Eugenia Loli Archive

Microsoft is expanding its security business unit with a group that will establish new software development processes and create tools for its programmers so that future Microsoft products will have fewer security flaws, a Microsoft executive said.

The OpenBFS team is proud to announce that a new version of OpenBFS (Beta 6) is available for download. This new version features a fix for the dreaded "Vnode already exists with a different cookie" problem, a fix for live queries, a fix for searching on non-indexed attributes and lots of other small corrections and additions. BeOSJournal features a mini-interview with BGA. Update: Here are part 2 and part 3 of David Reid's editorials.

Many articles already explain why you should use Linux and describes its advantages. However, for a potential new user, it's also important to know the other side: what are the disadvantages of Linux? This short article by Carl Simard tries to present this other side so that new users can evaluate much better if Linux is for them to try or if they should forget about it.

OpenDarwin 6.6.1 is announced, available immediately for both ppc and x86 architectures. OpenDarwin 6.6.1 is based on the Darwin 6.6 (which corresponds to Mac OS X 10.2.6) source release and licensed under the APSL. It includes additions and modifications from the OpenDarwin CVS Repository.

In what is being called "one of the largest desktop migrations to Linux ever seen", Microsoft seems to have lost a major account worth "tens of millions of euros" when the city of Munich said on Wednesday it would switch 14,000 computers from Microsoft's Windows operating system to Linux.

As the PostgreSQL developers continue to move forward on the upcoming v7.4 release, several bug fixes have been tag'd as being safe to back-patch into the v7.3.x branch, so there is 7.3.3. Click here for a recent interview with the PostgreSQL team.

The software giant says it withdrew a security update for Windows XP after discovering that it switched off Net connections for some of the 600,000 users who downloaded and installed it. Update: Microsoft explains what got wrong.

Information and pictures of the new Swing on Java 1.4.2. Elsewhere, this article examines some of these urban performance legends and 'sets the record straight' regarding Java's performance.

I don't need a server. Our FreeBSD home server runs unstoppably for years, asking nothing in return. However, my curiosity about OSes drove me on ordering the free evaluation version of Windows Server 2003 Enterprise, the latest Microsoft's OS offering. Naturally, there is a lot of marketing hype surrounding the product, but this time, I am really happy to witness that most of the hype is for real.

John Carroll editorializes about the SCO situation and advocates that the worst it could happen to the Linux OSS market is to have a temporary slow down, and not a collapse. Elsewhere, Sys-Con reports that people started all these conspiracy theories when Microsoft licensed the Unix IP from SCO, but in reality the magazine says, it was something that was on schedule to happen as Microsoft needed the license possibly for a new product of theirs.

ATI Technologies admits cheating the drivers to achieve higher 3DMark03 score, while ExtremeTech's exhaustive testing of both nVidia and ATI 3D hardware with the newest version of 3DMark2003 confirms Futuremark's findings of unfair optimizations by both companies.

FreeBSD Release Engineering team's Scott Long has written a bootloader front-end script that allows one to enable/disable acpi, boot single users, etc. Elsewhere, Matthew N. Dodd has implemented per-executable ELF prebinding in FreeBSD-current. Initial performance measurements are very encouraging. Relocatable objects (executables and libraries) contain elements that require relocation before they are usable. By 'prebinding', much of this work can be done beforehand and speed up the actual relocation process. As a result, apps like KDE and other library happy executables take a little less time to load.

Linux only has a small percentage of the computing market, however Microsoft already considers it a major competition as the open source OS steals the hearts of many users. Following the hard numbers though, Microsoft also increases its market share on both server and desktop space with time. The only logical explanation is that Linux steals quite a market share from the traditional UNIX providers (SCO, Sun, SGI, HP, IBM). But only Sun seems to truly be in a real Linux trouble, as it is the one with a resistance to Linux integration to its full product range.

Fabio writes: "Another whole month has gone by, which means that it's time for another status update. Read more about it, and also check the screenshot showing the Zune real time gradients in action!"