Like good day and welcome to issue 6 eh. This is another light one as it’s been another busy week. I have not had any time of my own to crawl through the news, but luckily my cohort Bill has flagged some good stuff for this week. Let’s get to it.
Internet
Happy Birthday FireFox! The browser turns 5 years old today. Ryan Paul has more in his article
Firefox turns five: half a decade of Web liberation.
The Google Chromium blog has an interesting post called A 2x Faster Web about their attempts to speed up your surfing. “The initial results are very encouraging: when we download the top 25 websites over simulated home network connections, we see a significant improvement in performance – pages loaded up to 55% faster”, says the blog. This is still in early testing phases but sounds very promising.
Operating Systems
Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols at Computerworld reflects on his time using linux on the desktop in Opinion: Linux desktop turns 10; world yawns. The article needs to be taken with a grain of salt. He states in the preamble that “The credit for creating and marketing the first Linux desktop designed for ordinary users goes to Corel Corp., which launched Corel Linux OS 10 years ago, in November 1999”. I take umbrage with this statement because by 1999 Caldera and Mandrake were already making great strides with linux on the desktop, Caldera even had a pretty boxed edition out in stores 2 years ahead of Corel, and Mandrake had a box out in 1998 (if memory serves). Sure Corel had a big name and some marketing power, but they were not the first and certainly not the best (Corel Linux sucked IMHO).
Security
This next article is a combination of software, security, legal, patents and what the hell. Microsoft Patents Sudo?!! is a story with it all. Microsoft has taken something that has been in use in the unix community since the 80s (and on Mac since OSX) and patented it. I wonder if RBAC is also covered by this? The link to the patent and information on sudo are included in the article.
Help Net Security has a post about a recent Cenzic report on web server and browser vulnerabilities. Read all about it in Firefox most vulnerable browser, Safari close second.
Software
According to Ars Technica, Novell is “offering a new commercial add-in for Visual Studio that will allow software developers to test and package .NET applications for Linux without having to leave their Windows development environment”. The new add-in, called MonoVS is available now for a free 30 day trial.
According to the WithinWindows blog Microsoft may have used GPL code in it’s released Windows 7 USB/DVD Download tool without contacting the author or releasing the source code back to the community. The article has some evidence to support this claim. Microsoft has pulled the tool pending further investigation.
Virtualization
Slashdot has a note about The Remus project. This project adds live migration/failover functionality to the Xen hypervisor allowing virtual machines to (reportedly) seamlessly move to another host without losing data or active connections. This was one of the last things that VMWare ESX offered that I could not find in the open source (read free) world so I’ll be sure to check it out myself.
Business
HP to Acquire 3Com for $2.7 Billion is a new release at the HP site. There’s a lot in there, read it for yourself. Hopefully this will be a good boost for 3Com which has not made anything outstanding since the 3c501.
A couple of items on the AMD front. Firstly AMD and Intel Announce Settlement of All Antitrust and IP Disputes which I hope will bury the hatchet once and for all and allow both companies to get back to innovation. Secondly, AMD has release some more news about their future roadmap and the “fusion” of CPU with GPU in AMD avoiding Larrabee route on road to CPU/GPU “Fusion” by Jon Stokes.
Well there was a couple more items on the list but I am out of time. Have a great weekend!
So like get lost eh! Hoser!
Brad
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