Internet Archive

Adam Dunkels, author of Contiki and the uIP embedded TCP/IP stack, held a talk at NUCCC 2005 this weekend about writing really small TCP/IP stacks and making them withstand slashdottings. Adam's various TCP/IP stacks have been both slashdotted and osnewsed several times. Nice quote from the talk: "Great hacks are the diamonds of computer science: 'Useless', yet priceless!".

A mass market exists for the mobile Internet, but it will remain untapped until designers make simpler Web pages that can be viewed properly on handsets, a pioneer of the World Wide Web said. More editorials on the subjects here and here. This is a good opportunity to remind everyone that both OSNews.com and GnomeFiles.org support ~120 mobile HTML-capable devices automatically (no reason to enter special URLs) in addition to our WAP-only sites. About 2,000 readers visit daily OSNews with such devices (out of ~250,000 readers, on average, daily).

BitTorrent 4.0.0 is released for Windows and Linux. The Mac OS X version is pending.

Keeping directories in sync on multiple machines can be difficult. Running Unison is one way to make the task easier.

StanaPhone is the first free telephone with real US phone numbers, and a Skype competitor.

Internet browser speed tests: Opera seems to be the fastest browser for Windows. Firefox is not faster than IE, except for scripting, but for standards support, security and features, it is a better choice.

1.0 versions of Voice over IP application Skype have been released for Linux and OS X. They've been in Beta for several months. These versions seem to have feature parity with the Windows versions, and cross-platform communication is possible.

Howl is a cross platform implementation of the Zeroconf zero configuration networking standard. It includes daemons and a client side SDK for registering, browsing, and resolving network services, and assigning link local IP addresses without a DHCP server. On Windows 2000/XP, it includes a sidebar in Internet Explorer that allows users to browse zeroconf-enabled Web and FTP servers. This release fixes a broken Makefile.am and a compilation error on FreeBSD. Elsewhere, Apple has recently released Technology Preview 3 of Rendezvous for Windows.

What happens when the corporation anybody seems to love to hate, namely Microsoft, release a killer app and of makes it free (as in dollars), but, of course, keeps its source jealously closed? And worse than that, use it to maintain a strong lock-in to the Windows platform?

AWLP - (Alptekin's Wireless Linux Project) is an open-source wireless software project that turns a Slackware Linux machine into a dedicated web-managed wireless access gateway. It has pretty much all the features you would expect from an off-the-shelf wireless access gateway. Description, detailed installation instructions, screenshots and downloadable source tarballs can be found at http://awlp.sourceforge.net

Microsoft and Sun Microsystems last week issued a progress report on the technical truce the companies called this year but gave little indication of what specific fixes they would devise to address customers' problems.

In this article we'll examine the range of choices available for Linux network file systems. While the choices are many, we'll see that Linux still faces significant innovation challenges; yesterday's network paradigm isn't necessarily the best approach to the network of tomorrow.

A group of researchers have found a way to quickly transfer huge amounts of data over computer networks, paving the way for greater global scientific cooperation and future commercial uses.

OneStat.com today reported that Mozilla's browsers have a total global usage share of 7.35 percent. The new Mozilla's Firefox has a total usage share of 4.58. Microsoft's Internet Explorer still dominates the global browser market with a global usage share of 88,90 percent which is 5 percent less as at the end of May.