ZDNet has the story on the new new G.SHDSL, which could be two to three times faster than
most versions of DSL targeted at business customers.

Kelly McNeill writes, “The CERT Advisory contains some good suggestions on the methods you can use to make your PC more secure from the Nimda worm . It also lists a number of suppliers of antivirus software. All the usual supporters are there — Central Command, Inc., Command Software Systems, Data Fellows Corp., McAfee, Sophos, Symantec, and Trend Micro. But there is one company missing. One company that would be the most suitable to supply antivirus software for Microsoft operating systems. One company that has never shown any disinclination for jumping into and dominating any software-related market. That’s right, Microsoft. Why doesn’t Microsoft market antivirus software?” The column’s at osOpinion.

The review’s at ZDNet: “KDE is available in binary form for most versions of Linux and Unix, and its feature set and
user-friendly look and feel will help facilitate the migration of Windows users to a Linux-based
desktop environment. Naturally, the primary downfall of deploying KDE is a lack of mature,
enterprise-level Linux productivity apps, especially those that can properly import documents in
MS Office format. In deciding whether to implement the KDE desktop, it’s essential that IT
managers evaluate users’ needs and abilities, and take stock of available productivity software
that’s compatible with the KDE environment.”

From ZDNet: “Droves of Napster clones are proving that it’s still cheap and easy to create file-swapping
services under the nose of the entertainment industry — but such ventures promise mostly
high risks and little pay for the people behind them.”

Posted at LWN.net: “The window manager Window Maker was found vulnerable to a buffer overflow
due to improper bounds checking when setting the window title.
An attacker can remotely exploit this buffer overflow by using malicious
web page titles or terminal escape sequences to set a excessively long
window title.
This attack can lead to remote command execution with the privileges of
the user running Window Maker.

A temporary fix does not exist; we recommend to update your system with
the new RPM from our FTP server.”

– By Jeff Field –

Every time I turn around, it seems hard drives have gotten bigger and faster.
But except for increases in interface, speed and size, we have not seen many other
noticeable changes in hard drives — they are still the same physical size, are
packaged the same, and make roughly the same amount of noise. And now, sizes and
speed are hitting a plateau. How are hard drive makers to compete with one
another?Seagate, a leader in hard drive and storage technology for more than 20 years,
has decided that because speed and size have become relatively even across most
quality desktop drives of similar specifications, it will make other
changes to its drives in order to be competitive.

Sound barrier technology
Seagate’s latest change to hard drives, its “sound barrier technology,” is really
a combination of several design changes meant to decrease the operational noise
of hard drives, a pet peeve for those who want to build “silent” PCs that
operate without being obtrusive. The main part of this technology is the
SoftSonic motor. Present in the Barracuda ATA IV, the SoftSonic Fluid Dynamic
Bearing motor reduces seek noise down to about 2.4 bels, much lower than
that on other drives, with an idle spin noise level of 2.0 bels.

Combined with this is a set of new seek algorithms that are designed to decrease
noise while not impeding the performance of the drive, Seagate’s fastest 7200 RPM
ATA drive yet.

Also included with the drive are Seagate’s slightly older technologies, known as
SeaShell and SeaShield. SeaShield reduces damage to the drive electronics by
covering them up, so if a drive is dropped a small distance, the mechanics
themselves could easily survive because none of the sensitive drive electronics get
damaged. SeaShell, on the other hand, is a packaging technology that Seagate
claims reduces returns from handling damage up to 70%, something that benefits
resellers and Seagate more than the consumer, in the long run, because costs on
return processing can be quite high.

System Configuration
Athlon 1.4GHz
256 Megabytes DDR RAM from Crucial
Gigabyte 7DXR motherboard
Slackware 8.0
Kernel 2.4.9

bonnie++ results
Bonnie++ is a hard drive benchmark that tests the writing and reading
from both a single large file (such as that of a database) and many small files (like a proxy, or mail program). It is
useful for simulating performance under such applications.

Bonnie++ results
Sequential Output
Drive	Per-Character	Block	Rewrite
Barracuda IV	15883 K/sec, 98% CPU	46820 K/sec, 30% CPU	10171 K/sec, 06% CPU
Sequential Input			Random
Drive	Per-Character	Block	Random
Barracuda IV	10622 K/sec, 58% CPU	40949 K/sec, 15% CPU	210.9 Seeks/sec, 0% CPU
Sequential Create
Drive	Create	Read	Delete
Barracuda IV	21993 /sec, 99% CPU	none	26431/sec, 100% CPU
Random Create
Drive	Create	Read	Delete
Barracuda IV	16810 /sec, 84% CPU	none	20601/sec, 100% CPU

To be honest, these are the fastest results I have ever seen for a drive — even beating the 10,000-RPM Cheetah drives Seagate produces in many of these tests. For speed, you just won’t find an IDE drive to match the Barracuda ATA IV, certainly not in the operations bonnie++ performs.

hdparm results

The hdparm tests give you the raw throughput of the device — essentially, the best you can possibly hope for. Uncached is
the buffered speed of the disk, without the use of the operating system cache. Cached results test the perform of the RAM
and CPU more than they test the drive itself.

hdparm -t (Uncached) Results
ST380020A	37.43 MB/sec
hdparm -T (Cached) Results
ST380020A	181.51 MB/sec

Again, the raw throughput of this drive is the fastest I’ve seen so far. Most drives I test come in at around 23.70 megabytes per second in the uncached results, and the fastest I’ve seen in that result is a 10,000-RPM Ultra160 Cheetah which pulled in 36.47 megabytes a second, still slightly slower than the Barracuda ATA IV’s score of 37.43. Again, amazing performance.

Conclusion
Seagate laid somewhat dormant in the “lower end” market of IDE drives for a while, dominated by Maxtor, IBM, and others. But Seagate has come back into this arena, and has come in swinging. With huge capacities and unparalleled speed, as well as nearly silent drives — certainly quiet enough not to bother my sensitive ears — Seagate has become the king of the ring for IDE speed, size and performance. Even better, the drives are not going to cost you an arm and a leg — at present, you can find an 80-gigabyte Barracuda ATA IV (ST380021A) on Pricewatch for around $200, not bad for such a fast, large drive. If you are looking for an upgrade for your hard drive that will bring you both speed and capacity without breaking the bank, look no further than the Seagate Barracuda ATA IV.

Kelly McNeill writes, “If the government makes using digital rights technologies a legal requirement, free software and free speech will almost certainly be adversely affected. Indeed, you have to wonder why government seems so keen to kiss up to big business. The only result of such legislation is to give an unfair advantage to corporate giants. Both the proposed digital rights legislation, called the Security Systems Standards and Certification Act, and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act suggest to me that the United States may not necessarily be best classified as the land of the free, as is commonly suggested. It appears that Americans’ precious constitutional rights and privileges are slowly being traded off to the big business.” The column’s at osOpinion.

An anonymous reader clues us in:”Check out kernel.org.” Yep, the changelog is there, at http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/testing/patch-2.4.10.log.

It’s posted at Net-Security.org with this commentary: “Looking at the binary of the virus is noticed that it
seemed to have a hardcoded boundary and wrote a quick
sendmail rule to filter it out.

It will probably slow down your mailserver and break alot
of things and I am not even sure it works (since I
haven’t been able to test it on a live virus yet). So you
use it on your own risk.

Use it, improve it or ignore it.”

Slashdot has the info. The licenses include X.Net, the New Artistic, the Sun Public
License, and the Eiffel Forum
License.