David Adams Archive

Microsoft To Offer Anti-Spyware Tool

Privacy, Security 52 Comments
Within 30 days, Microsoft will have a tool available to remove spyware from Windows PCs. The tool comes from a small company called Giant Company Software that Microsoft recently acquired. The anti-spyware tool will initially be free, but Microsoft has stated that it may eventually charge for the program. Update: It seems that another company has co-ownership of the code that Microsoft bought in this acquisition.
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Recent HP-Intel Announcements About Itanium

  Submitted by Bob Gezelter Hardware 18 Comments
Bob Gezelter writes: On December 16th, an article was posted on OSNews that stated, in effect, that HP was "Exiting Itanium". A careful review of the facts suggests that this press report was based upon an incomplete understanding of the HP-Intel arrangememnts. I have just published an article on OpenVMS.org, based directly on public published information, containing a more complete reprise of this week's announcements. Update: HP will be investing $3 billion on its Itanium-based server line.
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Implementing Hardware RAID on FreeBSD

  Submitted by Nix_User FreeBSD 13 Comments
RAID has been around for over 15 years. Why use RAID? For me, the reasons are redundancy and reliability. I don't like disk failures. By running RAID, a disk failure will not take down my system; it still runs after a disk fails. When a disk does fail, I still have my system, and I can find another drive, add it to the system, and be ready for the next failure. Read More at ONLamp.
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A Second Opinion on a Sun Reality Check

Unix 7 Comments
Some time back, I promised to double-check Sun executive Larry Singer’s “Reality Check” missives on HP. A week ago, Mr. Singer penned a Reality Check that, in light of HP’s decision to cancel its TruCluster integration effort, does in fact reflect more reality than rhetoric. It also reflects Mr. Singer’s opinions, some of which differ from mine. Presented herewith is Larry’s write-up, laced with a few comments of my own.
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Embed Perl Scripting in C applications

General Development 5 Comments
You get the benefits of an established language to expand the functionality of your application in a flexible way without users having to rebuild the application to use it. In this tutorial, you'll learn a process for embedding a scripting language into an application. You'll see how to build the application and how to provide wrapper functions that support full argument and return value support.
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The Five Gifts of Christmas

  Submitted by Timothy R. Butler Humor 8 Comments
With just a short time before Christmas, you may be wondering what little stocking stuffer you can get for your technically obsessed co-worker, computer savvy boss or geeky family member. It is not too late to pick out a gift that will stay out of the closet of useless gifts after the party's over. Timothy R. Butler looks at five gift ideas at OfB.biz.
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InfoWorld Thinks Apple Will Use IBM’s Power5 Sometime in 2005

Hardware 45 Comments
In a special report on IBM's Power5 Processor family, the bigger, badder cousin of the G5 PowerPC processor Apple uses in Power Mac and iMac models, InfoWorld predicts that some form of the Power5 will make its way to a Mac soon."PowerPC and Power form a continuum of compatible, and now open, processor designs," writes reported Tom Yaeger, "and our guess is that the Power5 design will arrive in some form in an Apple machine in 2005.
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Linux Looms Larger Than Thought

  Submitted by jeanmarc Linux 37 Comments
The overall Linux market is far larger than previous estimates show, a new study says. In an analysis of the Linux market released late Tuesday, market research firm IDC estimated that the Linux market -- including servers, PCs and packaged software -- is expected to register a 26% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) over five years, reaching a whopping $35.7 billion by 2008.
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OpenCVS Under Development, to be Released Soon

  Submitted by thequbemaster General Development 28 Comments
The OpenBSD project will soon release OpenCVS, a GNU CVS compatible, BSD licensed alternative. "The OpenCVS project was started after discussions regarding the latest GNU CVS vulnerabilities that came out. Although CVS is widely used, its development has been mostly stagnant in the last years and many security issues have popped up, both in the implementation and in the mechanisms."
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Sun’s New “Read-Only” License

  Submitted by theuserbl Java 37 Comments
Sun has put its TestingComatiblityKit (TCK) for Java under a "Read-Only-License". This means that you are allowed to look at the source-code but you are not allowed to modify or compile it. For more information, a couple of Sun people's blogs address the subject here and here. For a perspective from outside Sun, see here and here. Read the license here. And retrieve the source code of the TCK here.
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Linux has fewer bugs than rivals

  Submitted by Rahul Sundaram Linux 116 Comments
Standford University research team has found that Linux has fewer bugs than the competition using Coverity, a static source code analysis tool. Andrew Morton, one of the core developers says that the major bugs detected using this tool have already been fixed. It might be of interest that Linus Trovalds has developed a similar tool called sparse specifically for the Linux kernel which has proved itself to be pretty useful.
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Run a Windows X Server From a CD

  Submitted by Corey Shields Wayland 31 Comments
XLiveCD is an X Server that runs off of a Live CD for Windows. Put the CD in the drive and the X server and an Xterm both autostart, allowing you to ssh into a machine and run X-forwarded applications. This is great for use in public labs where you may want to run those remote Linux apps and don't have an X server installed. Built with Cygwin and a few other packages. See the home page for downloads, or just grab the torrent here.
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FreeBSD: ULE Scheduler Status

  Submitted by Sammy the Christmas Ham FreeBSD 25 Comments
Since the decision to demote ULE in favor of the 4BSD scheduler as the default for FreeBSD's 5.3-Release, many improvements to both schedulers have been committed. At the time it was marked broken, ULE was especially needy in light of the status of its maintainership, performance issues, and its unreliable nature in conjunction with threading and kernel preemption. Having resolved these problems, Jeff Roberson announces to -current that the ULE code is now in working order, kerneltrap reports.
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