Monthly Archive:: March 2008

"Windows' enterprise adoption declined in 2007, with the gains going to Linux and Mac OS. Vista is a bust. Forrester published the data on Thursday, but only released it publicly today. Forrester surveyed a whopping 50,000 users at 2,300-plus large to very large enterprises throughout 2007. Windows' enterprise adoption declined 3.7 percent, going from 98.6 percent in January to 94.9 percent in December. Mac OS gained 3 percent, going from 1.2 percent to 4.2 percent in the same time frame. Linux gained 0.5 percent in 2007." A classic case of 'do with it as you please'.

Linus Torvalds has a sense of humour. "Youtube no workee - Fedora 9 not usable for wife." So begins a bug he filed on Fedora's Bugzilla. "I didn't try a lot of videos, but I couldn't find a single one that actually worked. And what's the internet without the rick-roll? Some just show a light gray background, some give the play buttons etc, but show only a black screen even when the red ball at the bottom moves along. Steps to reproduce: 1. Install current Fedora 9; 2. Rick-roll!; 3. No profit!" Thanks to Fefes Blog and dr_evil in #haiku for pointing this one out.

Nvidia was cited as causing nearly 30 percent of early Vista crashes, while Microsoft itself was to blame for nearly 18 percent. Intel and ATI each accounted for about 9 percent of crashes, according to the documents in the Windows Vista Capable lawsuit.

"The U series from Asus has been one sort of an X factor in ultraportable notebooks for the past generation or two. Not being from a company like Dell, HP, or Lenovo, it tends to not get as much attention, but emerged as interesting alternatives. These models are most popular with PC builders and people already familiar with the Asus brand. The U6S is a 12.1" notebook with a Core 2 Duo T7500 processor and a weight of 3.5lbs."

As you surely know by now, the CanSecWest conference was the stage for a contest, PWN to OWN. Three laptops were set up; laptops running Windows Vista, Ubuntu Linux, and Mac OS X. The goal was to hack the computer and read the contents of a file located on each of the machines, using a 0day code execution vulnerability. During the first day, you can only attack the machine over the network, without physical access. On the second day, user interaction comes into play (visiting a website, opening an email). On the third and final day, third-party applications are added to the mix. Each machine had the same cash prize on its head. As you all know, the Mac was hacked first, on day two. The user only had to visit a website, and the Mac was hacked. Vista got hacked on the third day using a security hole in Adobe's Flash, and the Ubuntu machine did not get hacked at all. Update: Roughly Drafted responds.

"Considering that the previous revisions were surprisingly unstable, I can honestly call this one the most stable of the ones I have tested until now. I experienced only one crash and the performance was more than satisfactory. Now I can be almost sure that when a stable edition of KDE 4.1 is published, I will definitely say good bay to my old good KDE 3.5."

"Apple issued the first Mac OS X 10.5.3 seed (9d10) to developers yesterday. The latest update to Apple's Mac OS X Leopard addresses dozens of outstanding issues. Fixes range from Dashboard, Parental Controls, iCal Synchronization, memory leaks and stability issues. All in all, 75 distinct bug fixes are listed in the accompanying seed notes."

Version 2.4 of the OpenOffice productivity suite was released on Thursday, boasting enhancements to all its core components. Possibly the most significant alteration in the new version of the free suite is in the description of file types. The 'OpenDocument' description has been replaced by 'ODF', which stands for 'OpenDocument Format' and is becoming a well-known acronym thanks to rivalry with Microsoft's controversial OOXML format.

"An Apple Mac was the first victim in a hacker shoot-out to determine which operating system is the most secure. A former US National Security Agency employee has trousered USD 10000 for breaking into a MacBook Air at CanSecWest security conference's PWN 2 OWN hacking contest. The MacBook was lined up against Linux and Vista PCs - which have so far remained uncracked. Nobody was able to hack into the systems on the first day of the contest when contestants were only allowed to attack the computers over the network, but yesterday the rules were relaxed so that attackers could direct contest organisers using the computers to do things like visit websites or open email messages. The MacBook was the only system to be hacked by Thursday. Miller didn't need much time. He quickly directed the contest's organisers to visit a website that contained his exploit code, which then allowed him to seize control of the computer, as about 20 onlookers cheered him on. He was the first contestant to attempt an attack on any of the systems." There is more bad news for Apple: "If you have Apple and compare it to Microsoft, the number of unpatched vulnerabilities are higher at Apple." Update: The contest is over. Vista got hacked using Adobe's Flash, Ubuntu was left standing.

An outside contributor to Syllable going under the name Bean has rewritten the AFS filesystem driver for GRUB 2. The original driver was for GRUB 1 and was derived from the full AFS driver. This meant that the copyright could not be reassigned to the FSF, so the GRUB project didn't want to integrate the code. The new driver is much smaller and looks like it will be integrated into GRUB, so Syllable will have a new boot loader and maintenance will become much easier. Before that happens, though, more porting work needs to be done on GRUB 2 to integrate it in the build process and installer. Eventually, this will lead to EFI support and support by other operating systems to boot Syllable. Here is a separate test CD that is capable of booting an existing Syllable installation on disk. In addition, Ruwen Boehm got the newest version of PHP to work, so for the first time since AtheOS times there is a new PHP port. A binary package for version 5.2.5 is now available for download.

"Well the day has finally come, development of Automatix has been discontinued. We are doing this, not because we think Automatix is no longer necessary on Ubuntu and Debian, but because all of the Automatix developers have become wrapped up in more pressing commitments. I, Jared, have been asked by Technalign Inc. to assist in the development of the next version of their GNU/Linux distribution, Pioneer Warrior. I will use what I have learned as an Automatix developer to make Pioneer Warrior the best GNU/Linux distribution for the average user. Arnie, and the other Automatix Team members, currently are too involved in their personal lives to do justice to the Automatix project as well. We thank our loyal users for the years of support they have given us, and we wish them well on their journey in the world of free software."

As posted recently in the Haiku blogs, the April 2008 issue of the Japanese publication Software Design Magazine carries an article titled 'Writing Haiku: Begun in 2001, an open source replication of BeOS finally nears its alpha release' in its Pacific Connections series written by Bart Eisenberg. This is an eight pages long article that includes a full interview of Axel Dorfler, as well as comments from Bryan Varner (Haiku Java Port team lead) and Dane Scott, of TuneTracker fame. Go ahead and check out the English version of the article.

The web has been abuzz the past two days with the 'news' that it was supposedly illegal to run Safari for Windows on anything but an Apple-branded computer. It was obviously a mistake, so I decided to run no story on it. Now, however, it has specifically been fixed by Apple; Ars decided to phone Apple PR, and they fixed the issue. The WebKit guys also offer a fix for the 'fuzzy fonts' issue on Safari for Windows.

In targeting casinos, restaurants, and hotels, Microsoft knows it is barely scratching the surface of the demand for its tabletop computer. The company is convinced there is a mass market for an interactive touch-screen computer, but perhaps not in its current USD 10000 version. CEO Steve Ballmer told financial analysts last month that Microsoft had a plan to speed up the arrival of a consumer version of the tabletop computer Surface.