Link: Dell Considers Bundling Virtualization on Mobos

castrox writes “Ars Technica is reporting that Dell may be considering bundling virtualization on some of their motherboards. No more dual boot or VMs inside the running OS? ‘Any way you slice it, though, putting the hypervisor in a chunk of flash and letting it handle loading the OS is the way forward, especially for servers and probably even for enterprise desktops. Boot times, power consumption, security, and flexibility are all reasons to do this … The big question is: which hypervisor will Dell bundle with its machines? Vance suggests hypervisors from XenSource and VMware as two options, but I think that VMware is the most likely candidate since it seems to be the x86 virtualization solution of choice for the moment. However, if Dell doesn’t try too hard to lock it down, this system could easily be modified in an aftermarket fashion to include almost any hypervisor that could fit on the flash chip.’”

Link: Algorithm Seamlessly Patches Holes In Images

Beetle B. writes in with research from Carnegie Mellon demonstrating a new way to replace arbitrarily shaped blank areas in an image with portions of images from a huge catalog in a totally seamless manner. From the abstract: “In this paper we present a new image completion algorithm powered by a huge database of photographs gathered from the Web. The algorithm patches up holes in images by finding similar image regions in the database that are not only seamless but also semantically valid. Our chief insight is that while the space of images is effectively infinite, the space of semantically differentiable scenes is actually not that large. For many image completion tasks we are able to find similar scenes which contain image fragments that will convincingly complete the image. Our algorithm is entirely data-driven, requiring no annotations or labelling by the user.”

Link: SSH Overview (23 Jul 2007)

Nice article about ssh. ”SSH (secure shell) is a program enabling secure access to remote file systems. Not everyone is aware of other powerful SSH capabilities, such as passwordless login, automatic execution of commands on a remote system or even mounting a remote folder using SSH! In this article we’ll cover these features and much more.” polishlinux.org: SSH tricks

Link: What ever happened to Web engineering? (27 Jul 2007)

Web pages have become a major functional component of the daily lives of millions of people; you, the Web developer, are in a position to make that part of everyone’s lives better. Does it ever occur to you that today’s Web developers could learn a thing or two from traditional computer programming? What we have today is a generation of Web designers and developers who are attempting to build increasingly sophisticated Web sites without reference to the best practices of software engineerin

Link: Reduce permissions to increase DNS security

Every server process you run on your system provides another potential point of compromise. That’s why it’s so often recommended that you turn off unnecessary services on Windows machines and deactivate unneeded daemons on UNIX operating systems.

You can’t simply turn off all services and daemons, however, as the ability to use your operating system environment would be severely crippled if you did. As a result, it becomes necessary to attempt to secure the operation of the server processes you need.

Link: PhotoRec and TestDisk

File recovery programs for hard disks and removable media…

Link: What Is Tiny, Green, and Penguin-Friendly?

“This article briefly goes over six mini systems that you don’t have to build yourself. They are an ideal platform for a project or for a silent system for simple tasks like checking your email. The intention was to find systems that are small, Linux-ready, and customizable, but price was factored in as well.”

Link: Sun Says File Systems are Important Differentiator

Sun Microsystems was originally known as a workstation vendor, and it became best known as a maker of servers and their associated Solaris Unix operating system. But Sun has always been an innovator in file systems as well as operating systems, and three decades of innovation has not changed that. Sun still believes that file systems matter, and its Zettabyte File System (ZFS) and the expanding role it could play in the IT industry are proof of this belief.

Link: The tricky issue of spyware with a badge: meet ‘policeware’

Spyware is hated for a reason, but how does the issue of detecting and removing spyware change when it’s put in place by law enforcement?

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Link: Report: DVR adoption to surge past 50 percent by 2010

Just a few years ago, DVR units weren’t seriously considered as ways for cable providers to bolster their businesses. But the cable industry has since embraced the DVR, and in turn has helped DVR adoption rates to skyrocket.

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