Theo on Security Improvements in OpenBSD

From the OpenBSD Journal: In his post, Theo deRaadt gives a brief technical overview of the four major security changes in OpenBSD: POSIX page protection schemes, WorX, read only segments, and Propolice. Not all of these are on all platforms, but every platform has some protection. To quote Theo in his message, "We feel that these 4 technologies together will be a a royal pain in the a$$ for the typical buffer overflow attacker."

AMD Finalizes Roadmap on 64bit CPUs

According to heise.de and news.com, AMD finalized their CPU roadmap this Friday. Opteron is scheduled for April, Athlon 64 for September. The Barton core will debut on Februar 10th in the Athlon XP 3000+. The Barthon increases the L2 cache from 256 (Thoroughbred-B) to 512 kByte, and will probably run only with FSB333. A Athlon XP 3200+ will probably appear by the middle of the year.

Poll: My Favorite Unix-Based OS

Well, we all have used Unix, in one form or another (maybe even through embeded products). But which one is your favorite flavor of Unix-based/Unix-alike OSes? Read more and vote! Update: SHAME on you, who ever you are: Messing/hacking with go2poll's code and altering the results in favor of FreeBSD. By doing so, you are doing MORE BAD than good to your favorite platform.

A Glimpse of the Future? I Hope So.

"The minders ushered me into the dimly lit hut built of rough wood and palm fronds. They pointed to a place where I could sit. Then we waited. In a few minutes, the elder came in, then one of the chiefs. I was about to be shown something few outsiders had seen. After the ritual discussion of other things, the tall, animated chief motioned for me to approach. And then he showed me the current state of Ximian Desktop 2.0. It is very cool." Read the preview at LinuxAndMain.

Software Strategies for Emerging Developers

"Software is big business. Every year, consumers spend over a hundred billion dollars purchasing shrink-wrap software. For you as a developer, shareware is a cheap, effective means of marketing and distributing your software. Shareware lets the public redistribute your software for free, then pay a registration fee if they like it. Today, nearly all software companies provide some form of free trial version of their software." Read the article at MacDevCenter.

AMD Execs Still Vague On Athlon 64 Launch

AMD executives reiterated that the company is focusing on the server version of the Opteron processor, but that the 64-bit Athlon 64 will still appear in 2003."You saw our financials; I'm not going to lie to you. It doesn't make a lot of sense to build a new processor for a niche market," said John Crank, senior brand manager for desktop product marketing for AMD's Computation Products Group. Although PCs certainly dominate the computing landscape, Crank and other AMD officials said they believed servers and their applications would be better positioned to take advantage of the Opteron's capabilities at launch, rather than PCs.

Mandrake Linux 9.1 – The Beauty and the Beast

Andrew D. Balsa has been following the progress of Mandrake Linux 9.1 and its hectic pace of development. In the first two articles of this series he described his initial impressions of both betas to give us the taste of things to come. In this third part he delves deeper. He investigates various ways to improve that desktop look - with anti-aliasing, true type fonts, menu and cursor shadows, desktop icons and KGamma colour calibration. All accompanied by suggestions to developers and some new screenshots.

Goodbye to Ones and Zeros

When National Semiconductor decided to challenge Intel and Advanced Micro Devices in the market for low-end microprocessors in 1997, CEO Brian Halla teased a group of skeptical analysts, saying they probably thought he had been sprinkling testosterone on his corn flakes. Brian Halla predicts a technology transformation in which analog chips displace the zeros and ones at the heart of the binary language used in computing.

Mac vs. Windows: Who Cares?

In 1998, Apple ran a television commercial aimed squarely at its competitors. The "Toasted Bunny" ad, as it came to be known, portrayed one of Intel's Bunny-suited workers being hosed down by a firefighter. "Apple Computer would like to apologize for toasting the Pentium II processor in public," the voiceover intoned. "But the fact remains, the chip inside every new Macintosh G3 is up to twice as fast." Read the article at Wired.

Cool GUI Tools for Configuring your GNU/Linux System

Linux distributions have come a long way in easing the tasks of system administrators. From software installation to hardware configuration, Linux is moving away from making you manually edit text configuration files by providing you with elegant GUI tools to make system administration easier. In this article, LinuxOrbit takes a look at some of the latest GUI tools you can use to help configure and administrate your GNU/Linux system.