Wednesday, 18 Jun, 2008

 

Great news from Free and Open Source World!

As you all may know, Mozilla Foundation Inc. anticipated some time ago the download day event, with the objective to set a new guiness world record, by becoming the most downloaded software on 24 hours (the objective was set at 5 million downloads). Actual numbers seem to speak for themselves: 7,937,004+ Downloads (and still counting at the time of this writing).

From Netscape to Mozilla to Firefox, the people behind the scenes are showing the world that Open Source Software can take the lead and seriously drive the software industry with competence (and now with numbers). Today's browser war is no more about features (b/c plugins), but on speed and standards compliance (I must admit the improvements are genuine).

Yesterday and today I made my bit by downloading it from home, from office and spreading the word with my colleagues. Thanks Mozilla ;P

On another subject, wine devs reached a milestone: after almost fifteen years (yes, that is a lot), of hard work, they released the most anticipated wine-1.0 release. This is also good news, because, when at some point in time Microsoft would drop support for their legacy OSes (like Win 98), it won't be possible to keep that software running. I know, today may sound insane using this plain old software, but wine is more than that: wine can also play DirectX 9 video games via wine.

Unfortunately you can't have full Windows XP performance with wine (as a personal, and not scientifically demonstrable rule, I consider full 1600x1200 XP performance equivalent to full 1400x900 performance with wine), I hope someday GPUs (such as the new Geforce GTX 280), will become powerful enough to allow you to play your favourite videogames @ 30+ fps under wine, perhaps using native lcd res (I'm currently on 1920x1200, maybe "next" nVIDIA die shrink @ .55nm will do).

Since I'm on the HW scene, I wish to express perplexity about the "new" intel Atom processors: their performance are a dinosaur jump back to the past. On the HW upgrade italian forum I criticized the design by expressing my pov: they're not so exciting (even some intel Engineers seemed to dislike that stuff, or so did some ars article say). I mean, the concept is great and all, but forget good multitasking performance!

Hopefully nVIDIA, AMD, and, who knows, maybe Apple, will come to something more appealing by the time this new market is born (intel also seems to have plans for a future dual-core Atom...ouch!). After all, I consider the market as a great buffet: before eating, I'll wait for the dinner table to be full, then I'll choose what would better fit.

That's all from my (new!) news section.

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