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What started as the review of a bug report grew into an interesting debate as Linus Torvalds slammed the current suspend and resume [story] design in the Linux Kernel,"why the HELL cannot you realize that kernel threads are different? The right thing to do is AND HAS ALWAYS BEEN, to stop and start user threads only around the whole thing. Don't touch those kernel threads. Stop freezing them." Later in the discussion, Linus noted that he had no interest in Suspend to Disk (STD), and was only interested in a working Suspend to Ram (STR) implementation. He noted that complexity introduced by STD was infecting the STR logic, and that the two should be completely separated,"what irritates me is that STR really shouldn't have _had_ that bug at all. The only reason STR had the same bug as STD was exactly the fact that the two features are too closely inter-twined in the kernel. That irritates me hugely. We had a bug we should never had had! We had a bug because people are sharing code that shouldn't be shared! We had a bug because of code that makes no sense in the first place!" Linus noted that he doesn't use laptops much, but still likes STR on his desktop,"STR means they are quiet and don't waste energy when I don't use them, but they're instantly available when I care." He then went on to point to design flaws in the freezer:"I actually don't think that processes should be frozen really at all. I agree that filesystems have to be frozen (and I think that checkpointing of the filesystem or block device is'too clever'), but I just don't think that has anything to do with freezing processes. So I'd actually much prefer to freeze at the VFS (and socket layers, etc), and make sure that anybody who tries to write or do something else that we cannot do until resuming, will just be blocked (or perhaps just buffered)!"read more

STAR-CD, built with PGI compilers, delivers optimum performance across multiple x64 platforms

At Noon EDT, the Tux 500 campaign came to an end. The final donation came in, the final piece of merchandise was purchased. And final total is.... * drumroll *

For the next interview in the fortnightly People Behind KDE series we remain in North America, down to the deserts of Arizona to meet an astronomer who uses his work expertise to bring the galaxy to our desktops - tonight's star of People Behind KDE is Jason Harris.

The ground rules Interview: TIBCO's Stefan Farestam talks with Reg Developer about the ground rules of SOA governance.

[Any interest in SOA governance around here? - dcparris]

Part 2: Runtime efficiency issues in Mac Cocoa programming: Last time round, we looked at the way an unnamed developer had used Cocoa routines to chop up a simple C-string in order to determine whether or not it contained a particular, named OpenGL extension name.

[Not necessarily GNU/Linux-related, but Cocoa and OpenGL may be of some interest to our audience. If not, go ahead and holler. We'll unpost it. - dcparris]

The always provocativeBrad Templeton, whohung out with a large cadre of geeks at the Internet Identity Workshop (IIW, orIIW2007) last week, has some cautions about new identity systems, even if they are all"user-centric". These cautions lie in a paradox:"The easier it is to give somebody ID information, the more often it will be done. Andthe easier it is to give ID information, the more palatable it is to ask for, or demand it." The italics are his.Here he hits on the problem of market power asymmetries (vendors strong, customers weak) that have been with us for the whole Industrial Age, and are with us still. I think we have a way to overcome those, and that Brad's Paradox may provide exactly the conceptual hurdle we need to see before we can make progress.So let's start with Brad's explanation:

Change Reflects the Company's Inherent Strengths and Sole Focus on Online Network of Properties

The Standards Council of Canada is seeking comments on a proposal to adopt Office Open XML (Open XML or OOXML) as an international standard. So far there are over 130 comments to this proposal and the message is clear. People don't want OOXML. They want a truly open standard that isn't controlled by only one company. People want OpenDocument Format (ODF).

In these days lot of good things for GNU/Linux are happening or about to happen. Is the future of GNU/Linux looking bright for the first time? What good stuff is arrived and what is coming?

Dell promotional video discussing Ubuntu Linux

The third release of Xubuntu, the variant of Ubuntu with the lightweight Xfce desktop, appeared last month. Feisty Fawn (version 7.04) uses the final gold code of Xfce 4.4.0 rather than the release candidates in Edgy Eft (version 6.10) and Dapper Drake (version 6.06). I had very positive experiences with both Edgy and Dapper so I had very high expectations for Xubuntu Feisty Fawn. In some ways the new release does take a step forward but in some truly important areas it took a couple of steps backwards and has been something of a disappointment.

In a recentlkml thread the concept of dumping an image of the kernel's memory to swap when the kernel hits a bug was discussed.

Learn how to construct and deconstruct a simple multicluster using the General Parallel File System (GPFS), and remotely add an existing GPFS cluster to another cluster. GPFS is the parallel file system from IBM for AIX 5L and Linux clusters made up of System x and System p computers.

The lead developer of the Hugin panorama-stitching application, Pablo d'Angelo, has proposed a new open database for collecting camera lens information that could be used to correct systematic distortion in photographs. The database would be populated by user-submitted calibration data and some data donated from a competitor, but the exact format and licensing of the database are still under consideration. One developer's suggestion would make proprietary software that uses the database pay for the privilege.

Redmond itself will be up against software patents in a few years, says Ubuntu founder who believes Microsoft's real threat is the same as everyone else's.

TrueCrypt is free software that encrypts data “on-the-fly”. You can create an encrypted hard drive, a separate partition or a directory with TrueCrypt. It doesn’t encrypt simply the content of files but their names and the names of the directories as well. Moreover there is no way to check the size of the encrypted volume. TrueCrypt is available for Windows and Linux. |

gFTP is a complete, easy-to-use file transfer tool for the Linux desktop. In spite of its name, gFTP can transfer files using more than standard File Transfer Protocol; it provides several features that make it more than just another FTP client.

Develop and deploy a sample application using the Spring MVC framework.

Elitegroup Computer Systems is known for their array of products from desktop computers to graphics cards and motherboards. At hand today we have their NF650iSLIT-A motherboard, which is powered by NVIDIA's nForce 650i Chipset and caters toward the computer enthusiast crowd, but can it really deliver?