Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

ReadyTechs provides network support services for companies that don't want the expense of hiring and caring for their own employees. Now CEO Gerry Libertelli says the company is using Linux virtualization to open a new income stream based on cloud computing. Libertelli say he catches his existing customers at the end-of-life stage in hardware maintenance to offer them more than just virtual server administration. "We intervene in the hardware stream and say, 'How about a virtual network?' And that is starting to ramp up."

Dan Kaminsky spoke to a packed house at Black Hat on 6 August to outline the fundamental flaw he found in the Domain Name System (DNS). Contrary to his hopes, though, the flaw was discovered and publicized before his presentation. The vulnerability is interesting in its own right, but the implications of what can be done with it are staggering. In addition, the "fix" has well understood shortcomings that can still potentially be exploited to poison DNS caches. We reported on the vulnerability in early July, including Kaminsky's request that security folks not publicly speculate about the flaw. As one might guess, that request was largely ignored. When security researcher Halvar Flake published his speculation, another researcher, who was known to have the details of the flaw, publicly confirmed it, but just as quickly removed the confirmation. While it sounds a bit like a security community soap opera, it was fairly clearly caused by the attempt to contain the vulnerability information.

If you follow technology trends, you have probably heard of the semantic desktop -- a data layer for annotating and sharing the information in your computer. But what you may not be aware of is that the semantic desktop is not a distant goal, but scheduled to arrive at the end of 2008. And, when it does, the idea will probably be implemented through the work done by the Nepomuk project, and, most likely, by KDE first.

If like first-person shooters, you'll love Sauerbraten. This open source game might not have the visual finesse of other FPSes, but what it lacks in the graphics department, Sauerbraten more than makes up for with its various single and multiplayer modes, including an experimental role-playing game mode, and a unique WYSIWYG in-game map editor. Sauerbraten blends the best of FPSes like Quake and Max Payne to give you a unique gaming experience.

Web applications are set for a speed boost, but it's nothing to do with their developers. The TraceMonkey project is hard at work on a new and much faster implementation of JavaScript for the Firefox browser. While TraceMonkey is still in its early stages, the target is to make it a part of Firefox 3.1, which is expected in late 2008 or early 2009. TraceMonkey already performs various benchmarks in 4.5 percent to 55 percent of the time taken by Firefox 3, and useful further improvements are thought possible.

The KDE Community today announced the immediate availability of KDE 3.5.10, a maintenance release for the latest generation of the most advanced and powerful free desktop for GNU/Linux and other UNIXes. KDE 3.5.10 sports changes in Kicker, the KDE3 panel and KPDF, the PDF viewer. The KDE community has finalized yet another update to the 3.5 series. While not a very exciting release in terms of features, 3.5.10 brings a couple of nice bugfixes and translation updates to those who choose to stay with KDE 3.5.

You probably know intuitively that applications have limited powers in Intel x86 computers and that only operating system code can perform certain tasks, but do you know how this really works? This post takes a look at x86 privilege levels, the mechanism whereby the OS and CPU conspire to restrict what user-mode programs can do.

Photosynth is one of the most exciting programs I've seen in a long time. It takes a group of photos, typically of a single geographical location, but possibly taken at different times by different people, analyses them for similarities, and then stitches then together into a smooth-flowing, pseudo-3D panorama. It's really great. Just two problems. One: it won't run on GNU/Linux; and two: it's from Microsoft, and so is unlikely ever to do so. My question is this: Why didn't the free software community come up with Photosynth first?

While postal services want to promote letter writing, the trend is clearly working against them. With a push of the button, an e-mail lands in the inbox of its recipient before a letter writer can even moisten the stamp. The tools of the trade are e-mail programs known as"clients." They are used to manage correspondence on the computer, but nowadays they can often do far more.

In August 2008 a small OLPC XO deployment project was started in Russia. A group of Nizhny Novgorod State Pedagogic University professors has taught 32 students from Nizhny Novgorod how to use XOs in a summer camp environment. The project was launched in a field facility of Nizhny Novgorod State University in Staraya Pustyn village in Nizhny Novgorod region.

What's free, looks like Mac OS X, just works and is actually Linux? The answer is gOS, which recently launched a new beta that builds on the distro's initial success and adds new tools like integrated Google Gadgets for Linux. When it launched onto the scene late last year, gOS (which stands for good OS) made quite a splash for getting Linux into the U.S. retail giant WalMart. Through a partnership with PC manufacturer Everex, gOS brought Linux to your parents' generation via WalMart.

There was once a time when the now-defunct Open Source Development Labs, then the employer of Linus Torvalds, used to style itself as the centre of gravity of Linux. Not long after, the edifice toppled under its own weight - probably the force of gravity shifted. Or maybe the restructuring it had to undergo in 2005 and 2006 was the cause. No matter the reasons, the OSDL then merged with the Free Standards Group at the beginning of 2007 to form the Linux Foundation. Now, 18 months on, it appears that an organisation is no longer the centre of gravity for the Linux kernel - no, that role has apparently been taken on by the shiny, new head of the Foundation, Jim Zemlin.

A stompbox claiming to be "the world's first open source digital guitar effects pedal" is now shipping, after over a year of development. The pedal, the OpenStomp Coyote-1, allows users to create their own effects by writing programs for the pedal's operating system, and uploading them to the device via USB. Writing open source programs means that rather than sticking to the familiar chorus, distortion and so on, users can create entirely new effects, much in the same way that Max/MSP can be used to make synths and effects from scratch. Unlike Max/MSP, however, users are able to run programs solely from the device – without a computer in sight.

The very heart of the Linux operating system is the kernel, the piece of software which makes programs run and work with hardware. It's possibly the largest and most geographical spread open source project in the world. With software projects failing daily how can such a task actually work? It’s well known that Linux Torvalds originated the kernel which he dubbed Linux way back in 1991. Yet, by the release of version 2.6.24 in January this year, Torvalds was responsible for a tiny 0.6% of the changes. This isn’t to say Torvald’s work is insignificant by any means, but rather to emphasise how Linux has evolved from the creative work of a sole developer into a massive project spanning almost 1,000 developers representing over 100 corporations.

Not all user-friendly desktop operating systems are based on Linux; as demonstrated by PC-BSD, it is entirely feasible to turn a "geek" project into a piece of software that can be installed and used by even less technical computer users. In this issue, we talk to Kris Moore, PC-BSD lead developer, about his love affair with FreeBSD and the upcoming PC-BSD 7.0. In the news section, Fedora admits that some of its servers have been compromised, Novell signs a new, US$100 million "interoperability" deal with Microsoft, openSUSE ads SELinux support as an alternative security framework, and gNewSense celebrates its second birthday with an updated release of the "freest" Linux distribution. Finally, FreeBSD announces tentative release dates for its upcoming versions 6.4 and 7.1.

This article summarizes the experiences of one small- to medium-sized enterprise (SME) using a heterogeneous mix of Linux and Windows XP systems. Written by the founder of an international PC distributor, it compares and contrasts various Linux-based distributions, and assesses their suitability for business use.

Open source software company Red Hat warned of a network intrusion that compromised some of the company's servers. Though Red Hat considered the advisory critical and issued updated versions of affected packages, it said that a worst-case scenario -- a hacker accessing servers used to sign Fedora or Red Hat applications distributed through their auto-update process -- did not come to pass.

Computerworld Australia is undertaking a series of investigations into the most widely used programming languages. Previously we have spoken to Alfred v. Aho of [AWK fame, S. Tucker Taft on the Ada 1995 and 2005 revisions, Microsoft about its server-side script engine ASP, Chet Ramey about his experiences maintaining Bash, Bjarne Stroustrup of C++ fame and Charles H. Moore about the design and development of Forth. We've also had a chat with the irreverent Don Woods about the development and uses of INTERCAL, as well as Stephen C. Johnson on YACC, Luca Cardelli on Modula-3, Walter Bright on D, and most recently, Brendan Eich on JavaScript.

The Kindle, Amazon’s Linux-powered electronic paper book will have at least one new version out for the 2008 holiday season. The new Kindle, however, may be marketed more for college students returning to school in January rather than for finding a place under the Christmas tree. According to a report by Andreas James, Amazon will be marketing the revised “e-book reader to college students.”

If you've read through Part I and Part II of this tutorial series, you ought to have plenty of templates and clip art for OpenOffice.org (OOo), be typing grammatically-correct papers, and know a few more tips and tricks to ease your transition from Microsoft (MS) Office. Now this part will help you perform a few tasks in OOo that were available in MS Office, just harder to figure out due to the different interface. You'll find out you can still insert WordArt (actually called Fontwork), diagrams, and page numbering in OOo documents.