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Windows

University of Penn. Recommends Against Vista SP1 286

At least one university liberal enough to accept the deeply flawed and mostly rejected Vista OS is recommending faculty and students stay away from SP1. "University of Pennsylvania tech staffers are advising faculty and students not to upgrade their computers to the new service pack for Microsoft's Windows Vista operating system. The school's Information Systems & Computing department said it will support Vista SP1 on new systems where it's pre-installed, but added that it 'strongly recommends that all other users adopt a "wait and see" attitude,' according to a newly published department bulletin." And CIO magazine doesn't quite go so far as to call on Microsoft to throw away Vista, but it does ask its readers to weigh in on that topic.
Software

Preload Drastically Boosts Linux Performance 144

Nemilar writes "Preload is a Linux daemon that stores commonly-used libraries and binaries in memory to speed up access times, similar to the Windows Vista SuperFetch function. This article examines Preload and gives some insight into how much performance is gained for its total resource cost, and discusses basic installation and configuration to get you started."
Biotech

Submission + - New Wonder Weed Fuels Cars 1

Hugh Pickens writes: "Jatropha, an ugly, fast-growing and poisonous weed that has been used as a remedy for constipation, may someday power your car. The plant, resilient to pests and resistant to drought, produces seeds with up to 40 per cent oil content that when crushed can be burnt in a diesel car while the residue can be processed into biomass for power plants. Although jatropha has been used for decades by farmers in Africa as a living fence because its smell and taste repel grazing animals, the New York Times reports that jatropha may replace biofuels like ethanol that require large amounts of water, fertilizer, and energy, making their environmental benefits limited. Jatropha requires no pesticides, little water other than rain and no fertilizer beyond the nutrient-rich seed cake left after oil is pressed from its nuts. Poor farmers living close to the equator are planting jatropha on millions of acres spurred on by big oil companies like British Petroleum that are investing in jatropha cultivation."
Announcements

Submission + - Brain Differences In Democrats and Republicans

i_like_spam writes: Scientists from NYU and UCLA report in Nature Neuroscience that the brains of Democrats and Republicans process information differently. This new study finds that the differences are apparent even when the brain processes common information, not just political topics. From the study, liberals were more likely to be accurate and showed more brain activity in the region associated with analyzing conflicts. A researcher not affiliated with the study stated, liberals 'could be expected to more readily accept new social, scientific or religious ideas.' Moreover, 'the results could explain why President Bush demonstrated a single-minded commitment to the Iraq war and why some people perceived Sen. John F. Kerry ... as a flip-flopper.
Data Storage

Submission + - 48GigaBYTE flash chip (pennnet.com)

Hal_Porter writes: Hynix have stacked 24 16 gigabit (2 gigabyte) NAND flash chips in a 1.4mm thick package, giving 48 gigabytes of storage. It's not clear if it's possible to write to them in parallel — if so the device should be pretty damn fast. The usual objection to NAND flash as a hard drive replacement is lifetime. NAND sectors can only be written 100,000 times or so before they wear out, but wear levelling can be done to spread writes evenly over at least each chip. I worked out that the lifetime should be much longer than a typical magnetic hard disk. There's no information on costs yet frankly and it sounds like an expensive proof of concept, but it shows you the sort of device that will take over from small hard disks in the next few years.
Linux Business

Which Embedded Linux Distribution? 62

Abhikhurana writes "I work for a company which designs a variety of video surveillance devices (such as MPEG4 video servers). Traditionally, these products have been based on proprietary OSs such as Nucleus and VxWorks. Now, we are redesigning a few of our products and I am trying to convince my company to go down the Linux route. Understandably, our management is quite skeptical about that and so I was asked by our CTO to recommend a few RTOSs which have mature networking stacks and which work well on ARM platform. I know that there are many embedded Linux based distributions out there. There are commercial ones such as Montavista, LynuxWorks, free ones such as uclinux, muLinux and some Linux like distros such as Ecos. What is the most stable and best community supported embedded Linux distribution out there?"
Encryption

Full Disk Encryption - Xen, Windows and Linux? 49

Bofh To asks: "I'm in an industry that, more or less, requires full disk encryption, and to accomplish this, we use Pointsec on Windows. For the past 8 years, I've been running Linux on my work laptop, and this is the first time I'm running in a Windows only environment. I am interested in changing that, because I want to use Linux as my main platform, and only drop in to Windows when necessary (and use crossover if at all possible). I'm also interested in Xen, and would like to see if I can use that to virtualize Windows under Linux. My thought is that, as long as Pointsec is in dom0 and I use virtual disks for the Windows VM, I should be covered. The problem is that I'd also like a machine that is usable, as opposed to waiting endlessly as the virtual memory, virtual machine, pointsec, and xen all thrash around while I'm working on the machine. Has anyone used Pointsec for Linux, with Xen? "
Operating Systems

Submission + - Published Linux kernel 2.6.21

diegocgteleline.es writes: "Torvalds has released Linux 2.6.21 after months of development. This release improves the virtualization with VMI, a paravirtualization interface that will be used by Vmware. KVM does get initial paravirtualization support along with live migration and host suspend/resume support. 2.6.21 also gets a tickless idle loop mechanism called "Dynticks", built in top of "clockevents", another feature that unifies the timer handling and brings true high-resolution timers. Other features are: bigger kernel parameter-line, support for the PA SEMI PWRficient CPU and for the Cell-based "celleb" Toshiba architecture, NFS IPv6 support, IPv4 IPv6 IPSEC tunneling, UFS2 write, kprobes for PPC32, kexec and oprofile for ARM, public key encription for ecryptfs, Fcrypt and Camilla cipher algorithms, NAT port randomization, audit lockdown mode, some new drivers and many other small improvements."
Operating Systems

Submission + - Diving deeper into Linux

teh moges writes: From an administrator point of view, I know a lot about MS Windows, where files are stored, where settings are, which registry keys to edit, how to change drivers and so on. I made the initial switch to Linux a year ago, and now that I feel capable with using Linux from an end user's point of view, and when things go wrong, I can fix them, thanks to Google. I now want to now start to get deeper into it. Are there any great resources, such as websites, wikis or books for someone that wants to find out exactly how Linux works and how to fix and modify it?
Handhelds

Palm to go Linux 253

jetkins writes "The Melbourne Age reports that company officials announced Tuesday that Palm will move to a new Linux-based platform 'to help the company compete better.' The move was announced 'during a meeting with analysts in New York, where they also discussed the company's business strategy and refused to talk about recent rumors of a possible buyout.'"

Feed Weak Vista Launch Continues To Take Its Toll On Computer Industry (techdirt.com)

The release of Vista was supposed to have been a boon for the computer industry, as many were expecting business and consumers to upgrade their hardware at the same time they upgraded their operating system. But, despite Microsoft's claims to the contrary, the launch has generally been regarded as weak. The upshot is that makers of computers and parts are now being forced to ratchet down expectations. Yesterday, chip maker AMD warned of terrible earnings stemming from low volume and a brutal price war with Intel. Today, hard drive maker Seagate is getting slammed after it warned of weak demand and a difficult price environment. The company didn't say it explicitly, but it seems that the whole industry may have produced way too many drives in anticipation of strong, Vista-driven sales that never materialized. Seagate, of course, has another challenge: convincing investors that its core business is not under threat from makers of flash memory. There's no evidence that its troubles are related to competition from flash, but you can be sure that investors are keeping a close eye on the situation. If makers of flash memory continue to sail along, and prices in that space hold up fairly well, you can be sure that obituaries for the hard drive industry will be written once again.
The Courts

Submission + - Internet use from work may be protected

athloi writes: "A Welsh university employee has successfully sued the UK government in the EU court of human rights over monitoring of her personal internet use from work. "According to the complaint, the woman's e-mail, phone, Internet, and fax usage were all monitored by the Deputy Principal (DP) of the college, who appears to have taken a sharp dislike to her. The woman claimed that her human rights were being abused, and pointed specifically to Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (PDF), which governs private and family life." Amazingly, the courts agreed. This could set a precedent for internet use as a right independent of location."

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