connecting to Windows VPNs) to work on Solaris.

Virtualization

Since September of 2008, Sun’s virtualization solution has been open source and easily available. Sun xVM, as it’s called, is actually four different technologies combined into one umbrella service. The main “guts” of xVM for our desktop usage is VirtualBox, which Sun acquired and began improving a few years ago.

VirtualBox runs on Windows, Linux and even Mac OS X. On OpenSolaris, however, VirtualBox has distinct advantages. In Solaris, each guest operating system can run under a Solaris Container, which allows administrators to apply constraints that Containers support. These include broad RAM and CPU limits, in addition to even more granular controls that Solaris Containers are known for.

Running test instances on your desktop, as mentioned earlier, allows for the testing of applications and services that are destined to move into production. Virtualization, in this use-case, is an indispensable tool for systems testing and development. If your site uses Sun’s xVM Ops Center and xVM Server, then the testing and development in xVM VirtualBox on your desktop is a great starting point for testing VMs before deploying them on xVM server.

OpenSolaris has been running on my work desktop for the last four months. ZFS snapshots make testing dangerous things much less frightening, and VirtualBox allows me to run CentOS, FreeBSD, and anything else I need to. The Java issues mentioned above are really the only pain points with using OpenSolaris at this time, but they exist with any operating system.

Overall, OpenSolaris is easy to work with as a desktop. The ever-increasing number of pre-built, open source software packages means that you won’t be left stranded when the need for “the next best thing” comes up. OpenSolaris’s advantages including xVM and ZFS snapshots, provide a big advantage. You will run into things, like connecting to a VPN, that are far simpler in Linux. In the end, it’s all about what features you wish to have, and what features you can handle pulling your hair out for.

-----------------------------
BY Charlie Schluting
Source：Enterprise Networking Planet

Copyright 2009 Jupitermedia Corporation All Rights Reserved.

SCO: Garbage Time

From the very start, anyone who paid attention to SCO's attempts to throw a spanner in the Linux works, knew that they had no case. Over the years, I've covered their decline from the last major x86 Unix power to an industry joke. And, now SCO's story is almost over.
##CONTINUE##
It's garbage time now for SCO. Those of you who follow basketball know exactly what I mean. This is when the winning team, Linux, and its chief champions in the SCO lawsuits. Novell and IBM, can send in the reserves from the end of the bench. SCO's lawsuits are smashed to bits.

As the clock ever so slowly winds down, SCO is now dumping what was once its heart, its Unix OpenServer and UnixWare business, and its newer mobile software, to continue its forlorn lawsuits. SCO has filed a new reorganization plan with the federal bankruptcy court in Delaware on January 8th.

CEO Darl McBride explained this latest twist in a public letter. McBride explained that, "SCO has been working over the past nine months with several investment groups to formulate an investment plan. With the tightening of the world financial markets, it has been difficult to secure a plan sponsor prior to the restructuring plan filing deadlines." You think? "However, SCO continues to work with investment groups who could potentially come forward with an investment plan to acquire certain SCO assets."

Actually, SCO has been looking for someone foolish enough to pour money down its legal rat-hole for over a year. Last February, SCO thought it had found its patsy, Stephen Norris & Co. Capital Partners and its Arabian oil billionaire friends. These buddies of Bill Gates backed out of the deal and SCO has been looking for an idiotic investor ever since.

The idea that someone would actually invest tens of millions of dollars in SCO is silly. The idea, that, in this economy, anyone would pour serious cash into SCO is ridiculous. It's hard enough to get anyone to invest in good companies. Invest in SCO? Get real.

Despite this, some SCO apologists, like Maureen O'Gara, still think that, "All [SCO] needs to turn is one good trick." Eh, SCO hasn't managed to pull a single rabbit out of its hat despite years of promises.

I think Pamela 'PJ' Jones, news site Groklaw's editor has it right. In a recent Groklaw posting, she wrote that since Novell won, and SCO has filed an appeal. As I pointed out, Groklaw has achieved everything it set out to do, and since there can normally be no new materials introduced in an appeal, might this be a good time to take a breath and work on perfecting the work we've done?"

In other words, it's time to get back, and clean up the last of the SCO mess. Folks, it's garbage time.

-----------------------------
BY Cyber Cynic
Source：COMPUTERWORLD

A Case for Indie Development on Mac and Linux

MacOS and Linux's install base is dwarfed by Windows, so in terms of which platform to develop for, that ends the argument right there. Right? Wrong, says Wolfire Games' Jeff Rosen.
##CONTINUE##
His case is largely for the indie community, and anyone seeking growth — so it's not a challenge to the top publishers to take us all back to the Gil Amelio days when they actually wrote more than one AAA title for the Mac in a year. Or five. But at first blush, one can see shared values in the indie and Linux communities (and to some extent in MacOS), so the idea that they represent an extremely profitable five percent, given the right game, is not a real stretch.

Rosen, in his company's official blog (picked up by Ars Technica) uses Wolfire's game Lugaru as the lesson. According to their sales stats, the game's Linux and MacOS versions account for 50 percent of its overall sales. "Not all five percents are created equal," he says. For the right game, hee has a point.

Developing for MacOS and Linux has a word-of-mouth effect disproportionate to what you get with a game written for Windows, Rosen says. Maybe the spread isn't as large, because of the numbers involved, but within those communities, that kind of endorsement can really drive sales. Lugaru's went up 122 percent thanks to his decision to develop for those languages, he says.

"Having a Linux build meant coverage on Slashdot," he says. "A lot of people heard about and supported Lugaru simply because we had a Linux build. ... A small minority of your users will go crazy with your game and spread it all over the place. On the Internet, all it takes is one thread on a popular forum, and you've literally got hundreds or thousands of new visitors. Basically, a small amount of your users can make a huge difference for you."

"There is the famous case of Half-Life 2. Valve wanted a $1 million dollar advance on the Mac OS X version. No Mac developer has this kind of cash to front, and Apple decided not to foot the bill either, perhaps on principle of the unusual request. There is no technical reason that Mac users can't have Half-Life 2—it's simply messed up business development."

Two barriers stop the Linux/MacOS conversation before it gets started — the perception that it's harder to develop on those two platforms, and the idea that they're so unprofitable that only unusual up-front guarantees make it worthwhile.

It's a reasonable argument if you keep it in its proper context — indie gaming, where developers with a good idea, their own agenda, and where Steam distribution serves their purposes just fine, can see some growth and throw Mac and Linux gamers a bone. No one's suggesting this overrides the financial prerogatives of a mammoth like Electronic Arts or Activision. But it is something to consider.

-----------------------------
BY Owen Good
Source：Kotaku

New Sun system boosts performance

Sun Microsystems’ enhanced line of Sun Fire(TM) x64 servers and Sun Blade (TM) systems will deliver up to 35 per cent better performance over previous generations.

Powered with the new Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor and up to twice the storage, memory and I/O capacity as compared to competing servers, Sun's strengthened x64 server line offers exceptional scalability, virtualisation and consolidation capability at more than 110:1 ratio and supporting up to 100 virtual serves on a single system, said an official spokesman.
##CONTINUE##
Besides supporting Windows and Linux, servers are further enhanced with the Solaris(TM) Containers capability in the Solaris OS. Users can also select Solaris ZFS(TM) as their root file system and take advantage of a number of key virtualization enhancements.

"This innovative systems design is a potent combination for organizations to standardize and streamline their IT support requirements and scale as their business needs require,” said SEE Volume Lead, Sun Microsystems, Marc Heger.

"Sun's new Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor-based x64 servers stand out in three areas that matter to customers - performance, energy efficiency and scalability."

Sun xVM Server provides complementary virtualization solutions for heterogeneous environments. Sun(TM) xVM Ops Center software provides a unified management interface for both Sun xVM Server and Solaris Containers.

With AMD Virtualisation(TM) technology and Sun's xVM infrastructure, the enhanced line of Sun x64 servers simplify and optimize the next-generation datacenter, maximising consolidation and lowering overhead associated with software virtualisation, allowing for increased system utilisation, performance and scalability improvements.

Sun’s virtualisation and consolidation services enable users can reduce power and cooling costs by as much as 60 percent and space savings by as much as 57 per cent.

To further reduce power and energy costs, users can utilize Sun(SM) Eco Services Suite, which provides users with technical evaluations needed to optimize datacenter efficiency. Sun also offers HPC services to help customers architect, deploy, and manage their HPC environments for faster time to deployment and with reduced risk. Sun's portfolio of x64 Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor-based servers offer a choice of Solaris(TM) 10 Operating System (OS), Linux, Windows and VMWare.

-----------------------------
BY N/A
Source：TradeArabia News Service

SCO: The same procedure as last year?

The SCO Group, currently sheltering from its creditors under Chapter 11 of the US bankruptcy law and still legally embattled with Novell, IBM and Red Hat over rights to Unix, as well as over code alleged to have been copied illegally from Unix into Linux, has evidently allowed an important deadline to slip by. It was supposed to submit a business plan to the bankruptcy court by 31 December, covering its own reorganisation and a settlement with its creditors. That means the company's further destiny now lies in the hands of the judge. If he doesn't grant an extension of time, then in accordance with Chapter 7 of the same law the SCO Group will have to go into liquidation in March 2009.
##CONTINUE##
SCO applied for protection from its creditors under Chapter 11 in September 2007. US law limits the period of such protection to 18 months, during which a company can reorganise itself and seek a new beginning with new investors, without its creditors having full access to its assets. It has to submit a feasible business plan that the judge sitting on the bankruptcy case finds acceptable.

Executives within the SCO Group have periodically dropped hints about possible reorganisation models. One such was the announcement in February 2008 that a group of investors led by Norris Capital Partners would be injecting $100 million, in order to permit the "pursuit of legal claims to their final solution". But this amounted only to an announcement that the various disputes, over Unix copyright and Unix code that may have been copied illegally into Linux, would be continued. The lenders from the Near East, much cited by SCO, were in particular never heard of again. SCO finally postponed the SCO Forum, supposedly to enable it to present a new investor. When the event at last took place, a rescue plan was presented but no specific investor was mentioned despite the previous promises. The rescue plan was based on the idea of "SCO Operations" continuing the software and programming business, while the SCO Group pressed on with the legal disputes with Novell, Red Hat, IBM and some other firms.

Although the deadline for submitting its reorganisation plan expired at the end of the year, SCO seems confident that it will still be able to find investors, despite the crisis on the capital market. Jeff Hunsaker, President and Chief Operating Officer of SCO Operations, is quoted in the web magazine SD Times, for example, as saying the company has a plan that can save it from the impending bankruptcy proceedings, though he did not wish to disclose any details. The article goes on to speculate about the strategy being followed by Novell. Since obtaining a court victory against the SCO Group, Novell is that Group's major creditor. The court found that Novell had not sold the copyright in Unix when it sold Unix development to SCO. Novell is consequently entitled to a share of SCO's earnings from licensing Unix. Novell has many times attempted to enforce its claims in the bankruptcy court, before SCO's assets are totally exhausted in the administration of its bankrupt estate.

-----------------------------
BY Detlef Borchers
Source：heise-online

Sun boosts OpenSolaris on Atom

Intel has announced that the OpenSolaris variant of Unix is now better supported on its Atom processors.

The Atom support is being positioned to bring the joys of x64 computing to netbooks and other low-power computing devices, and it offers some of the best performance/watt in processing these days.

##CONTINUE##

Sun Microsystems, which largely steers the OpenSolaris effort and will use the distro as the basis of the next generation of Solaris, wants to be among the greenest of IT vendors. It also wants to find a new niche for Solaris, as Linux has done superbly on netbooks this year.

So, Atom support is important for Sun, even if it doesn't mean as much to Intel, which has done quite nicely for itself being a Linux zealot and helping its x64 partners sell against RISC/Unix iron.

Writing in his blog, David Stewart, who manages the OpenSolaris team within Intel's software and solutions group, which is predominantly involved in tuning Solaris for Xeon-class server processors, said that two important Atom features have been put back into OpenSolaris, which allows for drivers and other software to optimized to run on Atom. These features? Performance counters and support for the MOVEB instruction.

While these features seem pretty small on the face of it, the fact that Sun and Intel are working to get OpenSolaris working well on Atom chips means that Sun (or indeed, some other platform maker) has a better chance of creating Solaris-based embedded and consumer devices.

While Linux (of one sort or another) is the default platform for a lot of such devices these days, Solaris is well regarded, rock solid, and has the virtue of being a single distro (so long as you ignore some of the minor ones that have cropped up, such as MilaX, BeleniX, NexentaCP, and SchilliX).

OpenSolaris does boot on Atom-based systems, but sometimes requires some tweaks to the Grub loader to make it happen because it is checking for features that are not necessary to run in 64-bit mode on Atom that are on other x64 chips. If you are really bored, you can read about the bug and the workaround here. There are also issues with integrated network interfaces, too, which you can see here.

These kinds of issues are what made Linux support an issue on Mini-ITX machines that became all the rage a few years back and that, in part, has resulted in Intel delivering the Atom processors that the company hopes will displace x86 and x64 processors made by VIA Technologies and popularized in the Mini-ITX, Nano, and Pico platforms.

These VIA boards are getting smaller and more powerful, and they embody some pretty clever engineering, too. I have personally built and put into production Mini-ITX servers using laptop disk drives because of their low power consumption. But Windows works out of the box - believe it or not, even Enterprise Server 2003 and Small Business Server R2, which I have in production now on a bunch of machines.

While Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server has worked fine on these machines, the embedded BIOS-style RAID disk controllers don't work, which is a problem.

Small footprint, small start

In short, Sun has to do a lot more than get two key features on Atom chips working with OpenSolaris to be a viable alternative to Windows or Linux on any Atom-based platform. Getting the operating system to load is not as useful as having all of the features of myriad boards and systems fully supported in the operating system.

And, if Windows and Linux do a better job at this, they win and Solaris - open or otherwise - will lose. There are a lot of embedded systems and non-standard ATX and Micro-ATX motherboards out there using other processors aside from the standard desktop and server chips from Intel and AMD.

OpenSolaris support has to be broad as well as deep to compete, and with Sun not sure how to make money in its core markets, the company doesn't appear to have the dough to invest to make this happen.

And even if it did, it is not clear where the money is to be made in such devices. How much money has Sun made because Java is in cellphones and on hundreds of billions of desktops? See what I mean?

All that said, every new thing that the OpenSolaris community can make run the operating system run on is a good thing for the Solaris ecosystem. This is how Linux got to where it is today. One platform at a time.

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BY Timothy Prickett Morgan

Source：The Register

金山词霸 for Mac OS X 推出

自从金山推出 iphone 平台的金山词霸后，很多人纷纷猜测金山也将会推出 Mac 平台的金山词霸。而如今传说中的Mac平台上的 金山词霸今天终于推出了。产品目前还只是测试版本，但从已经透露出来的信息来看，还是非常可圈可点的。最重要的是不同与以往MAC平台的字典软件，这是一款专为中国人设计的字典软件。
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软件详细信息： 支持系统： Mac OS X universal，支持Power PC及Intel 推荐在Leopard 10.5.2及以上版本运行。 主要技术特点：

1，使用Mac OS X内建TTS引擎，实现单词朗读和语音播放，Mac平台也拥有了中文发声词典。
2，内置英汉、汉英词典，并能够导入和激活新的扩充词典，提供全面的Mac平台电子词典解决方案。
3，根据输入字母智能索引，简化查词操作；还能记忆每次软件启动后全部查词动作，方便回顾。
4，记录全部历史查词，学习过程一目了然，并能够进行删除等管理操作。

下载：金山词霸 for Mac OS X

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文章出处：weosx.com
作者：weosx我们用苹果