Sun Has High Expectations for Niagara

Oracle and SUN 45 Comments
Actually, there's more on processors today, but the processor in this article is so out-of-the-ordinary, that it deserves its own item. "Niagara has eight processing engines - called cores - each able to simultaneously execute four instruction sequences called threads. It's neither the first multicore processor nor the first to employ multithreading, but it embraces both ideas more aggressively than competing chips from IBM, Intel and AMD."
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Details on Power Saving in the 970MP; Fujitsu’s 4-Core 2.7Ghz SPARC

Hardware 7 Comments
Some newsbits from the world of processors. First, IBM detailed power-saving techniques in the new PowerPC 907MP (the dual-core G5). Secondly, "Fujitsu's Sparc64 VI+ processor, code-named Jupiter and due for release in 2008, is a four-core processor with clock speeds of at least 2.7GHz, the company said Tuesday." And to complement today's batch of processor news, IBM unveiled the Xbox 360 processor.
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The Highly Interactive Parallelized Display Wall

  Submitted by Hakime Seddik Geek stuff 3 Comments
"Scientists at UC Irvine have completed the world's highest-resolution grid-based display for visualizing and manipulating massive data sets. The Highly Interactive Parallelized Display Wall (HIPerWall) is a room-sized display that measures nearly 23x9ft (7x2.7m). The HIPerWall system, consisting of 50 flat-panel tiles, provides a total resolution of 200 million pixels (2x that of the 2nd best), bringing to life terabyte-sized data sets. Each panel, with a resolution of 2560x1600 pixels, is powered by a dual-processor 2.7GHz G5 node, with nVIDIA 6800 Ultra DDL graphics, that has access to an initial storage capacity of 10 terabytes."
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Sun’s Grid: Lights on, No Customers

Oracle and SUN 32 Comments
Many of you will remember the fanfare and bravado surrounding Sun Microsystems' Sep. 2004 announcement of a $1 per hour per processor utility computing plan. What you won't remember is Sun revealing a single customer using the service. That's because it hasn't. More than one year since it first started hyping the "pay-for-use grid computing services" Sun is still weeks away from presenting a customer to the public. The program has proved much tougher to sell that Sun ever imagined.
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File Systems Explained

General Development 27 Comments
"A file system is something which computer users hear about all the time, but many do not know very much about. This article is going to be a short guide, which goes over the basics of file systems so you will at least know enough to get by. This is a subject which can get as complicated as you want to make it, but a little knowledge can go a long way."
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12 Months of Progress for the Microsoft Security Response Centre

  Submitted by LogError Microsoft 14 Comments
"As the Internet has grown in popularity so too have threats against computer users; making it critical for individuals and companies to employ effective security strategies to protect their critical information. Microsoft created the Microsoft Security Response Centre (MSRC) to investigate, fix and learn about security vulnerabilities and to help keep customers protected from malicious attacks." So, did it fair well?
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Bounty Source: Project Management for OSS

  Submitted by vollmerk Open Source 4 Comments
"Bounty Source is a progressive step in project management for Free Open Source Software communities. In addition to the standard tools needed for managing an active community, we allow people to "put their money where their mouth" is by offering monetary rewards (bounties) toward the development of solutions to bug reports and feature requests. The end result of the bounty system is the creation of a catalyst that will increase development activity throughout all projects that choose to take advantage of Bounty Source."
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DR-DOS Violating GNU GPL?

  Submitted by Anonymous Open Source 75 Comments
"DR-DOS released DR-DOS 8.1 in the beginning of this month. But instead of an upgrade of the previous DR-DOS 8.0, it's something completely different. The kernel is a badly patched copy of the Enhanced DR-DOS kernel old version 7.01.06 without any credit to its author Udo Kuhnt. The other programs and drivers included are old versions of some popular open source, freeware and shareware products without licenses, documentation or even credit to their authors. This means that DR-DOS 8.1 is just a bunch of old tools plus a compilation of others' works, obviously sold without permission and in violation of their license terms."
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Toolbars in OpenOffice.org 2.0

  Submitted by Jane Walker Office 27 Comments
"I must admit that I had mixed feelings when I saw the new toolbar metaphor for OpenOffice.org 2.0. On the one hand, the 1.x system for seeing different toolbars was a bit complicated and weird. On the other hand, the huge list of toolbars under the "View" menu of the OpenOffice.org 2.0 (release candidate) seemed potentially overwhelming. I must admit, though, that I am a happy convert to the new system." (Part 1|part 2)
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Many DNS Systems Vulnerable to Pharming Attacks

  Submitted by Jennifer Jasper Privacy, Security 7 Comments
The Measurement Factory and Infoblox today announced results of a survey of more than 1.3 million Internet-connected, authoritative domain name system servers around the globe. The results of the survey indicate that as many as 84 percent of Internet name servers could be vulnerable to pharming attacks, and that many exhibit other security and deployment-related vulnerabilities.
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