QEMU addon makes emulation fast

QEMU is a generic and open source processor emulator which achieves a good emulation speed by using dynamic translation. Its sporting a new module called the 'Accelerator' which can achieve near native speeds, and currently runs on Linux 2.4.x and 2.6.x kernels. This means you could theoretically run Windows (or another OS) on a Linux machine at near native speeds without buying a commercial emulator.

Using DTrace to Profile and Debug A C++ Program

A sample program CCtest was created to demonstrate an error common to C++ applications -- the memory leak. The examples in this article demonstrate the use of the DTrace feature in the Solaris 10 Operating System to diagnose C++ application errors. These examples are also used to compare DTrace with other debugging tools, including Sun Studio 10 software and mdb in the Solaris 10 OS.

Extending GTK+’s Visual Flexibility

"To make the desktop look really nice, you want the ability to theme a window (or sub-component thereof) as a whole. This could mean graphics that span multiple widgets, it could mean moving widgets around, it could mean changing the spacing between widgets, etc. To address this, I believe we'd need to rework GTK+ a fair bit" says Red Hat's Havoc Pennington.

Boo 0.5 released

Boo is a new object oriented .NET language, heavily inspired by Python's syntax, that supports static typing for speed and duck typing for dynamic late-binding, python-style coding; there is full type-inference and closure supoprt, also.

Study finds Windows more secure than Linux

Believe it or not, a Windows Web server is more secure than a similarly set-up Linux server, according to a study presented yesterday by two Florida researchers. The researchers, appearing at the RSA Conference of computer-security professionals, discussed the findings in an event, "Security Showdown: Windows vs. Linux." One of them, a Linux fan, runs an open-source server at home; the other is a Microsoft enthusiast. They wanted to cut through the near-religious arguments about which system is better from a security standpoint.