Linux
Processes and policies governing the reuse and recycling of electronic products need to be standardized worldwide to stem and reverse the growing problem of illegal and harmful e-waste processing practices in developing countries, according to experts behind the world's first international e-waste academy.
Stanford photo scientists are out to reinvent digital photography with the introduction of an "open-source" digital camera, which will give programmers around the world the chance to create software that will teach cameras new tricks.
Imagine if the planet's collective brainpower and computing power could be brought together to tackle some of the world's toughest problems, including global climate change and cancer.
The Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory is now home to the United States' fastest operational unclassified supercomputer. The laboratory's 11.8 teraflops industry-standard HP Integrity system came to full operating power this week, marking the next advance in high-performance computing designed to enable new insights in the environmental and molecular sciences, including chemistry, biology, climate and subsurface chemistry.
Hewlett-Packard and Rice University's Computer and Information Technology Institute today announced their plans to build Texas' fastest academic supercomputer, based on HP's Intel Itanium 2-based workstations and servers. The Rice Terascale Cluster is expected to be the first computer at a Texas university with a peak performance of 1 teraflop, or 1 trillion floating-point operations per second. More than 30 researchers from fields as diverse as biochemistry, political science, physics and computational engineering have already booked time on RTC.
It may be Microsoft's time to feel a little smug. For years Redmond has been the butt of jokes --- and curses --- for the vulnerability its systems seemed to have to viruses. Now Linux has fallen prey to a nasty bug of its own, one that has created a giant peer-to-peer attack network from thousands of infected Linux Web servers. Only computer systems running both Apache Web server software and the Linux operating system are vulnerable, New Scientist reports. But that's a heck of a lot of machines. Once installed on a machine, the Linux.Slapper.Worm tries to forward itself on to other computers. "But unlike many other worms, it also tries to establish connections with computers that have already been infected," the magazine reports. The bug was first identified Friday, and though characterized by computer security firms as slow-moving, has so far infected an estimated 3,500 machines. In a note accompanying the worm, the author says it was designed as a proof-of-concept for "educational" purposes and should not be used for destructive attacks.
Chalk up another casualty of the Hewlett-Packard/Compaq merger. For two years, Bruce Perens was an in-house evangelist for the Linux operating system at computer giant HP. He would go around extolling the virtues of the open source software to corporate clients, pointing out that it was secure, cheap and kept customers from being locked into proprietary systems like Sun Solaris or Microsoft Windows. In fact, it appears to have been his self-acknowledged baiting of Redmond that eventually did him in. Perens was canned by HP, which finds itself post-merger as the single biggest buyer of Windows for PCs and servers and thus, as the New York Times' Steve Lohr put its, more dependent on Microsoft than ever. But don't expect Perens to go quietly into that dark night. "I'm sorry that I had to leave HP, but I'm not going to shut up about my views," he said. "I'm not just going to sit back and be a quiet engineer. I have a two-year-old son and I don't want him to grow up in a world that is less free."
