loxal DEV

After Singularity and SharpOS there is another project to build an OS in C# . Cosmos is an operating system that intended to be implemented in CIL compliant languages . Currently it is implemented exclusively in C#. The used IDE is Visual Studio 2008 which is -- without being ironic -- in fact the best IDE for C# resp. .NET development. An interview with Scott Balmos, the core developer of Cosmos, conveys a comprehensive overview about the Cosmos OS project .

In the past it was quite difficult to setup a virtualization environment under Linux. Thereby Xen is a nice method to virtualize Linux instances under Linux but if you want to virtualize Windows you need virtualization feature enabled CPUs . Also the Xen setup is not really intuitive -- especially for Windows. Now the Ubuntu team have developed a frontend for KVM which simplifies the configuration process by offering a GUI for a virtual operating system setup . This feature will be available in the upcoming Hardy Heron (Ubuntu 8.04) release.

I have always claimed it: Studying engineering turns people into ideology blinded, technocratic, infantile and introverted zombies . Now Diego Gambetta , Professor of Sociology and Official Fellow at the Oxford University (UK) has detected a positive correlation between studying engineering and being member of ideologically motivated groups like Al-Qaeda . In my opinion the strong bias to ideologies results from the very formal, pedantic and rule driven (also one-sided?) way of thinking dominating the engineering activity . Of course the concrete claim is quite provoking: "Studying engineering turns you into a terrorist". But terrorism is just a peculiarity of pedantism which is in fact a psychological disorder. The main cause of pedantism is static, formal and rule-driven thinking. Just think about people like John Forbes Nash, Jr. who had schizophrenia. In fact schizophrenia and other mental diseases are quite common within engineers and mathematicians .

Many people choose Linux if they are fed up with Windows because it is -- beside Max OS X -- one of the most widespread alternatives to Windows. But there are also other OSS operating systems which are also suitable for servers as well as desktop environments. FreeBSD and its desktop derivate PC-BSD is an Unix operating system which is one of the most known alternatives to GNU/Linux . So if you are an administrator or an advanced user who want to convert an existing Linux setup into FreeBSD, you should consider to use the Depinguinator v2 script which blows the penguin out of your PC remotely replacing him by the powerful BSD daemon .

A brief comparison between the GPL and BSD license shows that the core premises of freedom can be fully reflected by the BSD license . Whereas the GPL reflects the same idea but adds also some clauses which limit this idea. So the GPL can be thought of as an legal overhead that is put above the BSD license and which intention is to extend the BSD license with obligations . One of the most impressive facts regarding the debate which software license guarantees true freedom are maybe the answers to the question: How many words does freedom need? the BSD license is of the opinion that 231 words should be enough GPLv2 expresses its freedom in 2495 words and the GPLv3 adds further obligations to the GPLv2 which blows up the GPLv3 to 5226 words Which is your favorite? A definition which simply defines what freedom is or a definition that goes beyond this and defines also what freedom is not. Is it possible to define what freedom is not at all? You have to consider an infinite number of

For Windows Google's Desktop Search is available since quite a long time period and you can also obtain it within the Google (software) Pack as well as other useful and frequently used software . However within the Linux community Google's Desktop Search is not really popular what have also its reasons in the ideological attitude of the Linux community. Nevertheless the Google Desktop is one of the greatest software products I have recently used. It offers you a kind of private Google search engine exclusively for your desktop computer . After a one-time index creation procedure you can find everything on your computer within seconds. Thereby not only the filenames are indicated but also their content . So if you do not remember the filename of a particular document you can simply search for its contents. Another useful feature is that you can include your Google Mail account into the Google Desktop search index. In this manner the search experience remains the same independ

Prioritize closed tasks instead of open tasks : If you have a task which is not determined by any goal which can be accomplished within a short time period postpone this task. Instead try to accomplish a task which goal is accomplishable within a clear and manageable time period . So you will not be hold back by less important long time tasks from accomplishing your more important short time tasks .

Intel has created a really nice tool which makes it possible to determine power leaks caused by the interrupts of particular programs . In these way you can see the specific executables causing power consuming wakeups . Also some statistics about CPU power states, the average power consumption resp. usage in watts and the remaining battery life time are shown. In this way you can use this tool to benchmark your applications concerning power consumption which is today more and more important as there are a lot of mobile devices using these applications. There are many computing performance benchmarks but almost no power consumption benchmark results. With Intels new tool powertop this will hopefully change soon. Furthermore powertop provides general tips (also inside the application) how to reduce the power consumption of your running Linux operating system . There is also a site which describes the information and output details provided by powertop . You can install this tool by si

Ext3 as the by journaling capability enhanced successor filesystem of ext2 has quite conservative default parameters which ensure an adequate data integrity after crashes. But if you make backups and using a notebook you will maybe pay a greater attention to the read/write speed of your HDD than an exaggerated and performance wasting data integrity. In the following you can see the settings which I am using for my LUKS encrypted partitions accommodated by a LVM . You have to alter the both files below as followed: /boot/grub/menu.lst #[...] title Ubuntu 7.10, kernel 2.6.22-14-generic root (hd0,1) kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.22-14-generic root=/dev/mapper/vg-starlight ro rootflags=data=writeback,nobh,commit=100 splash usbcore.autosuspend=1 initrd /initrd.img-2.6.22-14-generic quiet /etc/fstab #[...] /dev/mapper/swap none swap sw 0 0 /dev/sda2 /boot ext3 noatime,nobh,d

DragonFlyBSD is a fork of the FreeBSD 4.x series which was made by Matthew Dillon. His intention was to create an operating system being suitable for enhancement with technologies focused on clustering, multi-core/CPU architectures ( SMP ) and concurrency . One of the main sub-projects of DragonFlyBSD is the development of an accordant filesystem called HAMMER. As the operating system itself the HAMMER filesystem is going to be highly scalable filesystem containing all(?) features of ZFS as well as some ground-breaking additional features like the built-in clustering facility . A nice comparison between ZFS and HAMMER emphasizes also its resource frugality. With HAMMER's infinite snapshot capability which keeps track of every change to a file, it is even possible to make source code repository systems like CVS, SVN and Git obsolete . According to Matthew Dillons statement regarding Michael Neumann's article "HAMMER vs. ZFS" he is "making good progress" b

...well, as much as I have figured out, there is no clean built-in solution for escaping single quotes (') in XSLT . You need this if you e.g. want to generate JavaScript function calls within the generated XML file. So I have found a workaround resp. a not really nice hack to solve this problem as you can see in the following: <xsl:variable name=" apos "> ' </xsl:variable> <xsl:value-of select="concat('javaScript_Function_With_String_Parameter (', $apos ,., $apos ,')')"/> In this way you can generate the JavaScript function call "javaScript_Function_With_String_Parameter( ' currentValue ' )".

Sometimes you discover that all people are obsessed by power in all its facets which is not necessarily bad because it is their nature which - per definition of "nature" - cannot be bad. But this is the point where you start to understand what is the propulsive power behind all the things they aspire. You start to arrange the things they done in the accordant context. You begin to understand that all the things they do are not so altruistic as they seem to be. The instruments, methods and tools they are using and the ways they choose are quite different but they want all the same: POWER!

The long awaited KDE 4.0 is finally available! But as it is a dotzero release you should not expect a well working, well integrated and bug free desktop environment . If you cannot wait until the upcoming KDE 4.0.1 release which should follow in a couple of weeks you can test many KDE 4.0 applications in a KDE 3.5.x environment on a Kubuntu system. First you should ensure that you have included all apt-get package sources in your /etc/apt/sources.list . My sources.list looks as followed: deb http://de.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu gutsy main multiverse restricted universe deb http://de.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu gutsy-backports main multiverse restricted universe deb http://de.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu gutsy-proposed main multiverse restricted universe deb http://de.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu gutsy-security main multiverse restricted universe deb http://de.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu gutsy-updates main multiverse restricted universe Optionally you should remove any previous KDE 3.9 alpha packa

2007 Sun Microsystems licensed its Java framework under the GPLv2. An important question arise from this fact is: Why have a big corporation choose a license with a strong copyleft like GPL instead of a permissive license like the BSD license ? This fact is inasmuch curious because the GPL is supposed to be a "socialism style license". But successful corporations are rational actors and interested in gaining but not decreasing their power and influence. So truly "socialism style licenses" are not really appreciated in these areas. Therefore the GPL was resp. might be in fact the best open source license Sun Microsystems could choose (among others) for OpenSolaris and their Java framework. This depends on the non-permissive nature of the GPL which license agreement is more than five times as long as the BSD license agreement and the GPLv3 is even longer. In its juridical overhead the GPL defines what is not allowed and constrains in this way the freedom of action

Many people are often distracted by many negligible things in everyday life. These things have no influence on their life but bother the mind which cannot deal with essential and important things during these time . So these people have difficulties to make any progress accomplishing important tasks because their mental capacities are bonded with irrelevant matters. Hence the solution for fast and successful accomplishment of tasks is to move the mental focus on issues that are important for your current life context .

Recently I have took a look on several development environments. Among them were MS Visual Studio 2008 (C#), KDevelop 3.5.0, Netbeans 6.0 and Eclipse. The main point of consideration was: Where can I achieve the most results with the least time investment which is basically the definition of RAD . Furthermore I have included also the following aspects choosing the best RAD development platform: The development environment should be platform independent as much as the created. applications It should be possible to start application development from scratch without big ceremonies of configuration and installation of additional software. There should be also integrated, easy to find and WORKING applications samples . The development environment should be suitable for the development of versatile applications with an emphasis on GUI, database and web technology related applications -- basically the most common high level applications. There should be a good documentation respectively d

To compile the example below type: gdc -time -O pwd_cracker.d -o pwd_cracker; time ./pwd_cracker /* Copyright 2008 Alexander Orlov. All rights reserved. Redistribution is allowed according to the MIT License/X11 license. */ import std.stdio : writefln; /** * * Generates char combinations orderly * * EXAMPLE: charCombinationGenerator(0, 3, 'a', 'z') * * @param charNum * @param from * @param chrPos * @param to */ void charCombinationGenerator(byte chrPos, byte charNum, char from, char to) { char[] chrCombination = new char[charNum]; byte chrPosTmp; int chrCombinationNumber = 1; // uncomment for void method type while (chrPos < charNum) { // all chars = fromAscii chrPosTmp = -1; bit incUntilChrPos = false; do { // all chrPosTmp prev chars = fromAsciiff for (byte toFromAsciiPointer = chrPos; toFromAsciiPointer > chrPosTmp; toFromAsciiPointer--) { chrCombination[toFromAsciiPointer] = from; } // fromAscii to toAscii output for (char chrC

Many people admire explicit perception based on explicit and formal knowledge because arguments and facts based on this kind of knowledge are commonly known as hard facts. This kind of knowledge is based on the boolean algebra so that its truth value is fully determined by just two values: true and false (and "tertium non datur"). Therefore explicit knowledge have the nature of inviolability because a (apparently true) fact can be -- according to the theory of epistemology -- at least certainly disproven . The notion " fact " is also a typical term of the explicit knowledge set because it is the synonym for a true argument . In fact all engineering science is based on mathematics which bares the idea of formal knowledge resp. truth. Today engineering science is the leading force in economy and therefore also in the educational system. People are trained to admire explicit resp. formal knowledge already in schools and universities because this is the kind of kn