Archive

Linux Foundation announces LSB 4.0 Beta

Guest post by Rahul 2008-10-17 Linux 7 Comments

Linux Foundation has announced Linux Standard Base 4.0 beta. LSB attempts to provide a consistent Linux platform for ISV's. These are a number of changes. Following Red Hat's efforts to consolidate on NSS, LSB has endorsed it as the cryptography solution as well as providing new distribution tests and tools for certification of third party applications.

10 Forces Guiding the Future of Scripting

Guest post by snydeq 2008-10-14 General Development 11 Comments

Peter Wayner examines the platforms and passions underlying today's popular dynamic languages, and though JavaScript, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, Groovy, and other scripting tools are fast achieving the critical mass necessary to flourish into the future, 10 forces in particular appear to be driving the evolution of this development domain. From the co-optation of successful ideas across languages, to the infusion of application development into applications that are fast evolving beyond their traditional purpose, to the rise of frameworks, the cloud, and amateur code enablers, each will have a profound effect on the future of today's dynamic development tools.

SELinux and Security Changes in the 2.6.27 Linux

Guest post by Rahul 2008-10-13 Privacy, Security No Comments

James Morris, one of the Red Hat SELinux developers has a blog covering the numerous SELinux related changes and general security improvements made in the new 2.6.27 Linux released recently. It is a impressive amount of changes and there is a large number waiting on queue to go into the next revision as well.

Linux Summit Will Preview New Advanced File System

Guest post by Rahul 2008-10-13 Linux 69 Comments

Linux Foundation is organizing a end user collaboration summit this week. A major topic will be a presentation on the new upcoming filesystems - Ext4 and Btrfs. Ted Tso, who is a Linux kernel filesystem developer on a sabbatical from IBM working for Linux Foundation for a year, has talked about the two-pronged approach for the Linux kernel, taking a incremental approach with Ext4 while simultaneously working on the next generation filesystem called btrfs. Read more for details.

OS and Virtualization or Virtualization and OS?

Guest post by Rahul 2008-10-11 Red Hat 9 Comments

We each behave according to our nature. It should come as no surprise, then, to learn that while a virtualization supplier believes that the operating system is, effectively, a feature, an operating system vendor would argue that the converse is true. The philosophical differences between Red Hat and VMware could not have been more apparent during their respective events - September’s VMworld gathering in Las Vegas and yesterday’s Red Hat analyst day held at the New York Stock Exchange.

Mozilla Labs Introduces Geode Geo-location Software

Guest post by Rahul 2008-10-11 Mozilla, Gecko 3 Comments

Mozilla Labs recently offered a sneak peak and download of Geode. Geode is one of the first applications to use the new W3C geolocation specification API. It is currently available as a plug-in for Firefox 3 (and seems to only support Windows and Mac systems at this time). Mozilla Labs indicates it will likely be a new feature integrated in an upcoming browser release.

KpackageKit: Future of Package Managers on Your Desktop

Guest post by Rahul 2008-10-11 Linux 55 Comments

PolishLinux has an interview with the KPackageKit developers. PackageKit is a abstraction layer over the different Linux package management tools. It is primarily designed to unify the graphical tools and provide a consistent distribution neutral framework for application developers to install add-ons as well. This project was initiated and continues to be maintained by Red Hat developer Richard Hughes who also wrote the initial GNOME frontend to it, called gpk-application. Multiple backends currently exist and it is the default for Fedora and Foresight Linux already. Other distributions including Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, Mandriva, and Gentoo are actively participating in the development of different backends. A KDE interface has been under rapid development recently and just did a 1.0 release last week. This interview provides more details.

Measuring the True Success of OpenOffice.org

Guest post by Rahul 2008-10-11 Office 32 Comments

Michael Meeks who leads the OpenOffice.org development team within Novell has taken a detailed look at contributions associated by metrics to OpenOffice.org and makes the case that Sun's tight control over the codebase and the lack of enough volunteer contributors leaves the development slowly stagnating over a period of time. Michael Meeks has recently started strongly advocating the position that Sun needs to setup a more independent OpenOffice.org foundation or otherwise allow more relaxed policies for commit access and be less rigid about assignment of copyright to itself for the development community of Openoffice.org to thrive beyond Sun developers.

Linus Blogs About 2.6.27 Release

Guest post by Rahul 2008-10-10 Linux 5 Comments

Linus Torvalds who has recently started blogging, writes about the new 2.6.27 release. The developer's viewpoint on releases tend to be different from end users. Some interesting bits...

AMD to Spin off Manufacturing Operations

Guest post by Flatland_Spider 2008-10-08 AMD 72 Comments

AMD finally fleshed out the "Asset Smart" strategy it has been talking about since, at least, last December. The result: AMD is now fabless.

Worst Windows Flaws of the Past Decade

Guest post by snydeq 2008-10-07 Windows 11 Comments

InfoWorld pays tribute to the humble Windows bug -- ground zero for several of the most colossal security meltdowns IT has ever endured. From share-level password flaws, to Web server traversal vulnerabilities, to overflow after overflow, the past decade of Windows flaws and patches and exploits has given IT one hot cup of hell after another -- all while giving rise to entire industries built around protecting users from malware authors who themselves have matured their practices to juvenile pranks to moneymaking criminal enterprises. Microsoft has been noted as the fastest vendor to patch OS flaws, to be sure, but the hits keep on coming. Perhaps it is high time for another OS vulnerability scorecard.

Microsoft Begins to Reveal Visual Studio 2010

Guest post by Flatland_Spider 2008-10-01 Microsoft 24 Comments

Yesterday Microsoft started introducing Visual Studio 2010 to Windows developers with a press release and a MSDN website. Introductions to the next Visual Studio also popped up on various technology news sites; InformationWeek, ChannelWeb, Microsoft Watch, BetaNews, and Ars Technica each have brief summary and explaination of the information Microsoft has released so far. Only NetworkWorld digs into the subject by asking various developers to give their impressions of the new Visual Studio.

Windows x64 Watch List

Guest post by David Handlos 2008-09-25 Windows 44 Comments

A Windows developer and Sysadmin has compiled a "Watch List" of the small but annoyingly important things to keep in mind when moving from 32 bit Windows to Windows x64.

Technogeeks Save America

Guest post by Flatland_Spider 2008-09-24 In the News 28 Comments

Reason Online, the online presence of libertarian political magazine Reason, is featuring a book review of Cory Doctorow's book, Little Brother. Little Brother re-imagines George Orwell's classic, dystopian novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, as a modern cyberpunk thriller for a young adult audience.

Nexenta: Ubuntu Server with ZFS goodness

Guest post by Anil Gulecha 2008-09-11 Ubuntu 20 Comments

OSNews has been reporting on the Debian/Ubuntu/GNU/Opensolaris hybrid for several years. But for those of you who've never looked more closely at this interesting OS, a Nexenta developer has laid out some of its more noteworthy features and advantages.

There’s More Than a Browser War

Guest post by The Bitland Prince 2008-09-09 Google 33 Comments

When Google released its new (and first) browser a few days ago (Chrome), many praised that move or welcomed this new player into the arena, but many others simply were a bit surprised and wondered if a new browser was really needed when this market already features IE, Firefox, Opera, Safari, Konqueror and a plethora of smaller ones. While IE is still leader, those who aren't satisfied with it have a good choice of alternatives, especially in Firefox and Opera. So fasten your seat belt to join me in a ride which will attempt to explain why this browser war could be a threat to Google's very foundation and why Chrome is maybe the most important move Google could have done to protect itself.

Google Chrome Considered Harmful

Guest post by Georgios Kasselakis 2008-09-03 Google 109 Comments

It appears that Google scored a PR success with their Chrome browser. In short, the promise is a web experience where web pages are allowed to behave more like desktop applications. This is done by boosting the abilities of common web pages in terms of performance, while also allowing 'plugins' to enrich the user experience of certain other pages. As it seems, the announcement shot at the heads of people who've been holding their breath for the fabled Google Operating System. However in the following text I will demonstrate that Chrome puts strain on the Designer and Developer communities, is not innovative (save for one feature), and copies ideas liberally from Google's worst enemy.

Multiple Return Values in Java

Guest post by Bjorn Raupach 2008-07-17 Java 65 Comments

Today was one of those days when I wished Java would support multiple return values. I had to develop a rather CPU-intensive algorithm which would compute a solution for a knotty constraint problem. Having a solution alone is sometimes not enough and you also need to add some parameters which measure the quality of the computed outcome. Most of these accompanying parameters can or have to be computed within the algorithm itself, but Java allows you to return only one value either an object or a primitive type. People working with Lisp, MATLAB or Perl, just to mention a few, don't have a problem like this at all. Functions supporting multiple return values is already implemented at the language level and frameworks make heavy use of this. But as a Java programmer you are pretty much stuck here and need to consider some other means to come out of this situation. In the following I would like to give some hints on that topic. Hopefully they are of help for anyone having the same problem every now and then.

Automatix Comes to Fedora 9 – FedoMATIX

Guest post by Rahul 2008-07-07 Fedora Core 18 Comments

Remember Automatix? Yes the nifty little application that made installing additional softwares on the Ubuntu system a breeze. Here comes the same for Fedora 9, FedoMATIX (v0.1Beta). It currently works on the command line only, but supports more than 60 additional softwares/apps already. The next version, which is due release in 2 months, will feature a GUI and many more softwares and hacks.

Red Hat Linux Beats Microsoft Windows in Power Test

Guest post by Rahul 2008-07-04 Rumors 1 Comment

No, not the kind of power you're probably thinking of. A recent independent test ranked Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5's power efficiency over Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise and Microsoft Windows Server 2008 on three different hardware platforms. RHEL averaged about 10% more power-efficient than Windows Server 2008 on the same hardware.LINK