Thom Holwerda Archive

Coming patch tuesday, Microsoft will issue fixes for two Windows critical bugs, and one for Microsft Office, among others. In addition, here is a short interview with Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's CEO. You can watch the video (140MB, Windows Media), or read the transcript.

More and more projects use the browser as a primary means of communicating with the program. The main drawback of this approach is that it requires the user to configure and maintain his own Web server, or else requires the program to come bundled with a Web server. Jetty is simple for both programmers and users, making it a good choice for bundled web server.

After suffering manpower and other issues, Debian says it has finally addressed concerns that it was falling behind on security. Debian's elected leader Branden Robinson yesterday flagged an inquiry into the processes by which security updates are released, citing a potential lack of transparency and communication failures.

IBM has today presented various new versions of their G5 processor at the Power Everywhere Forum in Japan. Firstly, it introduced the much-anticipated PowerPC 970MP, the dual-core version of the G5. In addition, they also announced 3 low-power G5s, ranging from 1.2Ghz at 13W to 1.6Ghz at 16W. These processors will most likely find their way into Apple's Macs.

FUDCon 2, the second gathering of Fedora Users and Developers, was held at LinuxTag, on the 24th and 25th of June in Karlsruhe, Germany. FUDCon 2 featured presentations from prominent members of the Fedora Project, both from Red Hat and from the Fedora community.

The second point release of the stable 2.10.x branch of GNOME is now officially released. This release has seen continued work to eliminate memory leaks, plain bugs and in general improve and polish the stable series of GNOME. Source: bindings, desktop, platform.

Terra Soft Solutions, the leading developer of integrated Power Architecture Linux solutions, today announces a VAR relationship with Genesi for provision of the Open Desktop Workstation with Yellow Dog Linux pre-installed.

Hardware accelerated 3D graphics on RISC OS took a step closer to reality, thanks to Simon Wilson. He claims to have ported Mesa 3.2, a 3D graphics library that sports an OpenGL software interface. More importantly, he says he has also ported an Nvidia graphics accelerator from BeOS to harness the GeForce2 video card in the Iyonix to plot graphics fast in hardware.

Delta Debugging is an automatic and systematic technique that deals with isolation of the source of the failure -- often the developer's longest, most demotivating, and most repetitive activity when carried out manually. Read more...

One of the things lacking on Linux is breadth of native commercial games. That's where emulating (or re-implementing) the host enviroment that the game was created for with Cedega (or WINE) comes in.

Bink.nu has some interesting information on Windows Server 2003 Compute Cluster Edition. It is 64bit only, and consists of 2 CD's. They also posted a set of screenshots.

Today the latest SVN checkout of Haiku sources gave us very good news: app_server can now run Tracker (screenshot 1 2 3), although it crashes so often that it is actually unusable. You can check this yourself by downloading a Haiku image from Philipp Schmid's blog and running it in Virtual PC (or VMWare). This news is a sign that Haiku is near alpha release.

De Raadt's team makes OpenBSD, an operating system, and OpenSSH, for secure communications. Here, he talks about why he does it, about industry use of open-source software, and about dedication to quality paying off.

On Tuesday, Microsoft posted a patch to its web site designed to prevent the problem, known as a memory leak. This error has plagued Microsoft's Tablet PC operating system for a long time. In addition, the software giant has promised not to charge for security fixes, but will charge for virus protection.