Microsoft’s Private Folders Become a Public Headache

  Submitted by Troy Drossi Microsoft 29 Comments
Microsoft's effort to provide a little privacy for Windows users has instead turned into a very public black eye. There was a near-immediate outcry saying that, without proper safeguards, what was intended as a benefit could turn into a big headache for businesses. The software could make it harder for companies to meet compliance regulations as well as to handle users who forget their password, critics said.
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Sun Boots Server with Niagara II Chip

  Submitted by Elloit Cannovi Oracle and SUN 8 Comments
Sun has booted its Solaris operating system on a server with a prototype of its forthcoming Niagara II processor, one key milestone for the company's attempt to restore the relevance of its Sparc processor family. The first Niagara chip, formally called the UltraSparc T1, is used in the Sun Fire T1000 and T2000 servers that have come to market in recent months. Niagara II keeps its predecessor's relatively low 70-watt power consumption and extends its ambitious design elements, multiple processing cores and execution threads.
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Windows Vista 5472.5 Released

  Submitted by Dolphin Windows 78 Comments
"Microsoft has just released the latest installment of the Windows Vista pre-RC1 builds, with Vista Build 5472.5 making its way to TAP and Tech Beta tester today, and for once, MSDN Subscribers too. Build 5472.5 is a standard FRE Staged build, only available in English at the moment, though Arabic, Japanese, and German builds may follow. At this point all the builds we are seeing seem to undergoing severe stages of heavy optimization: although faster code normally comes at the expense of larger files as a rule of thumb, this build of Windows Vista packs a punch performance-wise, but is only a 100 MB larger than its predecessor. "
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Review: Xandros Desktop Home Edition 4.0

  Submitted by Valour Oracle and SUN 17 Comments
"After suffering through version 1.0 many years ago, I thought Xandros would be the least likely of the commercial desktop GNU/Linux distributions to succeed. Each subsequent release since 1.1 has changed my mind a little bit, and now with version 4.0 of its home desktop edition, I'm at last convinced that Xandros is positioned for success. This should be the desktop operating system that you recommend to your Windows-hating friends and family."
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Tracker: Desktop-Neutral First Class Object Database

  Submitted by EJB General Development 38 Comments
"Tracker is a powerful desktop-neutral first class object database, tag/metadata database, search tool and indexer. Tracker is also extremely fast and super efficient with your systems memory when compared with some other competing frameworks. It consists of a common object database that allows entities to have an almost infinte number of properties, metadata, a comprehensive database of keywords/tags and links to other entities. It has the ability to index, store, harvest metadata. retrieve and search all types of files and other first class objects."
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How to Restore a Hacked Linux Server

  Submitted by anonymous Linux 27 Comments
"Hopefully you never had to restore your own system from a compromise and you will not have to do this in the future. Working on several projects to restore a compromised Linux system for various clients, I have developed a set of rules that others might find useful in similar situations. The type of hacks encountered can be very variate and you might see very different ones than the one I will present, or I have seen live, but even so, this rules might be used as a starting point to develop your own recovery plan."
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Application-Level Virtualization for Windows

  Submitted by Tal Windows 9 Comments
A company called Trustware, who has recently been nominated one of the 10 hot start-ups of 2006 by Microsoft, developed an application-level virtualization tool for Windows. This app, called BufferZone, promises to fight malware virtualizing I/O operations, so that the OS and user's data will be safe. Another cool advantage of this technology is that it doesn't require any user interaction. SecurityFocus published an interview with Eyal Dotan, creator of the tool, where he discusses the architecture, advantages of this design, performance, and how this method could be applied to servers running Windows or be ported to other OSs.
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AI Reaches the Golden Years

  Submitted by Eugenia Loli Geek stuff 22 Comments
"Artificial intelligence is 50 years old this summer, and while computers can beat the world's best chess players, we still can't get them to think like a 4-year-old. This week in Boston, some of the field's leading practitioners are gathering to examine this most ambitious of computer research fields, which at once has managed to exceed, and fall short of, our grandest expectations."
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SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop, Server 10 Released

  Submitted by AdamR01 SuSE, openSUSE 53 Comments
Since yesterday, .iso downloads for SUSE Enterprise Linux Desktop/Server 10 have been available from Novell's download page. After seeking confirmation from Novell's Nat Friedman, we can confirm these are indeed the final releases. SLED 10 is available for x86 and x86-64, while SLES 10 can be obtained for x86, AMD64/EM64T, PPC, IBM Power, Itanium, and IBM's zSeries. According to Friedman, a "big marketing blitz" will happen today. OSNews reviewed the RC3 release of SLED 10 in two stages not too long ago.
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Sharpdevelop 2.0 Released

  Submitted by Bernhard Spuida General Development 24 Comments
The Open Source IDE Sharpdevelop 2.0 has been released. This IDE not only allows you to code in c#, VB.NET, and boo, but also offers features you won't find elsewhere: conversion between the supported programming languages, support for .Net and Mono, Winforms, and GTK#. View the full feature tour or download Sharpdevelop and start into open source development for both Windows and Linux in one IDE.
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Xen Backed by Novell, IBM: Too Far, Too Fast?

  Submitted by gergnz OS News 8 Comments
Lots of news on Xen. Firstly, "This is a document about how to set up XEN and iSCSI on 3 Debian Stable machines so that you can have a virtual host that can be migrated live between 2 of the machines. The third machine will be the common disk for the virtual machine that is seen via the 2 machines running XEN." Secondly, "IBM and Novell are throwing their considerable weight behind Xen, but some experts are suggesting that these companies may be pushing this nascent technology too far too fast." Lastly, "You can now run OpenSolaris domains under Xen as dom0 with OpenSolaris domUs too."
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Windows Fundamentals Screenshots, Information

Windows 55 Comments
Bink.nu has more information and screenshots on Windows Fundamentals. "Microsoft Windows Fundamentals for Legacy PCs is a Windows-based operating system designed for enterprise customers with legacy PCs who are not in a position to purchase new hardware. WinFLP provides the same security and manageability as Microsoft Windows XP SP2 while providing a smooth migration path to the latest hardware and operating system."
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Freespire Beta 1 Released

  Submitted by jake tate Linspire 87 Comments
Kevin Carmony of Linspire/Freespire has announced that the first beta of Freespire has been released earlier than anticipated. Get it from the download page. According to Carmony, this release includes out-of-the-box support for proprietary formats such as .mp3 and WMV, plug-and-play support for Ati and nVIDIA cards without user intervention, Click-N-Run, and much more.
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Multipurpose Multimedia Processing with GStreamer

  Submitted by anonymous Multimedia, AV 13 Comments
"This article introduces you to GStreamer, a universal multimedia processing library that makes multimedia handling easy. GStreamer can answer many problems, such as 'I need to store all audio samples coming from various sources in a common format'. Because all formats are treated alike, you only need to write one tool. This saves time and makes the solution more robust and easier to maintain. Moreover, after you learn the GStreamer concepts, there's almost no limit to what you can apply it to."
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Shared Source Microsoft Device Emulator 1.0 Release

Wireless 9 Comments
The Shared Source Device Emulator is a compressed archive of the source code to the Device Emulator V1.0, buildable using Microsoft Visual Studio 2005. The Device Emulator is a software simulation of an ARM CPU and motherboard, that runs the Windows CE and Windows Mobile operating systems. This source release can be used as an research and experimentation platform: the CPU emulator can be modified or replaced, as can the motherboard, peripheral devices, and emulator UI. If ported to Unix it will make easier the development, debugging and testing of ARM-compiled Qtopia and Linux-based applications for phones/PDAs.
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Mac OS X: Viruses and Security

  Submitted by Umbra macOS 22 Comments
On Symantec's blog website, the company writes: "Researchers and engineers who are working in the security field must have strong constitutions - especially when it comes to weathering negative backlash and tired conspiracy theories whenever security and Mac OS X are mentioned in the same breath. With that in mind, in an effort to improve the quality of the dialogue, I would like to discuss some important issues regarding Mac OS X and security. Let's start with the hot-button issue of Mac OS X viruses. Simply put, at the time of writing this article, there are no file-infecting viruses that can infect Mac OS X."
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