"John Mashey is known in computing circles for a whole raft of things, among them are his work on the design of the original MIPS architecture, his work at SGI, and a long history of in-depth posts in the newsgroup comp.arch. David Kanter of Realworldtech has taken one of Mashey's posts and, with the author's permission, fleshed it out with more data and graphs for posting as a multipart series. Part I of the series is now available, with Part II on the way. One of the things that really struck me in reading the retrospective was just how prominent a role completely non-architectural factors play in the stories of the successes and failures of various processors."

"Following a decision to release a standalone version of IE7, browser development at Microsoft has come fast and furious. BetaNews this week sat down with Gary Schare, Director of IE Product Management, to discuss the changes coming in IE7, Firefox's growth, and how Microsoft will bring RSS to the mainstream."

"You manage a heterogeneous network and want to provide different Quality of Service agreements and network restrictions based on the client operating system. With pf and altq, you can now limit the amount of bandwidth available to users of different operating systems, or force outbound web traffic through a transparent filtering proxy. This article describes how to install pf, altq, and Squid on your FreeBSD router and web proxy to achieve these goals."

"In this HowTo I will show how to install and configure DenyHosts. DenyHosts is a tool that observes login attempts to SSH, and if it finds failed login attempts again and again from the same IP address, DenyHosts blocks further login attempts from that IP address by putting it into /etc/hosts.deny. DenyHosts can be run by cron or as a daemon. In this tutorial I will run DenyHosts as a daemon."

The Linux kernel has booted on top of the sun4v hypervisor on Sun's new Niagara CPU (just the kernel, there was no root filesystem). Sun has been very active in trying to get Linux support for their Niagara.

The 4th beta of OpenSUSE 10.1 has been released. This beta has quite a significant amount of bugs (especially in the installer) so be aware. The OpenSUSE developers somehow refuse to post any release notes, so I cannot tell you whether or not Novell's Xgl and Compiz are included. Update: In the meantime, check this page on how to get Xgl/Compiz running on OpenSUSE. RPMs available, so no compiling required. Happy experimenting.

"I use Fedora core daily and I've used every final release of Fedora since Yarrow (Fedora Core Release 1). When I get time, I also look at some of the test releases to see how Fedora is changing, and if there's one thing certain about Fedora, it's change. I decided to write this article to hopefully give people a chance to learn a little bit more about Fedora since the first release came to life back in November 2003, how the distro has matured and what to expect for Fedora Core release 5 in mid-March 2006."

"Mac OS X is a secure operating system in that it's multi-user and has limits on what some user accounts can do. If an account is setup as a basic user, that user can only hurt himself, not the whole system or other users. However, in the interest of being 'friendly' to new users, Apple leaves of a lot of the secure bits off for the first user created and this means that trojans like this week's can cause some pretty nasty problems on your system. Yet, all of this is easy to correct. Just run over the following and you should be well on your way to a protected computer."

Solaris Express 2/2006 (derived from Nevada Build 31) was posted yesterday, providing a host of useful improvements. Wifi, RealPlayer 10, and Gnome-Pilot support were introduced. Roughly 1150 bugs were fixed. You can obtain a free download. An overview of new features is also available.

A second strain of malware targeting Mac OS X has been discovered days after a Mac OS X Trojan appeared on the scene. The latest malware, Inqtana-A, is a proof-of-concept worm that attempts to spread using a Bluetooth vulnerability. The worm is not spreading in the wild and uses an internal counter that means it will expire on February 24, so it's unlikely to ever be much of a problem. Nonetheless, Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) users are still advised to make sure they're patched up in order to guard against attack from any future worm that uses the same exploit. In related OSX news, there's more fuel for the tablet-Mac fire.

Developers on the projects expected to make up the next major version of the K Desktop Environment want KDE 4 to offer features and software interaction beyond what is available now, and better, easier access for users to their files and information. Among the ideas are universally available personal information and a desktop that is tailored for and responds to the things users do most. Ian Geiser, a KDE developer and official US representative for the KDE project, says KDE 4 will most likely be released in late 2006, though internal debate could push the release back to early 2007.

"I've been looking at the 'My desktop OS'-articles, and found that I'll have to be the one writing one for Windows XP. To be honest, Windowx XP is very close to being usable on the desktop. I say very close, because it's not so out of the box. There is a few issues, however and many of them arises when you need to reinstall. You do need to reinstall Windows from time to time - it's just a fact of life!"

As was to be expected, Apple's legal team got busy concerning the OSx86 Project. Just days after OSX 10.4.4 for Intel got cracked, the project closed down its forum with the following notice: "We're sorry to report that despite our best efforts, the OSx86 Project has been served with a DMCA violation notice. The forum will be unavailable while we evaluate its contents to remove any violations present. We thank you for your patience in this matter."

On popular demand, here is Davyd Madeley's preview of GNOME 2.14. "Built on the shoulders of giants, GNOME 2.14 hits the shelves on the 15th of March. As well as new features and more polish, developers have been working around the clock to squeeze more performance out of the most commonly used applications and libraries. This is a review of some of the most shiny work that has gone into the upcoming GNOME release."