Naked Scanners, Big Content, and Groin Groping

In the News 101 Comments
As none other I know how problematic it is to discuss matters related to politics on the web. However, every now and then, there's no way around it, and this is one of those moments. There's this thing going on at airports in the US, and while many will see it as a separate issue, the body scanner issue, and the sad stories it has spawned, are symptoms of a far larger problem that is a direct threat to everything we've fought for during and since the Enlightenment.
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Genode Live CD Runs Linux Kernel as Browser Plugin

OS News 3 Comments
The Genode project has released a bootable live CD showcasing the capabilities of their OS-construction framework. It boots in less than 10 seconds (on VirtualBox) to a fully functional graphical user interface featuring a selection of five subsystems (screenshot). Each subsystem demonstrates different aspects of the framework. One of the highlights is a web browser that is executed natively on the microkernel and is able to run a sandboxed Linux kernel as browser plugin. Among the other demos are the famous Gears OpenGL demo showing Gallium3D in action, and a user-level Linux seamlessly integrated into the system.
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Oracle Solaris 11 Express 2010.11 Released

  Submitted by comay Oracle and SUN 59 Comments
Today Oracle released its latest version of Solaris technology, the Oracle Solaris 11 Express 2010.11 release. It includes a large number of new features not found in either Oracle Solaris 10 or previous OpenSolaris releases including ZFS encryption and deduplication, network-based packaging and provisioning systems, network virtualization, optimized I/O for NUMA platforms and optimized platform support including support for Intel's latest Nehalem and SPARC T3. In addition, Oracle Solaris 10 support is available from within a container/zone so migration of existing systems is greatly simplified. The release is available under a variety of licenses including a supported commercial license on a wide variety of x86 and SPARC platforms.
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Facebook Announces New Messaging System

  Submitted by koki Internet 26 Comments
"Popular social networking site Facebook today announced it is rolling out a whole new messaging system over the next few months that 'isn't just e-mail', but integrates four common ways users communicate: email, Facebook messages and chat, and SMS, and archives it all in a single thread." Will not succeed. Email/Facebook is free, SMS isn't, especially not when those tiny 160-character messages are getting body-scanned or violated when crossing borders. I'd hate to use this technology only to end up with a massive phone bill.
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Linux Super-Duper Admin Tools: audit

Linux 7 Comments
How do you audit your Linux environment? How do you track after changes to your files? What kind of processes are running on your system at any given moment? What uses the most resources? Valid questions, all. Special contributor Dedoimedo gives us the straight scoop on "audit.". Editor's note: Call for submissions: are you an OS expert? Can you provide some special insight, some tips and tricks, or just plain illuminate an obscure feature in your OS of choice? We'd like to publish it.
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Can RHEL Break Open Source’s ‘Low-Cost Ceiling’?

Red Hat 54 Comments
InfoWorld's Savio Rodrigues views Red Hat's notable marketing shift from low cost to high value as an "important shift in the ongoing evolution of open source software vendors' business models". Long left in the low-cost ghetto of enterprise IT mind share, RHEL is being pushed for its technical innovations, performance enhancements, and customer-requested improvements, rather than as a solution for cash-strapped shops. This shift, and the underlying improvements to RHEL 6.0, give Red Hat a legitimate shot against Microsoft, and open source a new model for competing with proprietary products. After all, focusing on low cost unnecessary limits the growth of open source business, creating a 'low-cost ceiling' that indirectly dissuades many IT shops from considering open source products.
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CDE: Automatic Packaging of Code, Data, Environment

  Submitted by fran General Development 7 Comments
"CDE is a tool that automatically packages up the Code, Data, and Environment involved in running any Linux command so that it can execute identically on another computer without any installation or configuration. The only requirement is that the other computer have the same hardware architecture (e.g., x86) and major kernel version (e.g., 2.6.X) as yours. CDE allows you to easily run programs without the dependency hell that inevitably occurs when attempting to install software or libraries. You can use CDE to allow your colleagues to reproduce and build upon your computational experiments, to quickly deploy prototype software to a compute cluster, and to submit executable bug reports."
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Fedora To Eventually Move to Wayland, Too

  Submitted by Debjit Fedora Core 80 Comments
Well, what do we have here? It turns out that Ubuntu isn't the only Linux distribution who took a left turn off the X.org highway, now driving on a road that will eventually lead to replacing X.org with Wayland. Fedora's 'graphics cabal', as they call themselves, have explained themselves on Fedora's devel mailing list. They also explain how network transparency can be added to Wayland in a number of different ways, making the mailing list thread intriguing reading material. Also, everybody happy with the headline? No panties in twists this time around...?
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Red Hat’s Secret Patent Deal

Red Hat 5 Comments
"When patent troll Acacia sued Red Hat in 2007, it ended with a bang: Acacia's patents were invalidated by the court, and all software developers, open-source or not, had one less legal risk to cope with. So, why is the outcome of Red Hat's next tangle with Acacia being kept secret, and how is a Texas court helping to keep it that way? Could the outcome have placed Red Hat in violation of the open-source licenses on its own product?"
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Apple’s Tablet Computer History

Apple 8 Comments
The iPad has been a long time coming. Apple has produced innumerable tablet computer prototypes and of course developed and released the much-maligned and much-beloved iPad precursor, the Messagepad2000/2001 a decade ago. There are some nifty designs outlined in this retrospective of Apple tablets but sadly, lack of advancement in flat screen technology made them largely a pipe dream at the time. Steve Jobs, however, was very interesting in putting Apple's R&D fully behind developing LCD monitors back in the 80s, and if the board had let him, it may have changed the mobile computing timeline substantially.
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Intel’s Former ARM Team Hits Chipzilla with New Server Chip

Hardware 3 Comments
The gloves are off in the ARM vs. Intel battle, now that Marvell has announced a full-blown ARM server chip for cloud datacenters. The 40nm, 1.6GHz, quad-core ARMADA XP is aimed squarely at a market segment that Intel has seen strong performance from in the past few quarters, and Marvell's co-founder, Weili Dai, is clear about that, saying, "Marvell's introduction of a powerful solution for enterprise-class cloud computing applications is a very important milestone in the mobile Internet revolution."
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