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'Open Source Code Contains Security Holes' (OSNews)
"Open source code, much like its commercial counterpart, tends to contain one security exposure for every 1000 lines of code, according to a program launched by the Department of Homeland Security to review and tighten up open source code's security. Popular open source projects, such as Samba, the PHP, Perl, and Tcl dynamic languages used to bind together elements of Web sites, and Amanda, the popular open source backup and recovery software running on half a million servers, were all found to have dozens or hundreds of security exposures and quality defects. A total of 7826 open source project defects have been fixed through the Homeland Security review, or one every two hours since it was launched in 2006, according to David Maxwell, open source strategist for Coverity, maker of the source code checking system, the Prevent Software Quality System, that's being used in the review." Note: I just want to state for the record that the headline has not been written by me. I do like the total kicking-in-open-doors air surrounding it, though. - Posted: 10.01-2008 09:18

Ars Gets Its Hands on the Optimus Maximus, Begins Payment Pl (OSNews)
"How do you get people interested in a USD 1500 keyboard? Simple, turn each key into an OLED screen. When you hit caps lock, the keys change to show they're upper case. Play a first-person shooter and the WASD keys turn into arrows. The Optimus Maximus keyboard brought this audacious idea to life, although since it was first shown in 2005 the hardware has gone through many delays. So many delays, in fact, that Art. Lebedev was accused of promoting 'vaporware' up until the price was announced, at which point there was a whole new set of sticker-shock-induced complaints." - Posted: 09.01-2008 00:36

Picture Fuzzy for Organic Thin TVs (OSNews)
Thin TVs made with organic light-emitting diodes could become a big hit with consumers, but not any time soon, according to Toshihiro Sakamoto, president of the Panasonic AVC Networks company. "It will start to grow as a market in 2015," he said during an interview at the Consumer Electronics Show taking place here this week. "You won't be able to beat the cost and price performance of LCD and plasma for a long time." - Posted: 09.01-2008 00:36

Torvalds Still Will Not License Linux Under GPL v3 (OSNews)
Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux operating system, still has no plans to license the Linux kernel under version three of the GNU GPL anytime soon. Torvalds, a vocal critic of GPL v3 while it was being drafted, prefers GPL v2, he told Jim Zemlin, the executive director of the Linux Foundation, Jan. 8 in the first in a series of podcasts titled 'Open Voices', which will feature the industry's top open source and Linux leaders. Torvalds also said Linux was the project that made the split clear between the religious belief in freedom advocated by the Free Software Foundation and the technical superiority that open source and Linux have always been about. - Posted: 09.01-2008 00:36

OSS 4.0 Released Under BSD Lisence (OSNews)
"4Front Technologies is proud to announce the release of the source code to Open Sound System v4.0 under the BSD license for FreeBSD and other BSD compliant operating systems. OSS is a cross platform API that provides drivers for most consumer and professional audio devices for UNIX and POSIX based operating systems, including Linux. Owing to its open architecture, applications developed on one supporting operating system platform can be easily recompiled on any other platform. Open Sound System is also available for Linux under the GPLv2 license and OpenSolaris under the CDDL license. It is also available for commercial and proprietary operating systems under the 4Front commercial license." - Posted: 08.01-2008 23:36

Visualising Fitts' Law (OSNews)
I detailed Fitts' Law not too long ago in one of my usability terms articles (the series will pick up later on, by the way, I am currently too busy with my bachelor's thesis), and this article is a very detailed addition. It is a little old (October 2007), though. "Back in school, I remember that it wasn't until I started taking classes in physics that calculus made any kind of real sense to me. I just need diagrams to function. In that spirit, I thought it would be nice to go over Fitts's Law, a staple in the HCI diet, with a few visuals to explain both the concept and why it's ideas are a bit more complicated than most would have you believe." - Posted: 08.01-2008 23:36

'Majority of New PCs Ship Without Windows Vista' (OSNews)
Statistics are fun, aren't they? Contradictions all over the place. "Microsoft's Windows Vista operating system is proving far less popular with new PC buyers than Windows XP did during XP's first year on the market, if statements by company chairman Bill Gates at this week's Consumer Electronics Show are any measure." - Posted: 08.01-2008 23:36

Apple Announces Penryn Mac Pros and Xservers (OSNews)
Apple today announced upgrades to the Mac Pro and the Xserve, which now feature Intel Penryn processors. Quad-core processors that go up to 3.2 Ghz, powerful video cards, and superfast front-side bus and memory make these especially delicious, however, there are still no Blu-ray drives available. Macrumors has more. - Posted: 08.01-2008 20:36

Syllable Desktop 0.6.5 Released (OSNews)
After an extensive development period, the Syllable project has released Syllable Desktop 0.6.5 with improvements all over. As always there are bug fixes, most notably in USB and the network stack, leading to large reliability and performance improvements. LibUSB and SANE were ported, so there is now USB access from user space and support for scanners. There are new network and video drivers, including a unique S3 DeltaChrome driver that Arno Klenke wrote from scratch. Two new window decorators debut from John Aspras. CD burning ability is now integrated in the form of SimpleBurn and CDRTools. A new network preferences applet from Andrew Kennan was integrated, and also Arno Klenke's port of OpenBeFS. Many ports were upgraded and the system layout has been heavily reorganised. Files needed for compiling software have been split off in a separate package. This is also the release that harmonises a number of things between Syllable Desktop and Syllable Server. The full change log is here. Installation CDs, the upgrade, and images for emulators are here. Additional software can be found here. - Posted: 08.01-2008 09:36

AmigaOS 5 Surfaces, Sort of (OSNews)
"AmigaOS 5 made a covert appearance at an event outside the CES, turning up in the guise of a version of Space Invaders running on a Windows Mobile 6-based smartphone. Amiga - the company - was ostensibly showing AmigaAnywhere 2, the new version of its virtual machine technology. But taking Amiga President Bill McEwen aside for a moment, we discovered that AmigaAnywhere 2 is AmigaOS 5." - Posted: 07.01-2008 22:27

Keystroke Dynamics From Custom Perl Algorithms (OSNews)
Measure the total time of entry and verify the time between keystrokes to help authenticate a user regardless of the data being entered. Learn how to apply the open source tools xev and Perl in keystroke dynamics to measure the more-subtle characteristics of human-computer interaction. This article uses example code to demonstrate keystroke dynamics for enhancing the security of your applications in authentication and continuous data entry contexts. - Posted: 07.01-2008 20:27

Dusting Off the 0.01 Linux Kernel (OSNews)
Abdel Benamrouche announced that he has updated the original 0.01 Linux kernel to compile with GCC-4.x, allowing it to run on emulators such as QEMU and Bochs. After applying his series of small patches, Abdel explains that the 0.01 kernel can be built on a system running the 2.6 Linux kernel. He added that he's successfully ported bash-3.2, portions of coreutils-6.9, dietlibc-0.31 (instead of glibc), bin86-0.16.17, make-3.81, ncurses-2.0.7, and vim-7.1 all to run on his modified 0.01 kernel. - Posted: 07.01-2008 20:27

'Despite Problems, Consumers Choosing Vista Over XP' (OSNews)
"Windows Vista didn't make a smooth market entrance; in fact, nearly every aspect of the operating system has been attacked since its release on January 30, 2007. Multiple SKUs allegedly confused customers, anti-DRM groups disliked Vista's Protected Video Path and its overall DRM friendliness, and Microsoft's definition of 'Vista Capable' got the company sued. Toss in a plethora of bugs and the usual consumer backlash over GUI changes, and you'd think consumers would be avoiding Vista in droves. According to new information, however, they aren't - Vista's adoption rate over the past year actually exceeded XP's in 2001, and consumers apparently choose Vista over XP by a 7:1 margin." - Posted: 07.01-2008 13:27

Remembering the Cray-1 (OSNews)
"The Cray-1 is to supercomputers what Sigmund Freud is to psychiatrists. That is to say: it's likely the only one of the bunch that you've heard about, and you can feign cleverness just by dropping the name. So let's take a whack at this computer legend." - Posted: 07.01-2008 00:18

Windows Mobile 7 To Focus on Touch, Motion Gestures (OSNews)
A lot of details have leaked on Microsoft's next major revamp of Windows Mobile, version 7. "Windows Mobile 7 will use touch gestures, similar to how the iPhone does. You will be able to flick through lists, pan, swipe sideway, draw on the screen. A lot of emphasis has been put on making navigation easier and doing away with scrollbars, including a new scroll handle that allows for multiple ways of finding items extremely fast. Windows Mobile 7 will use motion gestures, something the iPhone does not. It will not use an intricate and complicated series of gyroscopes and accelerometers. Instead, it will use the camera on the phone to detect motions and create appropriate actions. You will be able to shake, twist and otherwise manipulate the phone and get things done. The phone will be able to perform actions when placed face down on a surface, and it will know when it is in your pocket or bag." - Posted: 07.01-2008 00:18

RPM 5.0.0 Released (OSNews)
After seven months of comprehensive development, the popular Unix software packaging tool RPM Package Manager (RPM) was released as stable version 5.0.0. This version builds portably on a wide variety of Unix platforms and includes initial support for XAR as a package format, among other features. - Posted: 06.01-2008 09:18

New Red Hat CEO Prepares to Take on Oracle, Microsoft (OSNews)
Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst said yesterday - his fourth day on the job - that he's angling for a showdown with two tech titans in what he describes as a struggle to protect information sharing in software development. No longer satisfied just defending a company as he did while working at Delta Air Lines, Whitehurst is ready to go on the offensive against Oracle and Microsoft as he builds Red Hat toward billion-dollar annual revenues. - Posted: 06.01-2008 01:18

Linux Time Machine Alternative Reviewed (OSNews)
"If there is a defining feature in Apple's Leopard, it's Time Machine. As cool as it may be, the fact is that we, as Linux users, are obviously not going to see much benefit from this is pitiful. So it's a good thing that open source developers have taken it upon themselves to create something similar, be it not a 'pretty' alternative." - Posted: 06.01-2008 01:18

Mini-Interview: Haiku Developer Ingo Weinhold (OSNews)
Haikuware carries a Q&A of Ingo Weinhold, one of the main contributing developers to the Haiku Project. In this mini-interview, Ingo talks about his beginnings in the community, his motivations for adopting BeOS, his involvement in Haiku development, and a bit about his professional work too. He also gives a bit of insight about his Haiku-related subprojects, and expresses his determination to port the development tool chain and optimize critical services as the first steps to make Haiku usable as a full time OS for early adopters. "Being a professional Java developer and enjoying Java hacking," Ingo also seems to be thrilled by the recently announced Haiku Java Team and the prospect of finally getting Java on Haiku. - Posted: 06.01-2008 01:18

Format Wars are Over and Blu-Ray Won? (OSNews)
While this might be a bold statement, all things point to this. Blu-Ray was already winning in market share slowly but surely, and today's Warner decision to go BD-only puts the final nails into this HD format war as Warner is the biggest movie distributor. The HD-DVD Group didn't seem to know about Warner's decision and they canceled their CES conference out of the blu tonight, amidst making vague references to possible legal action. - Posted: 05.01-2008 05:09

Haiku Java Team Announced (OSNews)
According to a news post on the Haiku project website, a new port team is being formed to bring Java technologies to the Haiku platform. The goal of the Haiku Java Team is to port OpenJDK to Haiku, and they would like to see the port included within the structure of Sun's OpenJDK project. The Haiku developers have already been in contact with members of the OpenJDK Porters Group to pursue their objective, and a formal proposal has also been submitted for consideration by the OpenJDK project. The Haiku Java Team is an initiative lead by Bryan Varner, who together with Andrew Bachmann worked on the port of Java to BeOS in the past (demo video). - Posted: 04.01-2008 22:09

Aaron Seigo on KDE 4.0 (OSNews)
KDE's Aaron Seigo (who owes me a Martini) wrote about a few often-heard misconceptions and questions regarding KDE 4.0, which is supposed to be released January 11th. "Now that 4.0.0 is tagged and out and that bit of worry and concern is behind me for the moment, I wanted to take a moment to talk really bluntly about 4.0. In particular, I'm going to address some of the common memes in fairly random order that I see about kde 3.5 and 4.0. I'm going to speak bluntly (though not rudely) so prepare yourself." - Posted: 04.01-2008 22:09

Running Classic On Intel Macs (OSNews)
"When Steve Jobs announced Apples transition to Intel's x86 processor line, a huge stir occurred among some Mac OS X users who depend on 'Classic' the OS9 environment in Mac OS X for their day to day Mac usage, as Mac OS X on Intel means no more 'Classic' and they were right. Rosetta allows PowerPC applications to run on x86 through JIT (Just In Time) architecture emulation, but its translation is not on a low enough level within OS X to allow 'Classic' to work on x86 and as such those among us who use OS9 applications have been left out in the cold. Until now that is: a project called 'Sheep Shaver' was created to allow BeOS on PowerPC emulate the PowerPC architecture to run another PowerPC operating system on top of BeOS. This application was ported to Mac OS X with the demise of Be Inc. and has since been ported to Mac OS X on Intel processors." - Posted: 04.01-2008 01:09

Maudlin Over RISC OS (OSNews)
"New Year is traditionally a time in which the achievements, surprises and disappointments of the previous year are reflected upon. Often, in spite of the fireworks and wild parties, time is set aside in which to dwell upon one's private thoughts. As 2008 is now underway I've found myself mulling over my involvement with RISC OS. Whether I like it or not, my involvement in the Acorn and RISC OS scene has been a significant part of my life over the past 27 years." - Posted: 04.01-2008 01:09

IcedTea 1.5 Adds PowerPC Java Port (OSNews)
The IcedTea project added a PowerPC Java port (both 32 and 64 bit) of OpenJDK. IcedTea 1.5 now also tracks the mercurial repo, provides better GNU/Linux integration by using standard system libraries (libpng, libjpeg, zlib, giflib) and can be bootstrapped with the free gcj/ecj/classpath toolchain. OpenJDK just accepted a new porters group and Gary Benson wrote a guide to porting IcedTea that might be the start of a lot of other Java ports. - Posted: 04.01-2008 00:09

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