OSnews - Exploring the Future of Computing

Sun Cluster 3.2 Released

Submitted by milek 2006-12-20 Solaris 1 Comment

"Solaris Cluster provides high availability and global disaster recovery to suit the evolving needs of virtually any datacenter in any industry: across local distances, campuses or metropolitan areas, and across the world, ensuring business continuity without compromise. With out-of-the box support for the largest number of commercial and open-source applications, open and flexible configurations for both horizontal and vertical scaling, integration with the Solaris kernel and support on both SPARC and x64 platforms, Solaris Cluster provides industrial-strength high availability to your applications." There's documentation too.

Coming in January: ‘Month of Apple Bugs’

Thom Holwerda 2006-12-20 Apple 45 Comments

A pair of security researchers has picked January 2007 as the starting point for a month-long project in which each passing day will feature a previously undocumented security hole in Apple's OS X or in Apple applications that run on top of it. The 'Month of Apple Bugs' project, currently slated to begin on Jan. 1, is being orchestrated in part by a security researcher who asked to be identified only by his online alias 'LMH'. This is the same researcher who in November ran the 'Month of Kernel Bugs' project. LMH's partner in this project is Kevin Finisterre, a researcher who has reported numerous bugs to Apple over the past few years. As with the kernel bugs project, Apple will be given no advance notice with the Month of Apple bugs, LMH said.

Lazy Programming and Evaluation

Submitted by IdaAshley 2006-12-20 General Development 25 Comments

Lazy programming is a general concept of delaying the processing of a function or request until the results are needed. This concept has numerous applications, from the obvious to the obscure. Thinking in terms of lazy programming can help you rid your code of unneeded computation and restructure programs to be more problem-oriented.

Man Boots Mac OS X on Asus UMPC, Shoots Video

Thom Holwerda 2006-12-19 macOS 34 Comments

Apple's Mac OS X has been successfully used to boot up an Asus R2H ultra-mobile PC, which runs the operating system slowly but surely. To minimise claims that all the still photography is faked, the start-up process has been captured on video.

A Survey of Linux File Managers

Thom Holwerda 2006-12-19 Linux 54 Comments

"Linux file manager ontogeny encapsulates the history of GNU/Linux. File managers began as command-line and generic graphical tools and progressed to desktop-specific ones, gaining sophistication along the way, with mouse controls, for example, replacing buttons. Today, the more than a dozen options highlighted here will suit users with widely varied interests."

Google Axes Search API

Thom Holwerda 2006-12-19 Google 25 Comments

Google has quietly axed the web services API to its eponymous search engine. The stealth move was made without any announcement, but visitors to the page now receive a blunt message, backdated to 5 December, advising them that the SOAP API is no longer supported.

HP Battens Down HP-UX

Thom Holwerda 2006-12-19 Unix No Comments

"HP this week moved to bulk up the security tools available with its HP-UX operating system. The company has released an assortment of additions for HP-UX 11i V2 - including server-side encryption, a security chip and fortified data containers - that give customers some nice, high-end options. HP officials bragged that a number of the new tools arrive at no additional cost to customers. In addition, HP insisted that we remind you of its 'commitment to the long-term success of the HP-UX roadmap'."

Submitted by Rahul 2006-12-19 Fedora Core 16 Comments

When a group of Red Hat Fedora developers, engineers, and mangers got together last month for a three-day summit in Westford, Mass., the goal was to establish short- and long-term plans for future Fedora projects. The brainstorming session resulted in a road map that will lead to changes for the Fedora community as a whole.

Xandros Seeking Beta Testers

Adam Scheinberg 2006-12-19 Oracle and SUN 2 Comments

I received word from my contact at Xandros that they are looking for Red Hat Server Sysadmins for beta testing of Xandros Cross-Platform Management Tools. Xandros recently released version 4.1 of their desktop OS and Xandros Desktop Management Server. OSNews readers make great candidates for this type of beta testing. If you're interested, read on for the details of the call for beta testers.

2006: The Year that Changed Linux

Submitted by anonymous 2006-12-19 Linux 115 Comments

"I've been saying for years that Linux was well along on its way from being the tech fanboy operating system of choice, to becoming one of big business' favorite operating systems. Well, I was right all along, but in 2006, that progress smacked many Linux fans in the face. This is my list of the five most significant changes in Linux this year. They are not changes, however, that many who have embraced Linux in the past will appreciate. Like it or lump it, these are the changes that I also think clearly predict Linux's future in the mainstream."

Review: Neuros OSD

Submitted by anonymous 2006-12-19 Multimedia, AV 6 Comments

"The Neuros OSD promises a lot - it claims to be the first open source Linux-based embedded media center and it 'records video and links your PC, portables and entertainment center'. Bold claims, but can it live up to them?"

Submitted by falko 2006-12-19 Ubuntu 11 Comments

"This tutorial shows how to set up a PXE install server with Ubuntu 6.10. A PXE install server allows your client computers to boot and install a Linux distribution over the network, without the need of burning Linux iso images onto a CD/DVD, boot floppy images, etc. In this article I show how to configure a PXE server that allows you to boot multiple distributions: Ubuntu Edgy/Dapper, Debian Etch/Sarge, Fedora Core 6, CentOS 4.4, OpenSuSE 10.2, and Mandriva 2007."

Hubert Mantel Back at Novell

Submitted by Billamon 2006-12-19 Novell and Ximian 11 Comments

"I had more than 1 year of time to think about my future and came to the conclusion that the thing I'm most interested in still is Linux." During an exclusive interview to Data Manager Online and pc-facile, SuSe co-founder confirms, after he left one year ago, he's back at Novell since early December.

Should Javascript Get More Respect?

Submitted by anonymous 2006-12-19 General Development 31 Comments

JavaScript is often ridiculed as the black sheep of programming languages. Nearly every Web developer has cursed JavaScript at one time or another. Until recently, many developers had all but written off JavaScript as a necessary evil at best or a toy at worst. But JavaScript is becoming increasingly important. See why it remains the most broadly available scripting language for Web development and a better choice for developing modern applications.

Guest post by Kroc 2006-12-19 Editorial 77 Comments

Web 2.0 throws a lot of buzzwords at us. New technology has given us new terms to describe a particular design process. One of these is "user-centric" design. An example of a website that isn't user-centric would be microsoft.com. A static site where the users have no control over the content of the site, nor any choice in what they see. The company displays the information they deem important. This is considered web 1.0. (Note by AS: a new microsoft.com site has gone live since this submission). YouTube and Digg are examples of Web 2.0, user-centric sites whereby the users of the site contribute not only the content that the other users consume, but each user helps decide what content is promoted. Today, I'm going to coin a new term: self-centric design. To define this new term, I will compare OSNews to one of the leading web 2.0 sites: Digg.

Submitted by PlatformAgnostic 2006-12-19 .NET 20 Comments

Thanks to the efforts of Kurt Berglund, a new hire on the Windows Presentation Foundation (formerly "Avalon") team, there is now a library that allows standard WPF controls (like buttons, text boxes, lists) to be used interactively on 3D objects. This is not a native feature of the 1.0 version of the framework--such items could be displayed, but were non-interactive. See this channel9 video or this blog post for details on how this (dare I say) clever hack works. Source code is also available.

Features vs. Freedom

Thom Holwerda 2006-12-18 Open Source 108 Comments

"Recently there has been a lot of discussion bubbling up regarding the possibility that Ubuntu will ship proprietary 3D drivers by default for some video cards. My aim here is not to discuss the specifics of that decision, which is still being fleshed out and ratified, but to instead define my views on the bigger picture behind the discussion - features vs. freedom."

Why User Interface Actions Occur on Release, Not on Press

Thom Holwerda 2006-12-18 Graphics 21 Comments

"If you pay close attention, you'll notice that most user interface actions tend to occur on the release, not on the press. When you click on a button, the action occurs when the mouse button is released. When you press the Windows key, the Start menu pops up when you release it. When you tap the Alt key, the menu becomes active when you release it (there are exceptions to this general principle, of course, typing being the most notable one). Why do most actions wait for the release?"

Submitted by jayson.knight 2006-12-18 Microsoft 19 Comments

Microsoft has long encouraged its employees to 'RAS' into the corporate network from home or from the road to access e-mail, shared files and applications. RAS, short for Remote Access Services, is an old Microsoft term for what most people now call a client VPN. Microsoft, of course, maintains valuable intellectual property on its internal network, including the source code to all its operating systems and applications. These are constant targets for hackers, and Microsoft tries to protect its most valuable assets with defenses in depth; they are behind firewalls and on networks segmented with IPsec. In addition, the entire network is monitored for suspicious activity, scanned for malware and so on.

Disgruntled Debian Developers Delay Etch?

Eugenia Loli 2006-12-18 Debian 71 Comments

Debian GNU/Linux 4.0, codenamed Etch, had been due to arrive by December 4, 2006, but it's been delayed because some developers have 'deliberately' slowed down their work. According to a blog note by Andreas Barth, Debian developer & release manager, the delay has resulted because "Some people who used to do good work reduced their involvement drastically. There was nothing I could do about, and that happened way before I started full-time on release, but on the global picture that still counts."