OSnews - Exploring the Future of Computing

How Shellcodes Work

Submitted by Mediv 2006-05-19 Privacy, Security 4 Comments

Here is an article explaining how shellcodes work: "This article is not a guide on writing exploits, nor an overview of popular vulnerabilities. This is a step-by-step guide on developing a shellcode, a crucial point of any exploit software. Hopefully, learning how they work will help conscientious and respectable developers and system administrators to understand how malefactors think and to defend their systems against them."

Dell To Launch AMD Server

Thom Holwerda 2006-05-18 AMD 27 Comments

Dell will use AMD's Opteron chip. The PC maker has long been an Intel shop. But it intends to change that later in 2006, when it will begin offering a multi-processor AMD Opteron server. Dell, which announced its first-quarter earnings May 18, said in a statement that it would begin offering "AMD Opteron processors in our multi-processor servers by the end of the year offering a great new technology to our customers at the high-end of our server line." The Opteron server, likely to be a four-processor machine, will be sold alongside new Intel-based servers, Dell indicated.

Microsoft Tells All on Vista’s Hardware Needs

Thom Holwerda 2006-05-18 Windows 70 Comments

As expected, the software giant on May 18 unveiled its Windows Vista Get Ready Web site, along with a set of minimum PC hardware guidelines for Vista Capable PCs - which call for at least an 800MHz processor, 512MB of RAM and a DirectX 9-capable graphics processor, but ask for more for those who seek to use all of Vista's features - and a Windows Upgrade Advisor application as part of a campaign to prepare people. on a related note, the WinFS team whetted the appetites of advocates of Microsoft's next-generation file system by sharing information on plans for a new, Microsoft-developed application for WinFS, code-named "Project Orange".

SymphonyOS 2006-05 Beta Released

Submitted by Ryan 2006-05-18 Linux 14 Comments

SymphonyOS 2006-05 Beta has been released. This release, based on Debian unstable, is the first with a functional hard drive installer and the first to include the OneClick software installation system providing an easy to use interface to the debian repositories. TuxMachines has already posted a review, and screenshots are available as well.

Qt 4.1.3 Released

Thom Holwerda 2006-05-18 Qt 18 Comments

"Qt 4.1.3 - the latest maintenance release to the Qt 4.1 series - is now available, incorporating numerous bug fixes and optimizations. Qtopia Core 4.1.3 has also been released to Qtopia Core customers. For detailed information, please consult the changes-4.1.3 file found in the package."

Submitted by Marciano 2006-05-18 Benchmarks 64 Comments

"The latest 'OS X is slow' meme to impinge on the mass psyche of the Internet comes courtesy of one Jasjeet Sekhon, an associate professor of political science at UC Berkeley. The page has hit digg and reddit and been quoted on Slashdot. Is there any merit to this?"

Submitted by AdamW 2006-05-18 Mandriva, Mandrake, Lycoris 11 Comments

"We're happy to release the next issue of Mandriva Linux Inside, the Mandriva e-magazine. This issue features a new layout and more contents, including articles on Mandriva One and Mandriva Kiosk, an interview with the founders of Mandriva Brasil, new Cooker Weekly News and more. Due to its increased size, the new issue is a 2MB download in PDF format ."

GNOME 2.15.2 Released

Submitted by Philipp Esselbach 2006-05-18 Gnome 14 Comments

The second development release en route to GNOME 2.16 has been released. "GNOME 2.15.2 works well and you should definitely try it to see how well it works. So go download it. Go compile it. Go test it. And go hack on it, document it, translate it, fix it." The various download locations and NEWS files are listed in the release announcement.

Kickstart Fedora Workstations, Servers

Submitted by Jane Walker 2006-05-18 Fedora Core 1 Comment

"In this article, we walk you through the process of constructing a special set of bootable media called a kickstart, designed to help you rebuild systems when and as needed with minimal time and effort. Of course, it does require some planning, preparation and work to build a kickstart, but we'll cover that here."

Sun Blesses Java Phone

Submitted by anonymous 2006-05-18 Wireless 7 Comments

"SavaJe, a spinoff of Lucent Technologies, threw its hat into the ring at the 2006 JavaOne Conference in San Francisco this week, with the unveiling of a 'sophisticated' handset that runs a unique, Java-centric operating system. The Jasper S20 mobile phone, running SavaJe's Java-based SavaJe Mobile Platform, also garnered JavaOne's 'Device of the Show' honors. But why create a Java-based phone OS, when the mid- and high-tier mobile phone market appears to be locked in a three-way battle among Symbian, Windows Mobile, and Linux?"

Volunteer Distributed Computing Results

Submitted by Michael Muchmore 2006-05-18 Hardware 6 Comments

"There are dozens of other massively multiprocessor projects - known alternatively as distributed computing, grid computing, or volunteer computing - that can take advantage of your otherwise unused CPU cycles in an effort to do things like predict global climate change, calibrate particle accelerators, or develop drugs to combat cancer and AIDS. We decided to look into whether these projects have actually accomplished anything or were just spinning CPU cycles unnecessarily and making their users feel virtuous."

Submitted by fak3r 2006-05-18 General Development No Comments

"Today I learned about memcached, which I'd heard of before, but never really investigated. From the project's site, 'memcached is a high-performance, distributed memory object caching system, generic in nature, but intended for use in speeding up dynamic web applications by alleviating database load.' So, even though I don't have a huge amount of traffic, I still have dynamic sites, and I'm always looking at ways to speed up my Typo blog. So, using memcached, you can get a big performance boost in databases calls, which sold me on giving it a go."

PC-BSD 1.0 Review

Eugenia Loli 2006-05-18 PC-BSD 20 Comments

"PC-BSD aims to be an easy to use desktop operating system, based on FreeBSD. As many Linux users, I have little or no knowledge about FreeBSD. I heard many rumors about it. I read about it and about its history. I even tried it a little while ago and, although I appreciated some aspects of it, I came to the conclusion that it wasn't ready for the desktop. So when I read the announcement of PC-BSD being released, I decided to have a look at it." Read the review at LinuxForums.

Submitted by jeanmarc 2006-05-17 macOS 176 Comments

"Thanks to pirates, or rather the fear of them, the Intel edition of Apple's OS X is now a proprietary operating system. Mac developers and power users no longer have the freedom to alter, rebuild, and replace the OS X kernel from source code. Stripped of openness, it no longer possesses the quality that elevated Linux to its status as the second most popular commercial OS."

Submitted by Robert Escue 2006-05-17 Ubuntu 45 Comments

Sun Microsystems plans to offer support for the Ubuntu server Linux distribution on its T1 server line, the company said at the JavaOne industry conference in San Francisco. "We will be aggressively supporting the ~~fork~~ ~~work~~ that Ubuntu has been doing," Sun chief executive Jonathan Schwartz said at the conference. "The ideals of that community are relatively familiar to us." More here, while a comparison of Linux and Solaris on a T2000 is also available.

Submitted by jfpoole 2006-05-17 Apple 10 Comments

Geek Patrol benchmarks the MacBook against the MacBook Pro, and concludes: "The difference between the MacBook and the MacBook Pro varies between 75% and 115%; sometimes the MacBook is faster, sometimes the MacBook Pro is faster. For CPU-intensive tasks, I doubt most will notice the difference between the MacBook and the MacBook Pro. Unfortunately, Geekbench doesn’t measure GPU performance, which is the biggest difference between the MacBook and the MacBook Pro. For GPU-intensive tasks, most users will probably prefer the dedicated GPU in the MacBook Pro over the integrated GPU in the MacBook."

Xfree 4.6.0 Released

Submitted by Joel Dahl 2006-05-17 Wayland 40 Comments

Xfree 4.6.0 has been released. New features include security updates, driver updates and fixes, input driver enhancements, Xinerama improvements, and much more. Read the release notes, readme, and installation notes.

Nested Archive Toolkit for Java

Submitted by anonymous 2006-05-17 Java 1 Comment

Nested Archive Toolkit for Java is a tool that provides the layout details of archives, including nested or J2EE archives, so that users can efficiently open and update selected archive contents. This technology builds on existing Java APIs for accessing ZIP and JAR files and uses advanced techniques for opening and scanning nested archives.

Nokia Announces the Internet Tablet 2006 OS Update

Eugenia Loli 2006-05-17 Wireless 26 Comments

As promised, Nokia announces today the 2006 OS update for the 770 Internet Tablet adding Google Talk, a full screen finger keyboard, improved memory performance, and new refreshed look. Additional applets have also been added for faster access to internet services.

Researcher: Macs Not As Expensive as Thought

Thom Holwerda 2006-05-16 Apple 90 Comments

"Although Apple's machines are more expensive than PCs, one Wall Street researcher says the price of a Mac isn't that much more than a comparable Windows-based computer. Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster said that his research shows an average price difference of only 13 percent for desktops and 10 percent for laptops, once you factor in the same components that Apple uses." Run, Forrest, run!