Monthly Archive:: January 2011

ARM Introduces Dual-Core Cortex-R5, R7 MPCore

  Submitted by sawboss Hardware 4 Comments
"Processor design company ARM has today unveiled two new updates to its Cortex-R range of processors: the Cortex-R5 MPCore and the Cortex-R7 MPCore. While the Cortex-A processors can be found in mainstream consumer products such as cell phones and tablet devices, the Cortex-R chips are meant for deeply-embedded and system-on-a-chip duties. Notably you can find the last generation Cortex-R4 in hard disk drive controllers, wireless baseband processors, and automotive systems."
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Intel Discovers Bug in 6-Series Chipset

  Submitted by gogothebee Intel 4 Comments
"Intel just announced that it has identified a bug in the 6-series chipset, specifically in its SATA controller. Intel states that 'In some cases, the Serial-ATA ports within the chipsets may degrade over time, potentially impacting the performance or functionality of SATA-linked devices such as hard disk drives and DVD-drives'. The fix requires new hardware, which means you will have to exchange your motherboard for a new one. Intel hasn't posted any instructions on how the recall will be handled other than to contact Intel via its support page or contact the manufacturer of your hardware directly."
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Francis Ford Coppola: “Who Says Artists Have to Make Money?”

Multimedia, AV 152 Comments
Francis Ford Coppola is one of the most prestigious and critically acclaimed directors in cinematographic history. He directed, among others, the Godfather trilogy and Apocalypse Now, and has won so many awards it's hard to keep track. In an interview with 99%, he touched on the subject of art and making money, and his musings are fascinating, and yet another indication that the times are changing in the content industry. "Who says artists have to make money?" Coppola wonders.
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Pirate Bay, Decentralised P2P-DNS, ICANN

  Submitted by fsmag Internet 18 Comments
"I've always been a great fan of the law of unintended consequences. It takes you places. Unexpected places. Sometimes good, sometimes bad but never a dull moment. The recent kerfuffle over Pirate Bay is too well known to require detailed recounting here. What is really interesting though is where it might just eventually take us in terms of internet freedom. This article describes the one fallout of the legal judgements against Pirate Bay and how its response may unintentionally help to protect and promote internet freedoms."
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Portable C Compiler Approaching 1.0

General Development 63 Comments
The BSD licensed Portable C Compiler (PCC) is steadily on the road for a 1.0 release and is now able to compile a FreeBSD/amd64 CURRENT system with almost no changes. The current version of PCC has evolved from the original PCC developed at Bell Labs during the 1970s and has been maintained by Anders Magnusson and a small team of developers during the last decade. It has received more attention during the last few years, especially by OpenBSD and NetBSD people seeing it at as a viable option as a GCC replacement.
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Microsoft Asks Intel for a 16-core Atom Server Chip

Intel 20 Comments
"The Intel Atom processor line is associated with low power usage in devices such as a netbook or nettop computer. The emphasis is definitely not on performance, it's on pushing up battery life on a device with a small display and mid-range graphics requirements while still managing a decent desktop experience. Microsoft thinks Atom can do more, though, and wants to use it in servers. With that in mind it is calling on Intel to up the cores in an Atom chip to 16, and deploying it as a low power server chip solution."
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McKusick Tells of the BSD Days As Only He Can

BSD & Darwin 4 Comments
"The drought of those who speak without depending on slides has ended at the 12th Australian national Linux conference. Last evening, Marshall Kirk McKusick, a well-known BSD hacker, took those assembled down a slightly different track - after all, this is a Linux conference - with his narrative history of BSD. And what a rollicking ride it was! And the venue for his talk could hold only 100 people. He based his talk on notes he had made while travelling through Australia on a train in 1986 - he was a keynote speaker at the now-defunct Australian UNIX and Open Systems User Group conference in 1986."
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Hobby OS-deving 1: Are You Ready?

OS News 89 Comments
It's recently been a year since I started working on my pet OS project, and I often end up looking backwards at what I have done, wondering what made things difficult in the beginning. One of my conclusions is that while there's a lot of documentation on OS development from a technical point of view, more should be written about the project management aspect of it. Namely, how to go from a blurry "I want to code an OS" vision to either a precise vision of what you want to achieve, or the decision to stop following this path before you hit a wall. This article series aims at putting those interested in hobby OS development on the right track, while keeping this aspect of things in mind.
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Judge Silences GeoHot, Seizes His Computers

Legal 47 Comments
"Sony has won its request for a temporary restraining order in its PS3 jailbreak case against Geohot and fail0verflow, despite a jurisdictional technicality. At the same time, the judge at the US District Court for the Northern District of California has allowed Sony to keep the lawsuit in San Francisco. The restraining order forbids the jailbreak team from distributing or linking the jailbreak procedure, or encouraging others to jailbreak or hack their PS3 or PSN. They've also been ordered to turn over any computers or storage media used to create the jailbreak to Sony's lawyers." Land of the free fail.
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NICTA Releases Security Software for Operating Systems

Privacy, Security 4 Comments
"National ICT Australia, in conjunction with Open Kernel Labs, has released new software aimed at researchers, developers and manufacturers that has the ability to protect computer hardware from failure or being attacked. The seL4 microkernel is a small operating system kernel which regulates access to a computer's hardware and is able to distinguish between trusted and untrusted software."
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Concept Enables PC Operating Systems to Survive Attacks

  Submitted by jimmy1971 Privacy, Security 4 Comments
"Researchers at North Carolina State University have developed a method to restore a computer operating system to its former state if it is attacked. The concept involves taking a snapshot of the operating system at strategic points in time (such as system calls or interrupts), when it is functioning normally and, then, if the operating system is attacked, to erase everything that was done since the last 'good' snapshot was taken - effectively going back in time to before the operating system attack. The mechanism also allows the operating system to identify the source of the attack and isolate it, so that the operating system will no longer be vulnerable to attacks from that application. The idea of detecting attacks and resetting a system to a safe state is a well-known technique for restoring a system's normal functions after a failure, but this is the first time researchers have developed a system that also incorporates the security fault isolation component. This critical component prevents the operating system from succumbing to the same attack repeatedly."
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New Linux Network Device Naming To Be Tested by Fedora

Fedora Core 13 Comments
Fedora is holding a Test Day tomorrow (2011-01-27) to test a new network device naming scheme, as implemented by the biosdevname utility provided by Dell. biosdevname aims to give network interfaces names that are both consistent and appropriate to their physical attributes (onboard device number, or PCI slot), an approach that has been kicked around upstream for a while. This new system will likely come to most distros in future. The Fedora test day will concentrate on making sure it behaves as intended on both new installations and upgrades.
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