Slashdot Mirror

ChrisRijk wrote to us about the release of PKI information to Mozilla. The "Sun-Netscape Alliance" has that announced that it will give mozilla.org a bunch of PKI (Public Key Infrastructure) library source code and utilities. This was made possible due to looser regulation of encryption source code by the US Department of Commerce." A FAQ available at the Mozilla web site.

ChrisRijk writes "According to this MacWeek article Sun has started work on a port, though time-frame is currently unknown. After Sun made StarOffice freely downloadable for anyone (1.2M downloads so far) they got 6000 calls asking for a Mac port. They also mention that Sun has doubled the number of engineers working on StarOffice. Current StarOffice ports are Solaris (x86 and SPARC), Linux (x86 only), Windows and OS/2 in several languages. "

ChrisRijk writes "The Register is reporting that according to the German mag c't, next month Sun will buy StarDivision, whose major product is StarOffice. With Sun's financial and development resources behind it, StarOffice could rapidly become a worthy competitor to MS Office, especially in multiple-platform environments. The idea of having a major office productivity suite that looks and feels the same no matter which OS is beneath it is simply too good to be denied. But this is just a rumor report (albeit a well-sourced one), so don't get too excited yet.

ChrisRijk writes "See the HotSpot main-page for starters. HotSpot is basically a fast JVM, initially aimed at server-side Java - beta testers say it's 2x or more faster in real world applications - see this good article (not by Sun). See also the press release, FAQ, and white paper. Freely downloadable binaries available later this week. Linux port? Well, Sun are liscencing the code (for a fee), and claim to have designed it to be easily portable. Sun also announced their i-Planet software today - see this news.com article. "

ChrisRijk writes "Netpedia are offering free web-space (no banners, no references to netpedia) for people doing open source projects. " Its nice to have a few formalized places for folks needing space and bandwidth for projects. And without those obnoxious floating geocities logos too!

ChrisRijk writes " Details start to appear of IBM's port-and-extend of Apache to run on their mainframes and such. See article at Sun World. The product will be distributed open-source. " Related:I've got a nice letter from lawyers at IBM politely asking me to yank the IBM logo from Slashdot. Can anyone tell me how I can get permission to use it? Any IBM employees with some clout reading?

Chris wrote in to say "In the latest Microprocessor Report, this is the following piece on the forthcoming Merced. They think that the Merced is running into design problems. Performance will likely be lower than earlier estimates, Intel are downplaying the performance behind the scenes, and are saying to wait for McKinley (2nd gen IA-64). In fact, if delayed enough, the Merced could well end up as being not much more than a development chip. So, the IA-64 might not be around until 2001, but by this time next year, we should have the PowerPC G4, AMD K7 and UltraSparc III in full flow, and Alpha 21264 looking even smuger than it does now... There's also another new article there - PC Processor Market Stratifies, which is partly about how AMD are the only x86 maker likely to threaten/shadow Intel in top performance over the next year or two."