NetBSD Gets New Machines After Donations

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.

Code Analysis Shows Low Number of Possible Bugs in FreeBSD

On Tuesday, code-analysis software maker Coverity announced that its automated bug finding tool had analyzed the community-built operating system FreeBSD and flagged 306 potential software flaws, or about one issue for every 4,000 lines of code. The low number of flaws found by the system underscores that FreeBSD's manual auditing by project members has reduced the vulnerabilities in the operating system, said Seth Hallem, CEO of Coverity.

400,000 Windows Users Switch To Mac

Needham & Co. estimates that the "iPod halo" may have attracted up to 400,000 Windows users to the Mac so far this year. In a note to clients, analyst Charles Wolf observed that Apple's "key drivers" (iPod and the iPod halo effect) "continue to work". He believes Apple is set for even more growth in the future. Wolf wrote: "The iPod continued to lure Windows users into the Macintosh fold (in the third quarter). Mac unit shipments rose 35 per cent, three times the PC market growth rate."

Securing Wireless Technology: Wireless Devices, Part I

Wireless networking frees mobile workers from wires and cables, allowing them to collect and view data whenever, wherever they choose. The popularity of wireless networking is broad and continues to grow. The Gartner Group stated in an April 2005 study that by 2015, the average urban citizen in the United States and Europe will use at least six wireless networking technologies per day. read more.

Resuscitating Microsoft Exchange 5.5 with Linux

Microsoft dropped support for Exchange 5.5 on December 31st, 2004. Exchange 5.5 users can upgrade to Exchange Server 2003, continue to run 5.5 with all accompanied security risks, or switch over to another mail/groupware system.In this article I propose a fourth option that is really options two (run Exchange) and three (run another mail system) combined.

Spec#: Extension to C#

The Spec# programming system is a new attempt at a more cost effective way to develop and maintain high-quality software. Spec# is an extension of the object-oriented language C#. It extends the type system to include non-null types and checked exceptions. It provides method contracts in the form of pre- and postconditions as well as object invariants.

Ruby on Rails and J2EE: Is There Room for Both?

Ruby on Rails is a relatively new web application framework built on the Ruby language. It is billed as an alternative to existing enterprise frameworks, and its goal, in a nutshell, is to make your life -- or at least the Web development aspects of it -- easier. This article will contrast the Rails framework against a typical J2EE implementation using common open source tools that are regularly found in enterprise applications.