Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The reason it caught my attention was not because I agree with him (I do), but because the idea of simple authentication, especially among disparate systems, has been the Holy Grail of IT, and every time we think we have it solved, the solution seems to fall apart in our hands. In fact, OpenID/OAUTH/OATH is only the most recent attempt at solving the authentication problem. The last attempt was a little standard called X.500, and Jan's tweet this morning reminded me, not only of x.500 and its promises, but how far the standard has failed, because of its complexity.

One of the first things to learn about programming is to check your ego at the door. It's a complicated craft, and even the most hardened pros are regularly amazed by what they don't know. "Programming is one of those things that humans are not quite smart enough to do," warned Slashdot blogger Thangodin.

We reported last month that a native ZFS module was coming to Linux and would be released in mid-September. Rather than using ZFS-FUSE that runs the Sun/Oracle ZFS file-system under the FUSE module so that it lives outside the Linux kernel (and runs rather slowly as our benchmarks show), this new ZFS module is native to Linux and open-source but due to the CDDL license it's being distributed as a module and will not be included in the mainline Linux kernel. This module has now entered a closed beta testing process.

Google's open source Android operating system is not as free as it seems, Microsoft argues, because it infringes a number of patents. When asked whether open source models created problems for vendors with licensed software, the software giant went on the offensive. "It does infringe on a bunch of patents, and there's a cost associated with that," Tivanka Ellawala, Microsoft financial officer told MarketWatch. "So there's a... cost associated with Android that doesn't make it free."

[There is nothing like some good old fashion Microsoft FUD for your Friday afternoon. - Scott]

Watching Ubuntu and Fedora development is something like watching episodes of Iron Chef: Given roughly the same ingredients and the same amount of time, the two projects produce vastly different dishes. The Fedora 14 and Ubuntu 10.10 release cycle is particularly pronounced in this regard, with Ubuntu's focus largely on refining improvements from 10.04 and Fedora introducing major changes to the infrastructure.

Reviewing HPC hardware is not easy. You usually need to travel to a data center and look at a rack of servers while someone tells you where they landed on the Top500 list. One could review a server, but basically they are all pretty much the same inside. They are running Linux and use either AMD or Intel processors. In addition, testing a cluster takes time because running meaningful programs that exercise the whole system must be done carefully. And finally, clusters are not sitting on the “shelf” as they vary by customer due to possible packaging, interconnect, processor, and storage choices.

A vulnerability in the 32-bit compatibility mode of the current Linux kernel (and previous versions) for 64-bit systems can be exploited to escalate privileges. For instance, attackers can break into a system and exploit a hole in the web server to get complete root (also known as superuser) rights or permissions for a victim's system.

One of the new applications introduced with KDE 4 was Okular. KDE 3 had a PDF viewer named KPDF, but Okular aims to be a complete document viewing solution, supporting many different file types. Okular is fast-loading and works in any operating system and desktop environment that can run KDE applications.

Our two prior articles have detailed the performance results from a new patch, bcache, that uses SSDs to cache hard drives. We’ve looked at the throughput and IOPS performance of bcache and — while it is still very new and under heavy development — have found that in some cases it can help performance. This article examines the metadata performance of bcache hoping to also find areas where it can further boost performance.

OpenOffice.org just finished their annual conference in Budapest, Hungary. One of the outcomes of the conference announced today is the need for developers to spend more time together to properly fix problems.

Compiling the Linux kernel used to be a rite of passage, or just a necessity, for running Linux. It's not something most users need to do any more, but if you really want to compile your own kernel we'll show you how.

Yesterday there was a gathering for a few hours among X.Org developers for those who arrived early into Toulouse. There were a number of topics discussed over those few hours while drinking Paulaner (though unfortunately, no interviews were yet recorded), including Wayland with Kristian Høgsberg.

Like many, I have watched with satisfaction the rise and rise of the Android mobile phone platform. After all, at its heart lies Linux, and much of it is open source. But not all: leading phones contain major proprietary elements that mean that Android is not the perfect free software system we have all been waiting for. It is, however, one of the best we have got at the moment, and a good place to start from.

My own sources have also now confirmed that VMware is Novell's suitor. I still don't know those critical questions of how much, when, or any of the rest. According to the WSJ, and this I have been unable to confirm, Novell's remaining assets, including NetWare, Novell's old network operating system may end up in the hands of "Attachmate, which is owned by private equity buyout firms, which include Golden Gate Capital and Francisco Partners.

Apparently still troubled over the backlash sparked by Dave Neary's report of top (and bottom) GNOME contributors given at July's GUADEC convention, Mark Shuttleworth, posted his "Reflections on Ubuntu, Canonical and the march to free software adoption." As I reported previously on that report, Ubuntu was found to contribute less to GNOME than just about any other organization in the Open Source world. In response, Shuttleworth, et al., explained all the contributions Ubuntu makes to the community in other ways. The controversy had faded into the background and was almost forgotten, until the above-mentioned September 14 blog post.

The SCO Group has stated in an ad hoc press release that it will be selling its UNIX division to the highest bidder. SCO's UNIX unit handles sales and the development of UnixWare and OpenServer, alongside support for these products. Interested parties have until October 5 to submit a bid.

The team concentrated their efforts on refining and building upon this year's Google Summer of Code projects. digiKam had three GSoC projects this year: face detection and recognition by Aditya Bhatt, geotagging features by Gabriel Voicu and non-destructive image editing, and image versioning by Martin Klapetek. The results of this work will be included in the upcoming digiKam 2.0 version along with Kunal Ghosh's Season of KDE work—scripting support for digiKam. Of course, none of this work would have succeeded without the great mentors and digiKam developers, with whom the students could work side-by-side at the sprint: Marcel Wiesweg, Michael G. Hansen and Gilles Caulier.

After months on the auction block, Novell will be put out of its misery and sold within the next three weeks, according to credible sources. The only question is, why it has taken so long? The answer, according to a source close to the company, is patents. Big, juicy patents. After all, there’s no real mystery to Novell’s business (see disclosure below). Most of its legacy product portfolio is just that: a legacy of a bygone era when Novell was king of the networking hill, with a suite of services built up to sustain and advance that leadership. Products like GroupWise and Zenworks, renamed and reorganized constantly to make them appear fresh and new, have mainly sat on the shelf, as financial results demonstrate, quarter after quarter.

We're just like Sun, except when we're not. Oracle has promised to follow Sun and continue working on open-source Java in an apparent attempt to create a distraction from the damaging spectacle of its legal showdown with Google. Director of Java platform management Henrik Ståhl has promised that Oracle will be like just Sun Microsystems, working with the OpenJDK code base and developing the JDK under its GPL license.

Power supplies are one of those things you don't think about until yours dies. If you've been using personal computers for a while, there's a pretty good chance you've had a power supply fail on you. It's probably not as common as it once was, but that crisis does still happen. The other issue for some is what to do if you want to upgrade your graphics capabilities but don't have a sufficiently beefy power supply?