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May the source be with you, but remember the KISS principle ;-)
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May the source be with you, but remember the KISS principle ;-)
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( Linux-related news were compiled mainly from the news.freshmeat.net -- a very interesting site, highly recommended )
In this isssue:
Squid is a high performance Web proxy cache that can be arranged hierarchically for an improvement in response times and a reduction in bandwith usage. Squid runs on all popular Unix platforms.
BUILDER.COM - Web authoring - Wysiwyg HTML editors - Editors' Choice -- they recommend Dreamweaver 1.2 For hand-coding, Dreamweaver calls up an external HTML source editor (Macromedia supplies HomeSite 3.0 and BBEdit). It integrates your changes into the Wysiwyg view automatically.
BUILDER.COM - Voices - Dan Shafer - Java servlets could save the day - 9/28/98
Written to Sun's Application Program Interface (API), Java servlets are embedded in your Web server and extend the server's capabilities much like CGI scripts. The main use is to generate dynamic content. For example The Time Warner Pathfinder site uses servlets extensively in this way to customize content for different browsers. Compared to CGI applications, servlets are:
Many of the Java Integrated Development Environments (IDEs), including IBM's VisualAge for Java and Inprise's Borland JBuilder, have built-in support for servlets. Each servlet receives two objects, ServletRequest and ServletResponse, which implement methods dealing with actions (get, post, put, and delete) and retrieving information (including parameters passed with the servlet call, and information stored on the server). Two books to help you out are Java Servlet Programming and Java Servlets
Pine® - a Program for Internet News & Email - is a tool for reading, sending, and managing electronic messages. Pine was designed by the Office of Computing & Communications at the University of Washington specifically with novice computer users in mind, but it can be tailored to accommodate the needs of "power users" as well.
pgp4pine is an interactive program for using PGP with email programs, specifically Pine. It is compatible with PGP2.6.3i, PGP5.0, and GnuPG 0.4. This version introduces support for GnuPG. It uses pipes to extract your secret and public keys from PGP 2, PGP5, or GnuPG 0.4.
install-mail 0.1 -- a perl script that will make a fairly good attempt at installing email support on your Linux box. Just answer 7 questions and it will install fetchmail, qmail, serialmail and ucspi. This is the first release and still requires some tweaking.
Netware for Linux -- new Caldera release
KDE 1.0 released. Fore flavors ot Linux now use KDE. They include:
ProFTPD is an FTP daemon for unix and unix-like operating systems released under the GPL. It is designed to be advanced, incredibly configurable and secure.See also The KDE Free Qt Foundation
VaS means Vote and Survey. It's a set of scripts which allows you to make voting pages, customize them, place votes and display surveys based on the votes.
This version is a lot faster, as excluded directories are not searched at all. As a result, the command line has changed a bit to allow this. Other changes include the ability to only search specific filesystem types and to specify where log files are stored.
The OpenLDAP Project is a collaborative effort to provide a robust, commercial-grade, fully featured, and open source LDAP suite of applications and development tools. The project is managed by a worldwide community of volunteers that use the Internet to communicate, plan, and develop the OpenLDAP suite and its related documentation. Version 1.0.2 contains fixes for compilation problems and Makefile bugs.
Netscape (Nasdaq:NSCP) plans to introduce Netscape TuneUp for IE -- new software that offers the features of its Communicator browser to users of rival Microsoft's (Nasdaq:MSFT) IE. TuneUp can be downloaded for free by the end of October. The software is an attempt by Netscape to lure IE users to its Netcenter portal site -- and possibly get them to switch to Navigator in the future. After users download TuneUp for IE, they can take advantage of Communicator features, such as Smart Browsing, and set their search default to Netscape, which will then send them to the Netcenter portal -- even though they'll still be using IE.
JSFormatter reformats Java source files of different styles to a specific wanted style. The JSFormatter project is based on JSBeautifier (formerly Beautifier), and was created following a mutual interest of many users of JSBeautifier to have an ability to fully reformate Java sources.
Version 0.3.3 includes another series of bugfixes that seriously improve line-breaking.
Bugzilla
Bugzilla is the bugtracking system used by mozilla.org. It is written in Perl and uses MySQL for the database backend. Bugzilla has (once again) been completely rewritten. This time, it was a port to Perl. It can now also be obtained as a tarball, CVS is no longer necessary. If you have avoided Bugzilla before because you didn't like TCL or couldn't use CVS, you may want to take another look.
PRCS
PRCS is the front end to a set of tools that provide a way to deal with sets of files and directories as an entity, preserving coherent versions of the entire set. Its purpose is similar to that of SCCS, RCS, and CVS, but it is much simpler than any of those systems.
This is a maintenence release including a few patches received over the last few months. Highlights include egcs-1.1 compatibility, prcs info now reports project keywords, configure argument --disable-environment turns off compile-time environment defaults, and a greatly improved Emacs mode.
MSWordView is a program that understands the Microsoft Word 8 binary file format (Office97) and is able to convert Word documents into HTML, which can then be read with a browser. It requires Perl in order to operate.
Microsoft Windows NT Services for UNIX (suggested by Stepan Stadnyk)
Microsoft Windows NT Services for UNIX Add-on Pack The Microsoft Windows NT
Services for UNIX Add-on Pack will make it easier to integrate Windows NT Workstation 4.0
and Windows NT Server 4.0 into
existing UNIX environments. Windows NT Services for UNIX provides core interoperability
features, including:
- Resource sharing via NFS
- Remote administration via Telnet
- Password synchronization from Windows NT to UNIX
- Common scripting across platforms via the UNIX KornShell and utilities from MKS
With place of the size of the quarter coin and total size like a credit card, the drive will be cheaper than flash memory and can be used in hand-help devices. The drive would be compatible with flash memory chips and modules. Additional info is avalble at www.ibm.com/storage/microdrive.
On August 24, Intel added two new members of the Celeron family -- the 300A and the 333. Both have 128K of integrated L2 cache that works on full CPU speed. 333 MHz seems work with 66Mhz memory bus only, but due to high speed cache that model still makes sense.
The price of 333 is ~ $180 and the only decent competitor at this price/performance level is AMD K6-2 300. Althouth it will be generally somewhat slower it's much cheaper (~$120) and , unlike Celeron 333, K6-2 300 is capable of working with 100 MHz SDRAM chips. I do not recommend K6-2 333 or K6-2 266 because they do not work with 100Mhz bus -- speed of the chip should be exact multiple of the half of the speed of the bus. Also K6-2 350 (~$220) is probably only marginally better than K6-2 300 as performance of L2 cacheless K2-6 (it does have 64K L1 cache) does not increase as much with CPU speed as Pentium II or Celeron and that increase definitely does not worth $100 price difference.
Generally because most memory accesses are satisfied by L2 cache, faster DRAM speed is less important than the the increase in L2 cache speed and here Celeron 300A and 333 have an edge. According to ZD-labs tests due to full CPU speed cache the new 333-MHz Celeron can outperform a 300-MHz Pentium II. New Celeron cache is built into the processor die like L1 cache (Pentium II L2 cache chips are the same same 0.25-micron CMOS, but are separate entities mounted on the substrate on either side of the CPU and work on only one half of the CPU speed). That lead to performance ~30% better than Pentium II/266, and ~7% better than Pentium II/300. See also Celeron Caches Up -- ZDNet Products
But K6-2 is capable of supporting 3DNow floating point operations and for speech recognition applications (for example 3DNow optimized version of ViaVoice from IBM) or game engines (Apes Rising, Incoming, Speed Boat Attack, and several others; ID software is likely to support 3DNow in future versions) it can outperform PII on the same clock speed. Based on AMD tests 3DNow lets K6-2 300 match the performance of 400Mhz Pentium II for 3DNow optimized software.
AMD promised that K6-3 family with 256K onboard full CPU speed L2 cache(like in Celeron) will be available next year. K6-3 means that it's not much sense in leaving Super7 in favor of Slot 1.
See also:
[October 1, 1998]
Intel has landed at least two handheld deals with the StrongARM. The first in from Compaq and the second is from HP. Compaq Isy is a very promising PDA based on StrongARM 1100. HP will use the StrongARM 1100 and a new companion chip called the StrongARM 1101 in its Windows CE "Jupiter"(is the latest flavor of Microsoft's Windows CE-based handheld computers). The StrongARM 1100 runs at 190 MHz, faster than the 75-MHz processors HP currently uses in its Windows CE handheld computers.
Intel acquired the rights to build the StrongARM chip, which is rooted in a basic chip design from Advanced Risc Machines. The chip was first acquired by Digital and only then come to Intel as a part of settlement with Digital. Intel has committed to new generations of the chip every two years.
StrongARM has enjoyed popularity among designers of NC. Corel for example use it in its NC computer and will port Linux to it. It also has been used in the past in the discontinued MessagePad from Apple. Now the most popular NC based on this CPU is Acorn RiscPC. Linux was already ported to this NC. See screenshots.
StrongARM chips consume very little power and are very cheap. The StrongARM 1100 sells for $33 in volume while the StrongARM 1101 companion chip sells for $21.
For talented programmers this is a very interesting chip to try. See also:
Other news:
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Created: May 16, 1997; Last modified: August 15, 2009