Eugenia Loli Archive

Jeremy Hogan's commentary, Red Hat's community relations manager, is a response to NewsForge's Joe Barr, who asserted earlier this week that the company had given numerous confusing messages about its intent to enter the desktop market.

Dealing with widespread worms like Sasser raises the cost of using Windows, a research analyst said Wednesday. Mark Nicolett, research director at Gartner, recommended that enterprises boost spending on patch management and intrusion prevention software to keep ahead of worms, which are appearing ever sooner after vulnerabilities in Windows are disclosed.

The portable operating-system interface for Unix, 16-bit computing and the OS/2 subsystem will 'be lost' along with some legacy transport protocols, product manager for the Windows 64-bit client says.

If you're coming from a different programming background, one feature of XSLT (all versions) may seem especially difficult to grasp. I'm not referring to the XML-based syntax; once you get a feel for it, it is surprisingly transparent (even if bulky). For many novices, much more puzzling is XSLT's lack of an assignment operator. Read the article at DevChannel.

Luax is a similar framework as Java or Python for that matter, offering OS-independent programming platform for writing any kind of applications. Unlike Java, LuaX uses existing C/C++ open source libraries extensively (SDL, etc.) to do its work.

The new programming model of grid services allows applications to be abstracted through their interface, enabling cross-platform and cross-programming language interoperability. This article demonstrates this by showing how to implement and deploy an existing application as a grid service using the IBM® Grid Toolbox for Multiplatform.

Zonker wrote a review of the Sun JDS 1 at Unixreview, in the dawn of the JDS 2 release.

Microsoft officials poured cold water on a published report that said its Next-Generation Secure Computing Base (NGSCB, code-named Palladium) project is being canned. "The project is continuing full steam ahead. It's alive and kicking and we're very excited about it. The vision has been refined over the last year but it's absolutely not true that it's being killed," MS product manager Mario Juarez said.

Konstantin Ryabitsev sent a funny message to the development discussions related to Fedora Core, published at LWN. In the meantime, Red Hat CEO Matthew Szulik answered to this querstion: "So is Red Hat Consumer Desktop next?": "Now that's interesting. That won't be function-based, it'll be form-based. And when you look at the computing you and I will be using over the next 10 years, we won't have software resident on our hard drive. You'll go to somebody -- it may well be Red Hat -- and you'll get an e-mail package, a calendaring function, and it will be a subscription-based Web service. It's not that far away, look at what people do with their cellular phones today."

Jono Bacon believes that all DEs should include a utility that reminds the user of taking a break every so often, in order to escape RSI. Workrave (with the cute sheep mascot) is a good example.

Novell Inc. is banking its re-entry into the consciousness of IT shops on Linux. Through its acquisitions of Ximian and SuSE Linux AG last year, Novell is working hard to regain its stature as a major technology player. In this interview, SuSE chief technology officer Juergen Geck touches on Novell's Linux strategy, starting with its recent release of the YaST (Yet another Setup Tool) management tool to open source, his thoughts on back-porting features from the 2.6 kernel and SuSE's product road map for the rest of 2004.

R. Kirk McPike wrote a comparison between Microsoft's Word and OpenOffice.org Writer based on his experience writing a term paper. It's an attempt to consider the end usability of both products, and how OpenOffice.org's challenge should be responded to by Microsoft.

Mono Beta 1 has been unleashed onto the public. This is the first of two planned public betas before Mono 1.0 rolls out the door. The public betas are approaching an offical "production quality" state, and by 1.0 should be stable enough for corporate and coder consumption everywhere. This version includes a GAC (global assembly cache) implementation.

Microsoft has recommitted to releasing Longhorn, its next-generation Windows client and server, into beta testing in 2005 even though its chairman acknowledged that security concerns threaten his dream of enabling seamless connectivity and Web services. Here is the transcript of Gates' speech yesterday and here is Jim Allchin's. Also, Microsoft combined the Windows CE, Windows Mobile departments.