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Microsoft

Windows 8 system requirements Windows 8 – we->

Submitted by sauchox
sauchox writes "Microsoft shared the news concerning the requirements that tablets must meet to be able to work under the control of Windows 8, because of it we know what devices we can expect. So what the manufacturers, that will want to receive the honorable title of “Certified for Windows 8, have to include in their devices?"
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Operating Systems

Cinder Mobile OS Lets Users Send More Power To Slow Apps 92

Posted by timothy
from the would-like-something-like-that-in-my-laptop dept.
alphadogg writes with this excerpt from Network World: "Stanford University researchers are designing an operating system from the ground up to handle the power and security requirements of mobile devices. The Cinder operating system is already working on an Arm chip, and members of the team are working on making it run on the HTC G1 handset, according to Philip Levis, a Stanford assistant professor. Levis spoke about Cinder at the Stanford Computer Forum on Tuesday. If an application isn't running as fast as the user wants, a Cinder-based phone could include a button to boost the energy allocated to that application, Levis said. Cinder also could allow users to download any code and run it safely on their phones in a 'sandbox' mode."

Comment: Re:oookay. (Score 3, Insightful) 47

by Azar (#26673153) Attached to: Lucene and SOLR Get Commercial Support

"...in the hopes of making it the defacto choice of search technologies used by companies within their products. 'The Lucene search library ranks amongst the top 5 Apache projects... According to Lucid Imagination officials, the Solr search server, which transforms the Lucene search library into a ready-to-use search platform for building applications...

I agree, it could have been more explicit in giving a brief description, but was it really that difficult to glean what it does from the summary?

Technology

LED Lighting As Cheap As CFLs Invented 553

Posted by Soulskill
from the bright-ideas dept.
mcgrew writes "New Scientist reports that a British team has overcome the obstacles to cheap LED lighting, and that LED lamps as cheap as CFLs will be on the market in five years. Quoting: 'Gallium nitride cannot be grown on silicon like other solid-state electronic components because it shrinks at twice the rate of silicon as it cools. Crystals of GaN must be grown at 1000C, so by the time a new LED made on silicon has cooled, it has already cracked, rendering the devices unusable. One solution is to grow the LEDs on sapphire, which shrinks and cools at much the same rate as GaN. But the expense is too great to be commercially competitive. Now Colin Humphreys's team at the University of Cambridge has discovered a simple solution to the shrinkage problem. They included layers of aluminium gallium nitride in their LED design... These LEDs can be grown on silicon as so many other electronics components are. ... A 15-centimetre silicon wafer costs just $15 and can accommodate 150,000 LEDs making the cost per unit tiny.'"

Comment: Re:Short lifespan? I don't think so. (Score 1) 249

by Azar (#25981141) Attached to: Real-World Benchmarks of Ext4

Is there some reason the version under Linux would be so comparatively fragile?

My understanding is that Silicon Graphics (now SGI) wrote XFS specifically for their hardware which was designed to handle power failures, and would maintain enough power to finish it's current I/O operations. Since almost none (if any) x86 hardware has this built-in feature, XFS isn't as robust as it was on native SGI hardware. I can't find the references for this tibit, though. So take it with a grain of salt. It's just what I remember being told when XFS was first appearing on the Linux scene.

Although, some of the issues that people see on XFS may be due to modified files that haven't been flushed to disk before the system loses power. XFS intentially zeros any unwritten data blocks to avoid possible security issues arising from residual data [1]. I believe XFS also uses out-of-order writes for both meta-data and data so a loss of power could mangle some data.

There are a couple of slightly older, but still well-written, roundups about file system comparions. One here and one here.

Comment: Re:Short lifespan? I don't think so. (Score 4, Interesting) 249

by Azar (#25976435) Attached to: Real-World Benchmarks of Ext4

I was wondering why it was omitted from this article as well. I believe that it's because JFS just doesn't seem to have the mindshare of ext3, XFS, or even ReiserFS. After reading various filesystem comparisons, I chose it as my FS and I have been using it for over a year without a single issue. I don't have to worry about long fsck times at reboot, my CPU has less load when deleting or copying a large volume of files (virtual machines or CD/DVD isos usually), never had any file loss or corruption, and it seems to complete large file operations quicker than ext3 (what I used previously). There are some things that ext3 does better than JFS, but overall I prefer the advantages of JFS over the advantages of ext3.

I know that if I were to rebuild an older computer that had lower specs, or perhaps a set-top box like MythTV that I wanted to be more power effecient then JFS is going to be my choice for the filesystem.

Security

Encrypted Images Vulnerable To New Attack 155

Posted by kdawson
from the bye-bye-deniability dept.
rifles only writes "A German techie has found a remarkably simple way to discern some of the content of encrypted volumes containing images. The encrypted images don't reveal themselves totally, but in many cases do let an attacker see the outline of a high-contrast image. The attack works regardless of the encryption algorithm used (the widely-used AES for instance), and affects all utilities that use single symmetric keys. More significant to police around the world struggling with criminal and terrorist use of encryption, the attack also breaks the ability of users to 'hide' separate encrypted volumes inside already encrypted volumes, whose existence can now for the first time be revealed." The discoverer of this attack works for a company making full-disk encryption software; their product, TurboCrypt, has already been enhanced to defeat the attack. Other on-the-fly encryption products will probably be similarly enhanced, as the discoverer asserts: "To our knowledge is the described method free of patents and the author can confirm that he hasn't applied for protection."

Poland has gun control.