securitas writes "ITBusiness has an interview from the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference where Bill Gates says 'You don't need perfect code to avoid security problems.' Instead he suggests that users acquire and properly configure firewalls and make sure that they keep their software patches up-to-date. Considering that Microsoft says it is focused on security, the comments from the Chief Software Architect aren't inspiring, especially beacuse the underlying attitude seems to contradict the idea of well-written, secure code. What kind of message does that send to the developers who work for Gates?"

Greg Wilkins writes "Core Developers Network have reviewed the good, the bad and the ugly of the 2.4 servlet specification being produced by JSR154 . As well as introducing the new features, those that are missing in action are discussed. Also existing and newly added problems in the specification are presented."

An anonymous reader writes "The Debian Project, creators of the Debian GNU/Linux distribution, has voted to allow amendments to their Social Contract and Free Software Guidelines, as long as the developers agree with a 3:1 majority. The full text of the various amendments can be found in the original call for votes. Debian developer and XFree86 packager Branden Robinson has already proposed an amendment to the Social Contract that removes the requirement to maintain an archive for non-free software or "contrib" software (free software that depends on non-free software to work). Debian could still maintain this archive, but would no longer be required to do so. The proposal also updates the Social Contract to clearly require all works in Debian to meet the Debian Free Software Guidelines, not just software, which had come up repeatedly in the discussions over the non-free "GNU Free Documentation Licence". Both of these updates have been under consideration for some time, but were waiting on the ratification of the amendment procedure. The Debian Project voted on this amendment using their modified Condorcet voting procedure, which allows voters to rank the choices in order of preference, eliminating the "lesser of two evils" effect common to simple majority voting."

An anonymous reader writes "Robert Watson of the FreeBSD Core Team has put up a FreeBSD and Linux kernel source cross reference based on the LXR software used for the Linux kernel cross reference. The stated purpose is to make it easier for FreeBSD users and developers to explore and understand the FreeBSD code, as well as to compare the FreeBSD approaches with abstractions and implementation in the Linux kernel. This should help with portability, compatibility, and architectural cleanliness. Robert has posted to the FreeBSD mailing lists indicating he'll be pushing source code for other *BSD systems and Darwin in the near future as well. Sounds like this may be a really useful site for FreeBSD developers, but also for all open source kernel developers (Linux and others)."

Roland Piquepaille writes "Bill Camp & Jim Tomkins, from Sandia National Laboratories, have published a 77-page document about the architecture of the Red Storm supercluster being built by Cray Inc. The new nickname for the 40 teraflops system is "Thor's Hammer." Please read the full presentation if you have the time (PDF format, 3.54 MB). This technical analysis gives you the major characteristics of the system which will be operational by August 2004. With its 108 compute cabinets and its 10,368 compute node processors (AMD Opteron running at 2.0 GHz), it is expected to reach 20 teraflops on MP-Linpack. The report also looks at scalability and reliability, which are essential for a sytem which will be expanded to 30,000 processors in the future."

Comatose51 asks: "I've been desperately trying to create an application that uses Bluetooth over the last month. I've been frustrated by the lack of good books and lack of hardware compatible with readily available Bluetooth APIs. While Microsoft added Bluetooth support into Windows XP since SP1, most hardware vendors do not use the Microsoft Bluetooth Stack. Instead, they use other proprietary stacks that costs money to obtain the SDKs and APIs for. I had to buy the Microsoft Bluetooth Mouse to get their Bluetooth Stack and a compliant adapter, which is still many times cheaper than what some companies charge for their APIs and SDKs. Java is the other (potentially better, easier) option but I haven't found any hardware vendors that state that they're Java (JSR-82) compliant. Is there really no easy way of developing Bluetooth applications for Windows? It is sad because Bluetooth holds so much promise. Thanks in advance." Might Bluetooth's problems stem from the fact that there is no consistent development platform for the technology?

the_pete writes "The new OSSTMM WIRELESS 2.9 has gone live at www.osstmm.org and includes tests for most things wireless from RFID tags to 802.11 networks and back to Bluetooth. We began separating out the sections from the OSSTMM 2.1 because the 3.0 draft was looking big and we found most people used it to test specific areas. So we threw together all the notes we had so far for the Wireless Testing Section and formatted it nicely. It's not quite 3.0 but it's getting there. And if there's a wireless device we don't cover you can always contribute your ideas, skills, and knowledge."

securitas writes "If you had any doubts that you are overwhelmed by the volume of information in your life, a new Berekley study (PDF) shows that five exabytes of data were created in 2002, twice the 1999 total. That's five million terabytes of data, or 500,000 Libraries of Congress, which works out to about 800 MB of data for each of the 6.3 billion people on the planet. Of note is that 92 percent of the new information was stored on magnetic media, which may create an interesting problem for historians and archaeologists of the future. The study was conducted by University of California-Berkeley's School of Information Management and Systems professors Peter Lyman and Hal Varian. More at CNet, Infoworld, ByteAndSwitch and The Register."

Jan Stafford writes "In this interview, Linus Torvalds talks up the test version of the 2.6 Linux kernel released last weekend. He also hints at when a stable, production 2.6.0 might be released." Specifically, Linux encourages big shops to test out the improved high-end capabilities.

For a sysadmin, putting "MIT Network Operations" on a resume must feel pretty satisfying. James Kretchmar got the job, and now has written the book. ALecs writes with his review of Kretchmar'sOpen Source Network Administration, below.

gletham writes "Today at NMIC, Nokia officially announced a new mobile device development environment - Series 90. So why series 90? This article explains it in detail - Nokia has launched this solution to enable developers to leverage their apps across a range of devices that are tightly focused on specific needs - in this case, playing music, messaging, or playing games. Series 90 is based on the Symbian OS 7.0, incorporating standard technology for application development, browsing, and messaging. Additionally, details of the first mobile device -- the Nokia 7700, based on series 90 -- was also released."

An anonymous reader writes "This article shows how to access a non-booting Linux system with a Knoppix CD, get read-write permissions on configuration files, create and manage partitions and filesystems, and copy files to various storage media and over the network. You can use Knoppix for hardware and system configuration detection and for creating and managing partitions and filesystems. You can do it all from Knoppix's excellent graphical utilities, or from the command line."

AstroDrabb writes "It seems that CodeWeavers' CrossOver Office 2.1 now supports Dreamweaver MX and Flash MX. So for those who have been waiting to ditch MS Windows because of these two apps, now is your chance. The announcement from CodeWeavers can be found here and the changelog can be found here. The list of supported applications is also getting pretty impressive."

TheNomad writes "The Machinima Film Festival 2003 is over, and the results from the awards are in. Red Vs Blue swept the awards with 3 awards for "Best Independent Film", "Best Writing" and "Best Picture". Katherine Anna Kang's firm Fountainhead did very well too, with wins for "Best Direction", "Best Commercial Machinima", "Best Technical Achievement" and "Best Visual Design". Most of the films are available now, and there is a whole bunch of coverage of the event (with pictures) over at Machinima.com."

perf_monkey asks: "I'm part of a large Web Infrastructure Quality Assurance (QA) team at a large financial institution. Currently, we use Mercury Interactive's LoadRunner like a bunch of trained monkeys. We also use QA Load and SilkPerformer, but for smaller (non-J2EE) projects. As one of the technical folks, I've been trying to expand our horizons and our budget. I can no longer believe that large companies are willing to pay a QUARTER OF A MILLION dollars for the privilege of an additional 2000 Mercury VUsers. I'm looking at both commercial and open source alternatives. I've been tinkering with The Grinder and have had pleasing results. While not a full-blown QA tool, it is an excellent 'programmer's' load test tool. I was hoping that there are other tools like this and was hoping for the community's opinion. What web performance tools do you use and what do you think of them?"

An anonymous reader writes "The Cygwin/XFree86 project is leaving XFree86.org. For those that don't know, Cygwin/XFree86 is a port of the X Window System to Cygwin (which provides a *nix-like API on Windows). Here is the announcement and the start of the trouble. The XFree86 project has pushed away more developers than most projects ever have - is this the beginning of the end for XFree86?"

Michael Yuan writes "Enterprise JavaBean (EJB) is one of the most widely used technologies in enterprise Java. It is designed to be a scalable and flexible distributed framework. In EJB, almost everything can be done in several different ways and it offers the developer the maximum flexibility to choose the right approach for the project in hand." Yuan provides a review, below, of Bitter EJB, to guide programmers interested in large-scale Java development. Update: 10/27 18:27 GMT by T : Peter Wayner provides a somewhat deeper look at the book as well, also below.

keesh writes "Linux kernel 2.6.0-test9 is now out. Changes include SATA support and XFS and CIFS fixes. Because of the change freeze, this is a fairly minor update. In the announcement, Linus suggests that -test10 will be the final release before 2.6.0-final. Don't forget to use a mirror."

An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft released the design specifications document for C# 2.0 (codenamed 'Whidbey') to be released early next year. New features of the language include generics similar to those found in Eiffel and Ada, anonymous methods similar to lambda functions in Lisp, iterators, and partial types."

Anon. writes "GTK 2.3 was released today, and initial (not finalized) screenshots of the new file selector are available here(1), here(2) and here(3). But do remember that the new file chooser is very much a work-in-progress, and the UI is not yet final."