New Products
You're watching The Princess Bride on your DVR, and Wesley is about to kiss Buttercup. There's a blissful moment of silence, but it's pierced by the whirr of those pesky cooling fans. VIA Technologies wishes to save you such agony, and to that end has released the fanless Eden and Eden ULV processors. Boasting 90nm manufacturing technology and sipping a meager 3.5 watts for their 1GHz ULV processor, it's just the ticket for an application requiring either low power or low heat specs. For something with a little more umph, the 1.5GHz version is still a power miser, consuming only 7 watts. And Linux is fully supported, of course.
If you truly love your data, let it run away. If it doesn't come back, restore it from backups using BakBone's NetVault. The recently released Enterprise Edition 7.4 can manage all your troublesome backup needs, even in a heterogeneous platform environment (that is, you're stuck backing up your NT servers as well as your Linux and Solaris boxes). The latest release adds support for backing up VMware ESX server environments, allowing guest systems to access tape drives installed on the host. Pricing begins at $1,195 US for Intel-based systems.
Just as winter turns to spring each year, and Chicago Cubs fans prepare for another year of cruel disappointment, so too does this month bring another virtualization product announcement. The OpenVZ Project has a new beta, based on the Linux 2.6.15 kernel. New in this release is better hardware support (notably for AMD dual-core processors), resizing of ext3 filesystems and improved memory management. OpenVZ is the community face of the Virtuozzo commercial virtualization product, and those wanting to download or contribute to the project should visit the OpenVZ Web site.
Your editor has fond memories of developing an Ada compiler in Pascal to generate 6502 machine code in college. My therapist says the trauma will eventually fade. For those looking for a more modern take on Ada, AdaCore has a new version of its GNAT Programming Studio, now available for x86-64-bit versions of Linux. In addition to ADA, that old DOD favorite, GPS also supports C and C++ for cross-language development. GPS is part of the GNAT Pro Ada Development Environment, and subscriptions start at $14,000 US.
