Month: March 2006

Microsoft delayed Microsoft Vista until at least January 2007. This means that Dell, HP and other computer vendors won’t have Vista to install on PCs in time for the big “Christmas Sales” push. Most PC purchasers may wait until Vista is available since a large chunk of the price of a PC is the “Microsoft Tax” of the cost of the Operating System (unlike Linux, which is free!)

What’s Really Behind the Windows Vista Delay?

“While Microsoft emphasized during a Tuesday conference call with press and analysts that it was still going to make Vista code available to some customers in 2006, as the company has been promising for nearly two years, not everyone bought that argument. ‘Today’s announcement essentially means Windows Vista is delayed until 2007,’ said Joe Wilcox, an analyst with Jupiter Research. ‘While Microsoft says software will be available to businesses through volume licensing, the company’s own financials show that a small percentage of customers purchase that way. Most businesses buy Windows on new PCs, and these won’t be coming until 2007.'”

Linux v2.6.16 has been released according to the man himself… Linus Torvalds.

New Linux Kernel Released

Linus says:

“Ok, it’s being mirrored out right now, the git tree should already be all there, the tar-file and patches are still uploading.

Not a lot of changes since -rc6, but there’s various random one-liners here and there (a number of Coverity bugs found, for example), and there are small MIPS and PowerPC updates.

Appended is the shortlog from 2.6.16-rc6, the full log (from 2.6.15) is on the web/ftp-sites.

It looks like both Fedora and SuSE end up using a kernel that is pretty close to this 2.6.16 release, so let’s all hope it’s good. Give it a good testing, please, Linus”

I know, I know… everyone’s wondering… where’s Dr. Bill? Well, I have been swamped of late! I plan to get the podcast out this evening… better late than never! Whew! What is it about Spring that seems to stack things on your plate?!?

Two hackers in California won the “Intel Mac running Windows XP” contest this week.

Intel Mac Runs Windows XP

“The hackers who won the contest are keen to keep their anonymity and are known only by the handles ‘narf’ and ‘blanka.’ According to reports, their feat has been independently confirmed and XP has been made to run on an iMac, Mac Mini and MacBook Pro. Technical sites such as Ars Technica have provided walkthroughs for people keen to try it for themselves, though they stress that it is likely to defeat those who are technically unskilled. It is possible that easier ways to get a Mac booting both operating systems will appear as other hackers follow up the success.”

They won $13,854 which was contributed by surfers that hit the contest web site.

On another note, should I buy a MacBook Pro? Should the Doctor take the plunge? Everything I have read so far seems to indicate it is a great machine. Hummmmmm… opinions?

Microsoft is planning on releasing a “stripped down” version of Windows XP for legacy systems (systems that shipped with, say, Windows 95) so that they could drop all security updates on older systems. Now, that release has been delayed.

Microsoft Delays XP for Legacy PCs

“Windows Fundamentals can run on older machines that do not support XP while providing the same level of security. The system could be utilized as a Remote Desktop or Citrix client, along with supporting management tools, terminal emulation software, and viewing of some documents. Microsoft did not give a specific reason for the delay, but the company has been focusing most of its efforts on finishing Windows Vista.”

College students get bored. And when that happens, watch out! Check out this story (with pictures) of what some bored college students did with a bunch of old USB based floppy drives!

Floppy Based RAID

Just what we all need… slow, small capacity redundancy! Riiight!