"Although having this reputation, my question was: was a RAID 1 system too slow? Was it slower than not having any RAID? In fact, there are people that say that it is the other way round - these people say that having software RAID 1 is faster than having just one hard disk drive. In any case, who is right?"

IBM is adopting OpenDocument Format for the first generally available release of its network-based collaboration and office productivity suite. IBM said Sunday its Workplace Managed Client 2.6, due in early 2006, would adopt ODF so users could easily share files and information. The Workplace Managed Client is currently available on a limited capacity, with more than one million deployed seats.

"It saddens me to say that Aperture's innovations are only skin deep. If it could deliver on the promise of being both fast and produce flawless results, it would be the dream package. At this point it is an expensive and questionable alternative to Camera Raw, a free extension to Photoshop, and Adobe's Bridge which can batch produce better quality images in arguably less time. For $500 (Photoshop itself retails for $750 ), there is no excuse not to be aware of professional needs like a high-quality sharpen tool, DNG exporting or more basic things like curves, a sampler tool for RGB pixel readings, or retention of EXIF data on output."

Now that Visual Studio 2005 is out the door and the .NET Framework 2.0 has been released, Microsoft has issued an updated build of WinFS Beta 1 to MSDN subscribers. WinFS is Microsoft's new SQL-based file system technology that is slated for release as an add-on shortly after Windows Vista.

"Over two years ago a group was founded to reverse engineer the Broadcom Wireless LAN chipsets to provide Linux drivers. This chipset is used by many OEMs, for example in Apple’s AirPort Extreme in Power- and iBooks, Linksys’ WAP and WRT series of consumer grade wireless routers, various laptops from Acer, Dell, Gateway, HP and others and many more external and internal devices, including CardBus cards. That work has now come (.pdf) to a first milestone as there now is a free (GPL2 or later) Linux driver for a variety of these chipsets."

"One and a half years. A large number of developers contributing. High expectations and a lot of pressure. The wait is over, GStreamer 0.10 has arrived. GStreamer 0.10 is a huge step forward for GNU/Linux and Unix multimedia. Power, stability, functionality, deployment, industry support, GStreamer 0.10 has it all."

"We are pleased to announce the availability of the third full Release Candidate for the upcoming X.Org Foundation release of X11R6.9 and X11R7. RC3 includes many bug fixes and updates. We have tagged both the monolithic and modular trees and have prepared tarballs for you to test."

This website is reporting that Sun is going to announce its first Niagara-based server, the T2000, tomorrow at a network computing event. The T2000's CPU, the UltraSPARC T1 (Niagara) has 4, 6 or 8 cores; each of these cores has 4 threads, so that adds up to 16, 24 or 32 virtual CPUs. The maximum amount of RAM is 32GB DDR2. More information can be found in the documents section, or in the short summary here. A smaller version, dubbed T1000, is also supposed to be announced.

Life used to be simple: Your company was a Mac shop or a Windows shop. These days, the line between the two platforms is blurring, with many organizations using servers and workstations of both platforms for various functionalities. Ryan Faas explains some simple ways for system administrators to reduce the headaches of a multiplatform business.

Strings - such as command-line arguments, environment variables, and console input - are of special concern in secure programming because they comprise most of the data exchanged between an end user and a software system. This chapter covers the security issues with strings and how you can sidestep them.

"A couple of months back, Cale Lewis and I (Andrew Lampert) put our heads together and came up with some burning questions about the development of the BeBox and various BeBox prototypes that were built along the way. Given the nature of our questions, we headed straight to the source - Mr BeBox himself, Joseph Palmer - to seek some answers."

"The general feeling that SkyOS gives is... Simply great! A lot of work done under the hood seems to be paying back with a solid, responsive operating system. It scales very nicely, opening up a lot of OpenGL demos and other applications at once doesn't seem to affect stability, however it is currently very resource hungry (600MB RAM usage and up isn't anything strange while using Firefox, Gaim and having a few more apps open). Let us not forget that this is a debug build. It is completely usable and boots blazingly fast (~15 seconds from GRUB to desktop) though." My take: The best change? The new versioning scheme. Really.

On behalf of the NetBSD Release Engineering team, Matthias Scheler announced the availability of NetBSD 3.0 RC5 for testing. NetBSD 3.0 RC5 is available in the "daily builds" section of your local FTP mirror, and users are encouraged to test it out and report any bugs using send-pr(1). A brief summary of changes from NetBSD 3.0_RC1 to 3.0_RC5 is available in Matthias's announcement (a list of changes from NetBSD 2.0 to NetBSD 3.0 can be found here).

Genesi has announced a new product this weekend. "The Genesi Home Media and Communication System is built on the PegasosPPC platform, utilising the Freescale G4 processor for outstanding media performance. Enclosed in a fully aluminium case which will fit in with your existing Hi-Fi amplifier or TV, and featuring a VFD status display under mirrored acrylic glass." Software-wise, the machine will only feature open-source software. Genesi also made the EFIKA 5K2 available.