I’ve been installing a lot of different operating systems recently for testing different things, and there’s an interesting issue going on with the location of the ‘traditional’ terminal or command prompt.

I’ll admit, I’m a command line junkie after years of first DOS and then Unix. Despite being a complete Mac zealot as well, the first application I start after a browser and email when OS X starts up is either the Terminal or Apple’s X Windows System implementation.

But I’m noticing something odd. On Linux and Solaris the ‘Terminal’ application is often hidden away under the ‘System Tools’ or ‘Administration Tools’ part of the menu within whatever interface you choose. I suspect this is because these operating systems have been pushing for the ’standard’ (read not power or developer user) who don’t want to use a shell to use their OS.

Wild, wide Wednesday’s IT Blogwatch: in which Intel makes it easier to program for quad-core CPUs. Not to mention the annual list of least influential Americans…

Jon Stokes has the scoop:

Intel announced today that they’re open-sourcing their cross-platform Thread Building Blocks 2.0 (TBB) template library. While the company contributes code to open-source project like the Linux kernel and drivers, the opening of TBB marks the first time that Intel has taken a commercial tool and open-sourced it, making it Intel’s largest open-source commitment to date.

The aim of TBB … is to make it easier for coders in C++ to express task-level parallelism. TBB works by abstracting parallelism above the level that most programmers are currently used to, especially those coders who use POSIX or Windows threads. Coders can use the TBB template library in conjunction with the platform’s native threads, and the different pieces of the project (task scheduler, mutex locks, atomic operations, containers, etc.) can be used independently of one another.

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It’s Tuesday’s IT Blogwatch: in which the state of Massachusetts thinks it likes Office 2007 after all. Not to mention why not to mess with two yuppies in a BMW…

Eric Lai has the scoop:

Massachusetts today released draft specifications that would allow state workers to continue using Microsoft’s Office Open XML (OOXML) format. The latest proposal comes about two years after state IT officials kicked off a raging political battle by unveiling  specifications that would have required state workers to use applications that support only "open" technologies like the OpenDocument format (ODF).
…
According to pages 18-22 of the proposed Massachusetts Enterprise Technical Reference Model 4.0, OOXML, along with ODF, plain text and HTML formats, meets the IT division’s criteria for an open document format. Other formats that are not considered open but could be used by Massachusetts state employees include Adobe Corp.’s Portable Document Format and Rich Text Format.
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Microsoft has played hardball by lobbying hard in Massachusetts and other states, and to the federal government. On the other side, ODF supporter IBM has also lobbied governments.

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Parallels 3.0, the virtualization solution for Mac OS X, was released yesterday, and it contains a number of fairly significant new features.

Most important of all, 3.0 includes support for 3D graphics, one of the features that I consider to be the holy grail of virtualization support, because it is often the feature that becomes the limiting factor to using a virtualized environment. It’s not just for gaming, there are plenty of other 3D applications (CAD, for a start) where 3D is required.

I lost a good friend today. After an extended loan period, Apple finally asked for its iMac evaluation machine back. Now everyone in this household is going through withdrawl.

Apple originally sent the iMac as background for a feature I wrote on the future of the GUI. It was supposed to be here for a month or two. As the weeks and months ticked by no one wanted to see it go home. Apple didn’t ask. We didn’t tell.

Meanwhile, I kept trying to find time in my schedule to set it up as my primary work machine, as Scot Finnie did recently with a MacBook Pro. He never went back. Between other deadlines I never got around to the project.