Archive for August, 2009

News: Windows 7 vs. Snow Leopard: Inside the War Rooms

Microsoft is an engineering company, and Apple is a marketing company, and that makes all the difference. Microsoft may have a far better product in Windows 7 than Apple has in Snow Leopard, but Apple is making the most of its OS launch because its CEO is also its marketing guru. Microsoft has put together its best marketing team ever, but it’s not led by the CEO.

Last week’s big news was that Apple pushed up its Snow Leopard release by a month to provide a 60-day buffer between it and Microsoft’s biggest launch of the decade. Apple can’t match either Microsoft’s resources or price, but the feat of snagging an unchallenged 60 days during the back-to-school and early holiday shopping season points to Apple’s greatest advantage: Its marketing leader is also its CEO. Microsoft is fielding its best marketing team ever for the Windows 7 launch, led by Kathleen Hall, who was hired out of a leading advertising agency — but she isn’t the CEO.

This pits what is arguably a part of the most powerful technology company in the world against the most marketing-driven — thanks to Steve Jobs — company in the world, which coincidentally is the most profitable hardware-centric company in the world as well. Apple is the standing example of how important it is to properly staff and fund marketing. Right now, Apple is winning this fight.

I’ll close with my product of the week: an InterView monitor that is unique in the market because it has two screens — one for you and one for the person sitting across from you.

More details available at Technewsworld.com

News: On the 'Fake Linus Torvalds' and the Nifty Nokia N900

Will the best Fake Linus please stand up? The Linux Foundation, apparently courageous enough to risk acute embarrassment, has invited twits, er, tweeters to impersonate the Great One, promising “dangerously outrageous” fun. Though some Linux bloggers apparently think the Linux Foundation folks have been out in the sun too long, we’re expecting geeks to deliver the promised hilarity, if not the danger.

You know it’s a good day when included among all the dry-as-dust press releases that arrive on your virtual desk is one that promises to combine Linux, Twitter and “dangerously outrageous” fun.

Sure enough, from none other than the Linux Foundation came the tantalizing announcement of the “Fake Linus Torvalds” promotion, which it kicked off last week.

More details available at Technewsworld.com

Tutorial: How To Set Up A Secure & Free Proxy Server

A proxy server is a kind of server/software that sits between a network and another client machine and handles communication between the two. That one function is the primary use of a free proxy server – to act as a proxy for a client machine.

Proxy servers can also be configured to store (cache) webpages which the client machines frequently request. So when a client requests a webpage for the first time, the proxy downloads and caches the webpage and when a second request comes for the same page,the proxy serves it up from its cache instead of downloading it from the Internet, thus saving the user a hefty download bill and the agonizing wait. Such servers are called caching proxies.

More details available at MakeUseOf.com

Review: Can Ubuntu 9.10 Outperform Mac OS X 10.6?

Back on Friday we published Mac OS X 10.6 benchmarks and found it to offer some terrific performance improvements, but at the same time, there were a few notable regressions. Apple engineers have been working hard at pushing technologies like Grand Central Dispatch (GCD), OpenCL, full 64-bit support, and other changes to their OS X stack to bolster its performance capabilities and reduce the overall footprint. Now that we have tested Mac OS X 10.6, we are seeing how its performance compares to that of Ubuntu Linux. Ubuntu 9.10 “Karmic Koala” will be out in October and does have some performance improvements as our earlier tests have shown, but Canonical engineers have not been exclusively focusing on performance optimizations with this release. Can the Karmic Koala outperform Snow Leopard? Yes and no.

More details available at Phoronix.com

Site Of The Day: FontCubes.com

Here you’ll find the best free PC fonts and free Mac Fonts from the best font artists in the world. The fonts listed in our free font collection are their author’s property.

And this is great free collection of font.

Here the URL: FontCubes.com

Thank's to W3CERT.com

I want to say Thank to W3Cert.com or the owner Mr. Robin CCNA for the Donation. It’s make my child has a healthy back.

Thank you very much Mr. Robin for help me.

News: Apache.org Compromised

This is a short overview of what happened on Friday August 28 2009 to the apache.org services. A more detailed post will come at a later time after we complete the audit of all machines involved.

On August 27th, starting at about 18:00 UTC an account used for automated backups for the ApacheCon website hosted on a 3rd party hosting provider was used to upload files to minotaur.apache.org. The account was accessed using SSH key authentication from this host.

To the best of our knowledge at this time, no end users were affected by this incident, and the attackers were not able to escalate their privileges on any machines.

While we have no evidence that downloads were affected, users are always advised to check digital signatures where provided.

More details available at Apache.org

News: GNOME Shell 2.27.1 released

GNOME 3.0 will not be rolling out until the first half of 2010, but work is already underway on this major GNOME update that is the first to bring some radical changes in a long time. One of the major components of GNOME 3.0 is the GNOME Shell. The GNOME Shell will begin handling some of the responsibilities that previously was done by the window manager and GNOME Panel in GNOME 2.xx while offering a modern graphics experience. Continue Reading »

News: Mac OS X 10.6 Brings Serious Performance Gains

Some detailed benchmarks of Snow Leopard.

The performance improvements we encountered in Mac OS X 10.6 through our benchmarks we were quite astonishing. Thanks to the introduction of the Grand Central Dispatch, 64-bit migration, OpenCL support, and other refinements made “under the hood” of Snow Leopard, this is one hell of a fast operating system. We were quite appalled with multiple tests exhibiting nearly 50% performance boosts over Mac OS X 10.5.8. While that was an extreme improvement, many other tests ran 10~16% faster. In a few tests, the performance was the same or the delta was statistically insignificant, but in a couple tests, there were regressions.

News: Snow Leopard security: The good, the bad and the missing

Apple Engineers missed a key opportunity to implement an industry-standard technology in their latest operating system that would have made it more resistant to hacking attacks, three researchers have said.

Known as ASLR, or address space layout randomization, the measure picks a different memory location to load system components each time the OS is started. While Microsoft has had it implemented since the roll-out of Windows Vista, the analogous protection in Snow Leopard, which went on sale Friday, suffers from a crucial deficiency: It fails to randomize core parts of the OS, including the heap, stack and dynamic linker.

That means that attackers who identify buffer overflows and similar bugs in OS X components have a much better chance of causing the vulnerability to execute malicious code that compromises the machine. The halfhearted attempt at implementing ASLR has been a chief complaint of security researchers since Leopard, Snow Leopard’s predecessor. Many had hoped it would be made more robust in the new version.

More details available at channelregister.co.uk