I haven't kept this as up to date as I'd like but the stuff that is here is good to know. I'm going to modify it so other people can add sections to it and it can be a living document, but until then this is all you get.
"After what were surely a few extra pots of coffee last night, Apple released iPhone OS 2.2, the latest update to its operating system for the iPhone and iPod touch. As with the 2.1 update just over two months ago, Apple administered a healthy dose of new features and fixes throughout the OS and a handful of applications, many of which we saw previewed over the last couple months. Let's take a look at the most significant changes, some appreciated polish, and recap what's still missing."
IBM Research has uncovered work it is doing to bring the brain's processing power to computers, in an effort to make it easier for PCs to process vast amounts of data in real time. The researchers want to put brain-related senses like perception and interaction into hardware and software so that computers are able to process and understand the data quicker while consuming less power, said Dharmendra Modha, a researcher at IBM. The researchers are bringing the neuroscience, nanotechnology and supercomputing fields together in an effort to create the new computing platform, he said.
The Genode OS framework has seen another release. "We are pleased to announce the release 8.11 of the Genode OS Framework introducing a new device-driver API, a C runtime, support for asynchronous notifications, and many improvements of the base API. With the new release 8.11, we are aiming at enabling Genode for real-world applications that require custom device drivers and the reuse of existing code. Among the major improvements are a new device driver API that eases the reuse of existing device drivers and a C runtime that facilitates the reuse of a wealth of existing C library code on Genode. Furthermore, we extended the base API by a number of exciting feature such as support for asynchronous notifications, capability typification, and managed dataspaces."
Last month we covered an article titled, "MSI: Wind Doing Well, Linux Version Not So Much" which revealed that Linux MSI Wind netbooks saw a return rate upto four times higher than the Windows equivalent. But in a recent interview with the CEO of Asus he revealed that Linux and Window versions of Asus Eee PC have similar return rates. He also described the plans for 2009 and talked about some changes to come in the Operating System for the netbooks.
Damien Miller (djm@) issued the following advisory regarding the recent attack against SSH:
OpenSSH Security Advisory: cbc.adv
Regarding the "Plaintext Recovery Attack Against SSH" reported as
CPNI-957037:
The OpenSSH team has been made aware of an attack against the SSH
protocol version 2 by researchers at the University of London.
Unfortunately, due to the report lacking any detailed technical
description of the attack and CPNI's unwillingness to share necessary
information, we are unable to properly assess its impact.
What's after electrical charges and electricity in computer storage? Lasers and excitons. Theorists from the John Hopkins University have drafted a theory that uses low-power lasers and crystalline insulators to store data. In the theory, lasers would excite electrons in a crystalline-like lattice in order to record data; the atoms would vibrate at a certain frequency to indicate the type of bit. A side effect of using lasers and insulators is reduced heat output. The heat is reduced because the atoms do not exchanging electrons as current computer components do. The EE Times has a more detailed write up as well as WebIndia, TopNews.in, Eureka Alert, and Small Times.
The Linux kernel uses several special capabilities of the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) suite. These capabilities range from giving you shortcuts and simplifications to providing the compiler with hints for optimization. Discover some of these special GCC features and learn how to use them in the Linux kernel.
Microsoft plans to offer one more public test version of Internet Explorer 8 before releasing the final version of the updated browser, the company said late Wednesday.
The next test, essentially a "release candidate" version will come in the first quarter of 2009. That means the final release won't hit Microsoft's initial goal of finishing the browser this year. "Our next public release of IE (typically called a "release candidate") indicates the end of the beta period," general manager Dean Hachamovitch said in a blog posting, "We want the technical community of people and organizations interested in Web browsers to take this update as a strong signal that IE8 is effectively complete and done."
Every now and then, an article pops up which argues that it would make sense for Microsoft to offer a free, ad-powered version of Windows. "We are all aware that Google is the king of online advertising. Microsoft has wanted to compete in that space forever, which is why giving away Windows 7 makes so much sense," Business Pundit argues, "Let's look at the numbers; Microsoft's operating systems are on 90% of the world's computers, or roughly one billion machines. That's penetration on a massive scale. Even Google has to be impressed." While these articles make some valid points, they rarely dive into the actual details.
The following diff is the next step of some further cleaning
of the Ethernet ioctl handling code in the Ethernet drivers.
This takes advantage of the addition of MTU and multicast
handling to ether_ioctl() so some some duplicate code can be
removed from the individual drivers and simplifies things
a bit.
This needs testing with pretty much every NIC supported. Please
send me a dmesg with whatever you are able to test.
This mainly affects multicast handling which is used by things
such as IPv6, CARP and OSPF.
If you use networking, please test this diff!
Yes, this means you!
Earlier this year VIA announced they wanted to join the open-source bandwagon by establishing an open-source driver development initiative, releasing documentation and source-code, and to better engage with the Linux community at large. They have made a few small steps over the past few months, but today they have made their largest open-source contribution yet by releasing four programming documentation guides that cover the video, 2D, and 3D programming for their Chrome 9 graphics processor. In addition, they are now partnering with the community-spawned OpenChrome developers.
Arjan van de Ven from Intel Open source centre has posted the news that http://kerneloops.org has recorded its 100,000 oops. An oops in the Linux kernel is a deviation from correct behavior of the Linux kernel which produces a certain error log. kerneloops is a client side software that helps record oops more automatically on the website with the same name and is available as part of many distribution repositories and even included by default in Fedora. This is part of the QA efforts in the Linux kernel and when posting the news, Arjan has noted that Linux kernel developers have been fixes most of the top oopses quickly
Two years ago, Microsoft and Novell inked a landmark deal on patents and Linux-to-Windows interoperability. According to Microsoft and Novell, it's a deal that has shown dramatic momentum in its second year, with a triple digit percentage increase in customers for a total tally of more than 200 customers. "I was surprised at the number of over 200 customers, so I actually went back and double checked it just to make sure," Susan Heystee, General Manager for Global Strategic Alliances at Novell told InternetNews.com. "That represents over 250 percent growth in terms of the number of customers that are part of the partnership which is really great. A real positive surprise has been the great customer momentum."
Tech pioneer Hewlett Packard has had its ups and downs over the decades, but it's currently on the upswing, even during these trying economic times. #5 probably hits closest for OSNews readers: a renewed focus on innovation.
Linux and other Unix-like operating systems use the term "swap" to describe both the act of moving memory pages between RAM and disk. It is common to use a whole partition of a hard disk for swapping. However, with the 2.6 Linux kernel, swap files are just as fast as swap partitions. Now, many admins (both Windows and Linux/UNIX) follow an old rule of thumb that your swap partition should be twice the size of your main system RAM. Let us say I’ve 32GB RAM, should I set swap space to 64 GB? Is 64 GB of swap space really required? How big should your Linux / UNIX swap space be?
Royal Pingdom blog has posted with a comparison of home page load times and uptimes and concludes that various Linux distributions and Apple, both beat Microsoft's record.
13/16 Linux distributions (and Apple) had less downtime than Microsoft's homepage.
5/16 Linux distributions had less downtime than Apple's homepage.
Four homepages had NO downtime: Red Hat, Mepis, Knoppix and Fedora.
Five homepages had more than an hour of downtime: Gentoo, Mandriva, Mint, Arch and Microsoft.
Mitchell Baker, chairperson of the Mozilla Foundation and former CEO of Mozilla corporation has posted a report the details the financial status of Mozilla for this year. "Our revenue remains strong; our expenses focused. Mozilla's revenues (including both Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation) for 2007 were $75 million, up approximately 12% from 2006 revenue of $67 million. As in 2006 the vast majority of this revenue is associated with the search functionality in Mozilla Firefox, and the majority of that is from Google. The Firefox userbase and search revenue have both increased from 2006"
Alexandre Ratchov and Jacob Meuser had an interesting e-mail exchange recently:
From: Jacob Meuser
Date: Sun, Nov 16, 2008 at 6:17 PM
Subject: Re: CVS: cvs.openbsd.org: src
To: source-changes@
On Sun, Nov 16, 2008 at 01:44:03PM -0700, Alexandre Ratchov wrote:
> CVSROOT: /cvs
> Module name: src
> Changes by: ratchov@ 2008/11/16 13:44:03
>
> Modified files:
> usr.bin/aucat : aucat.1 aucat.c listen.c sock.c
>
> Log message:
> allow aucat to listen on multiple sockets. Each socket carries its
> channel and volume settings allowing multiple configuration to
> coexist. Mostly useful for envy(4)-like devices, but can be used
> to force different apps to use different settings.
OMG! that's the coolest thing ever! thank you thank you thank you!!!
now *all* multi-channel devices can has multi-stream capabilities.
e.g. I can do VoIP on DAC and ADC channels 0 and 1, and play music
on DAC channels 2 and 3, and the person I'm calling doesn't hear
the music I'm playing on 2 and 3. so cool!
is this even possible on NetBSD/FreeBSD/linux???
Very cool stuff is happening in the audio department, great job guys!
PIE support changes were committed recently to gcc, csu and gdb.
gcc: to add -fpie/-fPIE and -pie arguments
csu: to compile the C Start Up objects position independent
gdb: to add PIE debugging support
These changes build on top of prior work that enhanced ld.so to grok PIE, kernel changes to recognize and load PIE binaries, converting csu asm to be pic compatible and ld.so bug fixes for some relocations.
Am 16.09 und 17.09.2006 findet in Essen der LinuxTag Essen, Com2Linux, statt. Auch hier wird allBSD wieder zugegen sein um die BSD-Systeme zu präsentieren. Mehr Informationen finden Sie hier.
Das allBSD Projekt hat neue Flyer rund um die BSDs erstellt und stellt diese als PDF Dokument zum download bereit. Auf dem Linuxtag 2006 in Wiesbaden werden diese Flyer auf dem BSD-Stand ausgeteilt werden.
Der LinuxTag berichtet in einer News auch über das Engagement der BSDs auf dem diesjährigen Linuxtag.
In der neusten Ausgabe des freeX Magazins (http://www.freex-online.de/) wird über das allBSD Projekt berichtet. Desweiteren gibt es in dieser Ausgabe eine Reihe weiterer BSD-Artikel:
- FreeBSD auf dem IBM-Blade Center - DSL Multihoming mit NetBSD - Bluetooth unter FreeBSD - Lazarus und FreeBSD
Seite heute steht das Vortragsprogramm für den LinuxTag 2006 fest. Am Freitag dem 05.05.2006 wird es in Saal 6.2 den ganzen Tag Vorträge über BSD geben. Mehr Informationen zu den Vorträgen entnehmen Sie bitte hier und hier.
allBSD ist auf der CeBIT von 12.-15.März 2006 im Bereich LinuxPark und teilt sich den Stand mit anderen Open Source Projekten. Siehe hierzu: http://www.allbsd.de/events/cebit/index.html
Dru Lavigne, bekannt durch ihre Kolumnen bei O´Reilly, das Buch "BSD Hacks" und Ihr Engagement für eine BSD-Zertifizierung, hat ein online Diskussion mit Daniel Seuffert, Wilhelm Bühler und Axel S. Gruner geführt. Dabei geht es um die Ambitionen von allBSD.de, was der Slogan "push it, dont hype" zu bedeuten hat und wie man allBSD unterstützen kann.
Jürgen Dankoweit ist nun auch Mitglied bei allBSD.de. Er hat in der Vergangenheit viele FreeBSD Flyern erstellt und arbeitet nun aktiv bei allBSD.de mit.
Seit heute haben Sie die Möglichkeit in Ihren Kalender die hier angekündigten Events automatisch eintragen zu lassen. Hier können Sie die ICS-Datei abonnieren.
allbsd-announce - als Ankündigungsliste (Newsletter) allbsd-events - zur internen Organisation von Events (öffentlich) allbsd-misc - für sonstige Themen rund um allBSD.de (öffentlich)
Zur Bündelung der Aktivitäten zum Cebit-Stand 2006 der BSD-Projekte geht die Domain allBSD.de online. Geplant ist, bis Weihnachten 2006 eine Mailinglliste und ein Grundgerüst der Webseiten zu BSD aufzusetzen.
Once upon a time, when I was training to be a mathematician, a group of
us bright young students taking number theory discovered the names of
the smaller prime numbers.
2: The Odd Prime --
It's the only even prime, therefore is odd. QED.
3: The True Prime --
Lewis Carroll: "If I tell you three times, it's true."
31: The Arbitrary Prime --
Determined by unanimous unvote. We needed an arbitrary prime
in case the prof asked for one, and so had an election. 91
received the most votes (well, it *looks* prime) and 3+4i the
next most. However, 31 was the only candidate to receive none
at all.
Since the composite numbers are formed from primes, their qualities are
derived from those primes. So, for instance, the number 6 is "odd but
true", while the powers of 2 are all extremely odd numbers.
