OSnews - Exploring the Future of Computing

MS Plans to Buy Secure-Messaging Company FrontBridge

Thom Holwerda 2005-07-21 Microsoft 18 Comments

In more evidence of Microsoft's increased interest in security technology, the software company said on Wednesday that it plans to acquire FrontBridge, a provider of secure messaging services. Microsoft plans to use its acquisition of FrontBridge to deliver a secure, highly availabile e-mail service that will be marketed to companies with limited IT resources, Microsoft said in a statement.

Review: GFI LANguard Network Security Scanner 6

Submitted by LogError 2005-07-21 Privacy, Security 4 Comments

LANguard Network Security Scanner will scan computers for known vulnerabilities and common misconfigurations and other potential security issues. It produces reports that can be used to assist in the tracking and mitigation of security issues that have been identified.

Hacking the Linux 2.6 Kernel, Part 1

Submitted by anonymous 2005-07-21 Linux 29 Comments

In this first of a two-part series, learn about system and environment requirements, the best ways to acquire Linux source code, how to configure and boot your new kernel, and how to use the printk function to print messages during bootup.

Dan Kaminsky on Microsoft’s Security

Submitted by anonymous 2005-07-21 Privacy, Security 30 Comments

SecurityFocus published an interview with BlackHat/Defcon speaker Dan Kaminsky. He was guest-hacker at the Microsoft BlueHat event, and met Redmond's engineers and management. His conclusion: "My sense is that a combination of respect for SP2 and growing fear of Google (which has an entirely different, and arguably more managable security posture than Microsoft can achieve) has really pushed people towards seeing security in 2005 as stability was in 2000/2001."

Window Closing on Office 2003

Thom Holwerda 2005-07-21 Microsoft 65 Comments

Microsoft is facing an uphill battle to push copies of Office 2003 on customers and its ISV partner ecosystem, ahead of next year's predicted launch of Office 12.

Mozilla Scraps Firefox 1.1, Looks to 1.5

Thom Holwerda 2005-07-21 Mozilla, Gecko 46 Comments

The non-profit foundation has decided to increase the version number of the next major release to 1.5 from 1.1, reflecting the sheer number of bug fixes and features that have been worked into the next version of the browser. Mozilla still plans to ship the next version of Firefox around September of this year. Read the updated roadmap here.

The Open Source Revolution: What CIOs Should Know

Submitted by Jan Stafford 2005-07-21 Open Source 13 Comments

CIOs can gain competitive advantages by taking part in the open source revolution, a movement that will shake up the power structure of the IT world, said Julie Hanna Farris, the founder of Scalix. Farris explains why open source is not a fad and how it will benefit the business world.

IBM ETTK Tool for Laszlo

Submitted by anonymous 2005-07-21 General Development 7 Comments

Faces for Laszlo makes use of multiple J2EE (Java 2 Platform Enterprise Edition) emerging technologies for rich Internet applications, resulting in a rich user experience on the browser. Through a JSF custom tag library, developers using Faces for Laszlo can integrate OpenLaszlo components into their web application. These components can bind to server-side data that is made available as JavaScript data structures within the browser at runtime.

Submitted by j-s-h 2005-07-20 Gnome 66 Comments

Epiphany is a web browser for the GNOME desktop that aims to be simple and easy-to-use. FootNotes, a GNOME news site, has posted the Epiphany: The Web through the eyes of GNOME article.

Unhandled Exceptions and Tracing in the .NET Framework 2.0

Eugenia Loli 2005-07-20 .NET 16 Comments

The July edition of MSDN Magazine is out with some interesting .NET topics.

KDE 3.4.1 First Desktop from OpenSolaris Community

Thom Holwerda 2005-07-20 KDE 29 Comments

KDE 3.4.1 is the first modern desktop environment being compiled, packaged and working fully on the OpenSolaris platform. While KDE is known to compile out of the box on Solaris with GCC, using the Sun ONE Studio 10 Compiler still presents a challenge which requires a lot of patches. Dot.KDE has an interview with the Kde on Solaris team leader.

Why Linux Isn’t Ready for Desktops

Submitted by PapaPitufo 2005-07-20 Linux 223 Comments

Asa Dotzler, from the Mozilla foundation, has just written an interesting analysis describing why Linux is not ready for desktops yet, and suggests four main categories that must be addressed to improve this.

Firefox 1.0.6 and Thunderbird 1.0.6 Released

Thom Holwerda 2005-07-20 Mozilla, Gecko 29 Comments

Mozilla has released new versions of its Firefox Web browser and Thunderbird email client to fix problems introduced by the previous updates. An update to Camino has also been released.

Linux Trounces Windows Mobile in Smartphone Shipments

Submitted by anonymous 2005-07-20 Wireless 17 Comments

Linux powered roughly three times the number of smartphones as Windows Mobile, in worldwide shipments during Q1 of 2005, according to an article at LinuxDevices.com. Additionally, the data cited from Gartner research says smartphones comprise the fastest-growing portion of the "mobile terminal" market, with sales expected to double year-over-year in 2006, reaching 200 million by 2008.

Groovy’s Growth Spurt

Submitted by anonymous 2005-07-20 General Development 8 Comments

Groovy took a gigantic leap this past April, with the formal release of a new parser aimed at standardizing the language as part of the JSR process. If you weren't paying attention before, now's the time to start. The new syntax is chock full of enhancements to the language designed for a short learning curve and a big payoff. Resident Groovy practitioner Andrew Glover walks through most important changes to Groovy's syntax and shows you a handy feature you won't find in classic Groovy.

Zooming and Scrolling in Qt 4

Submitted by Johan Thelin 2005-07-20 Qt 2 Comments

The Qt 4 Resource Center has published a new article about zooming and scrolling. The zoomable picture viewer article discusses the Qt classes needed and the coding details that are dealt with.

Sleep: Perl ‘Inspired’ Scripting Language for Java

Submitted by Raphael Mudge 2005-07-20 Java 7 Comments

Sleep is an embeddable scripting solution for Java applications. Sleep is heavily inspired by Perl with bits of Objective-C thrown in. The Sleep Java API allows the language to be extended with new constructs, operators, functions, and variable containers. Version 2 just got released.

NetBSD Gets New Machines After Donations

Submitted by Rui Paulo 2005-07-20 NetBSD 23 Comments

The NetBSD project would like to thank all contributors for their generous response to the recent call for donations. In only one month, almost US $27K were donated allowing the NetBSD Foundation to purchase five new machines; three of those machines will be added to the nightly build infrastructure and two of those machines will become anonymous cvs servers. For more information, including the detailed specifications of the hardware purchased, please see Christos Zoulas' email to the netbsd-announce mailing list.

Microsoft Makes Longhorn Performance Promises

Thom Holwerda 2005-07-19 Windows 130 Comments

Microsft has made hard statements about perfomance improvements in Longhorn. They claim that applications will load 15% faster than in XP, while boot time is decreased by 50%. They also claimed that Longhorn will be able to wake up from sleep in 2 seconds. Users should also expect half as many reboots during patching. Time to dust of those trustworthy stopwatches.

Mozilla: IE 7 To Boost Firefox Growth

Thom Holwerda 2005-07-19 Mozilla, Gecko 56 Comments

Asa Dotzler, the community coordinator at the Mozilla Foundation, said Tuesday that he hopes to attract many corporate Windows 2000 users to the Firefox browser, since they will be unable to take advantage of the improvements in IE 7.