Native Client is an open-source research technology for running x86 native code in web applications, with the goal of maintaining the browser neutrality, OS portability, and safety that people expect from web apps. We've released this project at an early, research stage to get feedback from the security and broader open-source communities. We believe that Native Client technology will someday help web developers to create richer and more dynamic browser-based applications.

I picked up on this through a digg link to an ars technica article. I'm sure people have seen it but since I know relatively fuck all about security but since there are people like Decius, Acidus, et al here I was wondering what people think
edit oops do the recommend then see I should have checked discuss lol

nativeclient - Google Code

Google has been very vocal on its stance for net neutrality. Now, Richard Whitt--Senior Policy Director for Google--announces that Google will take an even more active role in the debate by arming consumers with the tools to determine first-hand if their broadband connections are being monkeyed with by their ISPs:

hahaha

Google To Develop ISP Throttling Detector - HotHardware

It takes surprisingly few pixels of information to be able to identify the subject of an image, a team led by an MIT researcher has found. The discovery could lead to great advances in the automated identification of online images and, ultimately, provide a basis for computers to see like humans do.

New Image-recognition Software Could Let Computers 'See' Like Humans Do

Here I report on code quality metrics I collected from four large industrial-scale operating systems: FreeBSD, Linux, OpenSolaris, and the Windows Research Kernel (WRK). The main contribution of this research is the finding that there are no significant across-the-board code quality differences between four large working systems, which have been developed using various open-source and proprietary processes. An additional contribution involves the proposal of numerous code quality metrics for objectively evaluating software written in C. Although these metrics have not been empirically validated, they are based on generally accepted coding guidelines, and therefore represent the rough consensus of developers concerning desirable code attributes.

A Tale of Four Kernels

Read my lips: Virgin Media are so awful that I'm leaving them and I encourage you to do likewise.

Reasons they're awful? Let me give you a list. To start with, I didn't much pay attention when they announced that they were going to start charging by the minute for telephone support calls. After all, I'm competent to configure my own broadband router; I don't need my hand holding, right? Well, I've changed my mind.

It appears highly likely that Virgin are probing the equipment you attach to your cable modem and dropping packets destined for broadband routers.

Charlie's Diary: Brand Dilution

The government is appealing against a High Court decision that granted Symbian a patent on a computer program.

BBC NEWS | Technology | Call for clarity on code patents

Have you ever left your terminal logged in, only to find when you came back to it that a (supposed) friend had typed "rm -rf ~/*" and was hovering over the keyboard with threats along the lines of "lend me a fiver 'til Thursday, or I hit return"? Undoubtedly the person in question would not have had the nerve to inflict such a trauma upon you, and was doing it in jest. So you've probably never experienced the worst of such disasters....

*THE* classic Unix horror story | WSU Linux Users Group

SAN FRANCISCO - Sun Microsystems Inc. plans to buy open-source software maker MySQL AB for $1 billion, beefing up the server maker's database offerings with a company whose technology is used by some of the world's biggest Web sites.

Santa Clara-based Sun is paying $800 million in cash and assuming $200 million in options to acquire MySQL.

Sun said the deal will help spread MySQL's software to large corporations, which have been the biggest customers of Sun's servers and software, and boost its distribution through Sun's relationships with other server makers such as IBM Corp. and Dell Inc.

MySQL competes with non-open-source offerings from Microsoft Corp. and Oracle Corp., which dominate database software for traditional businesses.

However, MySQL is the rapidly growing market leader in open-source database software, particularly among Web-based companies, where it commands about 80 percent of the global market, according to Sun Chief Executive Jonathan Schwartz.

Microsoft is less than 10 percent of that market, Schwartz said.

Sun to buy MySQL for $1 billion - Yahoo News

Mozilla Chief Technology Officer Brendan Eich and Microsoft's Chris Wilson are trading heated rhetoric over the proposed next version of ECMAScript, better known as JavaScript.

ITworld.com - Mozilla, Microsoft drawing sabers over next JavaScript

Computers in the European Union should be sold without a bundled operating system, according to this submission to the European Commission. It says that the bundling of Microsoft Windows with computers is not in the public interest, and prevents meaningful competition in the operating system market.

ok here's a piece of heresy for you
would a market place full of competing OSs none of which had market dominance be good for computing?
no common platform
no standard API
would open standards and interoperability (which sounds wonderful) become reality or would we face a fragmented market with software vendors having to write x number of versions to run on a variety of OSs
now we have (please correct me if wrong software expert i am not) windows, macs and linux (solaris) and that's it
my question is basically
how practical is it to write one piece of software with an interface layer to plug into x OSs? (this is a genuine question not rhetorical because i'm genuinely interested in the answer)

Globalisation Institute - Brussels' most popular think tank website - Unbundling Microsoft Windows