Thom Holwerda Archive

The heartland turned vicious this week when an Oklahoma town threatened to call in the FBI because its web site was hacked by Linux maker Cent OS. Problem is CentOS didn't hack Tuttle's web site at all. The city's hosting provider had simply botched a web server. This tale kicked off yesterday when Tuttle's city manager Jerry Taylor fired off an angry message to the CentOS staff. Taylor had popped onto the city's web site and found the standard Apache server configuration boilerplate that appears with a new web server installation. Taylor seemed to confuse this with a potential hack attack on the bustling town's IT infrastructure.

Phoronix takes a look at nVIDIA's SLI and nVIDIA's efforts to support alternative operating systems, such as Linux, BSD, and Solaris, and how HP fits into all that. "While this NVIDIA SLI support can still be considered very much rudimentary compared against the Microsoft Windows support with the ForceWare drivers, which were introduced back on November 9 of 2004, there is no clear sight for how it will ultimately fair in the world of Linux. According to some information we have obtained from our sources and research, NVIDIA's motives for Linux SLI may largely dissent from the public opinion. In this article today, there are a few comments we would like to share about the big green manufacturer and their outlook on alternative operating systems."

"Get an introduction to the embedded Rich Client Platform. Learn about the various components that make up eRCP and get some examples on how to use them in your applications. The embedded Rich Client Platform came about as a way to bring the advancements of the Eclipse Rich Client Platform and apply it to the embedded space. The eRCP is made up of the following components: Standard Widget Toolkit, eJFace, eWorkbench, and eUpdate. We will discuss each of these components and use code examples where appropriate."

Microsoft has released an interim build of Windows Vista, Build 5342, today to a select group of testers. This is the first build to come with the 'real' Aero Glass: fully scalable vector based transparencies that take advantage of pixel shading. The previous builds contained Aero Express and Aero Express with transparancy, not the real Aero Glass. Other notable improvements: a complete firewall, support for Pocket PC 2000, 2002, and 2003 synchronization, and more. Flexbeta has screenshots, but Flexbeta seems pretty down to me at the moment.

"The 770 is not for everybody. If you want something for practical day-to-day use, you're better off buying a PDA or smart phone. And a word to Nokia: make nice with Microsoft. I would love to be able to run Windows Mobile 2005 on this device in place of your version of Linux. It's both fast and complete. Trying to impress the Linux geek crowd is not a good business plan, nor is trying to shoe-horn Linux onto this type of platform. Using Windows Mobile 2005 would make this a far better, and far more successful, mobile device." And part II, one month later: "Right now, I feel like I've pretty much wasted $380 on the 770. I continue to work with it the hope I'll find some hidden feature or application I've missed so far."

"Many customers have asked us about having a better way to enter IE bugs. It is asked 'Why don't you have Bugzilla like Firefox or other groups do?' We haven't always had a good answer except it is something that the IE team has never done before. After much discussion on the team, we've decided that people are right and that we should have a public way for people to give us feedback or make product suggestions. We wanted to build a system that is searchable and can benefit from the active community that IE has here. As of today, our new Internet Explorer Feedback site is live."

Oracle has finally, after much delay, released 10g for the Solaris x86 platform. This should be a big boost for Sun's Galaxy class servers as well as other Solaris x86 users everywhere. You can get your copy at Oracle's download page. On a related note, "this article is a step by step guide for tuning and optimizing Red Hat Enterprise Linux on x86 and x86-64 platforms running Oracle 9i (32bit/64bit) and Oracle 10g (32bit/64bit) databases."

"This week was a huge move forward for the OpenVZ project. We have released an updated vzctl, an updated stable kernel, a new development kernel based on 2.6.16, a SUSE kernel, a template for Fedora Core 5, and finally a GIT repository with our development kernel."

Exactly five years ago, 24th March 2001, Apple officially launched its new operating system, Mac OS X, the highly anticipated (and highly needed) successor to Mac OS 9. From the official press release: "Apple today announced that beginning this Saturday, March 24, customers can buy Mac OS X in retail stores around the world. Mac OS X is the world’s most advanced operating system, combining the power and openness of UNIX with the legendary ease of use and broad applications base of Macintosh."

Microsoft appears to be in a state of panic, ordering 60 per cent of its new operating system to be re-written amidst a major shake-up of its troubled Windows division. According to a Volish denizen speaking to smarthouse.com, orders have come down from on high to rewrite more than 60 per cent of the consumer version of Vista in a bid to get it ready for the 2007 CES show in Las Vegas.

Anandtech reviews Sun's T2000 Coolthreads server, and concludes: "At first sight, Sun has won the performance/watt battle for now, but it cannot rest on its laurels. Low voltage versions of the Xeon 'Woodcrest' and Opteron might be able to come very close to the performance/Watt levels that the T1 offers. We also can't shake the feeling that the number of applications, which will really exhibit the kind of exceptional performance that Sun's own heavily optimised benchmarks show, will be quite limited. Last, but certainly not least, Sun's solid engineering has impressed us. Sun's meticulous attention to detail resulted in a sturdy, well-polished machine." More benchmarks here.

Reacting to US and Apple positions about the copyright law, french deputee Christian Paul, who worked hard to defend Free software during the debates, explains the parliament position. "We want to protect consumers' freedom of choice and privacy. We oppose the idea that the seller of a song or any other kind of work can impose on the consumer the way to read it, forever, and especially in consumer's home. It is essential to assure that the consumer can choose whatever device she likes, just as she can use her favorite hi-fi today and does not have to buy a new one for each vendor."

"I'm happy to announce today that ROTOR 2.0 has released to the web. You can download the release here. ROTOR contains most of the CLR and base class libraries found in our commerical product. It is released under the shared source program. There are several new things in this release: generics implementation; Lightweight Code Generation; stub-based dispatch support; new reflection and reflection emit; new C# features like Anonymous Methods, Anonymous Delegates and Generics."

Novell is talking to a number of OEMs about getting its upcoming SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 preinstalled on the hardware systems they ship. But while Ron Hovsepian, Novell's president and chief operating officer, said the company had nothing to announce in this regard at its annual BrainShare conference here, Novell is talking to a number of key vendors like Dell in this regard. "I know there is an opportunity here and we are working on the how and the when," he said in a media and analyst question and answer session. The delay of Vista could not have come at a better time for Novell, in this regard.