Monthly Archive:: March 2009

In a move that shouldn't surprise anyone, Microsoft has finally started to run an ad that's a direct attack against Apple. Previous marketing campaigns by Microsoft have always more or less ignored Apple, but the company's latest commercial is a direct attack on Apple in a place where it should hurt Apple the most: price.

Just now, both the server and desktop editions of the Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope beta have been released. It comes with a boatload of new features, some of which come courtesy of upstream. A new GNOME release, a new X.org release, a new notification system, they're all in there.

Winner of this and last year's PWN2OWN contest Charlie Miller made some bold statements last week, stating that Mac OS X is easier to exploit than Windows. In a new interview with Tom's Hardware, Miller explains that that doesn't mean users should avoid Mac OS X for security reasons. He also gives a little more insight into his winning exploits, and what exactly they do.

The Windows 7 beta release is already a few months old now, and Microsoft has already made quite a number of changes to its new windows release after that, as detailed in the Engineering 7 weblog. These changes would make it to the public via the release candidate, but it has always been a bit unclear as to when it would arrive. Thanks to a slip-up, we now know the RC is coming in May.

ZFS and unbreakable upgrades were introduced in an earlier article. XercesTech has written a detailed article on how apt-get and zfs join forces to provide a worry-free upgrade experience. "While some operating systems provide the ability to roll back changes, they usually require significant time, or an experienced user with some external repair tools. The goal here is to be instant, if something goes wrong with an upgrade, it should be possible to boot into the old system without running any terminal commands, booting any rescue system or installation disc, or otherwise manually rolling things back."

Techradar had a day touring Samsung's European forum and had the chance to interview Samsung's Head of Worldwide Sales and Marketing, Kyu Uhm. During the session, Uhm mentioned that future Samsung netbooks will undoubtedly include Windows 7, but having a full version as opposed to the sorry Starter Edition was iffy. It was also mentioned that future Samsung netbooks installed with a Linux distribution was a slight possibility if enough customers truly wanted it.

A week ago, we reported that IBM was in acquisition talks with Sun. Sun has been in trouble for a while now, and has been shopping around the Valley for a potential buyers for the company. This report came from "people familiar with the matter", but it seems that we now have a confirmation from none other than Intel's CEO, Paul Otellini.

Contiki released their newest version of the Contiki OS, 2.2.3. Contiki is an open source OS that is generally used to run very portable, networked embedded systems and wireless sensor networks. The typical RAM and ROM footprint of a Contiki configuration is two kilobytes and 40 kilobytes, respectively; if that's not 'highly portable,' I don't know what is. New features in 2.2.3 include checkpointing, which stores the complete execution state of a system in a single file; per-packet power profiling, which allows fine-grained breakdown of power consumption; announcements, which make neighbor and route announcements protocol-independent; and Deluge, a bulk data dissemination protocol. New ports to the Meshnetics ZigBit and Sentilla JCreate modules were also released.

On Friday, KDE officially launched its version of Dell's IdeaStorm - KDE Brainstorm. In less than 24 hours, over 100 new ideas were proposed. "Getting the non-developer and developer communities really communicating is often a challenge, and KDE's approach is a great start. Developers now have an opportunity to hear what end-users want."

A Test Day is planned tomorrow (Thursday 26th) for the Nouveau driver for NVIDIA graphics cards. This is a Fedora test day due to the inclusion of nouveau as the default driver in Fedora 11, but will be of interest to users of all distributions, as most are likely to switch to nouveau as their default driver in future, and all the work done by Fedora will be contributed to the upstream development of the driver. i586 and x86-64 live CD images are available, so anyone can easily help out with the testing without any kind of permanent changes to your machine.

Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst questioned the relevance of Linux on the desktop, citing several financial and interoperability hurdles to business adoption at a panel on end-users and Linux last night at the OSBC.

InfoWorld's Tom Yager writes in favor of Unix in IT, which has been increasingly losing ground to Linux. "Unix matters for a reason that escapes analysts' notice," Yager writes. "It's that little circle with the R in it." Asking whether IT would rather have a vendor's promise to interoperate with competitors' systems, or a contract obliging them to, Yager stresses the importance of The Open Group's registered trademark of the Unix 03 spec. "The trademark provides IT organizations that need to be sure, without need for digging, that Unix means something, and it does. It means that Unix enterprise solutions work and work together, without regard for the brand on the hardware" -- a guarantee of interoperability that is the "product of cooperation among Unix vendors, IT operations, universities, and professional organizations."

Recently, Microsoft released Internet Explorer 8, which boasted much better standards compliance than previous iterations of the browser. While it passed the Acid2 test, IE8 failed miserably in the Acid3 test, and many people criticised Microsoft for it. Microsoft Australia's Nick Hodge has stated that Microsoft purposefully decided not to support Acid3, because the test tests against draft standards.

Eric S. Raymond is one of the three big figures in open source, together with Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman. During a talk for the Long Island Linux User Group, he made some interesting statements about the GPL, namely that the GPL is no longer needed due to the way the open source movement works.