Monthly Archive:: January 2007

Is Internet Explorer 7 Explorer Too Locked Down for You?

Thom Holwerda 2007-01-19 Internet Explorer 46 Comments

A store owner in a bad neighborhood must balance safety against commerce. Too many locks and bars will keep away customers with the crooks. Based on Microsoft Watch reader feedback, Internet Explorer 7 sacrifices too much usability in the interest of safety.

Developers Get New Leopard Seed

Thom Holwerda 2007-01-19 macOS 9 Comments

Apple seeded developers with a new build of Mac OS X Leopard Thursday night, the first in more than a month. Leopard 9A343 is 22 builds newer than the previous seed, 9A321, and marks the 102nd build since Apple first distributed seeds of Leopard to developers at its Worldwide Developers Conference in August last year.

Submitted by twenex 2007-01-19 Linux 25 Comments

For independent software vendors, one of the major problems in supporting GNU/Linux is the variety of package management systems. However, if the Free Standards Group has its way, the next version of the Linux Standard Base will solve that problem by providing an application programming interface that acts as a bridge between the major package systems and software installers. Ian Murdock, CTO of the Free Standards Group, says the solution could be included in the most widely used distributions by early 2008.

Submitted by Sphinx 2007-01-19 Windows 7 Comments

"On January 30th Microsoft releases to consumers the newest version of its operating system, called Windows Vista. Although the company said on January 17th that it would make Vista available for sale and download online, most people will buy the upgrade in old-fashioned boxes, just as they did back in 1995. But this time, despite plenty of razzmatazz, few customers will be queuing up to buy a copy."

Mandriva Announces New Life Cycle

Submitted by anonymous 2007-01-19 Mandriva, Mandrake, Lycoris 10 Comments

"Customers and partners can sometimes make a difference. In accordance with their feedback and Mandriva's analysis of the overall advantages and drawbacks of the longer development schedule, Mandriva decided to adjust the life cycle of the consumer oriented products to a shorter 6 month period."

Two Tools for Building Third-Party Installers

Submitted by lh8 2007-01-19 General Development 6 Comments

"Bitrock's InstallBuilder and Macrovision's Install Anywhere Enterprise edition are tools for building third-party software installers. InstallBuilder uses Qt widgets, while Install Anywhere requires a Java Virtual Machine, but both are cross-platform, multi-lingual, proprietary tools that are available in downloadable demos. Both, too require minimal expertise to use. When run in wizard mode, Install Anywhere is more basic than InstallBuilder and suffers in comparison, but, when run in Advanced Designer mode, it eclipses its rival with a huge set of options."

Submitted by jayson.knight 2007-01-19 Windows 106 Comments

With the imminent release of Windows Vista to consumers this month, Linus Torvalds, the father of Linux, has claimed Microsoft's latest desktop effort is over-hyped and not a revolutionary advancement. "I don't actually think that something like Vista will change how people work that much," Torvalds told Computerworld. "I think it, to some degree, has been over-hyped as being something completely new and I don't actually think it is."

Fedora Core 6 ‘Re-Spins’ Released

Submitted by anonymous 2007-01-19 Fedora Core 12 Comments

"The Fedora Unity Project is proud to announce the release of new ISO Re-Spins (DVD and CD Sets) of Fedora Core 6. These Re-Spin ISOs are based on Fedora Core 6 and all updates released as of January 11th, 2007. The ISO images are available for i386 and x86_64 architectures via BitTorrent starting Thursday, January 18th, 2007. PPC images will follow within the next 5 days, but will have had only limited testing."

Jeremy Allison on Interoperability, Patents

Submitted by anonymous 2007-01-19 Novell and Ximian 3 Comments

"Did the Microsoft-Novell deal really have anything in it to promote interoperability? What's next for Samba? Should we call it "GNU/Solaris"? What's the first rule of Google? And what goes in your .burritorc file? We ask the only person who can answer all." Note that the first linked page starts playing the podcast immediately.

Ruby on Rails 1.2 Released

Submitted by Pieter Steyn 2007-01-19 General Development 19 Comments

"Rails 1.2 is finally available in all it's glory. We got the RESTful flavor with new encouragement for resource-oriented architectures. We're taking mime types, HTTP status codes, and multiple representations of the same resource serious. And of course there's the international pizzazz of multibyte-safe UTF-8 wrangling."

The Mac Still Proves a Winner for Apple

Thom Holwerda 2007-01-18 Apple 80 Comments

Apple may not want the word 'computer' in its title anymore, but it's hard to ignore the impact of the Macintosh on the bottom line. Despite a report of flat shipments, plus all the attention given to the iPod, iPhone and Apple TV in the last month, the Mac had a solid quarter for the period that ended on Dec. 30. Apple reported selling about 1.6 million of its signature product during the quarter. The Mac also saw its revenue share increase by about 40 percent compared to last year.

Linux Guru Argues Against Security Liability

Thom Holwerda 2007-01-18 Privacy, Security 40 Comments

Alan Cox, one of the leading Linux kernel developers, has told a House of Lords hearing that neither open- nor closed-source developers should be liable for the security of the code they write. Cox, who is permanently employed at Red Hat, told the Lords Science and Technology Committee inquiry into personal internet security that both open- and closed-source software developers, including Microsoft, have an ethical duty to make their code as secure as possible. "Microsoft people have a moral duty in making sure their operating system is fit-for-purpose," Cox said on Wednesday.

Sun Cheers Two SPARC Advances in One Week

Thom Holwerda 2007-01-18 Oracle and SUN 3 Comments

Sun this week announced a speed boost to its 'Niagara' UltraSPARC T1 processor line and confirmed the tapeout of the 'Rock' chips due out in the second half of 2008.

Examining Secunia Unpatched Warnings

Submitted by Ricus 2007-01-18 Privacy, Security 7 Comments

"Security, perception, reality. What security professional hasn't struggled with the gaps between those three things? Is there anything worse for security than a false sense of security?" And part II.

Use Apache Derby to Develop Eclipse Plug-Ins

Submitted by BlueVoodoo 2007-01-18 General Development No Comments

Get a demonstration on how to use resource indexing with the Apache Derby database to develop Eclipse plug-ins. The Derby DB embedded in Eclipse allows you to create an SQL database on the client side with no security issues or network problems, such as an unstable connection or high latency.

Why Do Workstations No Longer Matter?

Guest post by Anton Klotz 2007-01-18 Hardware 43 Comments

This article tries to explain why workstations are no longer an appropriate tool for the present working environment, what the alternatives are, and what consequences it has for the development of OSes.

Submitted by iangibson 2007-01-18 FreeBSD 49 Comments

FreeBSD 6.2, one of the most popular versions of the free BSD Unix operating system, is out with new features and updates. It plugs holes and, in addition to the usual route of installing directly to a hard drive this time around, offers a LiveCD that can be used to rescue a broken system. Developers on the free version of the BSD Unix operating system hope it will help build momentum for what is arguably the most popular BSD variant in use.

Submitted by tertiary_adjunct 2007-01-18 Windows 89 Comments

"Regardless of widespread skepticism, I was confident that Vista would dazzle me, and I looked forward to saying so in print. Ironically, playing around with Vista for more than a month has done what years of experience and exhortations from Mac-loving friends could not: it has converted me into a Mac fan."

Submitted by sogabe 2007-01-18 Zeta 32 Comments

Magnussoft has just announced that they are delaying the release of ZETA 1.5 Professional from 10 to 15 days in order to add a port of the AbiWord open source word processor, a native PCL6 printer driver and a Radeon x-series video driver. The addition of AbiWord is seen as a move to eventually replace the word processor component of GoBe Productive, a third party lightweight office suite currently bundled with ZETA that is no longer in development. Since AbiWord is released under the GPL, the port is expected to eventually benefit Haiku as well.

Despite 100 Million IE 7 Installs, IE Still Loses Ground

Submitted by Andy Harmony 2007-01-18 Internet 38 Comments

Although Microsoft recently touted the 100 millionth installation of Internet Explorer 7, Web measurement firms said that the new browser is simply being swapped out for older editions and hasn't had an impact on Firefox's continued climb. " January 8th, we had the 100 millionth IE7 installation," said Tony Chor, an IE group program manager, in an entry on the team's blog. "Even more important than installations is usage. According to WebSideStory (the company we use to measure browser usage), as of this week, over 25% of all visitors to sites in the U.S. were using IE7, making IE7 the second most used browser after IE6." While Microsoft had the WebSideStory numbers correct, it didn't tell the whole story, says Geoff Johnston, an analyst with the Web metrics company. " seems to be exclusively at the expense of IE 6," says Johnston. not eating into the Firefox share at all."