"A conceptual understanding of file systems, especially data structure and related terms, will help you become a successful system administrator. I have seen many new Linux system administrator without any clue about file systems. The conceptual knowledge can be applied to restore file systems in an emergency situation."

"If you have to travel, whether its out of your cubicle, out of your home, or out of the country, you should do your best to make your new surroundings as comfortable as possible. While so many things are out of your hands, one thing you can do to make your travels easier is to bring your favorite programs with you. To do this, all the things you will need are: a USB flash drive (practically any size) and a few minutes. When you get to your destination you will simply need a Windows computer, something which can be found in almost any library, office, hotel, or internet cafe anywhere in the world."

"Today's virtualization barely permits us to disregard what kind of resources we really have inside our servers. Companies like VMware, Microsoft, Xen, etc., are offering solutions to share (although still not in a dynamical way) CPU power, memory, storage and partially networking within a single server (or a cluster). Companies like Citrix, Microsoft, Sun, etc., are offering solutions to share applications within a single server (or a cluster). If you think these technologies could be just refined and nothing else, think again.

Tom Tromey (Red Hat) who wrote the GCJx as a extension to GCC to support Java 1.5 features among other changes has proposed a merge with ECJ, the Eclipse compiler from the Eclipse Foundation. The ramifications of this change are rather interesting.

Computer Guru has a theoretical solution to the Intel-Macs-Won't-Boot-Windows problem. All you need, according to him, is a set of Acronis applications, a clean install of Windows XP on another computer, Vista boot files, bcdedit, a Windows Vista DVD, and of course an Intel Mac. Please note that all of his ideas are pure theory, as he does not own a MacBook Pro or Intel iMac. Someone who does should try to verify this.

"On Wednesday morning, I met with Microsoft co-president Jim Allchin, the man most directly responsible for Windows Vista and Longhorn Server, the company's upcoming client and server operating system releases. Allchin is a soft-spoken, intelligent man with decades of industry experience, the last 15 years of which were spent at Microsoft. I've run into Mr. Allchin at various events throughout the years, but the last time I sat down with him for a one-on-one meeting was in August 2001, when we discussed the then-upcoming release of Windows XP. With Windows Vista on track for a late 2006 release, Allchin hit the road to meet with members of the technical press."

Microsoft's C++/CLI Language Specification is an ECMA Standard (ECMA-372) and they are trying to fast track this document to be an ISO standard. The problem is that the language specified is very different from C++ and so is likely to create a great deal of confusion. Details can be found in the UK objections , which suggest that a name distinct from C++ be used for the proposed language.

"This tutorial describes how to install and configure OpenSSH so that it will allow chrooted sessions for users. With this setup, you can give your users shell access without having to fear that they can see your whole system. Your users will be jailed in a specific directory which they will not be able to break out of."

"Recently, there have been a couple of articles on errata making the rounds, the first on Intel, the second on AMD. They both make my head hurt. A lot. No, not the errata, but the explanations, and lack of understanding of some simple concepts. When the first one, Intel, came out, I was teetering on the verge of breaking out the cluestick, but thought the better of it. When the conspiracy theory second article came out, well time to spring into action, two days late as usual."

Customers and partners who've been holding their breath waiting for Beta 2 of Windows Vista before getting serious about testing Microsoft's next-generation operating system can exhale. There will be no single, catch-all Beta 2 of Vista, according to Jim Allchin, co-president of Microsoft's Platform Products & Services Division. Instead, Microsoft is planning to rely increasingly on CTP builds to get its feedback from Windows testers. Elsehwere, Allchin said you should buy Vista for its security enhancements.

Plan 9 from Bell Labs is still very much alive. They just got an updated website, with easier access to nightly builds. "Plan 9 from Bell Labs is a research system developed at Bell Labs starting in the late 1980s. Its original designers and authors were Ken Thompson, Rob Pike, Dave Presotto, and Phil Winterbottom. They were joined by many others as development continued throughout the 1990s to the present. Plan 9 demonstrates a new and often cleaner way to solve most systems problems. The system as a whole is likely to feel tantalizingly familiar to Unix users but at the same time quite foreign."

This is already a fairly old article, but I'm pretty confident it never made OSNews' front page. In this article, the author proves that Windows XP can be installed, and 'run', on processors with as little as 8MHz. "The target of this project was to find the weakest system where you can run Windows XP. Keep in mind, that Microsoft official requirements are a CPU with 233 MHz an 64 MB of RAM. But that had to be beaten!"

"In this two-part series, Edd Dumbill examines the various ways forward for HTML that Web authors, browser developers, and standards bodies propose. This series covers the incremental approach embodied by the WHATWG specifications and the radical cleanup of XHTML proposed by the W3C. Additionally, the author gives an overview of the W3C's new Rich Client Activity. Here in Part 2, Edd focuses on the work in process at the W3C to specify the future of Web markup."

Digg users just "dugg" an item from Silicon Valley Sleuth to the top of their queue. The article asks boldly, "is Windows Vista really vapourware?" Although the article discounts some legitimate strides Microsoft is making with things like IE7, Least-Privileged User Account, and Windows Defender, there's little doubt that Windows Vista is a far cry from what we were promised a few short years ago.