Independent consultant Thomas E. Besemer writes for Embedded.com: "Is embedded Linux viable? You bet. Is it free? No way. If time-to-market matters, you get a lot from companies like Wind River with stable environments, or perhaps the current embedded Linux vendors." The December's article is accompanied by a number of insightful comments, and an additional response by the author.

"Nobody can deny that Sun has the technology and expertise to continue doing good things. But do they have the right direction? IT consultant Paul Murphy says what must be done if Sun is to correct weaknesses eroding its position. Here's his analysis on where Solaris and SPARC are headed, and the kind of management focus that can place Sun on higher ground." Read the article at Open Magzine.

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."

Apple has posted a chart in its Applecare Knowledge Base that outlines which Mac will support which releases of Mac OS 9, all the way up to the current machines which will not boot into OS 9 at all.

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.

Computer security experts said on Thursday the recent "SQL Slammer" worm, the worst in more than a year, is evidence that Microsoft Corp.'s year-old security push is not working.

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.

"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.

According to a PC World article, not only is built-in 802.11b wireless capability becoming the must-have feature for higher-end notebook computers, but vendors are starting to use dual-band chipsets that support both the widespread 802.11b standard and the faster 802.11a. 802.11a operates at 5GHz with maximum throughput of up to 54 mbps, compared to 802.11b's 2.4 GHz/11 mbps.

A Microsoft legal document put a late 2004 expected ship date on the next client version of Windows, code-named "Longhorn," putting in black and white what Microsoft officials have been telling partners, customers and reporters in private conversations.

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.

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.

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.

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.