Monthly Archive:: June 2005

Robert Watson has posted a number of status updates relating to various pieces of work going on in the TrustedBSD Project, and in particular, relating to integration of recent changes into the FreeBSD CVS tree for inclusion in the upcoming 6.0 release. This includes a information on verified execution, the MAC Framework, the SEBSD port of NSA's FLASK/TE to FreeBSD, and the new security event audit framework in FreeBSD 6.0.

Open Source has a wealth of offerings across many different arenas of software, to date a great deal of the offerings out there are development tools, general purpose applications, and first generation vertical applications. In the medical market there has been a long history of development on first generation software such as OpenEMR, FreeMed, FreeB and others. For some users these applications have offered a productive and capable platform on which to run their practice, but it is apparent to most the first time they go to use them that there is not the level of richness and depth found in proprietary alternatives like WebMD's Intergy, NextGen, or The Medical Manager. With the the release of ClearHealth 1.0 RC1 there is now a credible and full featured Open Source (under the GPL) offering that competes point for point in the big five areas of medical software:

Microsoft Corp. plans to announce as early as next week that it is ready to ship a Windows 2000 Update Rollup, the final security patch for the 5-year-old operating system. Microsoft has drawn some criticism after confirming that it will not make the next version of Internet Explorer available to users of its Windows 2000 operating system.

When SCO originally launched its case against IBM, most observers suspected that there was some kind of case to answer. There were two reasons to believe this.

Libranet's founder died on June 1st and all operations are frozen till later this month. Our condolences to Jon Danzig's family.

nVIDIA now has 3D drivers and OpenGL libraries for Xorg on Solaris 10. This brings the same level of functionality for the nVIDIA cards to Solaris that Linux and BSD have had already. Now, it's ATi's turn...

A new revision of Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 "Woody" is now available: "This is the sixth and final update of Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 (codename 'woody') which mainly adds security updates to the stable release, along with a few corrections to serious problems.

Microsoft said Thursday that it will introduce new XML-based file formats for its Excel, PowerPoint and Word applications when the company launches its Office 12 software package next year.

Microsoft has agreed to make modest changes to Windows XP in response to criticism from an antitrust compliance committee.

Following on from my previous article, the Java platform has an even greater image problem that is more than skin deep. Coming under yet another two-pronged attack, you'll typically hear complaints falling into the two camps:

The second update to Apple's Tiger operating system will continue to focus on stability and reliability, delivering dozens of bug fixes to the month-old operating system.

Microsoft's Dr. Watson error-reporting tool will undergo a significant makeover in Longhorn, but changes in the way program crash data is collected and transmitted have raised eyebrows among privacy rights advocates. Also, the next version of Windows, code-named Longhorn, will feature support for RAW uncompressed digital camera images--which could change the way people view and edit photos.

Novell today introduced the Mono Kickstart program to provide for the first time developer support to organizations using Mono for new application development or migrations. Mono Kickstart includes 25 developer support incidents along with one server or 50 desktop licenses for $12,995. Additional developer support incidents, server licenses and desktop licenses can be purchased separately.

XFCE project released a new development version of its Xfce Foundation Classes, which is a "set of integrated C++ classes for developing Xfce applications on UNIX-like operating systems such as Linux". Here you gain access to the full annoucement (description, minimum dependencies, enhancements from 4.3.0, fixes and, of course, packages downloads).