OSnews - Exploring the Future of Computing

Windows Flaws Allow PC Takeover

Eugenia Loli 2003-09-10 Bugs & Viruses 71 Comments

Microsoft identified three vulnerabilities in Windows on Wednesday that could have a similar effect to that of the dreaded MSBlast worm of August. The flaws, which affect Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000, Windows Server 2003, Windows XP and the 64-bit versions of Windows XP, are the latest in a string of critical weaknesses identified in Windows recently.

New Microsoft Storage OS Attracts Backers

Eugenia Loli 2003-09-10 Windows 20 Comments

Microsoft launched on Wednesday the Windows Storage Server 2003 operating system, accompanied by support from companies such as Hewlett-Packard and Veritas Software.

A River of Qt Articles

Eugenia Loli 2003-09-10 Qt 6 Comments

Jono Bacon has published his articles he wrote for LinuxMagazine.UK: "Getting started with Qt", "Qt Designer and KDevelop for beginners", "Using Qt Designer", "Getting to Know Debian" and other articles. Jono recently gave us his opinion in the current... non-competiveness between Gnome & KDE.

Ellison on Grid Computing: It’s Invincible, It’s Inevitable

Submitted by Gil Bates 2003-09-10 Databases 8 Comments

Speaking to thousands of attendees at Oracle's customer and partner conference, Chairman and CEO Larry Ellison launched Oracle's Grid Computing initiative, but to explain its significance, he dialed back the clock to 1964, to the advent of mainframe computing. Also, beta customers tap into Oracle Grid Computing while Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 achieves record-breaking benchmark with Oracle and HP.

What to Expect at Warpstock this Year

Eugenia Loli 2003-09-10 OS/2 2 Comments

Warpstock 2003 will be at the Doubletree Airport Hotel in San Francisco, California, the weekend of October 18 and 19. So far, there are several great presentations scheduled on, read about it here.

Interview with YellowTAB’s Bernd Korz

Eugenia Loli 2003-09-10 Zeta 53 Comments

Tonight we had a quick chat with YellowTAB's Bernd Korz over the Zeta OS. The German engineer, manager and spokesperson of YellowTAB is speaking of the release date, the changing goals of Zeta and more. Read more for the interesting transcript.

Debian GNU/Linux – Not Just Another Pretty Face (Part II)

Submitted by ladislav 2003-09-10 Debian 25 Comments

Debian GNU/Linux, the largest of Linux distros when measured in gigabytes, provides fertile ground for technical discussion. Last week, Robert Storey published Part I of his lengthy installation and configuration odyssey. This week, after having survived a typhoon and three power blackouts, he's back with the second and final part of the review.

ArsTechnica: Inside the GNOME 2.4 Desktop & Developer Platform

Submitted by Robert Renling 2003-09-10 Gnome 59 Comments

"GNOME 2.4 brings to the Linux desktop considerable polish, accessibility and consistency. This release is a culmination of the work done by commercial vendors and the GNOME community, as evidenced by the fact that three vendors--Sun, Red Hat and Ximian--have already shipped desktops focused on the GNOME 2 platform. The end result is a pleasant desktop that is nimble, attractive and unobtrusive. While it's not perfect, the foundation is now there and the overall product has matured." Read the in-depth review of GNOME 2.4 at ArsTechnica.

The Lindows Analysis: A Second Look

Eugenia Loli 2003-09-10 Linspire 27 Comments

"As a long time Linux user, and being somewhat of a geek, I personally would not run Lindows. That said, I must admit that I was extremely surprised at what I found after finally installing Lindows for myself. For the most part this is a well thought out Linux distribution targeted at new computer users and windows converts." Read the review at PhatViBez by Brad Chamberlin.

Technology and UIs on Movies: Entertaining a Diverse Audience

Eugenia Loli 2003-09-10 Multimedia, AV 70 Comments

With the computer market exploding into success the last 20 years more and more movies are featuring people using computers. Being a computer geek myself, I expect a level of "technological reality" for the movies that are not in the realm of "sci-fi", but directors usually are feeding their movies with superficial scenes about computers just for the happy clapping from the computer-illiterate audience.

SGI To Debut InfiniteStorage

Submitted by Greg Afinogenov 2003-09-10 SGI and IRIX 6 Comments

This press release announces SGI's coming debuts at the IBC in Amsterdam. These include several new workstations and InfiniteStorage, which seems to be a new fileystem for transparently sharing media files across operating systems (Linux, IRIX, Windows NT, OSX).

Real Programming with AWK

Eugenia Loli 2003-09-10 General Development 13 Comments

AWK may not be the first language that comes to mind when you need to write a program, but its flexibility may surprise you. The article is at LinuxJournal.

Has Linux Eclipsed Open Source?

Eugenia Loli 2003-09-09 Rumors 71 Comments

Linux's dominance "is not so much that it is better than BSD," Meta Group analyst Tom Murphy said. Indeed, there is a perception that in some ways, BSD is far stronger than Linux, NewsFactor reports.

TheSoftwareCorner: Lindows 4.0 Review

Eugenia Loli 2003-09-09 Linspire 33 Comments

"Lindows is heading in the right direction when it is going towards the home user market. Lindows is by far the easiest distro of Linux I have tried to date, and yes I've tried Mandrake 8.x/9.x and RedHat 8. Some aspects of Lindows are a bit confusing like the network printer share and no network wizard to share your internet connection." Read the short review at TheSoftwareCorner.

Comments, Trolls, and Flamewars

David Adams 2003-09-09 OS News 65 Comments

You may have noticed that we've implemented a system that allows readers to report comments that abuse our forum rules, in an effort to improve the quality of the conversation and make the job of moderating the comments a little easier for OSNews volunteers. However, this reactive solution is only half of the effort that will be required to make OSNews a better place for reasoned debate. The proactive, and more important, effort is the responsibility of all those who use the comments system. It involves showing a little restraint before being lured into the fray and contributing to a negative atmosphere.

Mandrake Linux 9.2 RC-2 Released

Eugenia Loli 2003-09-09 Mandriva, Mandrake, Lycoris 32 Comments

Mandrake Linux 9.2 RC-2 bittorrent link is now available, ftp mirrors to be updated slowly. UPDATE: Texstar uploaded his screenshots from Mandrake 9.2 RC-2 while most FTP mirrors are now updated.

Eclipse 3.0 M3 Released

Submitted by Deniz Kaan Çopur 2003-09-09 Java 37 Comments

This is the third milestone release towards Eclipse 3.0. Check out the new and noteworthy improvements this version brings. The group in charge of the open-source Eclipse project approved a three month long restructuring process this week that should reduce IBM's dominant role in the effort and make the project more attractive to Java vendors such as Sun Microsystems and BEA Systems. Also, they are thinking of changing the name of the project.

Linux 2.6: A Breakthrough for Embedded Systems

Eugenia Loli 2003-09-09 Linux 28 Comments

Linux 2.6 introduces many new features that make it an excellent operating system for embedded computing. Among these new features are enhanced real-time performance, easier porting to new computers, support for large memory models, support for microcontrollers, and an improved I/O system. This whitepaper at LinuxDevices.com describes the new functions and features of the latest Linux kernel of special interest to embedded system developers. On other Linux kernel news, Linus Torvalds released Linux 2.6.0-test5 for general testing.

How KDE & GNOME Fought their War and Got Things All Backwards

Eugenia Loli 2003-09-09 Wayland 48 Comments

What if FreeDesktop.org started to become the "free software desktop project" and GNOME and KDE slowly became "flavours aimed at different audiences", Seth Nickell wonders in his blog. Seth is having some good ideas about how the future of X11 DEs should feel like, while down that page there is an extra explanation of Storage, the technology we reported last week that Seth is developing.

Reversible Computers: Turning Back the CPU Clock

Eugenia Loli 2003-09-09 Geek stuff 15 Comments

You're working into the wee hours trying to fix that bug. But by time the debugger catches it the original cause has long since passed. How are you going to figure out just what went wrong a billion instructions earlier? It's at times like these that you need a reversible computer. The idea is simple: a computer merely executes a sequence of elementary instructions. If we could just run through that list of instructions in reverse we could work backwards and find the original cause of our error. But of course things are never quite that simple.