Mandriva is a new brand in the Linux world. It's a result of a merge between Mandrake and Connectiva. Currently Mandriva is acquiring another Linux distribution vendor - desktop oriented Lycoris.
DesktopLinux has an interview with Lycoris creator Joseph Cheek. He says not many new things. For me the most important question was about big players on the Linux desktop market. RedHat has lefr (for now?) leaving only Fedora. Mandriva, after financial problems, is most important here. Novell (SuSE) doesn't seem to push for desktop as hard. Mandriva new versions may be very interesting with features from both Lycoris and Connectiva.
Sun has released Solaris code to the public recently. It's not the whole system, however, only kernel with some additional libraries. It's clear that it's intended for developers. The file to download is rather big (40MB+) for kernel with libraries.
OpenSolaris is a very new project and it's hard to say if it will make Solaris (good system) more popular than it is now. For sure we will probably see ideas moving between Solaris and Linux and BSD family kernels.
A paper (PDF format, approx. 20 pages) was released about possible usage of the difference in HTTP parsing methods used by HTTP services (cache server, firewall etc and web server).
The authors show, for example, how to poison cache using only one special request. The techniques are interesting, but they apply only to specific software combinations. Still, they may be very dangerous if they happen more often than we exapect and/or more servers are vulnurable.
Nearly 3 years after version 3.0, Debian GNU/Linux version 3.1 (codename: Sarge) was released. 3.1 is now Debian stable version.
Debian is one of the longest running Linux distributions - it's more than 10 years old.
NewsForge has an article about usability experts from OpenUsability.org helping with KDE development.
Good to know that there's a group of people who can tell you which windows, dialogs etc should look differently. Moving them is easy, but you need to know first that the interface is not clear for users.
The security holes in Firefox I wrote about are now fixes in 1.0.4 release. Release notes and security page confirm this confirm this.
Slashdot writes about Google patents and the things that can be read from them (read: info about Google engine and how the new ideas affect your page ranking). The orginal site is unavailable when I'm writing this. The article (plus one from a different site) is in one of the comments.
The ideas are interesting but not very innovative (at least the quotes). Just algorithm...That's another example showing why I'm against software patents.
Zdnet writes about an exploit available in the wild that uses two previously unknown Firefox flaws. At the time I'm writing this there's no patch yet.
I'm counting time to see when a fix will be released.
Update: Fix (version 1.0.4) has been released.
BBC writes about a copy-protection technology for DVDs. Why I don't believe it'll work? And even if it will have a limited effect, a work-around will be found fast?
GCC 4.0 has been released (the official release data is April 20).
While waiting for first reviews (performance?) I'm wondering which mainstream linux distribution will be the first one to include it in stable release.
FreeCiv (Civilization clone) 2.0.0 stable has been just released. Slashdot has the news and you can download it from the project site.
Good news, improvements look nice, but I was hoping for better graphics. Maybe in 3.0 :)
George Weiss from Gartner had a talk about dangers for Linux (I can't find more official statement) on the enterprise market. He thinks that SCO and MS can't slow it.
What's more interesting, he shows 5 dangers Linux faces.
First one, fragmentation, has been mentioned for years. I don't know if he talks about Linux (kernel) or Linux (GNU/Linux - the whole system), but it's probably the second meaning. As I see it, most apps come from one source, sometimes projects divide. Kernel in nearly all distribution is heavily patched, but you can laways get the whole list and build your own, customized version.
Second, higher support costs. I don't think there's danger. Support prices going higher means more people getting in the field and doing support. Training for basic support doesn't take much time and there are enough people (IMHO) to deal with more compilicated cases.
Next problem - too many licences - may be really a problem. It requires people to know them and decide if to agree or find another program, with differnet licence. Also, the number of diffrent licences is going to drop.
Then there come problems with compatibility between versions. I don't experience this. If there are compatibility problems and many people want to stay with old version, someone decides to manage the old one (like with Apache 1.x and 2.x).
Last one is patent and copyright risk. It's mostly about patents (because all those crazy ones). It's hard to say which direction it's going.
Overall, Weiss thinks that there are no technological reasons to stop Linux and I agree.
I have just released my new three papers. Below there are their titles and abstracts. Full text is available only for one, more will follow.
Cache coherence and gigabit switches, while technical in theory, have not until recently been considered technical. such a hypothesis might seem counterintuitive but is buffetted by previous work in the field. Given the current status of psychoacoustic symmetries, cryptographers daringly desire the construction of the producer-consumer problem. In order to achieve this goal, we explore new introspective symmetries (Merganser), demonstrating that the much-tauted perfect algorithm for the evaluation of Boolean logic by James Gray et al. is impossible.
Ful text (PDF, 70KB) is also available.
Unified semantic theory have led to many confusing advances, including erasure coding and Byzantine fault tolerance. Given the current status of metamorphic archetypes, futurists daringly desire the visualization of Web services. In this work, we use modular models to prove that 802.11 mesh networks and gigabit switches are regularly incompatible.
The important unification of telephony and forward-error correction is a practical quandary. In this paper, we confirm the refinement of journaling file systems. In this work we use real-time epistemologies to prove that Internet QoS and context-free grammar can connect to overcome this grand challenge.
All three make no sense. There's even a reason - they're computer generated using SCIgen tool.
I decided to see if the popular pages use correct HTML (XHTML etc) code. My validation tool was W3C validator.
I checked portals only. Don't have a source showing which pages are most popular, so I had to guess. More sites - possibly later. Also, portal sites are generated dynamicaly, so validation results change.
I started from google. Simple page design, should be correct. And? Suprise. No type definition and other erors. No doctype produces 0 errors. 51 errors with default settings.
Then, Yahoo. More compilcated page, more changes for errors. And more errors - 253.
Next page, MSN, identifies itself as HTML strict. It doesn't validate, however. 22 errors, mostly not serious and easy to fix. So why not fixed?
BBC page code looks strange. It has a big number of empty lines, a number of empty tags and so on. Number of errors - moderate. Only 65.
CNN has page with more errors (106). Many of them are about missing picture descriptions. It's easier to read than the previous one, however.
So it looks that it's hard to find correct HTML on portal pages. Most of the errors are not serious and don't require much work, usually just changing one or two characters will fix it. It looks that no-one really cares...
Mandrake's changing its name after their marge with Connectiva. New name is Mandriva.
I'm not sure if it's a good move. Mandrake brand had a strong position. Connectiva the same, but in South America. New name is familiar only when you know that it's a mix of the two. It may cause problems for newbies. On the other hand, RedHat rename to Fedora went well.