The Mozilla Project released Firefox 1.0-RC2 for testing. Thunderbird 0.9 also available.

One of the key components in the TCP/IP protocol stack is the checksum computation, which ensures the integrity of the transferred data. This computation can be greatly accelerated with the use of single instruction, multiple data (SIMD) units prevalent in state-of-the-art processors. This article analyzes a former vectorization effort, shows how it can be improved upon, and then enhances it further.

While it's nice to just look at the finished product itself, sometimes it's useful to go back and look at how it's made. Especially today in the silicon industry, where both major players in the x86 desktop market are having issues with their top end products. Another large member of the industry, IBM, is also finding the going at 90nanometer a lot harder than they predicted. Today on Sudhian, we'll take a look at just how a processor goes from essentially sand to a fully functioning integrated circuit, and all the steps in between.

Novell released Mono 1.0.4 recently, along with testing version 1.1.2.

We assume Bochs is already installed. You can download an bootable Bochs disk image from here. Then uncompress it with "tar -jxvf disk1.tar.bz2" and modify Bochs' configuration (make the cd bootable) ~/.bochsrc: boot: disk ata0-master: type=disk, mode=flat, translation=auto, path="/freevms/freevms.dsk", cylinders=130, heads=16, spt=63, biosdetect=auto, model="Generic 1234". It should show you this boot prompt. More FreeVMS info here.

Joseph Cheek CEO of Lycoris has published a letter to their customers and the community. In the letter Joe addresses many outstanding issues that have gone unresolved over the past few months, and outlines major changes to Lycoris the company, the products, and future direction. My Take: I always thought that Joe is a great guy, and this letter confirms it. He is an objective and a responsible man.

In order to better understand why OpenBSD has decided this is important, KernelTrap approached Theo de Raadt with a few questions. In reply he fully explains the issue, talking about how successful this form of activism has been for OpenBSD in the past, and offering specifics on exactly what they are trying to accomplish. He summarizes, "the open source community has support for all the ethernet chipsets, all the scsi chipsets, all the raid chipsets, so why should we not have support for all the wireless chipsets?"

Adobe Systems, maker of major desktop software products such as Photoshop and Acrobat Reader, has begun a quiet effort to become more involved with desktop Linux.

NeoWin posted a roundup of the available Longhorn shots.

LinuxDevices.com has published the proceedings from the Sixth Real-Time Linux Workshop held in Asia for the first time, this week, at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. The papers span a broad range of topics ranging from fundamental real-time technologies, to applications, to hardware, to tools. As usual, the conference was organized by the Real-Time Linux Foundation.

IBM has ported/developed their Javacard smart card operating system for Sharp's 1MB smart card.

While the secrets of Easter Island in the South Pacific remain a mystery, Sun Microsystems is planning to reveal new details regarding Solaris 10 on November 15.

Want to reduce administration time and user frustration? Streamline your network file sharing with DFS. Jesse Smith tells you how to set up a DFS root, and you'll learn some good practices for managing one or more DFS roots on your network.

Using Linux and the Asterisk PBX, it is possible to build a secure, cost effective VoIP (and traditional PSTN) PBX solution. This article shows you how to take advantage of various hardware, software and tricks to accomplish this goal within a limited budget.