Diamond Age Solutions News for the IT Industry

Sat Oct 15 11:18:57 NZDT 2005

Today Index

The commercial Xara vector graphics package released as Open Source to aid porting to Mac and Linux platforms, following a reduction in market players:
http://www.xaraxtreme.org/

Ubuntu 5.10 "Breezy Badger" Linux distro released. An incremental improvement on 5.04, smoother install for new users. Updates guaranteed for 18 months:
http://distrocenter.linux.com/distrocenter/05/10/10/204207.shtml?tid=127

OpenOffice 2.0 final release is delayed due to a problem with disappearing transparent graphics. Another 3 minor issues will be fixed before full release:
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1870613,00.asp

IBM to contribute a chunk of the IBM Rational Unified Process to the Open Source community:
http://www-306.ibm.com/software/swnews/swnews.nsf/n/sdsd6h3qcr?OpenDocument&Site=rationalnews

The Gimp 2.4 Image editor has a sneak preview here. Note the amazing foreground extractor and the import of SVG from the clipboard:
http://software.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=05/09/28/1345228

Fuel cell manufacturers say their devices work, and work well, but will not be brought to market because they can't be taken on board an aeroplane:
http://computerworld.com/mobiletopics/mobile/story/0,10801,105235,00.html

And finally. The results of the Ig Nobel prizes are out, for research that can't or should not be replicated. The winner measured penguin poop exit velocities:
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn8108

News collated from various sources by Vik Olliver for Diamond Age Solutions Ltd. The views presented in this document are the personal opinion of the collator, and should not be taken as any more than that.