Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
SMACK stands for Simplified Mandatory Access Control and provides a security framework. Admittedly, the most used MAC solution in Linux is the very well-known SELinux and SMACK is less powerful. However, it is simpler to use and configure.
Just as Linux offers multiple filesystems and a boatload of text editors so too it offers flexibility in security options. SMACK doesn’t pretend to replace SELinux but does provide an alternative for smaller security problems and correspondingly requires far less configuration and very little application support. This fills a niche for those who find this more suited to their needs.
Latencytop on the other hand is largely unparalled. Like the other well-known tool that its name plays on – top, which shows CPU usage – latencytop lets you know what’s happening on your system right now. As the name indicates, it handles latency. All those little problems – slow servers, skipping audio, jerking video – can be identified using latencytop. Specifically, these jitters are mostly caused by an application wanting to run and execute code but yet a needed resource is not available (so the scheduler blocks the process.) With latencytop you can see at both a system and process level what’s happening, which process is suffering and what’s causing the delays. This is a great tool for users, system admins and developers alike.
There’s a whole heap more, of course – extra drivers, better 64-bit support, extensions to the ACPI thermal regulation and other items.
Also out this month is Ubuntu 8.04, Hardy Heron. This has been deemed by Ubuntu as a Long Term Support (LTS) release, meaning the company commits to providing support for three years on the desktop and five years on server platforms. So, Ubuntu 8.04 isn’t going to go away anytime soon, it’s a major release.
As a natural consequence Ubuntu have focused a lot less on new and flashy stuff but more on stability and reliability and robustness. People who found the previous Ubuntu release, Gutsy Gibbon, a disappointing experience are well encouraged to give Hardy Heron a spin and see how things have changed. In particular, there will be a raft of new device drivers and thus less risk of incompatible hardware problems.
As always, Ubuntu CDs and DVDs will be a Live CD release meaning a live Ubuntu session can be booted right off the disk. Adding to that, 8.04 includes the Wubi installer which runs under Microsoft Windows and lets Ubuntu be installed from within Windows without any need to reboot or fiddle around with partitions.
There will be a face lift coming, with the three major elements driving the user interface all being overhauled. This includes the kernel itself, and also the GNOME desktop environment and Xorg graphics handler. Each of these has been enhanced and upgraded since the previous Ubuntu release. Xorg has been particularly improved and no longer needs any manual editing of config files providing both a better automated configuration as well as a new feature called “Bullet Proof X” which will put up a graphical safe mode should anything go wrong within X-Windows.
David Bass
| For the fourth year in a row, IDC has placed content security provider Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) at the top of the IDC Worldwide Web Security 2011 –…
How to Make Business Discovery Work for Your Business
Business Discovery takes its cues from consumer apps. Like Google, it encourages us- ers to hunt for and explore data without worrying about or even noticing the underly- ing technology. Their entire experience is working within an intuitive interface to get real-time, self-service results with only minimal training. ...more
Try an easy-to-use set of web-enabled
tools for business-class productivity services. Office 365 provides
anywhere-access to email, important documents, contacts, and calendars
on almost any device.
