BBC Micro ARM7 Co-Processor Available

  Submitted by teigetje RISC OS 6 Comments
The ultimate accessory for 8 bit Acorn users, an ARM7 co-processor, is now available to order. Robert Sprowson's ingenious project to produce a second processor sees a 64MHz ARM7TDMI from OKI running alongside a BBC Master's dinosaur 6502 CPU. The box of tricks uses an Altera FPGA as digital glue to bind together the second processor, 16M of RAM, 512K of Flash ROM, and optional serial port and EEPROM chip. The ARM7 chip includes a 8K cache, and the kit took over six months to develop.
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Crossing borders: Exploring Active Record

  Submitted by anonymous Java 5 Comments
"The Java programming language has had an unprecedented run of success for vendors, customers, and the industry at large. But no programming language is a perfect fit for every job. This article launches a new series by Bruce Tate that looks at ways other languages solve major problems and what those solutions mean to Java developers. He first explores Active Record, the persistence engine behind Ruby on Rails. Active Record bucks many Java conventions, from the typical configuration mechanisms to fundamental architectural choices. The result is a framework that embraces radical compromises and fosters radical productivity."
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Intel Shows Origami-Like Device

Wireless 35 Comments
In a preview of Tuesday afternoon's demonstration, Intel Marketing Director Brad Graff showed CNET News.com several of the Ultra Mobile PC devices, including an example of the kind of hardware that will ship in the next few weeks as part of the Microsoft effort. As earlier reported, the first devices have a 7-inch touch screen, standard x86 processors, and can run full versions of desktop operating systems including the Windows XP variant being used for Origami.
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Intel Demonstrates Quad-Core PC, Server

Intel 19 Comments
Intel demonstrated two quad-core processors Tuesday, 'Clovertown' for servers and 'Kentsfield' for PCs, directing attention toward the future during a more troubled present. Pat Gelsinger, a senior vice president in Intel's Digital Enterprise Group, demonstrated both processors in a speech at the company's Intel Developer Forum here. Both chips are built using Intel's 65-nanometer manufacturing process and will ship in the first quarter of 2007, Intel representatives said.
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IBM Not To Use Vista – But Will Move to Linux Desktops

  Submitted by John Mills IBM 81 Comments
During a presentation on IBM's involvement with Open Source, Andreas Pleschek from IBM in Stuttgart, Germany, who heads open source and Linux technical sales across North East Europe for IBM made a very interesting statement. "Andreas Pleschek also told that IBM has cancelled their contract with Microsoft as of October this year. That means that IBM will not use Windows Vista for their desktops. Beginning from July, IBM employees will begin using IBM Workplace on their new, Red Hat-based platform. Not all at once - some will keep using their present Windows versions for a while. But none will upgrade to Vista."
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Mac OS X Patch Faces Scrutiny

macOS 39 Comments
An Apple Computer patch released last week doesn't completely fix a high-profile Mac OS X flaw, leaving a toehold for cyberattacks, experts said. The update added a function called 'download validation' to the Safari Web browser, Apple Mail client and iChat instant messaging tool. "While Apple added a checkpoint to the downloading and execution process, they did not eliminate this vulnerability," said Kevin Long, an analyst at security specialist Cybertrust and a Mac user for 11 years. "If a user can be tricked into opening a file that looks like a picture, the user may actually be opening a malicious script."
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Partnership Set to Run RISC Software on Intel Chips

  Submitted by Frank Kenya Intel 16 Comments
Transitive's translation software will be used to let software from rival RISC processors run on Intel's Itanium and Xeon server processors. The partnership is designed to make it easier for customers to scrap competitors' gear in favor of Intel-based systems. "With this relationship with Intel, Intel is funding development and providing us access to engineers so we can accelerate the development of processor-operating system combinations," Transitive Chief Executive Bob Wiederhold said in an interview.
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Patching Window Is Getting Shorter

  Submitted by John Privacy, Security 14 Comments
"Internet Security Systems has published a report which shows that hackers and cyber criminals are developing malicious codes to exploit known vulnerabilities much faster than before. The X-Force Threat Insight Quarterly highlights that the number of vulnerabilities in 2005 has increased by over 33% over 2004. Analysts from X-Force, the research and development team at ISS evaluated 4472 vulnerabilities in both hardware and software during 2005. From the public announcement of the vulnerability on the internet, the report highlights that 3.13% of threats discovered had malicious code that surfaced within 24 hours, whereas 9.38% had code that surfaced within 48 hours."
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Compiz on AIGLX

  Submitted by Rahul Wayland 20 Comments
Kristian Hogsberg (Red Hat) has been hacking on Compiz and AIGLX to run them together and has managed to do it with impressive performance. "With a bit of hacking, I managed to get compiz (and glxcompmgr) running on aiglx. I'm running it on my i830 laptop, and the performance is actually quite impressive."
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Review: Gentoo 2006.0

  Submitted by Valour Gentoo 45 Comments
"It's been a while since I last reviewed Gentoo Linux because there haven't been too many significant changes in the past few releases. I've been using it as my primary desktop operating system for a year and a half, though, and I've been running my main Web/email/database server on it since October of 2004. There's a reason why I've stayed with it that long, both as a desktop and server OS - and there's also a reason why I'm writing a review of the 2006.0 release after a long hiatus from Gentoo reviews." More here.
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GNU Classpath 0.90 “A La Mort Subite” Released

  Submitted by Mark Wielaard Java 17 Comments
GNU Classpath 0.90 "A La Mort Subite" has been released. Some highlights of this release: JTables can be rearranged and resized. Free Swing text components support highlighting and clipboard. Much improved styled text. Fast event dispatching and lower memory consumption. Better support for mixing lightweight and heavyweight components in AWT containers. GNU Crypto and Jessie cryptographic algorithms have been added providing ssl3/tls1 and https support. Unicode 4.0.0 support. GIOP and RMI stub and tie source code tools. XML validaton support for RELAX NG and W3C XML schemas. New file backend for util.prefs. Updated gnu.regexp from POSIX to util.regex syntax.
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University of Wisconsin’s Mac OS X Security Challenge

  Submitted by crispoe macOS 77 Comments
"In response to the woefully misleading ZDnet article, 'Mac OS X hacked under 30 minutes', the academic Mac OS X Security Challenge has been launched. The ZDnet article, and almost all of the coverage of it, failed to mention a very critical point: anyone who wished it was given a local account on the machine (which could be accessed via ssh). The challenge is as follows: simply alter the web page on this machine, test.doit.wisc.edu. The machine is a Mac mini (PowerPC) running Mac OS X 10.4.5 with Security Update 2006-001, has two local accounts, and has ssh and http open - a lot more than most Mac OS X machines will ever have open."
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Why Ubuntu Needs Linspire’s CNR

  Submitted by anonymous Debian 32 Comments
"It was recently annouced that desktop Linux's golden child, Ubuntu, may begin to offer Linspire's Click-N-Run service. This story which hit the internet just a few days ago is big news for the desktop Linux community. Ubuntu, which is the most popular Linux distribution (according to DistroWatch) has had a profound impact on the desktop operating system industry and any move it makes is going to be a critical one. Overall, feelings about this are understandably mixed."
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