People at AnandTech have taken a closer look at the performance improvements of 64-bit Windows XP, for 64-bit processors like AMD Athlon 64, over 32-bit Windows XP. They have used Release Candidate 1 of Windows XP Professional x64 Edition (which you can download for free from Microsoft) and found out that even with a pre-release version and not yet optimized drivers it is faster in almost all cases. The only big exception in this are games, which heavily depend on good drivers, especially for graphic cards. And unfortunately nVidia and ATI will have to do a much better job here in the future. But currently they are mostly focusing on stability and not so much on performance, which is understandable. The situation will surely change after the release of final version of Windows XP for AMD64. So currently you can in most cases only gain by upgrading to 64-bit Windows XP, unless you are playing games a lot, of course.

You can read the complete preview here:
Windows XP 64-Bit Preview: First Look at Athlon 64 Performance

Qt is a powerful and simple to use cross-platform development framework developed by Trolltech. It is already the basis for several commercial and also opensource projects like KDE. Up until now only programmers on Linux and Mac OS X were able to use Qt under GNU General Public License (GPL) for their opensource development. Windows developers could only use a commercial license. Starting with the release of Qt 4 later this year, Qt for Windows will also be available under GPL license for developing opensource applications. You can read the press release here.

Starting from June 2005 the default e-mail client on computers at University of Oslo is going to become Mozilla Thunderbird. Currently they are using Eudora, the same e-mail client we are using at our Faculty of Mathematics and Physics at University of Ljubljana. I hope our administrators also switch to a more modern, powerful and easier to use Thunderbird soon.

More about this here:
gemal.dk - Thunderbird to be default e-mail client at University of Oslo

Plastik is probably the most popular theme or style for KDE interface. This is why it will be the default in KDE 3.4. Its successor, Plastik 2 is already being designed. It has just recently also been uploaded to KDE CVS. You can find it here. To take an early look at Plastik 2 check out this screenshot. You can leave your comment about Plastik 2 here.

A couple of days ago the Legal Affairs Committee of the European Parliament (JURI) voted (with vast majority) for a restart of European Union process on software patents. Mega-corporations lost in this battle despite very heavy lobbying. The winners are: people, small and medium companies and democracy. The Commission will now have to review current software patent directive and submit a new one.

You can read more about recent not so small victory here:

FFII - European Parliament JURI Committee votes for restart with massive majority

NoSoftwarePatents.com - EU process on software patents restarted: “Like Rocky II with an instant rematch”

Remember that this is only one battle where we won. The war is still going on and we must keep fighting against software patents. Write about the danger on your blog and tell your friends and coworkers about this.

When I logged into my GMail account this morning I noticed that I have 50 invitations available to give out. Yeah that’s right, 50 (send me a request over Jabber or e-mail to get one). And when I talked to my sister and other people I found out the also got 50 new invites now. Does this mean that GMail will soon come out of beta phase. This would be great. It is working perfectly here for a long time now. The only thing that still bothers me is that they have yet to fix the compatibility with KDE’s web browser Konqueror. Support for it almost zero

On Blogs for Firefox I have just seen an entry with a link to a very nice article on one of the big news pages, CBS. They are reporting on how users are very quickly switching from the old and insecure Internet Explorer to a more safe, modern, fast and open source browser Firefox. It also has more features and it is completely free to download. Through Firefox people are also learning that they can replace almost any piece of expensive software on Windows with safer, less expensive open-source alternatives like OpenOffice.org and Thunderbird. They can even replace Windows with free operating system Linux.

The results for the best products for the year 2004 are in at Tom’s Hardware Guide. Readers have decided, for example, that the best chipset is nVidia nForce 3 250 Gb, the best CPU is AMD Athlon 64, the best graphics technology is nVidia Geforce 6800 series, the best display manufacturer is Samsung and the best mobile technology is AMD Mobile Athlon 64. So ATI lost this year and AMD Athlon 64 won by an amazing ratio of 7 : 1 over Pentium 4. You can read more details (also for other categories) here.

If you can read a little bit of French (or if you don’t mind using Babelfish or just watching the graphs), you can check out one of the first tests, or benchmarks if you like, of the upcoming 64-bit Intel Pentium 4 processor. They, at x86-secret website, have compared Pentium 4 630 (800 MHz FSB, 2 MiB L2 cache) to previous models and to AMD Athlon 64, off course. 32-bit and 64-bit applications were used and it looks like Athlon 64 still wins in almost all benchmarks. So situation isn’t much different than today with 32-bit Pentium 4 CPUs. Intel will have to do better to match the performance of Athlon 64. And it would also be nice if they reduced power consumption (about 125W compared to 95W for Athlon 64). A feature similar to Cool’n'Quiet would also help. Let’s wait for more tests and hope Pentium 4 does better in them.

Daniel Carrera wrote a very nice and informative article about OpenDocument format titled The Future Is Open: What OpenDocument Is And Why You Should Care. It is completely open and standardized format for office documents. It is based on XML and it will be the main format for at least two office suits (both open source and free): OpenOffice.org 2.0 and KOffice 1.4. Open and standard formats are very important for all of us, users and governments, because they assure us we can always read the documents and with any application that supports them. So it is no wonder OpenDocument is considered by European Union Commission as a candidate for an official format. You can also download the article in OpenDocument, OpenOffice.org 1.0 or PDF format.

On his blog, Inside Firefox, Ben Goodger (one of the main Firefox developers) tells us, he has updated the roadmap to upcoming versions of Firefox, which are developed of the same code base as Mozilla 1.8. Details are added about version 1.1. First Preview release (alpha) is expected in March, second PR (beta) in April and the final version in June (instead of March). The slippage is not due to his move to Google. They just want to be sure version 1.1 is of the same high quality as version 1.0 is.

If you look at the bottom of any blog article on my blog you may see a new trackbacks link. If you write something on your blog that talks about my blog article, then you can use this trackbacks link to display a link which you can then use to ping back to my blog. And the link to your blog article will automatically display in the trackbacks window here. Unfortunately Blogger.com doesn’t have a native support for trackbacks yet. This is why I registered (it is free) with HaloScan which provided JavaScript code to put on any blog or web page to enable trackbacks an comments. You can read more on trackbacks on Wikipedia.

One type of games I like to play a lot is submarine simulation. I very much enjoyed Jane’s 688(I) Hunter/Killer a few years ago and I still play Silent Hunter II, which I like even more. So you can imagine I was very happy to see news about a new submarine simulation reaching “gold” status. It is titled Dangerous Waters and it is brought to you by the same Sonalysts group that created 688(I). Dangerous Waters is available in a Deluxe (with 570 page printed spiral bound manual) and Regular version (manual as a PDF file). The game ships on 2 CD’s. Pre-orders are possible now. But I’ll wait until I see some reviews first. And may I also remind you that Silent Hunter III is scheduled to be released on 17th of March 2005. Things are exciting in subsim land

Nekaj trenutkov nazaj sem končal tudi s posodobitvijo prevoda programa KStars. To je odličen astronomski program, namizni planetarij, ki je namenjen predvsem ljubiteljskim začetnikom v astronomiji. Zelo prav pa lahko pride tudi pri učenju astronomije v šolah. Zaslonski posnetek poslovenjenega KStars si lahko ogledate tukajle.

English summary:
A few moments ago I finished updating the Slovenian translation of KStars, a great astronomy application. Screenshot of KStars with Slovenian user interface is available here.