Archive

Version 0.71 of Visopsys has been unleashed into the wild. "The bulk of this release consists of general bug fixes, and improvements to hardware detection and device drivers, with particular focus on USB. New features include the ability to boot from a USB device (a new USB image is available for download) and the ability to power down the system."

After three years of hard work and many enhancements, pfSense 2.0 has been released. Of the more impressive stats, more than 108,000 unique IP addresses have downloaded the snapshots during 2011, resulting in some amazing testing, feedback and now reliability with the 2.0 release. Among the many notable features and enhancements: Based on FreeBSD 8.1, Enhancements to IP Aliases, dashboard and widgets, SMTP and growl alerts, new traffic shaper, Layer 7 protocol filtering, major improvements to NAT engine and configuration, certificate manager, VPN improvements, virtual wireless AP support and many others.

ABC.net.au has published an article titled "The Case for Piracy". The writer shows how copyright has been hijacked by corporations and that publishers are their own worst enemies. "One of the main reasons we all have anti-piracy slogans embedded in our brains is because the music industry chose to try and protect its existing market and revenue streams at all costs and marginalise and vilify those who didn't want to conform to the harsh new rules being set."

"Looking past the Metro hype, the Build conference also revealed promising road maps for C#, Visual Studio, and the .Net platform as a whole. Perhaps the most exciting demo of the conference for .Net developers, however, was Project Roslyn, a new technology that Microsoft made available yesterday as a Community Technology Preview. Roslyn aims to bring powerful new features to C#, Visual Basic, and Visual Studio, but it's really much more than that. If it succeeds, it will reinvent how we view compilers and compiled languages altogether."

Linux 3.1 has been released. The changes include support for the OpenRISC opensource CPU, performance improvements to the writeback throttling, some speedups in the slab allocator, a new iSCSI implementation, support for Near-Field Communication chips used to enable mobile payments, bad block management in the generic software RAID layer, a new "cpupowerutils" userspace utility for power management, filesystem barriers enabled by default in Ext3, Wii Controller support and new drivers and many small improvements. Here's the full changelog.

Antonio Ospite explores Gnome 3 in fall-back mode and tries to make it look and behave more like Gnome 2.32 again. This summer Linus Torvalds made it to the news for complaining about the gnome-shell design; Gnome fall-back mode is the solution for those like Linus who can't - or better, do not want to - use gnome-shell just yet.

Last month we discussed how computers are portrayed in cultural icons like Lost in Space, Star Trek, The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show, and -- of course! -- that lost gem, The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes. This article continues this essential exploration of American culture with more probing profiles of computers on TV and in the movies.

KDE has announced the release of Plasma Active One, which is a KDE 4.x style interface and API designed for touch devices. The Plasma Active Team states that "Plasma Active is innovative technology for an intelligent user experience. It is intended for all types of tablets, smartphones and touch computing devices such as set-top boxes, smart TVs, home automation, in-vehicle infotainment".

InfoWorld's Peter Wayner provides an in-depth comparison of four Java cloud platforms, putting CloudBees, Google App Engine, Red Hat OpenShift, and VMware Cloud Foundry through their paces to 'reveal the pleasures and perils of coding on a public cloud platform.' 'The danger of lock-in seems to lurk around every corner, and that's not necessarily the worst part. What if we're happy with everything about our cloud except we need one missing feature that the cloud's masters either can't or don't want to deliver?' Wayner writes. 'Some of the clouds rely upon standard tools that take standard WAR files and deliver their information to the world. Others have so many proprietary twists that you might as well tattoo the code on your arm -- it's going to be with you for the rest of your life.'

InfoWorld's Dan Tynan takes us on a tour of the nine circles of IT hell, a place 'not unlike the underworld described by Dante in his Divine Comedy.' 'But here, in the data centers, conference rooms, and cubicles, the IT version of this inferno is no allegory. It is a very real test of every IT pro's sanity and soul,' Tynan writes. From IT limbo, to tech lust, to stakeholder gluttony, to tech-pro treachery, the IT inferno is not buried deep within the earth, it's just down the hall. 'Thankfully, as in Dante's poetic universe, there are ways to escape the nine circles of IT hell. But IT pro beware: You may have to face your own devils to do it. Shall we descend?'

Despite early successes on the Web, the latter years of Flash have been a tale of missed opportunities, writes Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister. 'The bigger picture is that major platform vendors are increasingly encouraging developers to create rich applications not to be delivered via the browser, but as native, platform-based apps. That's long been the case on iOS and other smartphone platforms, and now it's starting to be the norm on Windows. Each step of the way, Adobe is getting left behind,' McAllister writes. 'Perhaps Adobe's biggest problem, however, is that it's something of a relic as developer-oriented vendors go. How many people have access to the Flash runtime is almost a moot point, because Adobe doesn't make any money from the runtime directly; it gives it away for free. Adobe makes its money from selling developer tools. Given the rich supply of free, open source developer tools available today, vendors like that are few and far between. Remember Borland? Or Watcom?'

"Samsung plans to open up its homegrown mobile software platform to outside developers and device makers next year in a bid to kick-start growth in the operating system and reduce its reliance on Google Inc.'s Android in the increasingly litigious smartphone and tablet computer business."

After having its SSL and EVSSL certificates deemed untrustworthy by the most popular browsers, VASCO announced that DigiNotar, filed a voluntary bankruptcy petition and was declared bankrupt today. This is unsurprising, since a report issued by security audit firm Fox-IT, who has been hired to investigate the now notorious DigiNotar breach, revealed that things were far worse than we were led to believe.

InfoWorld's J. Peter Bruzzese provides a list of 15 open source tools for enhancing your Windows server-side experience. 'You might imagine that the best place to go for improving your Microsoft server-side experience is to the mothership itself. In many cases, you would be right. But the truth is there are a meaningful number of open source tools that go above and beyond what Microsoft has to offer in support of Windows Server, Exchange, SQL, and SharePoint. Many of these alternatives provide -- for free -- more powerful capabilities than what you'd get with third-party retail products.' Bruzzese also offers a look at the best free server tools Microsoft has to offer.