On Monday September 8th 2008, Mark Shuttleworth, the lead Ubuntero behind one of the most popular Linux distributions yet introduced some goals for the April 2009 release titled Jaunty Jackalope. Shuttleworth summed up two big points: faster boot time and cloud computing with ‘weblications.’
Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category
Thoughts on Jaunty Jackalope
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64-bit Linux, is it time?
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Recently there hasn’t been much talk about 64-bit Linux on the desktop. Most technical articles have been dated sporadically since the release of the Athlon64/Opteron CPUs in 2003. And while Linux was one of the first operating systems to take full advantage of the AMD64 and later EM64T extensions to the x86 architecture, no one has really truly adopted them for standard use because of some technology still being 32-bit only.
It was mid-July in 2005. I was working toward my Computer Science degree and realized I needed a laptop in order to work on projects and homework while away from home. I’d heard good things about Dell laptops, so I chose to purchase a Dell Inspiron 9300. It was a behemoth, but no XPS (actually, it was one step below an XPS, and without the frilly LED lights everywhere).
Linux and Closed Source: Skype
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In the first edition of Linux and Closed Source, I discussed nVidia’s closed source drivers. This edition will focus on the Voice-Over-IP application Skype. Skype was initially released in August of 2003, and in the 5 years since then it has becoming the most used VOIP software on any platform with over 300 million users worldwide. Telephones have even been built around the Skype technology, and eBay thought so much about the technology that they purchased it in 2005. Skype is closed source.
Today, September 2nd, 2008, Google released their Chrome browser project. Google is aiming to reboot the browser experience by using updated technology to speed up JavaScript, provide safeguards to crashes, and other improvements.
Linux and Closed Source: nVidia
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nVidia has always felt a need to keep their drivers closed source, providing binary driver packages for Windows, Linux, Solaris, and BSD. This article focuses on the rationale and possible solutions to this “problem” in the case of Linux.
Adobe and Linux
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Recently, John C. Dvorak, columnist with MarketWatch posed an interesting challenge: Adobe could fend off Microsoft by embracing Linux. Well, first off, his rationale behind his was moreso a response to Microsoft’s Silverlight technology. Microsoft is attempting to build a replacement for Adobe’s venerable Flash player, a technology thousands upon thousands of websites use to serve dynamic animation and information. Dvorak then made the statement that Adobe should port their CS Suite to Linux.
Online Ubuntu Services
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Overview:
Provide the following services to Ubuntu users via a SSO method such as OpenID:
Hardware Submission
Configuration Settings per application
Bookmarks (Firefox, Konqueror, Epiphany, etc)
Bug Submissions
Brainstorm Ideas
Hardy Heron blueprints
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Canonical’s next version of its widely popular Ubuntu Linux operating system, codenamed Hardy Heron, will be version 8.04 and will feature Long Term Support. Ubuntu has been, for the last few years, striving to create an operating system that is a free and easy to use alternative to Windows.
One of Canonical’s services, Launchpad is a community site dedicated to bug tracking, feature requests, and package building. Its a novel approach to having one interface for the many different types of developers that help put Ubuntu together.
One feature of Launchpad, the blueprints area, is a place both developers and the avid Ubuntu user can go and request features to the point of actually specifying details on how they think the feature should be implemented. For Hardy Heron, there are currently 6 “Essential” features, 10 “High Priority” features, 18 “Medium Priority” features, 9 “Low Priority” features, and 1 undefined priority feature.
I’d like to discuss the features that I think are quite important, or just plain cool, that are in the pipe for the next version of Ubuntu, Hardy Heron 8.04 LTS.
Malware
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ArsTechnica posted an article about malware. It described how hackers and malware companies have altered their delivery and execution of malware over the course of the last few years. It also went into some of economic aspects of malware distribution and the reason its still a popular choice for hackers.
I’d like to discuss the topmost reason malware still exhibits a problem for both home and corporate users. Microsoft Windows. Secure Computing has some statistics about malware, collected during specified date ranges. The report dated 8/01/07 to 8/31/07 shows some interesting figures. Ninety-seven percent of the new malware found is in the form of Windows Executable code. From my point of view, two things are causing this. And I will explain both. Read more »
