Monthly Archive:: March 2002

"Like almost all things in life, good security costs good money. It has to be that way, because there are simply not enough skilled security specialists to look after all of the networks that need their attention. An unfortunate result of low supply and high demand is the migration of highly skilled personnel to clients who can meet their salary requirements. This leaves a lot of small and underfunded networks in the hands of less experienced administrators, who might not know how to design, configure, and monitor these networks' safety mechanisms, leaving them vulnerable to attacks from unscrupulous people looking for inside information, free warez storage, zombie hosts for DDoS attacks, or systems they can simply destroy for fun of doing it." Read the rest of the article at O'Reilly.

"Finding solid performance data to help choose among competing technologies is as tough as creating the data in the first place. This is particularly true in the database space, where database vendors routinely use no-benchmarking clauses in their license agreements to block publication of benchmarks of which they do not approve. We tested IBM's DB2 7.2 with FixPack 5, Microsoft Corp.'s SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition with Service Pack 2, MySQL AB's MySQL 4.0.1 Max, Oracle Corp.'s Oracle9i Enterprise Edition 9.0.1.1.1 and Sybase Inc.'s ASE (Adative Server Enterprise) 12.5.0.1." Read the rest of the benchmark article at eWeek. Our Take: Hey, where are my PostgreSQL benchmarks?

"Canadian scientists have opened a powerful computing lab they said will help speed up research into diseases like cancer and diabetes by allowing researchers to view three-dimensional models of cells in a room similar to the holodeck in the Star Trek television series. The $3.7 million University of Calgary facility is a step ahead of the handful of other virtual-reality labs used in such research because users for the first time can build models on their own computers, rather than be tied up for days or weeks programming at the site, officials said." Read more about the Java3D-based system at ZDNews.

FreeHackers.org features two very interesting, long interviews, taken at FOSDEM 2002, the "Free Software and Open Source Developers Meeting" in Brussels just a few days ago. The first interview is with Guido Van Rossum, the Python creator who recently received the FSF 2002 award. The second interview is with six KOffice members talking just about everything.

Descriptive quote from the editorial at OSOpinion: "Even though Palm's operating system still owns more than half of the PDA (personal digital assistant) market, Microsoft's marketing engines are roaring. With Microsoft aligning with Intel, and making a full-court press to capture more of the mobile operating system market, it is not hard to see a new Microsoft-Netscape battle brewing. This time, though, the battle is more than just browsers. It is about full operating systems, and Palm now is the would-be David facing the Goliath of the software industry."

This bi-monthly report covers development activities on the FreeBSD Project for December 2001 and January 2002. A variety of accomplishments have been made over the last couple of months, including strong progress relating to the KSE project, which brings Scheduler Activations to the FreeBSD kernel, as well as less visible infrastructure projects such as improvements to the mount interface, PAM integration work, and translation efforts. Shortly following the deadline for this status report, the BSD Conference and FreeBSD Developer Summit were held, and will be covered in the next bi-monthly report at the end of March.