David Adams Archive

The UK security research company, Secunia said that it has found a critical security flaw in Firefox web-browser that could put users at risk of information disclosure attacks. In other security news, a variant of the Cabir mobile virus, which was developed at first to prove it is possible, called Mabir, has been targeting mobile phones using Symbian Series 60 operating systems.

HP and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) have collaborated on a new 11.8-teraflop Supercomputer for the Department of Energy. The $24 Million HP Supercomputer uses the Linux OS and Intel's Itanium2 processors.

The release of the Sony PlayStation Portable in the US has not been a rousing success so far, with many retailers only selling a few of their small allotment. It's be very successful in Japan. Is it just too early to judge? UPDATE by ELQ: OSNews now supports the PSP web browser and serves its mobile page automatically. We would appreciate it if someone could send us a picture of it.

From a very personal and revealing interview with ex-Sun executive Danese Cooper: "The prevailing open source wisdom is that Linux is going to win, and anything you do that doesn't directly influence Linux in a positive way is not a good thing. We spoke to Linus Torvalds about this once, the OpenSolaris team, and he expressed interest in the project as a way for him to be able to get the Open Source community around Linux to move to a higher level, you know, to match some of the advantages that are in Solaris. We were talking about a virtuous cycle where Solaris gets better because of the places where Linux is better than Solaris now. Like especially for one and two processor performance, and Linux gets better because of the places where Solaris does better now. The beneficiary is the consumer."

If you weren't able to attend Brainshare but are interested in seeing what the big N is up to, the keynote speech is online. Some topics discussed: Linux solving high performance problems, virtualization technologies via Xen, capabilities of the Linux desktop including transparency, graphics and animation effects and demos of mono applications doing amazing feats.

Thomas Hazlett, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, looks at the various competitive pressures (Apple, Firefox) facing Microsoft and wonders whether its era of dominance might be on the wane in an editorial at the Financial Times.

A report in today’s Wall Street Journal suggests Microsoft has fiddled with the registry in its stripped-down Windows offerings and the result is that video clips embedded into Microsoft Word documents don’t run properly, for example. The Journal quotes Jonathan Todd, a spokesman for European antitrust chief Neelie Kroes, as saying: 'The commission is still in the process of assessing ... whether Microsoft is complying properly with the requirement to offer a fully functioning version of Windows without Media Player.'

This article looks at user reactions to common problems with user interfaces and corporate policies, and how these reactions can make some common business decisions counterproductive. When it comes to inconveniencing your customers, and sometimes even offending them, are some sales tactics worth it in the long run?

Tuxmachines has a KDE 3.4 review and declares it to have "more shine and polish than ever experienced with any desktop environment in existance today."

Prex, a portable real-time operating system for embedded systems, is a small, reliable and low power micro kernel designed specifically for the small memory footprint system. Prex 0.1 is the first public release, and includes kernel, syscall library, sample hello world application, and some technical documents.

A PC Magazine story examines the conventional wisdom of Firefox's reputation for security (compared to IE) and finds that it's probably more secure, but that it's not so simple to just say so.

The Mac Mini isn't just competition for Shuttle computers and mini-tower PCs. It's also competition for the much smaller embedded development boards that many users are building custom applications around. Peter Seebach takes a look at the Mac Mini as an embedded development platform.

XFCE 4.2.1 was released today.

A c|net editorial posits that Google may be well on its way to developing a complete suite of internet-based services that could act as a computing environment for any thin client that's capable of accessing it. And Microsoft may be planning a similar move.