Frenzy LiveCD 1.0, based on FreeBSD 6.1, has been released. This is a 'system administrator's portable instrument'; a LiveCD based on FreeBSD, which allows the administrator to boot from it and get a fully functional system with a wide variety of software for tuning, testing, and analyzing the network, testing computer hardware, and much more. Frenzy contains its own configuration center, can be installed on a hard drive as a fully functional operating system (USB Flash install is also supported).

"Any Linux system will generate many log files by default, containing various information about the operation of the system. If no rotation would occur on the various log files, then they will just grow bigger and bigger, filling up the space. This little how-to will show you how the default log rotation works, based on syslog and logrotate."

Windows 2003 Server is a more reliable server operating system than Linux, a research firm said Monday. According to the Yankee Group's annual server reliability survey, only Unix operating systems such as HP-UX and Sun Solaris 10 beat Windows on uptime. Windows 2003 Server, in fact, led the popular Red Hat Enterprise Linux with nearly 20 percent more annual uptime. The Yankee Group made a point of stressing that the survey was not sponsored or supported by any server OS maker.

Microsoft will have showcase applications ready in time for the Vista launch, which is still set for January 2007, company officials said. But given recent lawsuits and public disagreements with the likes of Symantec and Adobe Systems - two of Microsoft's biggest independent software vendor partners - which vendors are likely to be leading the Vista charge?

"Originally, I had never intended to write a follow-up to 'Why First Generation Apple Products Suck'. But after receiving exceptional feedback on my thoughts, I think I need to make few things clear. Many of you thought I was unfairly singling out Apple even though defective first generation products are a common occurrence across the technology sector – software or hardware. Just to be clear, let’s not mesh software and hardware together. Neither I nor anyone else should ever expect software to be perfect. On the opposite end, with hardware, it is possible to perfect the craft of developing tangible products, such as the iPod music player."

Ron Hovsepian explains how his outfit aims to regain investors' confidence and turn the tide against Linux leader Red Hat. "Our core Linux business grew 20% quarter-over-quarter. Why? Our strategy is different than Red Hat's. They are approaching this as an edge server play, and it's an enterprise play."

While some just talk about the quality of open source software, Red Hat said it's actually doing something about it. Commercial Linux vendor Red Hat announced at the company's annual Red Hat Summit last week that it is launching a project directed squarely at quality assurance.

"In this third in-depth interview focusing on ODF-compliant office productivity suites, I interviewed Erwin Tenhumberg, Sun's Product Marketing Manager, Client Systems Group. This series of interviews, and the other activities I have planned to follow, are intended to illustrate the rich environment of applications and tools that are evolving around the OpenDocument Format specification developed by OASIS, and now adopted by ISO/IEC."

Microsoft plans to make several significant tweaks to the next beta of Windows Vista to make a key security feature less annoying to users. In response to widespread criticisms that the implementation of the UAC (User Account Control) feature triggers too many privilege elevation prompt pop-ups, the software maker will make changes in Windows Vista RC1.

Chinese computer supplier Lenovo has denied a report that it is planning to stop offering Linux on its range of PCs and laptops. On Friday, CRN reported that Frank Kardonski, Lenovo's worldwide product manager for its 3000 series, had indicated that Linux support was being dropped. But Lenovo made strenuous efforts on Monday to set the record straight, emphasizing that Kardonski provided incorrect information to CRN and that the company plans to continue to offer Linux on ThinkPads.

Vista and Office 2007 have many new fonts. NeoSmart takes a look at the ten most popular Vista and/or Office 12 fonts with screenshots, sample usages, and a critique of each font, one-by-one. These 10 fonts are the latin-based scripts that ship with Vista and/or Office 2007. My take: Microsoft has created some very beautiful fonts here. I especially like Segoe UI; it looks stunning when in use in Vista.

"The process of booting a Linux system consists of a number of stages. But whether you're booting a standard x86 desktop or a deeply embedded PowerPC target, much of the flow is surprisingly similar. This article explores the Linux boot process from the initial bootstrap to the start of the first user-space application. Along the way, you'll learn about various other boot-related topics such as the boot loaders, kernel decompression, the initial RAM disk, and other elements of Linux boot."

Protothreads are an extremely lightweight, stackless, thread-like programming abstraction designed for severely memory constrained embedded systems that may have as little as a few hundred bytes of RAM. Protothreads are designed to replace event-driven C code with sequential programming but without the memory overhead of full multithreading - a protothread requires only two bytes of RAM. Protothreads are implemented in ANSI C, does not require any machine code, and is therefore highly portable. Version 1.3 adds the possibility to determine if a protothread is blocked, has yielded or has ended, and can be downloaded here. Also be sure to read how protothreads work, under the hood.

Reusable code saves time and effort in testing and documentation. The C++ algorithms, containers, function objects, and predicates work together to provide the developer with the tools necessary to create such generic programming. In this article, Tracey and Cameron Hughes show some of the specific uses for predicates and function objects in C++.