Home Blog Page 9478

Turning the tides on Perl’s attitude toward beginners

Author: JT Smith

From an article at Perl.com: “It seems that the very thing we want to have happen, adding number to our ranks, is the first thing we fight against when beginners
show their faces. Wielding our swords of “RTFM” and shields of “killfile” we smite the very programmers that will carry this language
into the future. I have a co-worker who is known for saying, “It’s a good thing Perl is so powerful and cool, it barely makes up for the
collective, childish ‘elitism’ displayed by its community.” Collectively, this is a sad truth.”

BSD project goals, IP Filter licensing, and Darren Reed interview

Author: JT Smith

BSD Today discusses the recent licensing spat that led OpenBSD to remove IPFilter from its distribution. A major part of the article includes an interview with Darren Reed, author of the program.

Category:

  • Open Source

Fair game: What OS X means for gaming on the Mac

Author: JT Smith

In the first of a two-part series, Macworld’s David Read takes a look at how games are ported to the OS X operating system.

EU goes against the flow on new domains

Author: JT Smith

Reuters (via ZDNet): “As the Internet’s global standard-setting
body met on Friday to push for the creation of seven new Web domain
tags, Europe appeared to go against the flow with plans for a pan-EU
geographic domain name.”

Help, I’ve fallen

Author: JT Smith

“Find out more mysteries of find! See how to suspend a job, even when you no longer have the shell from which the job began! Peruse the painless (well, more
or less) method of switching from csh setenv to /bin/sh (or ksh, bash, zsh) exports! Study up on the exciting world of security! And more…” Get the answers at Daemon News.

Category:

  • Unix

What are those words that trigger Echelon?

Author: JT Smith

“According to various UK media sources today, the buzzwords said to trigger the
US, UK, Canada, New Zealand spying mechanism Echelon have been “posted on
the Internet.”” The Register is a bit skeptical of that report, considering those words haven’t popped up on any of the usual sites where such things are reported, but they do give a quick rundown of what some of those words reportedly are.

Monitoring a number of FreeBSD hosts

Author: JT Smith

Daemon News: “When running a number of servers it is at least interesting, but mostly yet important to be informed about the state of each system. Generally, it is desirable to get
essential information with a quick look. Thus monitoring software should provide data permanently and concisely. Displaying system data by graphical means is
nice, but often unsuitable when monitoring via a modem line or on a (perhaps wireless) PDA. Presenting data on a standard terminal display may seem to be a
little bit old-fashioned, but is still the most generic approach. A remote host monitoring software doing so is rmonitor which will be described in this article.”

Category:

  • Unix

Open Source stock report: Unemployment numbers save the day

Author: JT Smith

– By Dan Berkes
The motto for this week’s market: It could have been worse. Tech stocks led the Friday rally, but most were down from last week. Also this week, investors found good news in unemployment figures.The short trading week can best be described as “mixed,” with both the Dow and Nasdaq closing significantly down from the previous Friday. The week ended better than expected, thanks to a modest market rally on this first day in June, as investors speculating that the latest U.S. unemployment figures could signal an economic turnaround.

The Dow slipped back under 11,000 points for the first time since May 16, closing at 10,990.41. The Dow gained 78 points from Thursday’s close, but it was still 15 points lower than last Friday’s bell. Nasdaq’s index closed at 2,149.44, staging a 38-point gain for the day, but down almost 102 points from the close of business last week.

While tech stocks were the major winner’s in Friday’s upbeat rally, all but two of the stocks monitored in our handy table at the end of this column dropped in price from last Friday. “No one likes to see their stocks drop in price,” said market analyst James Philburn, “but considering where these shares were a day or two ago, it’s a vast improvement.”

Today’s modest rally was in part caused by the latest unemployment report from the U.S. Department of Labor. Numbers edged lower in May, down to 4.4 percent, compared with 4.5 percent in April. Most Wall Street analysts were betting the unemployment roles would rise to 4.6 percent this month.

Today’s report was the first time since September that unemployment rates have dropped since September 2000, when unemployment hit a 30-year low at 3.9 percent.

Philburn cautions against these numbers generating excessive enthusiasm, noting that the changes may be more procedural in nature. The government, he noted, revised its April report after changing the way it counted working Americans. The new counting methods revealed that more jobs were actually created than originally reported.

“We’re excited about the unemployment numbers,” said Philburn, “but I’m still betting that this number is going to bounce between 4.4 and 4.8 for the next year, at the least.”

Sun rise, Sun set
A few major announcements from Sun this week, one good, one bad. In the good-news department, Sun announced the presence of SUNSOURCE.net, a “Web portal that centralizes critical information on all of Sun’s free and Open Source projects,” including Sun-sponsored community and other projects to which Sun contributes. The new site is powered by development hosting service CollabNet.

In less-than-good news: A leaked company memo disclosed that Java v.p. George Paolini, the brains behind the company’s Java ONE response to Microsoft’s .NET, and overseer of the controversial Java Community Process, will leave the company this week. LinuxGram’s report of Paolini’s departure notes that one of the signatories on that memo was chief marketing officer John Loiacono, believed to be one of Paolini’s rivals within the company.

Paolini will join Zaplet, Inc., as chief marketing officer. Zaplet, an “email development” concern with $90 million in VC funding, is headed by Alan Baratz, who holds the blame by some in the Open Source community for creating Sun’s initial Java closed development fiasco.

IBM: Go east, young Tux
The big news in Linux and Open Source software this week was the announcement of an alliance between Fujitsu, Hitachi, IBM, and NEC that will work on Open Source projects in an attempt “to drive Linux further into the enterprise.” The partnership plans to work with existing Open Source developers to offer enterprise customers additional Linux features. In the works is a “problem-isolation” project allowing developers to pinpoint problems in running systems.

Caldera goes to Tokyo
In a press release issued Thursday evening, Caldera International announced the opening of its new Japanese subsidiary, Caldera K.K. Plans call for Caldera K.K. to open local offices “providing local Linux and UNIX business solutions to the Japanese enterprise market. The new subsidiary counts Fujitsu and Hitachi among its investors, and Makoto Asoh, formerly of Caldera’s Nihon SCO has been named as its director.

Here’s how Open Source and related stocks ended the week:

Company Name Symbol 6/01 Close 5/25 Close
Apple AAPL 20.89 22.76
Borland Software Int’l BORL 10.64 10.06
Caldera International CALD 1.74 1.95
EBIZ Enterprises EBIZ.OB 0.80 0.77
Hewlett Packard HWP 29.25 30.05
IBM IBM 112.89 117.80
Merlin Software Tech. MLSW.OB 0.25 0.28
Red Hat RHAT 5.34 5.95
Sun Microsystems SUNW 16.63 20.47
TiVo TIVO 8.61 11.21
VA Linux Systems LNUX 3.85 4.46
Wind River Systems WIND 22.74 25.03

Category:

  • Open Source

Enter Runix: Linux for the PlayStation

Author: JT Smith

There’s been much news about Linux for the PlayStation 2 game console, but here’s something new: a distribution for the original PlayStation. ZDNet UK reports that Czech firm Blokman Trading has released an alpha version of the 2.4 Linux kernel for Sony’s original console. Called Runix, the PS1 distro will be freely available under the GPL.

Category:

  • Linux

OpenBSD 2.9 released

Author: JT Smith

Slashdot: “Well, the mirrors have had overnight to update, so I suppose we can announce that
OpenBSD 2.9 is available. The release notes and changelog contain details of what has
changed and improved. For our newer readers, OpenBSD is a BSD flavor that
concentrates on security – they aim to be the most secure server operating system.”

Category:

  • Unix