3101185
submission
Da Massive writes:
Enterprise networks now have an alternative choice to Microsoft Active Directory (AD) servers, with the open source Samba project aiming for feature parity with the forthcoming release of version 4, according to Canberra-based Samba developer Andrew Bartlettt.
Speaking at this year's linux.conf.au Linux and open source conference in Hobart, Bartlett said Samba 4 is aiming to be a replacement for AD by providing a free software implementation of Microsoft's custom protocols.
Because AD is "far more than LDAP and Kerberos", Bartlett said, Samba 4 is not only about developing with Microsoft's customisation of those protocols, it is also about moving the project beyond just providing an NT 4 compatible domain manager.
1759067
submission
Da Massive writes:
UNIX PDP-7, a classic DEC PDP-8, the original IBM PC, Commodore's C64, Apple's Lisa, a MITS Altair 8800 made famous by Bill Gates, through to a working PDP-11 that plays the ADVENTURE and DUNGEON games. Max Burnet has got it all. Burnet has turned his home in the leafy suburbs of Sydney into arguably Australia's, if not the world's largest private computer museum. Since retiring as director of Digital Equipment Corporation a decade ago, Burnet has converted his home into a snapshot of computer history. Every available space from his basement to the top floor of his two-storey home is covered with relics from the past. On top of his hardware collection are numerous punch cards, tape machines (including the original paper tape) and over 6000 computer reference books. So in demand is his collection that one Australian film called on him to re create a computer setting (PDP-9) for a movie about the Moon Landing in 1969.
1748815
submission
Da Massive writes:
Leading Hollywood film studios Village Roadshow, Universal Pictures, Warner Bros Entertainment, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation and Disney Enterprises are suing Australia's second largest ISP, iiNet, saying it's complicit in the infringement of their copyrighted material. According to a statement of claim, "the ISP knows that there are a large number of customers who are engaging in continuing infringements of copyright by using BitTorrent file sharing technology".
1723817
submission
Da Massive writes:
Microsoft has denied paying a Nigerian contractor US$400,000 in a bid to battle Linux's movement into the government sector.
Media reports alleged that Microsoft had proposed paying the sum to a government contractor under a joint marketing agreement last year in order to persuade the contractor to replace Linux OS with Windows OS on thousands of school laptops. Although a joint marketing agreement was drafted to document the best practices for using technology in education, it was never executed, said Thomas Hansen, regional manager for Microsoft West, East and Central Africa. It became clear, he added, that one customer wanted a Linux OS.
1710887
submission
Da Massive writes:
"Why is IE still relevant and why is it worth spending money on rendering engines when there are open source ones available that can respond to changes in Web standards faster?," asked a young developer to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer in Sydney yesterday.
"That's cheeky, but a good question, but cheeky," Ballmer said.
Then came the startling revelation that Microsoft may also adopt an open source browser engine.
"Open source is interesting," he said. "Apple has embraced Webkit and we may look at that, but we will continue to build extensions for IE 8."
1186425
submission
Da Massive writes:
Techworld has an in-depth chat with Simon Peyton-Jones about the development of Haskell and his philosophy of do one thing, and do it well. Peyton-Jones describes his interest in lazy functional programming languages, and chats about their increasing relevant in a world with rapdily increasing multi-core CPUs and clusters: "I think Haskell is increasingly well placed for this multi-core stuff, as I think people are increasingly going to look to languages like Haskell and say 'oh, that's where we can get some good ideas at least', whether or not it's the actual language or concrete syntax that they adopt."
1177187
submission
Da Massive writes:
The government of Peru will run the first ever trial of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) association's low-cost XO laptop running on Microsoft's Windows XP operating system, putting the nation at the heart of a software controversy.
The little green laptop, which OLPC is trying to reduce to just US$100 per device, will be given out to school children throughout Peru for use over the next nine months as part of the trial. Currently, the XO costs around US$200 each to build.
The program puts Peru at the heart of a software controversy that has been raging for years between those who advocate making software and its source code free, such as Linux OS developers, and those who charge for software and keep the development recipes secret, such as Microsoft.
817569
submission
Da Massive writes:
For a technology that has been in stable release since May 22, 2000, PHP 4 has finally reached the end of its official life. With the release of PHP 4.4.9, official support has ended and the final security patch for the platform issued.
With eight years of legacy code out there, it is likely that there are going to be a fairly large number of systems that will not migrate to PHP 5 in the near future, and a reasonable proportion of those that will not make the migration at all. For those who are not able to migrate their systems to the new version of PHP noted PHP security expert, Stefan Esser, will continue to provide third party security patching for the PHP 4 line through his Suhosin product.
763387
submission
Da Massive writes:
Researchers at the University of Sydney have developed technology that could boost the throughput of existing networks by 100-fold without costing the consumer any more, and its all thanks to a scratch on a piece of glass.
After four years of development, University of Sydney scientists say the Internet is set to become on average 60 times faster than existing networks.
According to the Centre for Ultra-high bandwidth Devices for Optical Systems (CUDOS) at the University's School of Physics, the scratch will mean almost instantaneous, error-free and unlimited access to the Internet anywhere in the world.
630436
submission
Da Massive writes:
Mark Dowd's paper "Application-Specific Attacks: Leveraging the ActionScript Virtual Machine" — that points out a set of techniques that promises to open up a class of vulnerability research and exploits that was previously thought to be impossible to attack — has alarmed researchers. Already the small but growing group of Information Security experts that have had the chance to read and digest the contents of the paper are expressing an excited concern depending on how they are interpreting the contents of the paper.
While the Flash vulnerability described in the paper has been patched by Adobe, it is the presentation of a reliable exploit for NULL pointer dereferencing that has the researchers who have read the paper excited.
600748
submission
Da Massive writes:
The number of open-source projects that use the GNU General Public License Version 3 has grown to more than 2,000, according to Palamida, which sells software and services for tracking open-source code within a customer's code base. "Our database now contains over 2,000 projects that are using the GPL v3. "At this rate the GPL v3 is being adopted by 1,000 projects every 4-5 months, and if the trend continues, the license will be used by 5,000 projects by the end of the year," states a recent posting on Palamida's blog.
491792
submission
Da Massive writes:
Ministers in the Filipino government now understand Linux can do so much for so little outlay. Speaking at the linux.conf.au event in Melbourne, Australia, independent open source consultant Ricardo Gonzalez has told of how he has helped bring 23,000 Linux PCs to over 1000 schools in the Philippines.
http://www.computerworld.com.au/index.php/id;1163450117;pp;1
321539
submission
Da Massive writes:
While the industry is distracted by the ongoing tussle between Microsoft and OpenOffice.org over document formats, the KDE project is quietly preparing the next generation of its own office suite, KOffice, which will run on for Linux, Mac OS X and... Windows.
http://www.computerworld.com.au/index.php/id;1596080362
110425
submission
Da Massive writes:
Forget speech-recognition software: How about typing a letter just by thinking it? An Austrian company is showing a brain-computer interface at Cebit that 'reads' thoughts to operate a computer.
http://www.computerworld.com.au/index.php/id;36148 5560;fp;16;fpid;1
93616
submission
Da Massive writes:
A worldowide grid computing project has analysed a possible malaria cure faster than ever before: 4 months instead of 420 years.
http://www.computerworld.com.au/index.php/id;44613 6154;fp;16;fpid;1
