An anonymous reader writes "The Eclipse consortium celebrates its second anniversary this month, and is releasing milestone builds of the third version of its universal platform for tools integration. The Eclipse platform has been downloaded over 18,000 times, and in two short years has spawned an entire "ecosystem" of users and vendors. Eclipse has been recognized with more than eight top industry awards and honors, and open technology and commercial offerings associated with Eclipse have also grown at an unprecedented rate for tools technology."

Ridgelift writes "CRN is reporting the release of Linux 2.6.0 in mid-December. 'Torvalds, Linux's lead developer and now an OSDL Fellow, and Linux kernel maintainer Andrew Morton this week released the test10 version of Linux 2.6 after a three-year development effort. A final test11 version is expected before they sign off on the production version next month.' Get ready for 'major scalability improvements, faster performance, enhanced support for embedded systems and, to a lesser extent,' a kernel that 'supplies desktop systems with better USB and FireWire support.'"

An anonymous reader writes "Phoenix Technologies Ltd. unveiled a vision and roadmap for a next generation of system BIOS firmware that the company calls "core system software" today, at its Strategy 2004 conference. As defined by Phoenix, CSS is a new category of core system firmware that transcends the boundaries of traditional BIOSes and to deliver "extensible firmware that provides the critical foundation of trust, manageability, and connectivity required for networked computing," in a broad range of devices including desktop and laptop PCs, servers, and handhelds gadgets. Specific technologies that Phoenix is integrating into its d-NA CSS firmware include: support for the Trusted Computing Group (TCG) specification, remote diagnostics and error-checking, intelligent configuration checking and integrated system policy management, automated provisioning of servers and server virtualization, "radically enhanced" device power management, embedded TCP/IP, remote management functions including dynamic provisioning, load balancing and software resource control, and an XML and SOAP standards-based interface to CSS functions."

leming writes "This article in Linux Journal explains low-cost DVD authoring available in Linux. Traditionally, DVD authoring has been an expensive affair. Full-featured professional applications can cost thousands of dollars, while cheaper products, such as Apple's iDVD, have arbitrary restrictions that significantly reduce their usefulness. A new open-source effort, dvdauthor, is bringing the possibility of low-cost, professional-grade DVD authoring to Linux. Although it doesn't yet support all the features of the DVD specification, development is proceeding at a fast pace, and new features are being added with each release."

Bert690 writes "We all know that it's possible to search the huge expanse of the public web with a single uniform interface (think Google). But what about searching over private files, such as those someone you might not even know has given you access to on some obscure file-sharing network? A recent paper looks at supporting uniform search of distributed private content. The goal is to do it without opening up those who share stuff to lawsuits or other privacy violations, or relying on a central trusted index host."

milaf writes "Who doesn't know about XML nowadays? Quite a few people, actually: there has been so much hype around it that some people think that XML is a programming language, a database, or both at the same time. On the other hand, if you are a developer, chances are that you feel that -- no matter its usefulness -- there is not much to XML. After all, it may take just a few hours to get the hang of creating and parsing an XML document. Maybe this is why most of the many and voluminous books discuss numerous XML-related technologies, but say less about the usage of XML itself." Read on for milaf's review of a book that takes the opposite tack.

antrix angler writes "Linus Torvalds released the 2.6.0-test10 Linux kernel today, tentatively calling it the "stoned beaver" release. Linus plans to hand the kernel over to Andrew Morton in a few weeks, and then it will be up to Andrew to decide when we see the final 2.6.0 stable kernel. Download it from a mirror."

An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft last week published a document on its Web site that describes how the company manages security on its own 300,000 node corporate network. The document is basically a dry discussion of IT risk management strategy, with lots of references to 'asset classes' and 'stakeholders,' and about five, nearly identical 'cycle of life' type diagrams showing how one risk management strategy leads to the next and so on, in a never-ending process. However, the document does open a window on how the biggest, richest software company in the world does security: from the deployment of 65,000 smart cards (let's see, at $50 a piece, that comes to....?), to MS's admission that 'there is a medium to high probability that within the next year, a successful attack will occur that could compromise the High Value and/or Highest Value data class.' According to the document, that includes things such as source code or human resources data."

tempest303 writes "In order to help improve integration between apps on the Gnome desktop, Gnome.org is offering bounties for the completion of a variety of integration tasks. Bounties range from $15, for submitting new .ical files for Evolution 2.0's multiple calendar view, to $2500 for allowing synchronization between Evolution's addressbook with Gaim's buddy list!"

A reader points to a roadmap on freedesktop.org that provides a good summary of what is out there for *nix desktops, with emphasis on X but also covering some other areas.

Joe Clark writes "Nearly a year after an interview with this correspondent highlighted a few problems with Slashdot's HTML, Daniel M. Frommelt and his posse have recoded a prototype of Slashdot that uses valid, semantic HTML and stylesheets. Frommelt projects four-figure bandwidth savings in the candidate redesign, were it adopted, not to mention better appearance in a wide range of browsers and improved accessibility. Next he needs volunteers to retool the Slashdot engine. And yes, he did it all with CmdrTaco's blessing." Slashdot has kept its HTML 3.2 design for a long time ("because it works"), but perhaps this effort will be a catalyst for change...

null-und-eins writes "A new webservice offers automatic debugging of Linux binaries. It takes a (with "-g" compiled) binary and two invocations where one fails and the other doesn't. The service repeatedly runs the two programs and tries to find the smallest difference between the two that causes the failure. Nice google-like interface with statistics about its own performance."

christodd writes "I have become big fan of mouse gestures, a feature included in Opera, Mozilla, and MyIE2. There's even a plugin for IE. Other programs like StrokeIt and Cocoa Gestures are also based around the concept. I can't believe nobody else has thought of this before, but what about mouse gestures in javascript? Turns out that it is incredibly simple to implement, and really handy for those 'feature incomplete' web browsers. Unfortunately, for the total user experience, we'd have to upgrade the whole internet..."

BSDForums writes "The Darwin team is pleased to announce the availability of the Darwin 7.0.1 Installer CD. This is a single Installer CD that will boot and install Darwin on Macintosh computers supported by Mac OS X 10.3, as well as certain x86-based personal computers. The version of Darwin installed by this CD corresponds to the open source core of Mac OS X 10.3. Check out the release notes for more information." dmalloc writes "The Fink team has announced that their binary distribution versioned 0.6.2 is ready for use now. It is a bug-fix release to alleviate issues that came up in 0.6.1. Along with the bug fixes, it introduces an enhanced package manager which is now capable of using the finkmirrors.net-supplied rsync and distfiles mirrors."

An anonymous reader writes " Shortly after Linuxant has released their commercial DriverLoader, Pontus Fuchs has made an NDIS wrapper available under the GPL. Since some vendors refuse to release specifications or even a binary Linux-driver for their Wireless LAN cards he has decided to solve it himself by making a kernel module that can load Microsoft-Windows NDIS drivers. ndiswrapper has been tested with some BroadCom miniPCI cards and it seems to work on some laptops . With some more work it should be possible to support more cards. Hopefully this will be the case for the many owners of Linux laptops based on Intel's Centrino technology. Please contact Pontus if you are interested in helping out!"

H0ek writes "Seems Mono is still moving along in spite of the Novell purchase. They present a nicely comprehensive roadmap. You can read the official Novell press release if you're into that kind of nonsense. All I can say is, go Miguel! Don't let the Man get you down!"

HPC Prophet writes "For those of you that can't go to SC2003 or can't afford the US$750 late registration, here is a small taste of what we put together for our friends at Mellanox Technologies...It benches out at over 1.2TFLOP (192 dual Intel Xeon Processor blades, 64 in a Rackable chassis, 128 crammed into a Ciara chassis and all connected via InfiniBand) and loaded up with Callident Rx (based on NPACI Rocks) OS/Middleware. Total estimated time to unpack, build and get up and running was 17 hours." Read on for some details on this power-hog.

JigSaw writes "Clinton De Young reviews for OSNews the premier theKompany product, Data Architect. The product allows you to design ODBC and other databases under Linux, Windows or Mac OS X, utilizing the Qt toolkit."

mfago writes "Scott Robert Ladd has written an enlightening article and accompanying software package that utilizes genetic algorithms to optimize the optimization flags fed to a compiler. Those who have tried to squeeze the last drop of performance from a code know that it can be very difficult to determine the set of optimization flags beyond -O3 (with gcc for example) that yields the best performance. Lots of background links included in the article."

Christopher Kings-Lynne writes "PostgreSQL 7.4 has just been released. The list of new features is impressive and includes greatly improved OLAP performance among many other speed improvements."