Back in 1983, 25 years ago, the world was quite different. The market for the home computer - still a fairly new market - was wide open, but Apple was about to make a major splash with its Macintosh. It was also the year in which a company from Redmond first introduced its "Windows" operating system. What is this Windows you speak of?

Last week, we reported on a crude hack which allowed users of build 6801 of Windows 7 (the build handed out at PDC) to use a slightly botched version of the new taskbar. Rafael Rivera created a new tool that enables many more protected features, such as gestures, panning, and desktop slideshow. It's as simple as the click of a button, and also works on Windows 7 installations which already had the previous hack applied. I can confirm that the tool works.

LLVM 2.4 has been released. "LLVM 2.4 includes many bug fixes, much faster compile times at -O0, substantially better code generation in various cases, a new PIC16 target, new IR features, and numerous other improvements and features (see the release notes for details)." You can get it at the project's download page.

Saturday November 8, I received an email from someone, inquiring if I would be interested in "doing a first interview/introduction into a new operating system". We get these emails and news submissions all the time, and most of the time, "new operating system" means Ubuntu-with-a-black-theme, so we don't bother. I figured this time things wouldn't be different, but after a bit of digging around, there's a little more to it this time.

The U2 SystemBuilder Extensible Architecture for UniData and Universe (SB/XA) 6.0.0 introduces new application architecture for SystemBuilder applications. One of the features provided by the changes in the architecture is the ability to modify the presentation of your applications without modifying the underlying business logic. In this article, learn how to present a traditional SystemBuilder menu as a Tree View menu.

One of the common problems when Windows Vista was released was that of missing or non-working drivers. Microsoft massively reworked many of Windows' internal systems and frameworks, meaning lots of drivers broke, with most of them needing major work, and some even needed to be rewritten completely. Apparently, Microsoft didn't communicate this well enough with its hardware partners - or the partners were lazy, who knows - because many devices failed to work with Vista during its early months of being out in the wild. Microsoft is trying to keep this story from repeating itself, saying that everything that works on Vista should work on Windows 7. To gain a little more insight into this problem, Microsoft gave out some very interesting figures regarding driver installation failure rates.

"If you want to make sure your computer or server is not tricked into undertaking malicious or undesirable behavior, it's not enough to keep bad code out of the system. Return-oriented programming exploits start out like more familiar attacks on computers. The attacker takes advantage of a programming error in the target system to overwrite the runtime stack and divert program execution away from the path intended by the system's designers. But instead of injecting outside code - the approach used in traditional malicious exploits - return-oriented programming enables attackers to create any kind of nasty computation or program by using just the existing code."

Cluster means different things to different people. In the context of this article, cluster is best defined as scale-out -- scale-out clusters generally have a lot of the same type of components like Web farms, render farms, and high performance computing (HPC) systems. Administrators will tell you that with scale-out clusters any change, no matter how small, must be repeated up to hundreds of thousands of times; the laziest of admins have mastered techniques of scale-out management so that regardless of the number of nodes, the effort is the same. In this article, the authors peer into the minds of the laziest Linux® admins on Earth and divulge their secrets.

Red Hat and AMD have just done the so-called impossible, and demonstrated VM live migration across CPU architectures. Not only that, they have demonstrated it across CPU vendors. "If you look at the video here, you will see that they did it. Live migration while streaming HD video isn't all that bad a trick mind you, but doing it between a Barcelona, Shanghai and Intel box is. 36 more of these, and we will be in great shape." Only a few months ago during VMworld, Intel and VMware claimed that this was impossible. Looking at the initial reaction, VMware is quite irked by this accomplishment by Red Hat using KVM technology and they are pointing to stability concerns. Red Hat has been a heavy contributor to KVM and acquired Qumranet, the original developers of KVM a while back.

As you have probably noticed, new versions have arrived of Ubuntu, Xubuntu and other derivatives. One of the most exciting new features has received far less publicity than it deserves - the ability to 'install' it onto your USB flash drive with just a few clicks. The advantages are obvious: just plug your flash drive into a computer and run your favourite operating system. What's more, everything you do - installing applications, saving documents, editing preferences - will be saved to your flash drive and will be available to you every time you run it! The best news is that it's astoundingly easy: all it takes is a few clicks.

Smolt is a opt-in hardware profiler developed by Fedora Project and now adopted by OpenSUSE and in consideration by Ubuntu as well. While originally developed for understanding commonly used hardware, InternetNews looks at the potential for Smolt to be a tool to count Linux users."Smolt could also potentially be a tool for counting the total number of users for a given platform, though that's not its ideal use case. The Linux Foundation's Ts'o noted that Smolt probably wound not be that great for counting Linux users as a whole.Fedora's Frields agreed, noting that Smolt is probably not as good for counting users as it is for counting proportional use of hardware across the user base.'We prefer to count users with other methods, which we document on our wiki openly and transparently,' Frields said."

Most of the popular browsers these days are based on one of the two open source rendering engines - khtml/WebKit and Gecko. The most popular browser, however, is based on proprietary technology: Internet Explorer. Even though IE made some progress during the past few years, it's no secret that it took Microsoft far too long to counter the success of Mozilla's Firefox. Currently, Microsoft is working (and thus, spending money) on Internet Explorer 8, and this prompted an audience member during a keynote by Steve Ballmer to ask an interesting question: is it worth spending money on IE, with so many open source engines readily available? Ballmer's reply may surprise you.

Android is a java based environment. This is nice for new developers as Java is widely accepted as a much easier language to get started in than C++, which is the norm for mobile development. Google has also done an excellent job with documenting the API and providing examples to use. There is an example to show functionality for almost 100% of the API, called API Demos. If you're familiar with Java and have already used Eclipse, getting your first app working should be fairly simple. If you've never coded anything in your life before, you will have a lot to absorb as you move forward, but don't get discouraged.

It's no secret that SSDs suffer from performance penalties when it comes to small random writes. Even though more modern SSD try to solve some of these issues hardware-wise, software can also play a major role. Instead of resorting to things like delaying all writes until shutdown and storing them in RAM, SanDisk claims it has a better option. At WinHEC yesterday, the company introduced its Extreme FFS, which it claims will improve write performance on SSDs by a factor of 100.