Not directly operating system news, but nevertheless, interesting news for all us geeks. So, Carmack says that GeForce4-MX is not a good buy for Doom3: "Nvidia has really made a mess of the naming conventions here. I always thought it was bad enough that GF2 was just a speed bumped GF1, while GF3 had significant architectural improvements over GF2. I expected GF4 to be the speed bumped GF3, but calling the NV17 GF4-MX really sucks. GF4-MX will still run Doom properly, but it will be using the NV10 codepath with only two texture units and no vertex shaders. A GF3 or 8500 will be much better performers. The GF4-MX may still be the card of choice for many people depending on pricing, especially considering that many games won't use four textures and vertex programs, but damn, I wish they had named it something else."

"There are many distributions of BSD, the most popular of which are OpenBSD, and BSD/OS. Similar to Linux, BSD is based on open source code and widely used for Web hosting. Often compared to Linux, noncommercial BSD operating systems generally have more liberal open source licenses, 10 years' more history, and many BSD proponents credit these operating systems with greater reliability and efficiency than Linux. But while Linux garners all the industry attention and sales, BSD is hidden from the spotlight." Someone could argue that FreeBSD is the most popular BSD these days, but in any case, you can read the article at ZDNet.

Breadbox Computer Company, announced recently that they have signed a worldwide non-exclusive licensing agreement with Geoworks, to license the GEOS operating system for use on any and all hardware platforms and devices, including desktop computers, PDAs, smart phones, communicators, set-top boxes, and other embedded devices. Breadbox has been devoted to and particpated in most major GEOS projects for the past 10 years. In other operating system news, Roadrunner, a single-user, general-purpose operating system based on the POSIX standards just had a new release, while MenuetOS, the x86 assembly-only OS, had a release with support for more advanced multithreading. Last, but not least, the SkyOS folks let us know of their latest advancements on their OS, which it seems to be shaping up pretty good.

KernelTrap has spoken with Linux kernel hacker, Andrew Morton. His contributions cover a wide range of kernel components, including ext3 on the 2.4 kernel and the low-latency patch.

Those of you who had been following my articles at BeNews last year, you probably remember the France-based RealTech-VR and their effort to bring a Direct3D-to-OpenGL wrapper to the BeOS. The company paused most of that effort when was clear that BeOS was stopped being developed, but after pressure from the community, they have now open sourced their D3D-2-GL implementation and work has already started to port the wrapper to MacOS and Linux in an effort to bring Direct 3D to more alternative operating systems. Today we feature a mini-interview with Stephane Denis of RealTech-VR about the implementation.

Yet another excerpt (previous articles here and here) from the well known "Modern Operating Systems" book at InformIT (free registration required): "When a page fault occurs, the operating system has to choose a page to remove from memory to make room for the page that has to be brought in. This sample chapter from Modern Operating Systems looks at a variety of page replacement algorithms designed to tackle this problem." InformIT also features two more excerpts this week: "Multithreading and the C++ Type System" from the "Modern C++ Design" book and "Solaris: Cluster and Complex Design Issues" from the "Designing Solutions with Sun Cluster 3.0" book.

"Operating systems will become highly distributed and self-healing and will collaborate with applications. Imagine computers in a group providing disk storage for their users, transparently swapping files and optimizing their collective performance, all with no central administration. But the machines providing this pool of virtual storage dare not trust one another completely. Indeed, a hacker takes over one of them and ruthlessly begins attacking others in the group." Read the rest of the story at ComputerWorld.

Gobe Software recently announced the release of version 3.0.3 of gobeProductive, a free update for all 3.0.x versions. If you are a user of gobeProductive, you may upgrade by selecting "Check for Updates" from the 'Help' menu within gobeProductive. gobeProductive 3 is a great office suite for Windows and Gobe is so generous that is giving away 10 copies to 10 lucky OSAlert readers, one copy every day for the next 10 business days! Total value of $1250 USD. Enter the competition now, read more how you can win.

After more than a week of coding, the updated OSAlert design is pretty much done. While a lot of you (including myself) prefered the older, simpler & cleaner design, which was also much faster to load and even rendered nicely on... text-based browsers, this updated design was necessary. We had to expand PriceGrabber (part of the deal) so we can get some revenue to be able to pay for our (always on-the-increase) bandwidth needs, and the only way to do so was to add a vertical bar. Also, we needed to add more menu items (check out the massively updated "OS Resources" and "Advertise" pages), so we had to make the menu vertical (the 765-pixel wide horizontal menu was not a scalable option anymore). UPDATE: I just added better support for Lynx, Links & W3M text-based browsers. *You will have* to load www.osnews.com/home.php instead of the plain www.osnews.com though because the default index.php is actually static (generated on-the-fly every 1 minute) so it won't work with my PHP text browser detection code. UPDATE 2: Better AvantGo support added.

"This will end up being one of the world's worst investments, I'm afraid," - David House, former Intel chief of corporate strategy said in the early 1990s. I've been fasinated by microprocessors for years and have been following the Merced debacle since back in 1994 when HP and Intel announced they were getting together to make some amazing new technology.

Virtual Dimension has finished translating this year's video coverage of the Amiga 2001 show. This annual show held in Cologne, is the highlight Amiga event among the dozens Amiga events being held annually all over the world. Highlights inlude an interview with Ben Hermans of Hyperion Entertainment about the development of AmigaOS4, an interview with Gerald Carda of bplan GmbH regarding their new PPC based PEGASOS motherboard and MorphOS; 'a lightweight PPC OS which is able to emulate 68k AmigaOS and software on PPC hardware in a similar way to how Amithlon works on x86 hardware' and finally it also includes a demonstration of AmigaOS XL powered systems. Amiga Inc and some AmigaDE partners were not present as they decided to attend a very small Canadian Amiga show, which was being held simultaniously to ensure some interest.

"ST Microelectronics Inc. has decided to put its graphics operations up for sale, placing the future of the Kyro graphics accelerator in limbo. The announcement comes after the troubled graphics accelerator, designed by PowerVR Technologies, itself a division of the U.K.'s Imagination Technoogies PLC, missed several major milestones that company executives outlined in an exclusive interview last June." Read the rest of the report at ExtremeTech. Our Take: With 3Dfx long gone, Matrox & 3DLabs already out of the 3D gaming market and SiS, VIA, Intel and Trident not been able to produce fast 3D chipsets, the ball is now only between the duopoly of ATi and (mainly) nVidia. I wish good luck to ATi, as I just can't handle yet another monopoly in the tech world. I want choice, I need diversity.

Sun's chief executive dressed up as Tux the penguin at an analysts meeting to prove his love for the GNU/Linux operating system. CEO Scott McNealy: "Sun will create its own version of Linux". Read the rest of the article at ZDNet UK.

'Stubear' is a graphics artist who in his free time helps the OpenBeOS folks in constructing the User Interface for a future version of this new operating system. Particularly, this shot looks pretty clean, but the widgets still need some work to look sharper. These are just concept screens, but sometimes, especially if you have lots of time in your hands, it is nice staring at nice shapes and colors. Moreover, OSAlert received an email (which contained a real screenshot) from a BeOS user who wished to remain anonymous. The screenshot shows a hidden feature ("easter egg") of the "Dano" version of BeOS which is called ZSnake! To enable this feature press and hold CNTRL+ALT+SHFT and then click on the "Menu" application under "Preferences". While this feature seems unfinished (zooming to the screenshot shows some pixels out of order) this is a neat little UI gimmick that it not supported by any other operating system or Toolkit so far and it looks at least interesting UI-wise.