Eugenia Loli Archive

This paper by Ulf T. Mattsson, Chief Technology Officer, Protegrity Corporation, presents a practical implementation of field level encryption in enterprise database systems, based on research & practical experience from years of commercial use of cryptography in db security.

How many Opteron or Nocona processors can a computer system support? Good question, and one that only AMD and Intel can answer. Since they're not saying, here are some system scalability facts you can draw upon when generating scalability guesstimates.

While the just-released first service pack for Microsoft's Office 2003 primarily rounds up security and bug fixes, it also enhances features in the 2003 versions of OneNote and InfoPath.

Linux boasts the widest array of filesystem support among mainstream operating systems. However, Microsoft (with Longhorn) and Apple (with Tiger) have made it clear that they consider the filesystem of the future to be a database of information to be mined, and that client PCs will be a major part of the next chapter in the "search wars."

Computer bugs, or errors in software, can mess up just about anything: They've been blamed for missing homework, blackouts, prison breaks and even the loss of multimillion-dollar space probes. Andrew Ko, a computer researcher at Carnegie Mellon University, talks about a new debugging program, Whyline.

The package installation problem is one of the primary barriers to desktop Linux adoption. Most if not all solutions so far have addressed the wrong problem (at least for desktop users) -- resolving dependencies at package installation time. A much better approach is to ensure that as few dependencies exist as possible. While this might seem a lofty goal, given the open source development emphasis on reusing as much code as possible, this goal is indeed achievable through a process of desktop component standardization.

Version 2.1 of the VG.net vector graphics system was released today. With this version, you can build animated vector graphics displays in Visual Studio .NET and deploy them to web pages in Internet Explorer. Read more at the VG.net 2.1 release announcement. See a sample animated vector graphics web page on the VG.net development blog.

For many developers, there's usually more than one dynamic language that they use to do their jobs. It's also ActiveState's job with its latest IDE release for professional developers using open source dynamic languages, Komodo 3.0. Dynamic languages such as Perl, PHP, Python, Tcl and XLST are all part of the Komodo IDE, which strives to make developers lives easier by offering a common interface and toolset to develop in multiple languages.

At the AmiWest 2004 show in Sacramento KMOS CEO Garry Hare announced that KMOS has acquired Amiga Inc. A few months ago we reported that KMOS acquired AmigaOS4 assets, but now it seems that the whole Amiga, Inc. belongs to this not-so-public company.

FreeBSD core team member Scott Long posted the latest bi-monthly status report, covering FreeBSD development for May and June of 2004. Scott begins: "May and June were yet again busy months; the Netperf project passed major milestones and can now be run with the debug.mpsafenet tunable turned on from sources in CVS. The ARM, MIPS, and PPC ports saw quite a bit of progress, as did several other SMPng and Netgraph projects. FreeBSD 5.3 is just around the corner, so don't hesitate to grab a snapshot and test the progress!" Read the rest over at KernelTrap.

Sun COO Jonathan Schwartz aired the idea of porting Solaris to two additional architectures during his 20 July earnings concall. "We’ve begun looking at Solaris on Power as well as Solaris on Itanium as a way of delivering incremental volume," said Schwartz, who apparently believes that POWER and Itanium support is just the Solaris volume exopansion solution Sun needs.

Novell is developing a slimmed-down version of SuSE Linux especially designed to desktop enterprise deployments easier to support. SuSE Linux 9.1 Professional, the latest version of the desktop OS, comes with 3,000 packages and seven web browsers, according to Novell. Steve Brown, Novell’s European VP, said there was a danger of the OS becoming too "top heavy".

Moving off IBM's drawing board into testing stage is code-name Antares, a dual-core version of the PowerPC 970. The forthcoming PowerPC 970MP chip will join AMD & Intel in the race for dual-cores.

This download provides the DirectX 9.0c end-user package that devs can include with their product.