Red Hat and Mandrake are cutting support for older versions of their Linux distributions... The results will be a security nightmare for the Internet, says Jon Lasser.
"Over the past year and change I've worked on porting quite a few projects to OS X. At first, it's a pretty scary ordeal, but most of the issues you'll run into are easily solved if you know how. To save yourself the trouble of figuring this out yourself, read on..." The article is located at Advogato. More porting tips at Fink's site.
At January's Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, PC Magazine editor-in-chief Michael Miller talked with Microsoft chairman and chief software architect Bill Gates. The conversation ranged from Tablet PCs and Microsoft's effort—dubbed SPOT—to infuse watches and other everyday objects with online intelligence, Longhorn, to a slated Xbox Live showdown between Gates and NBA star Shaquille O'Neal. "I'm a little worried," Gates conceded, regarding the face-off with Shaq.
"Andrew Zamler-Carhart of KavaSoft, maker of iConquer, was kind enough to answer our questions this week, and here on a Friday morning, we're posting them for our inquisitive readers. He talks about the upcoming version 2 of iConquer, Rendezvous technology in MacOS X and the perils of being a game programmer." Read the full interview at MacSlash.
The Bush administration signed off Friday on the final version of the United States' strategy for protecting the Internet and securing information systems. Additionally, Attorney General John Ashcroft wants even more power to snoop on the Internet, spy on private conversations and install secret microphones, spyware and keystroke loggers.
Plexuscom, a designer and manufactures of broadband Internet access solutions and appliances, has reached an agreement with Genesi Sarl to produce and deliver limited quantities of the PegasosPPC computer for release at CeBIT 2003. Genesi and Plexuscom will share a Booth at CeBIT, 12-19 March in Hannover, Germany. Read the specs and see the pictures at the morphos-news.de site.
"When Sun Microsystems got started in 1982, companies such as Wang and Data General dominated the hardware business. In less than a decade, this upstart Unix outfit was a billion-dollar-plus phenom while the once-mighty minicomputer makers had been consigned to irrelevance." Read the commentary on ZDNews and a comment a few days ago, explaining Sun's Linux strategy, which is different of what IBM, DELL or HP does with Linux. Also, another Sun article says that Java servers feel the open source heat.
Until now, the internet has largely been used as a tool for communication - but new applications are starting to use the internet to coordinate work between machines. This could lay the basis for a whole new level of automation across society, leading to great gains in productivity. The first step in this process is 'grid computing'.
FreeBSD team's Scott Long lays out a roadmap for FreeBSD-5 stable in this informative email. He says that although the latest release of FreeBSD 5 marks a major milestone in FreeBSD's history, there are significant improvements necessary in the areas of SMP, kernel lockdown, performance, network driver stability, ACPI and much more. He also presents a tentative schedule for the rest of the year for FreeBSD 5.1 and 5.2 releases.
Lindows has aimed to become the GNU/Linux distribution for anyone coming from Windows to Linux (hence the name). They have, without a doubt, pushed the envelope for marketing and pushed the Linux operating system into the mainstream media and retailers. Still, does LindowsOS have what it takes to be the victor of the Penguin Shootout? Find out at OfB.biz.
"For the last few weeks I have been reporting on the development cycle of Mandrake 9.1. Then, the presence of an ISO image for Mandrake PPC 9.1 Beta 1 piqued my curiosity, and some days later two ISO images for Mandrake PPC 9.1 Beta 2 were made available on the various mandrake mirrors. Among my obsol... err, I mean, my old computers, I have a 350 MHz iMac which hasn't seen much use for the last 8 months. So without any extraordinary expectations, I decided to attempt the installation of this different flavour of Mandrake Linux. I was in for a few good surprises..." Read the article at DistroWatch.
"Sun Microsystems' Java software and Solaris operating system haven't always gotten along, an internal memo indicates, but Sun says it has fixed the problems in the two years since the memo was written. The version of Java for Solaris is a poor choice for many types of programs, is slow to load, isn't well-supported within Sun and requires too much memory to run, several Sun engineers said in the memo."Read the rest at ZDNet.
Build 68 is now available from FTP's and via the Update Wizard (fixed SVIdir in keytable init script, kdeconfig: LANG support in startkde, changed KDEDIR to /opt/kde2, ktip now shows Desktop/LX Welcome, uses viewlets profile and 48 pixel image, defattr(-, root, root), updated FAQ for helpcenter, added khtml security patch).
On Feb. 12, Norway's Trolltech formally announced its relationship with IBM, which is using Trolltech's ATopia office application suite as part of its 405LP design. LinuxPlanet caught up with the nine-year-old company's CEO Haavard Nord to ask him about the IBM deal, the latest on Trolltech's Qt libraries, the embedded device market, and about what Sun could learn from Trolltech's dual-licensing scheme.
The MacOSX 10.2.4 Update delivers enhanced functionality and improved reliability for the following applications, services and technologies: Address Book, Classic compatibility, Finder, FireWire, Graphics, OpenGL, and Sherlock. It includes AFP and Windows file service improvements, as well as audio, disc recording, graphics, and printing improvements.
LIUtilities's WinBackup is a backup program for Windows 98/NT/ME/2000 and XP. Despite it's low cost ($50 boxed, $30 for a downloadable version) and small size (under 2 Mb) WinBackup has a ton of features including built in CD/DVD burning support and 256-bit encryption.
Microsoft showed off some of the forthcoming programmability features of "Yukon," the next version of its SQL Server database, here at the VSLive! developer conference on Thursday. Yukon won't be an XML database, but will rather integrate support for XML data types into the relational SQL Server database.
Microsoft is working on a newer version of its Media Center software, which is expected to debut on PCs around the third quarter, according to sources.
Now that the usual round of end of year regurgitations of the past years IT events has ended we may further indulge ourselves by examining the pundits procastinations for their worthiness, or lack thereof. As ever, we were dished up a list of happenings which the IT scribes believed warranted our special attention. What our computers feel about such matters remains to be seen but some brave souls did manage to come up with various musings on what the future may hold for us, and them, (our computers that is) in this age of technical speculation. Whilst these ritualistic utterings have become a feature of the holiday silly season, why not build on this truly great and ancient tradition and comment on the level of veracity of the scribes from our much beloved land of nerds? They got it all wrong.
ExtremeTech runs a story where explains the measures Intuit has taken in its latest version of its TurboTax software in order to escape pirating. Except the DRM issues arose, the software writes on sector 33, without asking the user. On many computers, there could be partitioning information, or even important data on your alternative OS.
