According to eWEEK’s John Taschek, the reason that Linux came out ahead in last week’s TPC benchmark test was that the benchmark is flawed. Hardware was tested, not operating system performance. There is, however, still a victory for Open Source within the results: “Linux’s amazing score shows that at least two companies with substantial resources… are willing to go to bat for Linux, and provide its value to the enterprise.”

ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/alan/2.4/. Intermediate diffs are available from http://www.bzimage.org.
In terms of going through the code audit almost all the sound drivers still
need fixing to lock against format changes during a read/write. Poll creating
and starting a buffer as write does and also mmap during write, write during
an mmap.

2.4.5-ac4
o       APIC parsing updates                            (Ingo Molnar)
o       Retry rather than losing I/O on an IDE DMA      (Jens Axboe)
        timeout.
o       Add missing locking to cs46xx                   (Frank Davis)
o       Clean up sym53c416 and add PnP support          (me)
o       Tidy up changelog in apm.c                      (Stephen Rothwell)
o       Update jffs2, remove abuse of kdev_t            (David Woodhouse)
o       Fix oops on unplugging bluetooth                (Greg Kroah-Hartmann)
o       Move stuff into bss on aironet4500              (Rasmus Andersen)
o       Fix up alpha oops output                        (George France)
o       Update SysKonnect PCI id list                   (Mirko Lindner)
o       Update SysKonnect GigE driver                   (Mirko Lindner)
o       Add ATM DS3/OC12 definitions to atmdev.h        (Mitchell Blank)
o       Clean up atm drivers, fixed up user space       (Mitchell Blank,
        access with irqs off, kmalloc and use after      John Levon)
        free.
o       Update input device/joystick/gameport drivers   (Vojtech Pavlik)
o       Update USB hid drivers                          (Vojtech Pavlik)
o       Fix out of memory oops in hysdn                 (Rasmus Andersen)
o       Belarussian should be Belarusian according to   (Nerijus Baliunas)
        the standards
o       Support booting off old 720K floppies           (Niels Jensen, 
                                                    

ComputerUser: “The administration’s top security coordinator Richard Clarke once warned that the United States could face an “electronic
Pearl Harbor” if the nation’s electronic defenses were not strengthened. He painted an equally gloomy picture earlier this
week.

The increasing sophistication of electronic attackers, coupled with growing U.S. reliance on Web-based systems has created a
very dangerous environment, Clarke said at the Global Internet Project, a gathering of high-tech executives. Clarke is the
Bush Administration’s national coordinator for security, infrastructure Protection, and counter-terrorism.”

Chris Brandstrom writes: “In the long-running debate of NT versus Linux, one of the main arguments that the NT camp have used against Linux is that it is trailing in data-center features. They argue that it does not contain the features required for a production server in a data-center environment. Yet, NT lacks a major feature of Linux which makes it perfect for data-center environments: headless operation, the ability to run the computer without a monitor, keyboard, and mouse attached.”
Why Headless?
The advantages of headless operation are many and significant. There is the obvious hardware cost savings because you don’t need a monitor, keyboard, and mouse for each computer. This in turn saves space, often an expensive commodity in a data-center. The traditional workaround for these issues has been to use KVM switches to connect a single monitor, keyboard, and mouse to several computers. But this approach has drawbacks. For one thing, each rack of computers requires many cables, as many as 210 cables for a full rack. All the cables and KVM switches in a large data center, and the space they take up, can represent a significant financial cost. An even bigger problem can be the complexity this adds to your system of servers. An administrator can find himself digging through hundreds of cables looking for a loose connection. Of course, you want to decrease the number of issues that might a rise with a server system, not increase them.

That is where Linux’s headless operation capabilities can help. If your Linux server hardware supports headless operation, the only connections it will require are a network connection and a power connection. Compare this to the costs and complications caused by the bloated cable requirements of an NT server and you have one more reason to switch to Linux. In addition, companies like Rauch Medien (www.rauchmedien.com) have taken this idea to new levels with graphical web browser-based administration. This allows you to log on to a server from your web-browser and use a graphical menu to adjust server settings and manage user accounts and services. This approach makes Linux server administration much simpler. It also allows for remote administration, an incredibly useful ability not possible with KVM switches.

Conclusion
In the area of data center support, headless operation is one major feature where Linux is superior to NT. Even Redmond is recognizing the benefits of headless operation, and is now planning to support it in their next OS release (See: Whistler will offer headless option). However, it should be at least a year and a half from now before it truly is supported. And even then it will not be a full implementation such as Linux already enjoys. Of course, while NT is busy trying to catch up, Linux will have progressed even further. A year and a half is a very long time in the world of Open Source.”

Ted Johnson writes: “Frontwheeldrive is running a lengthy interview with Glyn Moody and Peter Wayner. Both of these guys have written books about free software (“Rebel Code” and “Free For All”) and the interview gets their opinions on how things are going in the Linux arena right now, what may happen in the future, and what it was like to write a book about free software. Cool stuff.”

LinuxSecurity: “WireX is pleased to announce the broad release of FormatGuard 1.0, the latest member of the Immunix security tool suite.
Similar to StackGuard http://immunix.org/stackguard.html , FormatGuard provides run-time protection against printf format
string vulnerabilities. http://www.securityfocus.com/archive/1/81565.”

Anandtech: “Gigabyte brings us dual Socket-370 performance with their VIA Apollo Pro 133A implementation. Does it have what it takes to make it against ABIT’s, MSI’s and Iwill’s Apollo Pro 133A boards? Only one way to find out.”

Wired: “Sarah Gordon, part of Symantec’s AntiVirus Research Center team, specializes in profiling the people who write destructive e-mail worms. And no, she doesn’t think they’re evil.”

Mikael Pawlo writes: “According to this Gnuheter story (in Swedish), Frits Bolkestein, in charge of the Internal Market Protection of intellectual property rights in the European Union and member of the European Commission, has said that there is no support for business method patents in the EU.” From Bolkesteins speech:


“Recently, considerable debate has taken place in Europe about the patentability of software-related inventions. Some consider that patents in this field tend to stimulate innovation. Others believe that patents will, on the contrary, stifle fair competition and hinder innovation. In the Commission we are currently considering what is the best approach to follow. We are studying the results of a public consultation we launched on the subject. It is clear from the replies we have received that there is no support for moving to a very wide protection extending, for example to business methods, which is the approach which the US applies. Any action at EU level would therefore be limited to harmonising and codifying the existing practice of Member States and of the European Patent Office.”
“

PCworld: “Sharp will unveil its long-awaited Linux-based PDA at the JavaOne conference beginning in San Francisco on June 4, according to a company source.”