Thom Holwerda Archive

Starting Monday, Google will offer Google Apps for Your Domain, a free package of programs for businesses, universities and other organizations. Workers will be able to send e-mail with Gmail, Google's two-year-old Web-based mail service, but messages will carry their company's domain name. The package also includes Google's online calendar, instant-messaging service, and Page Creator, a Web page builder.

A landmark study on Department of Justice network crime prosecutions reveals most attacks used stolen IDs and passwords, resulting in far greater damages to affected organizations than previously thought: up to USD 10 million per occurrence and on average more than USD 1.5 million per occurrence. The report, "Network Attacks: Analysis of Department of Justice Prosecutions 1999-2006", concludes that 84% of attacks could have been prevented if, in addition to checking the user ID and password, the organization had verified the identity of the computer connecting to their networks and accounts.

The ReactOS team has released ReactOS 0.3.0. There's a massive changelog for this release. You can get 0.3.0 from the SourceForge page. "The ReactOS project is dedicated to making Free Software available to everyone by providing a ground-up implementation of a Microsoft Windows XP compatible operating system. ReactOS aims to achieve complete binary compatibility with both applications and device drivers meant for NT and XP operating systems, by using a similar architecture and providing a complete and equivalent public interface."

"Imagine if you will, a world where your ideas and perhaps, even your own creative works became part of the OS of tomorrow. Consider the obvious advantages to an operating system that actually adapted to the needs of the users instead of the other way around. Not only is there no such OS like this, the very idea goes against much of what we are currently seeing in the current OS options in the market."

"When OSDL announced the first release of its Portland initiative at LinuxWorld Boston in April, heralding it 'a breakthrough in desktop Linux', I muttered my skepticism to a co-worker. He expressed surprise at my reaction, noting that the initiative employs extremely smart people. I don't doubt their intelligence, or their sincerity, but I wouldn't bet a penny on the project living up to its initial claim, because you can't conjure a silver bullet out of intelligence and sincerity." KDE developer Kevin Krammer replies: "There is an article over at linux.com which predicts that the Portland initiative will fail to reach its goal of 'unifying the Linux desktop'. Unfortunately the author somehow missed that 'unifying the Linux desktop' is not the goal of Portland."

"Can you imagine controlling your computer with a peripheral that resembles a fluffy bar of soap? Well hear us out, because the Soap pointing device from Microsoft Research offers to combine the accuracy of a traditional optical mouse with the freedom of a wireless, even desk-free peripheral." There are even instructions in the video to make one yourself.

iRex used Linux and an electronic paper display to build a portable reading device that 'reads just like paper, and is perceived as such by the human eye'. The device can save students from having to carry around heavy stacks of text books, and might also be popular with doctors, lawyers, and technicians.

Red Herring interviews Eric Raymond. "Open-source advocate Eric Raymond on winning over the iPod generation, the need for open source to conquer hearts and minds beyond geekdom, and why Linux advocates don’t have much time to beat Microsoft." Update by ELQ: Raymond shows signs of once more playing a bigger role in open-source circles. Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols explains this change of strategy in DesktopLinux.com as he knows Raymond personally.

Microsoft has reached Pre-RC1 with this latest release, Build 5536. The screenshots taken show some of the new features in this build. According to a quick test, Pre-RC1 is very stable and fast. "This build is Pre-RC1 as the screenshots demonstrate. 5536 is surprisingly stable and fast compared to all previous builds."

"Sysjail is a userland virtualisation system for OSs supporting the systrace library. It runs on OpenBSD, NetBSD and MirOS. The first generation of sysjail is as close to a drop-in replacement for FreeBSD's jail subsystem as reasonably possible. While sysjail currently behaves as a NetBSD/OpenBSD/MirOS implementation of jail, it also provides additonal auditing and resource-limiting utilities."

Release Candidate 3 of Slackware 11.0 has been released. Patrick says this will most likely be the last RC but he won't rule out an RC4. One important thing in this release: kernel 2.6 has been moved out of /testing and placed into /extra. From the changelog: "Here is Slackware 11.0 release candidate 3. I think most of the irresistible upgrades are in here now, and the bug reports have been mostly handled."

Technologic Systems is offering a freely downloadable, Debian-based Linux OS image said to boot from an SD card in less than two seconds, on the company's ARM9-based SBC (single-board computer). The TS-7300 SBC targets embedded applications requiring "extreme design security, flexibility, and reliability", according to the company.

T2 SDE 6.0.0 has been released with various prebuilt .iso images for AMD64, i386, PPC, PPC64, and SPARC64. The various architectures include support for Intel Macs as well as Sun's T1 Niagara CPU, and ship with Xorg 7.0, GCC 4.1.1, KDE 3.5.4, GNOME 2.14.3, and much more. T2 SDE is not just a common Linux distribution - it is a flexible open source System Development Environment. T2 allows the creation of custom distributions. Currently the Linux kernel is used - but they are expanding to MINIX, Hurd, OpenDarwin, and OpenBSD.

The web exploded yesterday with the news that Microsoft would cripple 32bit versions of Vista so they would not play protected high-definition content. However, Microsoft was quick to respond, stating: "The community is buzzing with reactions to APC Magazine's article regarding playback of protected High Definition content in 32-bit versions of Windows Vista. However, the information shared was incorrect and the reactions pervading the community are thus (understandably) ill-informed. The real deal is that no version of Windows Vista will make a determination as to whether any given piece of content should play back or not."