Slashdot Mirror

An anonymous reader writes "This series of articles helps you migrate your Win32 C/C++ applications to Linux on POWER. Win32 C/C++ Apps to Linux Part-1 of this series covers the Win32 APIs mapping to Linux on POWER regarding the initialization and termination, process, thread, and shared memory services. Win32 C/C++ Apps to Linux Part-2 illustrates how to map Win32 to Linux with respect to mutex application program interfaces (APIs)."

Donna writes "This article discusses detailed similarities and differences involved in booting Linux on an x86-based platform (typically a PC-compatible SBC) and a custom embedded platform based around PowerPC, ARM, and others. It discusses suggested hardware and software designs and highlights the tradeoffs of each. It also describes important design pitfalls and best practices."

DonnaMai writes "Face it: the only scorching hot thing you want with a chip is salsa. Any other overheating is potentially counterproductive, and can be downright damaging to the microprocessor -- or other components. This article uncovers potential ways to chill the chips."

Mai writes "Computers are getting faster all the time, or so they tell us. But, in fact, the user experience of performance hasn't improved much over the past 15 years. This article takes a look at where all the precious processor time and memory are going."

Mai writes "What happens when two coalitions within a standard come into conflict, and it doesn't get resolved quickly? The ultrawideband technology standard shows you."

A reader writes: "There's been a lot of bits written recently about the growth of Open Source databases; as well as IBM's patent gift, as their release of the Java database Cloudscape. There's a contest running on SourceForge.net around Cloudscape; download and run with it." SF.net is part of OSTG, like Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes "This article reviews common issues of wireless security, and shows how to use open source software to suss out wireless networks, get information about them, and start recognizing common security problems. You will learn how build a lightweight wireless sniffer that runs on open source software and see how simple it is to interact with wireless networks."

An anonymous reader writes "In the latest posting on the Xen developer list, IBM pledges to make Xen more secure by porting its secure hypervisor (sHype) architecture to it. In their posting, IBM discusses an SELinux like access control frame work, resource control and monitoring and trusted computing support for Xen. It appears that a lot is happening on the Xen front (for example, the announcement of XenSource Inc. and Intel's code drop in the xeno-unstable.bk tree for their super secret VT CPU)."

An anonymous reader writes "The following articles highlight major enhancements to the core Rational software solutions. These solutions, code-named Atlantic, help unify development team members on the open Eclipse framework and more tightly link business, development, and operations organizations."

An anonymous reader writes "This series on embedded development shows you how to migrate a project prototype from x86 to PowerPC. This initial installment explains the realities and rationale of the project: it introduces the robotic submarines that were the start of the project (and where they came from), and describes the Linux/GCC development environment and the bare-bones Kuro Box PowerPC development board."

DeanMan writes "From spintronics to clockless CPUs, 2004 was a year of process and research in the microprocessor industry. As a way to transition into the new year, this article offers a month-by-month look at the highlights of the 2004 microprocessor timeline."

An anonymous reader writes "The microprocessor changed the world: how did we get from the first 4-bit models in the 1970s to today's 64-bit multicore monsters? This article covers the history of the micro from the vacuum tube to today's dual-core multithreaded madnes."

almondjoy writes "I was project leader for publication of this recent IBM Redbook, available for free download here: Linux Client Migration Cookbook: A Practical Planning and Implementation Guide for Migrating to Desktop Linux. At this point, I'm gathering input for what we could improve on, and what additional topics should be covered in a second version of the book. I realize this is a broad topic to cover in a rapidly changing environment. And because these books are developed by IBM there are some content limitations. Nonetheless, in the next version we want to continue making the book as useful as possible for anyone considering a migration to Linux on the desktop."

NW writes "According to FOIA documents obtained by EPIC new Postal Service self-service postage machines take portrait-style photographs of customers and retain them for 30 days." IBM is the contractor behind the kiosks. Note that the kiosk is supposed to not complete the transaction if it determines the photograph has been compromised, so simply covering the camera is unlikely to work. As the cost of cameras and digital storage approaches zero, is it inevitable that every machine you interact with will take your photograph and store it?

nokiator writes "IBM issued a press release today claiming that it has built an SRAM memory cell that is ten times smaller than those currently available. My interpretation of the PRese in this release is that IBM will be able to build 256Mb or 512Mb SRAM chips or integrate 32MB or more SRAM into processor dies for cache applications in the future. Of course, showing some SRAM cell prototypes is a long ways from being able to manufacture this technology in a cost effective way. There is no information in this PR about the speed or power consumption of SRAM blocks that can be built with this new cell technology. This is not likely to be a potential DRAM replacement for mainstream applications as DRAM already offers more than ten times density compared to SRAM at much better cost."

An anonymous reader writes "The second in a three-part series on how to leverage Linux to get the most from your network, this tutorial shows how to set up a Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) server with Internet Systems Consortium (ISC) DHCP. Sample code and configuration files are provided throughout to aid understanding."

yerdaddie writes "The cell processor will be introduced in graphics workstations before release in the Playstation 3, according to press releases by IBM and Sony. As previously discussed, IBM will be releasing more details in February 2005. However, apparently prototype workstations have already been "powered-on" and will be available in 2005. Since Windows on PPC was scrapped back in 1997, this leads to speculation that perhaps Linux, AIX, or BSD will be the operating system for cell workstations."

yerdaddie writes "The cell processor will be introduced in graphics workstations before release in the Playstation 3, according to press releases by IBM and Sony. As previously discussed, IBM will be releasing more details in February 2005. However, apparently prototype workstations have already been "powered-on" and will be available in 2005. Since Windows on PPC was scrapped back in 1997, this leads to speculation that perhaps Linux, AIX, or BSD will be the operating system for cell workstations."

Jestrzcap writes "This just posted on Freshmeat: FairUCE (which stands for 'Fair use of Unsolicited Commercial Email') is an SMTP proxy, running between multiple instances of Postfix, that verifies email by attempting to verify the sender through lookups (a user customized challenge/response). It claims to be able to 'stop a vast majority of spam' without the need for content filters, and 'virtually eliminates spoofed addresses, phishing, and even many viruses with a few cached DNS look-ups and a couple of if/then statements'."

museumpeace writes "Tired of fixing your computer? What if your system broke down two billion miles from the nearest spare part or human? NASA has just held a colloquium where Ulster University computer science researcher Roy Sterritt was invited to present his ideas on Autonomic Computing. In the last few years,the leading system vendors have realized 'There is no less than a crisis today in three areas: cost, availability and user experience.' There has been a fair amount of academic research since customers like NASA see in it the potential to make remotely operated complex systems sustainable. It all makes for some very cool systems design work and there are lots of further research opportunities. Just don't forget what it may do to your job."

Crow writes "IBM developerWorks has posted an interview with John McCalpin, one of the guys who works on the POWER line of processors. He discusses work on POWER5 (and how the design process works at IBM -- he's also involved in work on the POWER7) and defends the decision that IBM doesn't hand-tune their ICs (as has often been criticized on Ars Technica. Also covers some of the features in the POWER processors, like SMT, the Hypervisor and virtualization -- even addresses the question of whether AIX was designed by space aliens or not. The POWER5 just broke the 3 million transactions per minute barrier on the TPC-C benchmark."

An anonymous reader writes "Multithreading and concurrency are nothing new, but one of the innovations of the Java language design was that it was the first mainstream programming language to incorporate a cross-platform threading model and formal memory model directly into the language specification. While this simplifies the development of platform-independent concurrent classes, it by no means makes writing concurrent classes trivial -- just easier."

An anonymous reader writes "What are the sofware tools of the future going to be? It's an interesting question, with many facets. Here are some important trends in design and construction tool strategy, which will effect the kinds of software tools that will be delivered in the future. It looks at how to improve software development efficiency through visual modeling, generating code from abstract models, and systematic reuse."

Shell writes "If they want to send spam, make them pay a price. Built on the widely available SHA-1 algorithm, hashcash is a clever system that requires a parameterizable amount of work on the part of a requester while staying "cheap" for an evaluator to check. In other words, the sender has to do real work to put something into your inbox. You can certainly use hashcash in preventing spam, but it has other applications as well, including keeping spam off of Wikis and speeding the work of distributed parallel applications." If you're specifically interested in hashcash for your mail server, Camram has some interesting ideas -- their Frequently Raised Objections page may be illuminating.

An anonymous reader writes "Perl 6 is finally coming within reach. This article gives you a tour of the grammars and regular expressions of the Perl 6 language, comparing them with the currently available Parse::RecDescent module for Perl 5. Find out what will be new with Perl 6 regular expressions and how to make use of the new, powerful incarnation of the Perl scripting language."

An anonymous reader writes "Perl 6 is finally coming within reach. This article gives you a tour of the grammars and regular expressions of the Perl 6 language, comparing them with the currently available Parse::RecDescent module for Perl 5. Find out what will be new with Perl 6 regular expressions and how to make use of the new, powerful incarnation of the Perl scripting language."

An anonymous reader writes "Perl 6 is finally coming within reach. This article gives you a tour of the grammars and regular expressions of the Perl 6 language, comparing them with the currently available Parse::RecDescent module for Perl 5. Find out what will be new with Perl 6 regular expressions and how to make use of the new, powerful incarnation of the Perl scripting language."

dshaw858 writes "BBC News reports that IBM has unveiled its new Blue Gene/L machine. The Blue Gene project already has two of the top ten supercomputers in the world. Big news for IBM! I wonder what great things they can calculate in just seconds now... maybe I should get a stronger PGP key."

An anonymous reader writes "This article relates many Grid computing concepts to known quantities for developers, such as object-oriented programming, XML, and Web services. The author offers a reading list of white papers, articles, and books where you can find out more about Grid computing."

An anonymous reader writes "This article relates many Grid computing concepts to known quantities for developers, such as object-oriented programming, XML, and Web services. The author offers a reading list of white papers, articles, and books where you can find out more about Grid computing."

An anonymous reader writes "IBM's famous reseach lab for nanotechnology, micoelectronics and exotic science, Almaden Research Center, has released an advanced, efficient, pen-based text input method for mobile computing, that allows you to trace letters on the keyboard to enter a word rather than typing each letter individually. The new technology provides a more fluid, smooth, and natural interaction (see demo ) than tapping on stylus keyboards."

An anonymous reader writes "IBM's famous reseach lab for nanotechnology, micoelectronics and exotic science, Almaden Research Center, has released an advanced, efficient, pen-based text input method for mobile computing, that allows you to trace letters on the keyboard to enter a word rather than typing each letter individually. The new technology provides a more fluid, smooth, and natural interaction (see demo ) than tapping on stylus keyboards."

An anonymous reader writes "A common and a consistent framework for accessing information enables developers to do more things with more people more often. This article shares how Derby fits into IBM's developer strategy, the Java application stack, its intention to drive more innovation around Java on Linux, and why they want to make the Derby database become as ubiquitous as the Apache HTTP server." (Derby is the new name for the project based on the formerly commercial Cloudscape database.)

An anonymous reader writes "Each of the leading microprocessor manufacturers has announced the availability of one or more 64-bit desktop processors, but differences exist in architectural design, fabrication, support, and intended use of each processor. This article looks at the critical issues in a few of IBM's 64-bit POWER designs, covering 32-bit compatibility, power management, processor bus design, and the manufacturing process."

An anonymous reader writes "58 million transistors can drive a lot of power. Apparently, Apple appreciated the choices IBM processor architects made when designing the 970 family. This article provides the 64-bit architecture big picture for the 970 family (A.K.A. the Power Mac G5) and the critical issues in IBM's 64-bit POWER designs, covering 32-bit compatibility, power management, and processor bus design."

Hobart writes "Last Wednesday, IBM's AIX was the first to receive the UNIX 2003 certification from The Open Group, beating out Sun, HP, SCO and the rest. No mention anywhere in the branded products register of any Linux/BSD distribution, or Mac OS X. Are any companies still developing software to this certification, or requiring it?"

An anonymous reader writes "Perl is an incredibly flexible language, but its ease of use can lead to some sloppy and lazy programming habits. We're all guilty of them, but there are some quick steps you can take to improve the performance of your Perl applications. This article looks at the key areas of optimization, which solutions work and which don't, and how to continue to build and extend your applications with optimization and speed in mind."

News for nerds writes "It was just 3 weeks ago that we learned IBM's BlueGene/L with 36.01 TFlops edged out NEC's Earth Simulator, but today NEC announces a new SX-8 supercomputer with a peak processing performance of 65 TFlops (press release). It may be available in the U.S. as Cray's OEM like SX-6."

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."

dryeo writes "IBM has Open Sourced Object Rexx. IBM Announcement. Source code has been turned over to The Rexx Language Association under the Common Public Licence. Rexx is an interpreted language which has been included in platforms such as the Amiga, OS/2 and AIX, and most IBM mainframes. For a quick overview check out Rexx for everyone."

dryeo writes "IBM has Open Sourced Object Rexx. IBM Announcement. Source code has been turned over to The Rexx Language Association under the Common Public Licence. Rexx is an interpreted language which has been included in platforms such as the Amiga, OS/2 and AIX, and most IBM mainframes. For a quick overview check out Rexx for everyone."

An anonymous reader notes that "IBM has launched its new product line of storage devices: the DS6000 and the DS8000. The results are quite impressive, with the DS6000 being rack mountable, 3U, and ONLY 125 pound storage device that will hold up to 67.2 TB! The DS8000 is equally impressive, with 6x performance of ESS 800 (Shark), making it the most powerful storage system to date. "

An anonymous reader notes that "IBM has launched its new product line of storage devices: the DS6000 and the DS8000. The results are quite impressive, with the DS6000 being rack mountable, 3U, and ONLY 125 pound storage device that will hold up to 67.2 TB! The DS8000 is equally impressive, with 6x performance of ESS 800 (Shark), making it the most powerful storage system to date. "

An anonymous reader notes that "IBM has launched its new product line of storage devices: the DS6000 and the DS8000. The results are quite impressive, with the DS6000 being rack mountable, 3U, and ONLY 125 pound storage device that will hold up to 67.2 TB! The DS8000 is equally impressive, with 6x performance of ESS 800 (Shark), making it the most powerful storage system to date. "

Early in September, some of the luminaries of the mobile gaming and mmog industries got together for the Austin Game Conference, an event organized by the Austin Game Initiative. Running concurrently with the Game Conference was the Women's Game Conference, a get-together focused on women in gaming. Over the past two weeks there have been a number of good reflections and observations put forth on the experience of both conferences. Show Director Chris Sherman sat down for an interview with Gamespot. Gamedevnet has a wrap-up of the whole event, as does the Guardian. TerraNova has observations on The BigWorld Middlewear suite, and a mmog specific wrap-up. For those interested in wireless, IBM has an article about mobile gaming. There are discussions of the Women's Gaming Conference as well, from MemoryCard's parting thoughts and the Guardian's one day overview.

LeninZhiv writes "Celebrating five years of DevelopperWorks goodness, IBM has just launched a new section dedicated to the Power architecture. Initial stories include such goodies as "the developerWorks' Power Architecture challenge" and the Linux on Power Architecture toolkit. May this usher in a new era of community support for Linux on POWER outside IBM?"

LeninZhiv writes "Celebrating five years of DevelopperWorks goodness, IBM has just launched a new section dedicated to the Power architecture. Initial stories include such goodies as "the developerWorks' Power Architecture challenge" and the Linux on Power Architecture toolkit. May this usher in a new era of community support for Linux on POWER outside IBM?"

LeninZhiv writes "Celebrating five years of DevelopperWorks goodness, IBM has just launched a new section dedicated to the Power architecture. Initial stories include such goodies as "the developerWorks' Power Architecture challenge" and the Linux on Power Architecture toolkit. May this usher in a new era of community support for Linux on POWER outside IBM?"

LeninZhiv writes "Celebrating five years of DevelopperWorks goodness, IBM has just launched a new section dedicated to the Power architecture. Initial stories include such goodies as "the developerWorks' Power Architecture challenge" and the Linux on Power Architecture toolkit. May this usher in a new era of community support for Linux on POWER outside IBM?"

T.Hobbes writes "IBM's BlueGene/L has set a new speed record at 36.01 TFlops, beating the Earth Simulator's 35.86 TFlops, according to internal IBM testing. 'This is notable because of the fixation everyone has had on the Earth Simulator,' said Dave Turek, I.B.M.'s vice president for the high-performance computing division. The AP story is here; the NY Times' story is here."