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Monthly Archive:: August 2005

Discussion: Which is Your Favorite Browser Extension?

The last few years have seen the introduction of the concept of "extensions" in most popular web browsers. While Mozilla natively supports extensions, Opera and Safari come feature-packed and can be easily hacked via config files, and a market has cropped up around the IE engine which supports adding new functionality to your browser. In the interest of sharing a good thing, which are your favorite browser extensions?

Interview: With Tuomo Valkonen

This week in Arch Linux's news letter there was an interview with Ion's creator Tuomo Valkonen. Ion is a complete desktop environment built on the tiling windowmanager PWM. It uses Lua as an embedded interpreter which handles all of the configuration. It mainly uses the keyboard to access the functions but also supports the mouse for some things.

Linux-on-Mac Seller Aims to Fill Void

When Apple Computer announced in June that it planned to move to Intel chips, one of the companies left in the lurch was Terra Soft Solutions. This week, Terra Soft is announcing it has filled some of the void created by Apple's move. Under a new deal, Terra Soft will resell PowerPC-based servers from Mercury Computer Systems. Mercury's XR9 systems use the same G5 chip as Xserve, but at 2.4GHz, the chips are slightly faster than those used in Apple's servers.

Getting Started with launchd

In Tiger, Apple introduced a new system startup program called launchd. The launchd daemon takes over many tasks from cron, xinetd, mach_init, and init, which are UNIX programs that traditionally have handled system initialization and prepared the system for the user. These venerable programs are widely used by system adminstrators, open source developers, managers of web services, even consumers who want to use cron to manage iCal scheduling, and they can still be called with launchd.

One-Stop Security

Confusion, fear, procrastination; these are words often associated with making decisions about IT security and as threats become more sophisticated it is easy to see why. The increasing popularity for workforce mobility have made detecting and eliminating threats purely from within the corporate network alone an inadequate approach to network security.

Microsoft Antitrust Hearings in Seoul Slated for Tuesday

The antitrust regulator in South Korea will begin a crucial hearing on Tuesday (Monday evening US time) to determine whether Microsoft violated the country's fair trade rules by bundling its instant messenger and Media Player programs into its Windows XP platform. Officials have been reticent about whether the regulator, the Fair Trade Commission, will rule on the case after a closed hearing of two days. The commission held a closed hearing in July to listen to arguments from Microsoft and its local competitors, but it has not clarified how many more hearings it will need before ruling.

OpenBSD Calls for Important Testing

Modifying memory functions is never easy on an operating system, as a problem with memory affects everything in the system. OpenBSD developers have put out a call to help testing a new memory management system for the upcoming 3.8 release, which is tentitively set to be released this October.

Vectorlinux 5.1 Review

Madpengiun has a review of the latest release of the trimmed-down Slackware-based Linux distro, Vectorlinux. At the end, the author advocates its use for "PC Recycling," wherein old, decommissioned hardware is set up for schools or nonprofits.

Inside OpenOffice 2.0

OpenOffice.org instructor Solveig Haugland explains why the upcoming OpenOffice 2.0 is set to make her job a whole lot easier. She says, "As an OpenOffice.org and StarOffice trainer, I teach a lot of one-day classes on the core software features. As I introduce the program and then word processor (Writer), spreadsheet (Calc) and presentation maker (Impress), I teach students how to deal with the oddities of each application before we get into the primary lessons. My first half hour of each section is gone."

Microsoft Acrylic Tool

Microsoft seems to be making its move into a market that it's left alone for a long time: It's new software, code named "Acrylic," professional design program that combines pixel-based painting and vector graphics. It is supposed to be somewhat based on the Creature House Expression product Microsoft bought in 2003. There's a new Community technology Preview available.

History of Commodore

Commodore, the company that sold 2.5 million VIC-20's and 25 million Commodore 64's was reduced to bankruptcy less than ten years after it released the computer that was supposed to revolutionize the computer industry, the Amiga.  Read the history of Commodore at Braeburn.

Intel’s Desperate PR Push

The Register notes that due to Intel's developer conference going on this week, and its excellent public relations capabilitites, we'll be seeing a lot of good news about Intel in the press over the next few days. Don't be fooled. Things aren't quite as rosy for the chip giant as they'll make it seem.

Review: Freespire 5.0 – Linspire Freed

It seems that a free Linspire clone has hit the ftp mirrors. DistroWatch reports: "Freespire is a new Linux distribution, a free edition of Linspire with all proprietary components and trademarks removed. The distribution comes with a free repository of over 1,500 packages available via apt-get and Synaptic. This initial release functions as a live CD only and serves as a proof of concept. It certainly looks like an interesting idea: combining the benefits of Linspire's excellent usability and hardware auto-configuration with a free repository of Debian packages." Review.