Monthly Archive:: November 2009

Geeks.com, a popular shop for computer parts and mp3 players sent us over the second generation iPod Touch 8 GB for a review. Check in for more!

Whether you like Microsoft or not, the Redmond giant does have one thing going for it: the company's research division. Working together with several universities and other institutions, Microsoft Research works on the soft and hardware of the future, ranging from research operating systems to insanely cool things like what Microsoft's chief research and strategy officer Craig Mundie showed off during the Microsoft College Tour '09 (more videos).

"There is a discussion at osnews.com about a simple question: "Should ZFS Have a fsck Tool?". The answer is simple: No. I could stop now, as this answer is pretty obvious when you work a while with ZFS, but i want to explain my position. And i want to ask a different question at the end."

"As a major Linux vendor, one might expect that Red Hat's new Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Servers solution would be able to run on Linux servers. You'd be wrong. Not only is that not the case, but the Management Server piece of RHEV, which provides virtualization management capabilities, requires users to be running Microsoft's Windows Server. That's no typo: A Linux vendor is requiring its users to run one of its key new products on the rival, closed source Windows operating system. According to Red Hat, the plan is to have a Linux version ready by some point in 2010. But in the meantime, Red Hat customers who want to run the virtualization manager must purchase or already own a Windows server."

Click-to-Run is a new technology Microsoft are introducing to allow you to test out Office 2010 quickly and easily, by literally streaming the app to your computer from the Internet into a virtualised space.

A few weeks ago, we asked you for ideas on interesting interview subjects. You had a lot of great ideas, and we started contacting people. We'll probably be working through that list for many months. We've decided to start with three interviews: Timothy Normand Miller from OGP, Michael Dexter at Linux Fund and the Arch Linux Team. We've created a "conversation" for each interview subject over at our conversations area. For the next few days, we're going to collect interview questions in the comments of those conversations.

We already had the news about Psystar's Rebel EFI possibly including open source code, but now we have another story which doesn't really seem to bode well for the small Florida clone maker. Gizmodo has a story on an interesting customer experience.

There's no right way to do it, only ideas that are better than others in certain situations. But if you had the opportunity to head up the design of a new OS, one to Put Things Right, one that could be radical enough to varnish out those UI/X bumps that have clung on for years, but practical enough to be used every day, what would you design? How would you handle application management? What about file types and compatibility? Where would you cherry pick the best bits from other OSes and where would you throw away tradition? I've tackled this challenge for myself and present (an unfinished idea): KrocOS (warning: HTML5 site, will display without CSS in IE/older browsers). OSnews Asks: What would make your perfect OS?

"Researchers say they've uncovered a flaw in the secure sockets layer protocol that allows attackers to inject text into encrypted traffic passing between two endpoints. The vulnerability in the transport layer security protocol allows man-in-the-middle attackers to surreptitiously introduce text at the beginning of an SSL session, said Marsh Ray, a security researcher who discovered the bug. A typical SSL transaction may be broken into multiple sessions, providing the attacker ample opportunity to sneak password resets and other commands into communications believed to be cryptographically authenticated. Practical attacks have been demonstrated against both the Apache and Microsoft IIS webservers communicating with a variety of client applications. A consortium of some of the world's biggest technology companies have been meeting since late September to hash out a new industry standard that will fix the flaw. A draft is expected to be submitted on Thursday to the Internet Engineering Task Force."

"Money can't buy everything, especially when it comes to freely available open source software from the Apache Software Foundation. The ASF is now celebrating its 10th anniversary as a non-profit foundation that has grown from its initial project, the Apache HTTP Web Server, to more than 60 projects today. The Apache HTTP Web Server remains the most widely deployed Web server today, with more than 42 million active sites, according to the latest data from research firm Netcraft. At the ApacheCon conference today, pioneers of the ASF talked about their experiences at the trail-blazing open source foundation. They also outlined why the ASF remains relevant today, and why money doesn't buy many favors."

When talking about the webOS, one of the main complaints is often that the operating system feels sluggish, especially considering the Pre has the same hardware as the iPhone 3GS. At a webOS Developer Event in London, Ben Galbraith and Dion Almaer (the Mozilla guys who joined Palm) talked about why this is the case, and hinted that it will be fixed sooner rather than later. They also addressed The One Question: will Palm ever open source the webOS?

We reported on the lack of Atom support in development builds of Mac OS X 10.6.2, but a more recent build re-enables support for Intel's Atom line, popular in netbooks. "In the latest development build Atom appears to have resurrected itself zombie style in 10C535. The Atom lives another day, but nothing is concrete until the final version of 10.6.2 is out."

"Google makes its Google Wave Federation Protocol available to let would-be Wave providers build their own Wave servers and get them communicating with other Wave servers, similar to the way e-mail servers talk to one another. This federation would ideally pave the way to making Wave ubiquitous, making it more available for future users. But given the learning curve stumping early users of Wave, how many programmers will want to build their own Wave servers? That remains to be seen."

KDE 4.3.3 has been released. "KDE 4.3.3 has a number of improvements that will make your life just a little bit better. Some of KWin's effects have been smoothed and freed of visual glitches, JuK should now be more stable, KDE PIM has seen its share of improvements while in the back-rooms of KDE, the developers are working hard on porting all applications to the new Akonadi storage and cache."