Is it Friday already? Where has the week gone? Whatever, we’ve got lots of good news tidbits for you this week, including several follow-ups to previous stories. Enough jaw-jacking, let’s get to the news.
Operating Systems
This week we got an early alpha of Google Chrome OS, which is slated for full release sometime in Q4 of 2010. ZDNet blogs and Ars technica have three good first looks at Chrome. First up is Adrian Kingsley-Hughes article Chrome OS – The good, the bad and the ugly, and how it fits in with Windows, Mac and Linux.
For a more security related view, Ryan Naraine has an early look into Chrome OS security with Inside the Google Chrome OS security model.
Lastly, Jon Stokes at Ars Technica has his own first look with screenshots in Chrome OS: Internet failing at PC > PC failing at Internet.
There’s a new Fedora in town. The popular Linux desktop put out by Red Hat released its newest version. Bill has gone crazy for Fedora articles today, so here’s a point form list of what he found.
- Fedora 12 Release Announcement. The announcement has links to the feature list, release notes, download page, etc.
- The Red Hat press release about Fedora 12 called Fedora 12 Unites Latest Features and Usability Into Compelling Free Distribution.
- Tip of the hat: Fedora 12 a strong update by Ryan Paul goes through some initial impressions of Fedora 12 and what it brings to the table.
- Christopher Smart at Linux Magazine has his own first look in Fedora, Still Pushing The Envelope.
- And finally the first major bug has been reported and fixed in Fedora 12. Fedora 12 lets unprivileged users install packages has the initial information about the bug, and PackageKit change has information on the fix.
Have you ever wondered just how much you can take out of Windows and still have a usable system? The Minwin project set out to find that out for you. Warren Rumak discusses Minwin and what it’s all about in Inside “MinWin”: the Windows 7 kernel slims down.
Data Centers
Scuttlemonkey at SlashDot posted a question about how to evaluate a datacenter. This question has elicited a flurry of discussion on the topic with some good (and bad) stories, but buried inside are many good thoughts on criteria that would be useful in any evaluation. Read more in “How Do You Evaluate a Data Center?“.
Data Center Knowledge has an interesting article by Kevin Normandeau. It’s all about how a greener datacenter can pay off in the long run. “…Amazon, Toyota, and Nike, have realized that focusing on limiting energy calories in the datacenter and elsewhere pays profitability dividends on the financial side” says the article, which draws on a whitepaper from IDC on the subject.
Also at Data Center Knowledge, Rick Miller has a note about Rackspace expanding its headquarters with a new 120,000 square foot expansion. See Rackspace Expands Its Headquarters for more, and a video tour of one of their offices.
Hardware
Cnet news has an article about the recently released Square Trade survey of laptop reliability. Square Trade is a warranty provider who offer coverage for many brands of laptops so they should know. See Who makes the most reliable laptops for some excerpts from the report, and the full report can be found in PDF format from the Square Trade website.
Security
A follow up from last week regarding the Microsoft “sudo” patent. According to Ryan Paul this patent does not cover sudo at all. Read more about it in Microsoft’s pseudo sudo patent doesn’t really cover sudo.
A follow up to a post from a couple of weeks ago—there is now an exploit for the mentioned SSL/TLS attack vector. Dan Goodin at The Register has more in his article Researcher busts into Twitter via SSL reneg hole. More technical details on the exploit can be found in Understanding the TLS Renegotiation Attack.
Software
A follow up to last week’s article, Microsoft confirms the Windows 7 USB/DVD download tool contained GPLv2 code and has indicated that they will provide the source/binaries for the tool under the GPL. Peter Galli from Microsoft’s Open Source division has more in Update on the Windows 7 USB/DVD Tool.
Internet
The UN-backed Internet Governance Forum was on last week in Egypt. One of the hot topics was ownership of the DNS root domain, which is currently controlled by the US. This made sense when the internet was only in the US universities, but with the global nature of the ‘Net, there is no good reason for a single country to have control of something that controls the basic functionality of the internet. Janna Quitney Anderson has more in IGF attendees: America, surrender the root zone file!
Virtualization
A follow-up review on VMWare Fusion 3, running Windows 7 in OSX. Dave Girard has put Fusion through its paces; read about his results in Running Windows 7 under OS X: Ars reviews VMware Fusion 3.
That’ll do it for this week’s edition. As always feel free to add your own news or perspective in the comments. See y’all next week!
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