Apparently the Blue Screen of Death has been harassing NIN on tour. Well, sort of; according the Gizmodo's Sean Fallow, Trent Reznor is a Mac fan so he's slipped a jab at windows in the concert visuals. I have to admit that the above picture must be the coolest screenshot of a BSOD, ever. Gizmodo

Yesterday Mark Shuttleworth announced in a mailing list that Ubuntu 9.04 would be know as Jaunty Jackalope.  The next version of Ubuntu, due next month, is known as Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex. lists.ubuntu.com [via Ars Technica]

Visitors to this site using Firefox account for almost three-quarters of all traffic.  Overall browsers are (at the time of writing) ranked as follows:

1. Firefox (74.00%)
2. Internet Explorer (13.66%)
3. Safari (4.78%)
4. Mozilla (3.07%)
5. Opera (3.05%)
6. Others (1.44%)

Sun has released a major update to it's open source virtualization software, VirtualBox.  VirtualBox 2.0 brings with it such new features as:

• 64 bits guest support (64 bits host only)
• New native Leopard user interface on Mac OS X hosts
• The GUI was converted from Qt3 to Qt4 with many visual improvements
• New-version notifier
• Guest property information interface
• Host Interface Networking on Mac OS X hosts
• New Host Interface Networking on Solaris hosts
• Support for Nested Paging on modern AMD CPUs (major performance gain)
• Framework for collecting performance and resource usage data (metrics)
• Added SATA asynchronous IO (NCQ: Native Command Queuing) when accessing raw disks/partitions (major performance gain)
• Clipboard integration for OS/2 Guests
• Created separate SDK component featuring a new Python programming interface on Linux and Solaris hosts
• Support for VHD disk images

VirtualBox [via Information Week]

The finalists for the 2008 Open Source CMS Awards have been announced.  Voting started on September 1^st and ends on the 20^th.  Read on for the finalists.

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As noted on this site, and many others, the Google Chrome EULA is nothing short of preposterous. Among other things it gives Google a "perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and nonexclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, [Google’s products, software, services and web sites.]" Now Ars Technica tells us that Senior Product Counsel for Google Chrome, Rebecca Ward has commented on the controversial EULA. She told Ars Technica:

[Google] tries to reuse these licenses as much as possible, "in order to keep things simple for our users." Ward admits that sometimes "this means that the legal terms for a specific product may include terms that don't apply well to the use of that product" and says that Google is "working quickly to remove language from Section 11 of the current Google Chrome terms of service. This change will apply retroactively to all users who have downloaded Google Chrome."

Ars Technica also notes that the EULA, as it stands, is unenforcable due to the BSD license under which Google Chrome is published.

Users could simply download the source code, compile it themselves, and use it without having to agree to Google's EULA. The terms of the BSD license under which the source code is distributed are highly permissive and impose virtually no conditions or requirements on end users.

Ars Technica

As the furore over Google's Chrome browser dies down, what is left behind are questions about some dubious terms found in the EULA. Here are a few things which stand out from the agreement:

1. Google has a right to use ANY content you submit, post or display, even though you retain full copyright over your work.
2. Google has the right to "make such content available to other companies"
3. The software can automatically update without notice to you
4. Google has the right to target advertisements to you based on "queries made through the Services or other information."

Read on for more detail...

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Linux.com has an interesting review of a Linux distribution called Finnix.  Finnix is a lightweight distro, based on Debian testing, built especially for system administrators.   What's more, Finnix is comparitively tiny, "currently the entire distribution is over 300MiB, but is dynamically compressed into a bootable image of about 100MiB."

Finnix 92.0 is a useful distribution for system administrators. With many tools covering jobs such as data recovery, hardware diagnostics and benchmarking, network services, and monitoring, this distribution can greatly help an administrator. However, Finnix is not for the average user accustomed to booting up a system and doing things graphically. While Finnix's CLI-based tools are not that complex, one must have the necessary knowledge to fully understand how to use them. I was satisfied with the packages included in this distribution, especially the filesystem management and recovery utilities, as well as the CLI backup tools. For serious network troubleshooting, I would recommend instead distributions such as Network Security Toolkit or BackTrack, which are specifically intended for such purposes.

• Linux.com review
• Finnix home page

Initial impressions:

• The browser really does seem to be very fast
  • Even JavaScript heavy sites like Facebook load very quickly, even on first use when the browser hasn't built up a cache.
• The address seems to have been lifted straight from Firefox 3
• Obviously still in development, though
  • Closing your last tab closes the entire browser
• Could be a winner if Google can build a community around it in the same way that Mozilla has done with Firefox

Hit the read link to see a gallery of screenshots.

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Google Chrome is now available for download at http://www.google.com/chrome I'll give it a quick whirl and then post my initial reaction to it.