Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

A quick search of the CVE database turns up 80 CVE numbers related to kernel vulnerabilities so far this year. At one recent conference or another, while talking with a prominent kernel developer, your editor confessed that he found that number to be discouragingly high. In an era where there is clearly an increasing level of commercial, criminal, and governmental interest in exploiting security holes, it would be hard to be doing enough to avoid the creation of vulnerabilities. But, your editor wondered, could we be doing more than we are? The response your editor got was, in essence, that the bulk of the holes being disclosed were ancient vulnerabilities which were being discovered by new static analysis tools. In other words, we are fixing security problems faster than we are creating them.

While announcing its merger with the Consumer Electronics Linux Forum (CELF) today, the Linux Foundation launched an open source build system project called the Yocto Project. Based on the Poky Linux build system, the CELF- and Intel-driven Yocto Project aims to provide open source tools to help companies make custom, Linux-based embedded systems for ARM, MIPS, PowerPC, and x86 architectures.

Last week I was on the road and out of my home office. Even with my little Eee netbook and plenty of spotty wireless access I still managed to get behind in just about everything. My trip was non-technical in nature so a few days away from the high-tech hub-bub was useful. I was not on vacation either. My trip was to attend meetings as part of my work with a local non-profit organization. It turns out that having geek mojo helps outside of HPC as well. I managed to set up a Wiki and an on-line survey that has been received quite well. (As a side note, I used LimeSurvey. It made the job so easy and made me look like and an uber geek. Nice work Lime team.)

Having trouble figuring out why Apache isn't starting, or another program is crashing and burning, and the logfiles are giving no clue? Time to reach for strace. What's strace? The strace utility is used to run a command and display its system calls, so you can see exactly what the program is doing until it exits. Experienced users can work with strace to do performance testing and so on, but even beginners can use strace as a diagnostic tool to see why a program is crashing.

The Microsoft strategy against Android owes less to Ray Ozzie than it does to John Roberts. As I noted at the time, the non-decision in Bilski vs. Kappos gave companies a green light to try and sue innovation out of existence. This nightmare has now come to pass. The problem with software patents, as opposed to those for drugs or medical devices, is that they don’t cover the way you do something, but the idea of doing something.

When I first started to read the title of the motion, I thought with joy that Oracle was dismissing its complaint. But of course, no. That's in my perfect alternate universe, where Oracle comes to its senses and the parties work it all out, in the FOSS community way. Instead, it is asking the court to dismiss parts of Google's Answer -- some of its counterclaims, particularly the ones claiming that Oracle's patents are invalid -- some of Google's affirmative defenses -- which Oracle calls improbable and too vaguely pleaded -- and believe it or not it would like to censor some of the factual background material in Google's Answer. It says paragraphs 7 through 22 of Google's Answer are merely "a long list of self-congratulatory remarks and polemics that have nothing to do with Google’s counterclaims for non-infringement and invalidity." Oracle says they are immaterial and impertinent. It is to laugh, as they say. Silly stuff already, and we're just clearing the runway.

The Linux Foundation (LF) and its smaller embedded Linux counterpart, the Consumer Electronics Linux Forum (CELF) announced they will merge, with CELF becoming a technical workgroup at the LF. With the merger of the two non-profit groups, the Linux Foundation will expand its embedded computing technical programs, and will launch a new embedded Linux "Yocto Project."

TransGaming, the company behind the Cedega program for running Windows games on Linux (as an alternative to using Wine or CodeWeaver's CrossOver Games) and Cider as the Mac equivalent, has just announced that Adobe is now licensing its SwiftShader Technology for the Adobe Flash Player and Adobe AIR. SwiftShader is TransGaming's pure software 3D renderer that supports features like vertex/pixel shaders, floating point rendering, and other DirectX 9.0 / OpenGL ES 2.0 level features.

AISL, the Italian Association of Free Software companies, recently debuted at the SMAU exhibit, the Italian leading ICT to discuss items related to digital technologies for business. As results clearly from the FAQ, AISL is born to bring under the same roof Italian IT companies promoting, creating and selling free software-related services. AISL will participate also to the very next event of the “Open Source Focus Group” series, dedicated to electronic purchase of open source services via the Public Administration Electronic Marketplace.

We cannot ignore them — they are everywhere. Lists of things “todo”. Things to buy. Choices to choose from. No mobile environment would be complete without the ability to display a list of choices to a user. Of course, every platform has their own name for them. Android calls its list a ListView and requires an “adapter” to supply the data to the list widget. iPhone developers create lists with the UITableView and flesh out a “protocol” in Objective-C to provide the data via a callback paradigm. For the Java programmers among us, a protocol is similar to an Interface in Java.

It's easy to lampoon Ray Ozzie's farewell memo to Microsoft - Dan Lyons summarised it as "We suck. I quit. Goodbye." - but the departing Chief Software Architect has made some serious points. Tech is changing, and Microsoft isn't changing fast enough. It's not the easiest memo to read, because Ozzie never uses one word when he can use 80 - so we stuck it through Microsoft Word's AutoSummarize feature to find the important bits*.

Intel will be introducing their first Sandy Bridge CPUs in the coming months, which we already know has Linux graphics support well underway, but for now the top-end Intel desktop processors are the Gulftown CPUs that were introduced earlier this year. The Gulftown CPUs boast six physical processing cores with Hyper Threading to put the total thread count per CPU at 12. Besides putting 12 processing threads at your disposal, these CPUs are built upon the 32nm die shrink of Nehalem and boast 12MB of L3 cache. The first Gulftown desktop product to launch was the Intel Core i7 980X, which was quickly followed by the Core i7 970, and we now finally have the chance to test out this incredibly fast but expensive processor under Linux.

Microsoft plans to impose royalty fees on Taiwan-based vendors of Android handsets for using its patents in e-mail, multimedia and other functions, with Acer and Asustek Computer being targets in an actual attempt to prevent the two vendors from adopting Android and Chrome OS for their netbook and tablet PCs, according to Taiwan-based makers. There are only several Taiwan-based handset vendors and only HTC has signed for licensed use of Microsoft patents.... Acer's and Asustek's handset shipments are in small volumes and therefore Microsoft's royalty charge is not for revenues, the sources noted.

The "Unity" user interface that debuted in Ubuntu 10.10's Netbook Edition will be standard on the next version of the Ubuntu Desktop Edition, as well. Ubuntu Desktop 11.04 will replace the Linux distribution's default GNOME environment in favor of the multitouch-enabled Unity user interface, says Canonical. Making the announcement at a keynote Oct. 25 at Ubuntu Developer Summit in Orlando, Fla., Mark Shuttleworth, Canonical’s founder, said Ubuntu Desktop 11.04 will swap out the GNOME user interface in favor of the Unity interface that is now available on UNE.

I’ve said before that I love what Ubuntu is doing with design, but the recent announcement to ship Ubuntu 11.04 with Unity as the default desktop is going to make things a bit rocky for the next couple of years. The Unity interface, while beautiful, still has quite a few bugs to work out, which will make it rocky for Ubuntu developers. Adoption of Unity probably means that the GNOME Shell is not going to be used in Ubuntu, which makes relations between the GNOME and Ubuntu developers a little more rocky. Right in the middle of all this are Ubuntu’s users who might be left wondering what their place in all of this is.

Compact Flash and SD storage cards are everywhere; gigabytes for cheap in a tiny form factor. Most come formatted with VFAT. So what is the fastest Linux filesystem for these little devices? Flash drives and SD Cards are getting bigger, faster and cheaper. They're not just for sucking down snaps from your pocket camera any more: they're backup storage, portable homedirs, netbook expansion ... you name it.

The general X.Org planning summit for Ubuntu 11.04 just ended at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Orlando. Here's a few key highlights from this hour-long discussion about the make-up of the X.Org / graphics stack for the Natty Narwhal release due for release in April.

One of the reasons Ubuntu developers gather at the Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS) is to figure out what the next version of their Linux distribution should be about. At the Natty UDS currently underway in Florida, Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth has provided a new desktop direction with a move to the Unity shell, instead of the GNOME Shell. Moving beyond just the user interface, Shuttleworth has also shared some insight into where he sees Ubuntu headed in the next five years.

Oracle continues to be at the center of controversy despite their press release stating they will continue to support and release OpenOffice.org as an open source project. Most recently Oracle was vilified by bloggers and the press for asking members of The Document Foundation to resign from OpenOffice.org due to potential conflicts of interest.

Roughly half a year and over a thousand commits after the first stable release, the KDevelop hackers are proud and happy to announce the release of KDevelop 4.1, the first of hopefully many feature releases. As with the previous bugfix releases, we also make available updated versions of the KDevelop PHP plugins. KDevelop 4.1 is more stable and polished than 4.0; we suggest everyone should update to this new version.