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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Review: Mac Mini Core Solo

Apple 40 Comments
Ars reviews the Mac Mini Core Solo, and concludes: "Because this machine maintains the same great form factor and adds a ton of new, standard features in addition to having substantially better performance with only a price increase of $100 on each model, I'm giving the Mac Mini Solo a score of 8. The integrated graphics issue is an issue to be sure, but the impacted population is so small and the cure so easily fixed, that I don't feel that knocking the score down any further is warranted. From nearly all other perspectives, this is a great entry level machine with a great footprint and the ability to utilize peripherals most people already have." On a related note, the new Mini's processor is upgradable.
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Middleton Battles ‘Misinformation’

RISC OS 4 Comments
Following rumour and speculation over the future of RISC OS 4, RISCOS Ltd's managing director today poured scorn on 'every rumour and piece of misinformation that comes up on the Internet'. In a frank email he told Select subscribers today: "Some people have a habit of starting rumours that can upset many other people's views of how the market is progressing. Negative rumours, especially when they are unfounded, can have a tremendous effect on the market, so please treat anything you hear or read with caution unless it is fully verified."
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Mac OS X Hacked Under 30 Minutes

  Submitted by netpython macOS 75 Comments
Gaining root access to a Mac is 'easy pickings', according to an individual who won an OS X hacking challenge last month by gaining root control of a machine using an unpublished security vulnerability. On February 22, a Sweden-based Mac enthusiast set his Mac Mini as a server and invited hackers to break through the computer's security and gain root control, which would allow the attacker to take charge of the computer and delete files and folders or install applications. Within hours of going live, the 'rm-my-mac' competition was over. The challenger posted this message on his Web site: "This sucks. Six hours later this poor little Mac was owned and this page got defaced".
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C++ Modularity with Namespaces and Exception Handling

General Development 14 Comments
Did you know that there are three different C++ namespace types? Namespaces, which are simple to learn and apply, offer a clever means of packaging your code and can assist when symbol conflicts occur. And how well does your code handle exceptions? Inserting exception-handling code can make your code more ready for packaging as external functions. Stephen Morris contends that just as namespaces offer an efficient way to package code, the skillful use of exception handling can quickly simplify that code.
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The Role of Architectural Risk Analysis in Software Security

Privacy, Security 3 Comments
Design flaws account for 50% of security problems. You can’t find design defects by staring at code—a higher-level understanding is required. That’s why architectural risk analysis plays an essential role in any solid software security program. Find out more about architectural risk analysis in this sample chapter. Also, Matthew Heusser and Sean McMillan are convinced that it takes smart people to develop good software that makes money. Where do you find smart people? You don't find them; you make them! Matt and Sean provide some fundamental rules for doing just that.
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Presenting Data with the DataGridView Control in .NET 2.0

.NET 20 Comments
In .NET 1.0, the DataGrid control was the primary Windows Forms control for presenting tabular data. Even though that control had a lot of capability and could present basic tabular data well, it was fairly difficult to customize many aspects of the control. Additionally, the DataGrid control didn’t expose enough information to the programmer about the user interactions with the grid and changes occurring in the grid due to programmatic modifications of the data or formatting. Due to these factors and a large number of new features that customers requested, the Windows Client team at Microsoft decided to introduce a replacement control for the DataGrid in .NET 2.0. That new control, the DataGridView control, is the focus of this chapter.
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Price Differences Between Europe, US

Apple 116 Comments
This week saw the introduction of various new Apple products. Everybody has their own opinions on these new products, and websites all over the world saw enough discussions about the integrated video card of the Mini, the 'HiFi-ness' of the iPod HiFi, and more. Another issue, however, which got considerable less attention, was that of pricing. And no, I'm not talking about expensive-or-not (God, no). I'm talking about price differences between the US and Europe. And quite frankly, it's pissing me off. Note: This is this week's Sunday Eve Column.
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