Agent Support in libferris 1.1.10

General Development 3 Comments
There is now a plugin interface in libferris so that the filesystem can use AI to make suggestions as to what emblems a file should have. Currently I have Bayesian (bogofilter) and Support Vector Machine (svm_light) agents. The interface supports anything that can train on selected files and the attachment of emblems and then proffer a fuzzy assertion or retraction given an example file. The agent's beliefs are all collected and resolved to give an overall fuzzy assertion/retraction belief based on how trusted you think the agents are (the trust resolution should allow many resolution paths in the next release).
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Proper Security Will Take Horsepower

Privacy, Security 16 Comments
A ZDNet article has figured out what to do with all that extra processing power that Moore's Law keeps giving us: use brute force to make our computers secure. Encrypting everything, between machines, and also between processes might do the trick. Of course, you can't keep your keys in software, so that's where hardware tricks like "Trusted Computing" come in. So let me get this straight, because we're all afraid of viruses and hackers now, we're going to get back on the processor upgrade treadmill and give up ultimate control over what's on our PC to our motherboard and OS vendors?
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Consumers Up In Arms Over Hard Drive Scam

Legal 50 Comments
Isn't it annoying when you buy a new 160 GB hard drive and when you get it all formatted and ready it'll only hold 152 GB? Well, a couple of guys are not going to take it lying down, and they've sued the major HD vendors (PC Makers) to prevent them from overstating their products' capacities. This issue is similar to that of the "viewable area" of CRT monitors, where manufacturers were eventually forced to admit that a 17" monitor actually has a 15.2" viewable area.
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NYT Writer Repents for Oversimplifying Security

Bugs & Viruses 30 Comments
New York Times writer David Pogue recently wrote an article about the recent rash of computer viruses in which he stated the old maxim that most viruses target windows because it's the dominant platform. Welcome to the OS Wars, Pogue. In a follow-up column, he notes that he received quite an education on the subject from readers who emailed him in, and notes that he's learned that Unix-based/Unix-like OSes like OSX and Linux are inherently more virus-proof for several reasons.
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Can Sun Become the Dell of Enterprise Software?

Oracle and SUN 18 Comments
"Sun finally unveiled the full dimensions of its quest to change the computing landscape this week. It's fundamentally a more monolithic landscape populated by pre-integrated components either acquired by or developed by Sun. It's an alternative to Microsoft Windows abstracted from the operating systems (Solaris and Linux) and processors (SPARC and x86). It's also Sun's attempt to become a leading solutions provider competing against IBM, HP and Microsoft." Read the editorial at ZDNews.
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A Chat with the Inventor of the Computer Mouse

Hardware 16 Comments
Doug Englebart worked on a project for Stanford Research Institute to develop a manual method for manipulating data on a computer screen in 1963, with a grant from NASA. He'd been mulling over the idea since 1951. Bill English, who actually built the mouse (out of wood) based on Englebart's design, later moved to Xerox PARC, and refined the invention. It took a long time to catch on. Most people never heard of a computer mouse until Apple debuted the Macintosh in the 80's. And nobody can remember who first called it a "mouse."
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Yellow Dog Linux 3.0.1 Released

Linux 20 Comments
DistroWatch reports that Terra Soft Solutions has updated its Yellow Dog Linux product to version 3.0.1: "Yellow Dog Linux v3.0.1 ships with all errata as of 2003/09/04, kernel 2.4.22 (Xserve rev2, PowerBook 17" rev1 sans fan support), and improved installer (no more dual drive bug!). Available now from the Terra Soft Store and YDL.net Enhanced accounts." See the announcement on the distribution's home page and the YDL 3.0 errata page for further details. Yellow Dog Linux 3.0.1 is available from the Terra Soft Store from US$25 or to members of the US$5-per-month YDL.net Enhanced subscription service.
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Athene 3.2 Available; Overcomes X11 Speed Constraints

OS News 34 Comments
Athene 3.2 is now available for download. In conjunction with this release a port of SDL is available, along with a number of games at rocklytefiles.com. ZTerm has also been upgraded to provide full terminal emulation and is now installed by default in the 3.2 release. Rocklyte Systems also announced that the latest release of the freely distributed Athene for X11 overcomes one of the X Window System's most pressing speed constraints. Testing of the new release demonstrates graphics throughput approximately twice as fast as previous releases of Athene, by bypassing conventional X11 programming techniques and using the 'shared imaging' hack to copy graphics to the X video display.
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