The pain from recently announced job cuts by AMD could ripple out to the Linux community, as the chipmaker has shut down a small but important Linux OS research facility in Dresden, Germany.

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 This week NVIDIA began advertising their new "R310" Linux graphics driver that "delivers [a] massive performance boost to Linux gaming" as a result of Valve releasing their Steam Linux Beta. The NVIDIA 310.xx Linux graphics driver not only improves the performance for Valve's Source Engine games, but many Linux OpenGL games. In this article are benchmarks from three graphics cards to highlight the optimizations.

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 a new stable release of Slackware has arrived! Since our last stable release, a lot has changed in the Linux and FOSS world. The kernel has moved on to major version 3 (we're using the long term supported 3.2.29 kernel for this release), X.org has released X11R7.7, and Firefox has had a whopping *11* major releases to arrive at version 15.0.1!

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What about how Shanghai fairs against its older brother Barcelona? Well, in some cases, the gain is clearly just the increased clock speed. However, in others Shanghai achieves an increase of anywhere from 10-15% over and above the clock speed difference. It's obvious that Shanghai is what Intel would call a "Tock" of the clock for the Barcelona architecture, and it is a nice little bump for turning a few knobs and a die shrink. 2009 will be a very interesting year for AMD and Intel. Whether or not Shanghai can hold down the fort until Istanbul comes out remains to be seen.

Complete Review at anandtech

Red Hat confirmed Friday that hackers compromised infrastructure servers belonging to the company and the Fedora Project, including systems used to sign Fedora packages.

In the Fedora breach, company officials said they had "high confidence" the hackers did not get the "passphrase used to secure the Fedora package signing key." Regardless, the company has converted to new Fedora signing keys.

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Speaking at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas, security researcher Dan Kaminsky warned that a critical vulnerability in the internet’s worldwide DNS (Domain Name System) infrastructure is worse than initially thought.

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According to a somewhat jaw-dropping story in The Register, it appears that Microsoft has performed a trifecta of geek-scaring feats: They have joined the Apache Software Foundation as a Platinum member(at $100K USD a year), submitted LGPL-licensed patches for ADOdb, and have pledged to expand their Open Specifications Promise by adding to the list more than 100 protocols for interoperability between its Windows Server and the Windows client.

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