Patch Tuesday Advisory

8 patches, five of which bear the dreaded "critical" rating. The link above will take you to Microsoft's advisory on the subject.

Meanwhile, Apple has had to apply another patch to QuickTime. The new version is 7.4.5 and here is Apple's advisory. Once again; media players bite.

Opera also has a new version of their browser out, version 9.27, which fixes two critical security flaws present in all previous versions.

Upgrade and patch at every opportunity. What else have you got to do with your life, right?

Jack

Linux Kernel Development (April 2008)

Subtitled "How Fast it is Going, Who is Doing It, What They are Doing, and Who is Sponsoring It" this is the Linux Foundation's overview of Linux kernel development. It's worth a read if you ever wondered where all that code actually comes from.

Jack

Ray Tracing To Debut In DirectX 11

This 3 page article will show you where Microsoft, Intel and several other major companies intend to go with graphics in the reasonably near future. I thought it was a pretty good interpretation of how I see things shaping up.

Jack

JavaScript slows down the Internet; WebKit to the rescue

For all the criticism I lay on Safari, and Apple because of it, here is one instance where they are leading the way and in a style we should cheer.

Every browser has a "rendering engine", which is what actually decides how to interpret the code to display the page. It is a rather large set of processes. The idea of having a separate "loading engine" makes a lot of sense and while Apple is not calling what it is doing with Safari a loading engine, I believe that is a good way to describe it. As far as I know, no one else is actually doing things this way......yet.

Jack

XP gets reprieve as Vista is too big and clanky - The INQUIRER

"Microsoft will not kill off Windows XP on June 30th deadline as it would have liked to.

The fact that Vista won't run on the current rash of low-cost, low-spec lappies has a lot to do with it."

If you want Windows XP look at a Dell, XP is still available from them.

AlaskaJoe

On Computers Radio Show Podcast 03-30-08

This is the On Computers Radio show podcast for 03-30-08. You can listen live every Sunday from 10AM to 1PM Pacific thats 1PM to 4PM Eastern. If you prefer, you can download the same file here via ftp.

Don't forget, Geek Meet 2008 is in 2 weeks in Las Vegas. Please visit http://geekmeet.oncomputers.info for more details.