Logging The Cyber World

There are fast computers, and then there are Linux fast computers. Every six months, the Top 500 organization announces “its ranked list of general purpose systems that are in common use for high end applications.” In other words, supercomputers. And, as has been the case for years now, the fastest of the fast are Linux computers.

As Jay Lyman, an analyst at The 451 Group points out, Linux is only growing stronger in supercomputing. “When considered as the primary OS or part of a mixed-OS supersystem, Linux is now present in 469 of the supercomputer sites, 93.8% of the Top500 list. This represents about 10 more sites than in November 2007, when Linux had presence in 91.8% of the systems. In fact, Linux is the only operating system that managed gains in the November 2008 list. A year ago, Linux was the OS for 84.6% of the top supercomputers. In November 2008, the open source OS was used in 87.8% of the systems. Compare this to Unix, which dropped from 6% to 4.6%, mixed-OS use which dropped from 7.2% to 6.2% and other operating systems, including BSD, Mac OS X and Windows, which were all down this year from the November 2007 list.”

Read the article at ComputerWorld

WASHINGTON (AFP) - Google plans to launch Tuesday its own Internet browser, opening up a new challenge in cyberspace to Microsoft and its dominant Internet Explorer.

The California-based Web search leader said the new browser, called Google Chrome, would “add value for users and, at the same time, help drive innovation on the web.”

“We realized … we needed to completely rethink the browser,” Google’s Sundar Pichai said in a blog post.

The application can be downloaded for free in more than 100 countries and its code will be open source so no rights will have to be paid by anyone using or adapting the software.

Full article at Yahoo News
and screenshots at blogoscoped.com

Linux distributor red Hat has issued a critical security update after its servers were hacked last week.

The organisation has acknowledged the attack, and one on the Fedora servers as well. It says that it is investigating to see if data was stolen or malware introduced to its systems.

“In connection with the incident, the intruder was able to get a small number of OpenSSH packages relating only to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 (i386 and x86_64 architectures only) and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (x86_64 architecture only) signed.

More at vnunet.com

Microsoft on Friday expanded its support for the open-source community by giving money to the Apache Software Foundation, the first time it has given money to the long-standing open-source project.

Microsoft also said it is contributing code to support a PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) project and committing to offer royalty-free specifications for Windows Server and.NET Framework protocols as part of its expanded support for the open-source community. The company announced its plans at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) now being held in Portland, Oregon.

Full Story at Yahoo News

The goal of BOSS is simple: to foster innovation in the search industry. Developers, start-ups, and large Internet companies can use BOSS to build and launch web-scale search products that utilize the entire Yahoo! Search index. BOSS gives you access to Yahoo!’s investments in crawling and indexing, ranking and relevancy algorithms, and powerful infrastructure. By combining your unique assets and ideas with our search technology assets, BOSS is a platform for the next generation of search innovation, serving hundreds of millions of users across the Web.

Full article from news @ cnet.com.

Related Link: Yahoo! Developer

“The 2008.0 final release is out! Code-named “It’s got what plants crave,” this release contains numerous new features including an updated installer, improved hardware support, a complete rework of profiles, and a move to Xfce instead of GNOME on the LiveCD.”

http://www.gentoo.org/

At JavaOne in May, 2006, Sun Microsystems announced they were going to release Java as free software under the terms of the GPL. The size of the task (6.5 million lines of code) was only eclipsed by the size of the opportunity for Java as a free and open technology.

At JavaOne in May 2007, Sun announced that the work was largely completed and so OpenJDK was launched. What was less newsworthy was the fact that on release - OpenJDK still relied on code that was encumbered - between 4 and 5 percent of the code was closed, non free source that Sun didn’t own.

complete article here.

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