J2SE 6.0 (“Mustang”) Early Access Realease
Sun Microsystem has just released the early access editíon of J2SE 6.0 (Mustang).
Monthly Archive:: December 2004
Securing IE
There's been a lot of hoopla about Firefox lately, and its security/privacy benefits over IE. However, here this guide can lead you to tools and practices that will make IE safer to use, for those who don't want to stop using IE.
File Systems and Databases
The topic of combining a database system (usually a conventional relational db system) with a file system to add meta-data, a richer set of attributes to files, has been a recurring discussion item on this and other sites. The article published last week, Rethinking the OS, under the heading "Where Is It Stored?" talks about the ability to locate a file without knowing the exact name or location.
Blast from the Past: Mac Portable
Do you remember this one? It was pretty amazing when it came out. The Mac Portable was heavy, innovative, and mildly successful. The first portable to include a full keyboard, and trackball, the Portable also included a Lead Acid battery, providing 12 hours of battery life. Read the article at MLAgazine
Linux Versus Solaris – Linus’ Perspective
"Because I personally don't think they have anything left worth taking after I've applied the general Unix principles. I really do think Linux is the better system by now, in all the ways that matter." Read more here
Implications for Power Architecture
Major electronics companies have come together to form a new standards body focused on Power Architecture technology. Power.org will create and promote a family of standards, reference designs, and more. Here's a developer's-eye view of the future and implications for Power Architecture standardization.
Major Security Bug in PHP
A serious bug in the popular PHP development language, which affects php versions prior to 4.3.10 or 5.0.3, can leave databases wide open to intrusion if the proper security steps aren't taken.
Computer Best-Of List: 2004
OSNews contributor Thom Holwerda posted his end of 2004 best of list, filled with lots of OS-related highs and lows for the year. I particularly like his "Best Computer News Site.
How to Kill Open Source on the Desktop
A KDE developer opines that the move to port the top open source applications to Windows will undermine the potential for a widely-used open source desktop operating system.
Knoppix Will Split into 2 Editions
Uber-popular Linux live CD Knoppix will split into a "lite" version, optimized for older computer, and a "maximum" version targetting newer machines, which contains more Debian packages.
64-bit Support in Tiger Is Only for Server Processes
In the new article "Developing 64-bit Applications" of the
"Tiger Developer Overview Series" published on ADC, Apple states that the Cocoa and Carbon GUI application frameworks will not be ready for 64-bit programming. Even the kernel will be compiled in 32-bit address mode and will be provided in only one version for all the machines. The only 64-bit system framework which will be provided in a "fat" format will be libSystem which command-line applications, servers and computation engines will be linkable to. The 32-bit GUI clients will be capable however to communicate with the 64-bit server processes by using several IPC techniques.
FreeBSD: ULE Scheduler Status
Since the decision to demote ULE
in favor of the 4BSD scheduler as the default for FreeBSD's
5.3-Release, many improvements to both schedulers have been committed.
At the time it was marked broken,
ULE was especially needy in light of the status of its maintainership,
performance issues, and its unreliable nature in conjunction with threading and kernel preemption. Having resolved these problems, Jeff Roberson announces to -current that the ULE code is now in working order: More information can be found on kerneltrap.org.
PCLinuxOS Preview 8 Released
The much awaited new preview of PCLinuxOS has been released: "PCLinuxOS Preview 8 comes with kernel 2.6.7 with udev support. KDE 3.3.2, OpenOffice.org 1.1.3, Firefox 1.0 with plugin support, Thunderbird 1.0, P2P filesharing for Kazza and Gnutella, and many more applications." Read more here. Also, check out the screenshot tour at OSDir.com.
Ant Scripting with Groovy
The ubiquity and utility of Ant as a build tool for Java projects is virtually unsurpassed. Even Maven, the new, upstart utility in the build arena, owes much of its power to lessons learned from Ant. This article introduces Groovy's builder utility, which makes it especially easy to combine Groovy with Ant and Maven for more expressive and controllable builds.
GNU/Hurd: Support For Partitions Larger Than 2 GB
The debian project has some interesting developments related to its GNU/Hurd port, including a solution to the annoying limitation mentioned above.
Changes in the Open Source Database Landscape
Newsforge reviews the effect of recently open sourced databases like IBM's Cloudscape and CA's Ingres and its effect on the classic open source players like MySQL and PostgreSQL as well as the proprietary database leader Oracle
FreeBSD 5.3: “Stable” But Not Production-Ready
After much development and four previous releases, FreeBSD-5 has finally gone stable with version 5.3. But don't mistake a stable codebase with stable software. While the development team will no longer accept major changes to the base system, FreeBSD 5.3 still has bugs and problems. NewsForge has the review.
Review: FreeSBIE 1.1 – Free System Burned In Economy
Version 1.1 of FreeSBIE, a FreeBSD Live CD, was released last week, and here's a first look. Update: Screenshots via OSDir.com.
Commodore 64 Lives!
Jeri Ellsworth, a 30-year-old high school dropout and self-taught computer chip designer, has re-created the entire Commodore 64 on one chip and inserted it into a joystick, with several games, (like the cool Atari-in-a-joystick games) allowing nostalgic thirtysomethings to relive their youths. A NYT/news.com article has an interesting profile of Ellsworth, her creation, and other projects she's worked on.
Impressions From a Fedora PPC Installation
Fedora PPC is now in test stage, a Fedora Core 3 test was released last week. Here few impressions and screenshots on this test release.