I just noticed an article on Slashdot about Adobe giving Mozilla a new piece of code. This is an ECMAScript interpreter, which can lay the basis for a complete JavaScript engine. Unfortunately, I also noticed a rather disturbing reference in the comments:

On compilers, the current SpiderMonkey engine can convert JavaScript to byte code, but does not have the ability to convert byte code to native machine instructions; this is a major feature that Tamarin provides. I don't know enough to comment on relative code quality; I'll leave this to others who've actually had experience with both code bases.

This is getting out of hand. Just-in-Time compilation in Gecko? So far it's just a suggestion; but compiling to native code Just-in-Time is unportable and has security implications on high security systems. Perhaps it would be more worthwhile to spend time improving the state of interpretive execution (bytecode interpreters)?

Seems these days there's loads of chatter about dual-core systems and how they're going to be so much better than single core systems. On the other hand, there's a large amount fo chatter about how much dual core is useless and the benchmarks show you don't get any more FPS but 1 or 2 from dual core. We all know the only thing games do is pump FPS, so obviously games can't take advantage of dual core processors right? WRONG. Maybe if these people knew anything about computers besides that they play Halflife 2 they'd know how stupid this notion is.

I've noticed a lot of people I've talked to (mainly self-proclaiming X11 experts--some of them respected Xorg devs, others just users who think they have a clue) say it's technically infeasible or not useful to do a number of things, like threaded X or reloading of config files without restarting X. I've noticed a few problems (on Linux) and I'm thinking there may be some use to rewriting X in a 'microkernel' style (yes I know it doesn't make sense; just force the connection). This was also posted to comp.os.minix, if anyone cares.

Some of us may be wondering: Whatever happened to Minix? Is it dead? Is anybody working on it? It's older than Linux yet there's no Minix distros; there's PC-BSD and FreeBSD for FBSD, and there's tons of Linux distros, Nexenta for Solaris, so where the hell is Minx?! Well, for those of you that curious, I've posted an entry on my blog about it (reproduced here for convenience). Spoiler: Minix is only one year old!

Occasionally, Holy Wars arise due to security concerns in the Open Source community. These concerns can center around anything from project managment to mainline kernel features, and typically wind out with a lot of people being pissed off at eachother and occasionally some forking. Like any flamewar, of course, the arguments used are typically shakey and either omit facts or contain blatant untruths.

I posted this to the Kernel Security Issue pole, but it didn't seem to take so here it is again.

I use the Hardened Gentoo sources, which patch the kernel with all the latest security fixes. The hardened-dev-sources (2.6 branch) have a new release almost every day though. Kind of shows how well the 2.6 development model is working for security, huh? *cough*