Leveraging Linux to sell yourself by ZDNet's Paul Murphy -- It's pretty clear that the handwriting is on the wall for the present way of doing things in IT and when something significant changes the people with the broadest range of skills will adapt first, and thus end up doing best
Will Mozilla set Thunderbird free? by ZDNet's Larry Dignan -- It appears that Mozilla may be setting the Thunderbird project free so it can develop more rapidly on its own. Mozilla has been supporting Thunderbird since its inception. That effort has delivered some promising results, but Mozilla is mostly focused on Firefox. In a blog post, Mozilla chairman Mitchell Baker said: The Thunderbird effort is dwarfed by [...]
Facebook and employment: an equal opportunity information trap by ZDNet's Denise Howell -- Those worried that their Facebook or other social networking data can come back to haunt them in the employment context can take heart: employers can get in trouble as well if their use of such data is unauthorized and runs afoul of employment discrimination or privacy laws.
Beware the iPhone/Safari dialer by ZDNet's Ryan Naraine -- One of the iPhone's most nifty features -- dialing any phone number by simply tapping on a Web page -- can be its most sinister.
The Multi-Pointer X Server (MPX) is a modification of the X Server. A standard X Server only provides one mouse cursor (pointer) and one keyboard focus, regardless of the number of input devices connected. MPX provides the user with multiple mouse cursors and multiple keyboard foci. Multicursor applications have been developed in the past but MPX is the first implementation of a multicursor windowing system (or a multicursor X server).
MPX devices are independent. Each cursor is a true system cursor and different pointers can operate in multiple applications simultaneously. This allows for two-handed interaction and/or collaboration on a single display. MPX is compatible to legacy applications such as the GIMP, the Firefox web browser and numerous other applications. Keyboards provide multiple keyboard foci. So you can actually type into several applications at once. Both mice and keyboards can be hot-plugged.
MPX is significantly different to solutions like cpnmouse, SDGToolkit, MIDDesktop and other toolkits or applications. It is fairly easy under most operating systems to write an application or toolkit to support multiple input devices. It is trickier to support the same for legacy applications. Supporting new and legacy applications at the same time is hard.
MPX changes the windowing system, the environment for all graphical applications. This way, legacy applications are supported and provided with extra features. New applications can use the multi-pointer facilities and thus create novel interaction methods at the same time. That is why we think that the windowing system is the correct place to support multiple input devices.
Vista SP1 beta 1 to launch in mid-July by ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley -- It's official: We are now in the under-promise and over-deliver era at Microsoft. Beta 1 of Vista Service Pack 1 is coming -- with shut-down, CPU performance and other fixes -- earlier than expected. And the final Vista SP1 is looking like November 2007.
The dark side of search engines by ZDNet's Ryan Naraine -- As a malware researcher, I spend the majority of my days days studying the dark side of the web and one of the most interesting things I get to see are the weird, and sometimes wonderful, search engine queries that result in dangerous Web sites.
Open source security arrives with Untangle by ZDNet's Dana Blankenhorn -- Even with paid updates on signatures and code we're talking here about a security solution small businesses can finally afford, from which small VARs can finally profit.
Linus contradicts OpenBSD founder on Intel TLB issue by ZDNet's George Ou -- OpenBSD founder Theo de Raadt has been making a lot of noise over a change in Intel’s current generation Core 2 microprocessor goes as far to claim that this will lead to serious security flaws. Linus Torvalds by contrast has given a completely opposite view of the situation while other CPU analysts like David Kanter [...]
