Embarcadero ha introdotto in C++ Builder XE3 un compilatore a 64 per Windows (BCC64) che si va ad aggiungere al vecchio compilatore a 32 bit (BCC32) che è utilizzabile per Windows e Mac OS X, a differenza del nuovo compilatore da 64 bit che è disponibile solo per Windows e per processori Intel. In questo post sono illustrate alcune differenze tra i due compilatori.

Il nuovo compilatore supporta gli standard C++98, C++TR1, C++11, ANSI C, ISO C, C99, C11, ed usa la versione 5.3 del Dinkumware's Standard C and Standard C++ libraries, mentre il compilatore a 32 bit usa la versione 5.01. Inoltre il nuovo compilatore usa la versione 1.5 delle Boost C++ libraries. Il vecchio compilatore a 32 bit non supporta la versione 1.5 delle Boost C++ libraries, ma la versione 1.39, e non supporta parte dello standard C++11.

Some compiler and Windows differences to be aware of (most of the time the compiler and RTL will take care of things for you unless you have platform specific code):

• 64-bit Windows Applications use the familiar Windows API
• Windows API calls must be 64-bit versions.
• Try blocks are supported in 64-bit Windows programs.
• A 64-bit Windows application can use a 32-bit Windows type library (as some 64-bit MS Office applications do).
• Cannot mix 32-bit and 64-bit code in the same process.
• DLLs, components, libraries, and packages require that you compile or install separate 32-bit Windows (design-time) and 64-bit Windows (run-time) versions if you want to use the Form Designer.
  64-bit Windows is needed for OS extensions, shell extensions.
• The size of LRESULT, WPARAM, and LPARAM all expand to 64 bits, so message handlers will have to be checked for inappropriate casts.

Il team di Samba ha annunciato il rilascio della versione 4.0.

Major enhancements in Samba 4.0.0 include:

Active Directory services
=========================

Samba 4.0 supports the server-side of the Active Directory logon environment used by Windows 2000 and later, so we can do full domain join and domain logon operations with these clients.

File Services
=============

Samba 4.0.0 ships with two distinct file servers. We now use the file server from the Samba 3.x series 'smbd' for all file serving by default.

DNS
===

As DNS is an integral part of Active Directory, we also provide two DNS solutions, a simple internal DNS server for 'out of the box' configurations and a more elaborate BIND plugin using the BIND DLZ mechanism in versions 9.8 and 9.9.

NTP
===

To provide accurate timestamps to Windows clients, we integrate with the NTP project to provide secured NTP replies.

Python Scripting Interface
==========================

A new scripting interface has been added to Samba 4, allowing Python programs to interface to Samba's internals, and many tools and internal workings of the DC code is now implemented in python.

Note di rilascio disponibili a questa pagina.

I ricercatori del Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), del MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), hanno annunciato di aver sviluppato un nuovo linguaggio di programmazione chiamato "Halide".

 Halide è stato progettato per semplificare lo sviluppo di applicazioni riguardanti l'Image Processing.

Adding a new function to an image-processing program, or modifying it to run on a different device, often requires rethinking and revising it from top to bottom.

Researchers at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) aim to change that, with a new programming language called Halide. Not only are Halide programs easier to read, write and revise than image-processing programs written in a conventional language, but because Halide automates code-optimization procedures that would ordinarily take hours to perform by hand, they’re also significantly faster.

Rilasciato sotto licenza MIT, Halide è disponibile per piattaforme x86-64/SSE, ARM v7/NEON e CUDA. Il compilatore è attualmente disponibile per le recenti release di Mac OS X e Linux. Il supporto per sistemi Windows è tecnicamente fattibile, ma per ora non è stato testato su sistemi Windows.

Nuova versione stabile per il browser di Google, Chrome 17.0.963.78

The Chrome Stable channel has been updated to 17.0.963.78 on Windows, Mac Os X, Linux and Chrome Frame.  This release fixes issues with Flash games and videos, along with the security fix listed below.

Security fixes and rewards:

Congratulations again to community member Sergey Glazunov for the first submission to Pwnium!

- Critical CVE-2011-3046: UXSS and bad history navigation. Credit to Sergey Glazunov.

Adobe mette a disposizione il tool Adobe SWF Investigator con cui sarà possibile analizzare i file Flash ed effettuare l'analisi statica ed il testing dinamico. Il tool consente anche di decompilare i file SWF per poter esaminare il codice sorgente di ActionScript e contiene un editor HEX.

Download per sistemi Windows e Mac OS X da questa pagina, disponibile anche il source code a partire da questa pagina. Il tool è rilasciato sotto licenza Mozilla Public Licence 1.1.

Annunciato il rilascio di MySQL 5.5.21, nuova versione del RDMBS (Relational Database Management System) open source

MySQL 5.5.21 is a new version of the 5.5 production release of the world's most popular open source database. MySQL 5.5.21 is recommended for use on production systems. MySQL 5.5 includes several high-impact enhancements to improve the performance and scalability of the MySQL Database, taking advantage of the latest multi-CPU and multi-core hardware and operating systems. In addition, with release 5.5, InnoDB is now the default storage engine for the MySQL Database, delivering ACID transactions, referential integrity and crash recovery by default.

Functionality Added or Changed

A new CMake option, MYSQL_PROJECT_NAME, can be set on Windows or Mac OS X to be used in the project name. (Bug #13551687)

Bugs Fixed

Performance: InnoDB Storage Engine: Memory allocation for InnoDB tables was reorganized to reduce the memory overhead for large numbers of tables or partitions, avoiding situations where the "resident set size" could grow regardless of FLUSH TABLES statements. The problem was most evident for tables with large row size. Some of the memory that was formerly allocated for every open table is now allocated only when the table is modified for the first time. (Bug #11764622, Bug #57480)

Incompatible Change: An earlier change (in MySQL 5.1.62 and 5.5.21) was found to modify date-handling behavior in General Availability-status series (MySQL 5.1 and 5.5). This change has been reverted.

The change was that several functions became more strict when passed a DATE() function value as their argument, thus they rejected incomplete dates with a day part of zero. These functions were affected: CONVERT_TZ(), DATE_ADD(), DATE_SUB(), DAYOFYEAR(), LAST_DAY(), TIMESTAMPDIFF(), TO_DAYS(), TO_SECONDS(), WEEK(), WEEKDAY(), WEEKOFYEAR(), YEARWEEK(). The previous behavior has been restored. (Bug #13458237)

InnoDB Storage Engine: A Valgrind error was fixed in the function os_aio_init(). (Bug #13612811)

InnoDB Storage Engine: The server could crash when creating an InnoDB temporary table under Linux, if the $TMPDIR setting points to a tmpfs filesystem and innodb_use_native_aio is enabled, as it is by default in MySQL 5.5.4 and higher. The entry in the error log looked like:

101123 2:10:59 InnoDB: Operating system error number 22 in a file operation.
InnoDB: Error number 22 means 'Invalid argument'.
The crash occurred because asynchronous I/O is not supported on tmpfs in some Linux kernel versions. The workaround was to turn off the innodb_use_native_aio setting or use a different temporary directory. The fix causes InnoDB to turn off the innodb_use_native_aio setting automatically if it detects that the temporary file directory does not support asynchronous I/O. (Bug #13593888, Bug #11765450, Bug #58421)

InnoDB Storage Engine: References to C preprocessor symbols and macros HAVE_purify, UNIV_INIT_MEM_TO_ZERO, and UNIV_SET_MEM_TO_ZERO were removed from the InnoDB source code. They were only used in debug builds instrumented for Valgrind. They are replaced by calls to the UNIV_MEM_INVALID() macro. (Bug #13418934)

InnoDB Storage Engine: The MySQL server could halt with an assertion error:

InnoDB: Failing assertion: page_get_n_recs(page) > 1
Subsequent restarts could fail with the same error. The error occurred during a purge operation involving the InnoDB change buffer. The workaround was to set the configuration option innodb_change_buffering=inserts. (Bug #13413535, Bug #61104)

InnoDB Storage Engine: With 1024 concurrent InnoDB transactions running concurrently and the innodb_file_per_table setting enabled, a CREATE TABLE operation for an InnoDB table could fail. The .ibd file from the failed CREATE TABLE was left behind, preventing the table from being created later, after the load had dropped.

The fix adds error handling to delete the erroneous .ibd file. This error was less likely to occur in MySQL 5.5 and 5.6, because raising the number of InnoDB undo slots increased the number of simultaneous transactions needed to trigger the bug, from 1K to 128K. (Bug #12400341)

Replication: Executing mysqlbinlog with the --start-position=N option, where N was equal either to 0 or to a value greater than the length of the dump file, caused it to crash.

This issue was introduced in MySQL 5.5.18 by the fix for Bug #32228 and Bug #11747416. (Bug #13593869, Bug #64035)

Replication: On Windows replication slave hosts, STOP SLAVE took an excessive length of time to complete when the master was down. (Bug #11752315, Bug #43460)

A query that used an index on a CHAR column referenced in a BETWEEN clause could return invalid results. (Bug #13463488, Bug #63437)

Expressions that compared a BIGINT column with any non-integer constant were performed using integers rather than decimal or float values, with the result that the constant could be truncated. This could lead to any such comparison that used <, >, <=, >=, =, !=/<>, IN, or BETWEEN yielding false positive or negative results. (Bug #13463415, Bug #11758543, Bug #63502, Bug #50756)

When the optimizer performed conversion of DECIMAL values while evaluating range conditions, it could produce incorrect results. (Bug #13453382)

When running mysqldump with both the --single-transaction and --flush-logs options, the flushing of the log performed an implicit COMMIT (see Section 12.3.3, "Statements That Cause an Implicit Commit"), causing more than one transaction to be used and thus breaking consistency. (Bug #12809202, Bug #61854)

It was possible in the event of successive failures for mysqld_safe to restart quickly enough to consume excessive amounts of CPU. Now, on systems that support the sleep and date system utilities, mysqld_safe checks to see whether it has restarted more than 5 times in the current second, and if so, waits 1 second before attempting another restart. (Bug #11761530, Bug #54035)

When used with the --xml option, mysqldump --routines failed to dump any stored routines, triggers, or events. (Bug #11760384, Bug #52792)

It was possible on replication slaves where FEDERATED tables were in use to get timeouts on long-running operations, such as Error 1160 Got an error writing communication packets. The FEDERATED tables did not need to be replicated for the issue to occur. (Bug #11758931, Bug #51196)

References: See also Bug #12896628, Bug #61790.

If an attempt to initiate a statement failed, the issue could not be reported to the client because it was not prepared to receive any error messages prior to the execution of any statement. Since the user could not execute any queries, they were simply disconnected without providing a clear error.

After the fix for this issue, the client is prepared for an error as soon as it attempts to initiate a statement, so that the error can be reported prior to disconnecting the user. (Bug #11755281, Bug #47032)

Using myisamchk with the sort recover method to repair a table having fixed-width row format could cause the row pointer size to be reduced, effectively resulting in a smaller maximum data file size. (Bug #48848, Bug #11756869)

On Windows, the server incorrectly constructed the full path name of the plugin binary for INSTALL PLUGIN and CREATE FUNCTION ... SONAME. (Bug #45549, Bug #11754014)

The stored routine cache was subject to a small memory leak that over time or with many routines being used could result in out-of-memory errors. (Bug #44585, Bug #11753187)

Il changelog completo è disponibile a questa pagina. Download a partire da questa pagina.

Presentato sul blog ufficiale di Windows il nuovo logo di Windows 8, che ricorda il logo di Windows 1.0

Microsoft ha allungato il periodo di supporto per i suoi sistemi operativi, Windows XP, Windows Vista e Windows 7. Secondo quanto scoperto da ZDNet Microsoft ha rivisto la data di fine supporto per i tre sistemi operativi Windows. In particolare Windows XP sarà supportato fino fino all'8 aprile 2014, Windows Vista (per il quale in precendenza la data di fine supporto era il 10 aprile 2012) sarà supportato, indipendentemente dalle versioni, fino all'11 aprile 2017 e Windows 7 sarà supportato, indipendentemente dalle versioni, fino al 14 gennaio 2020. In questo modo Microsoft porterà il periodo di supporto per i suoi sistemi operativi a 10 anni.

Rilasciato VMWare Player 4.0, software freeware con cui è possibile far eseguire immagini realizzate con VMWare. Come per VMWare Workstation 8.0 anche VMWare player 4.0 potrà girare solo su PC con processori a 64 bit. Note di rilascio a questa pagina

The hardware requirements to install this version of Workstation have changed. Workstation now requires a relatively modern 64-bit CPU.

This version of Workstation includes many hardware improvements. To try new hardware features, you must upgrade the hardware version of your virtual machine or create a new virtual machine that uses the latest virtual hardware version.

• The display technology has been changed to provide a better experience for Unity users and users who have multiple monitors. These changes also allow you to add a projector to your laptop without restarting your virtual machine.
• Virtual machines can now support up to 64GB of memory. The host system should have more than 64GB of memory to use this feature.
• An HD Audio device is available for Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 2008, and Windows 2008 R2 guests. The HD Audio device is compatible with the RealTek ALC888 7.1 Channel High Definition Audio Codec.
• USB 3.0 support is available for Linux guests running kernel version 2.6.35 or later (Ubuntu 10.10) through a new virtual xHCI USB controller. To enable this feature, add the following line to the .vmx file: usb_xhci.present = "true". Do not enable this feature for Windows guests. Because Windows does not currently have a generic xHCI driver, this feature will not work in Windows.
• Bluetooth devices on the host can now be shared with Windows guests. With the latest hardware version, Bluetooth devices that are paired to the host system radio are available to Windows guests and can be paired from within the guest. You should not pair Bluetooth audio devices, such as headphones, or Bluetooth input devices, such as keyboards and mice, to a guest.

Il download di VMWare Player è possibile da questa pagina (è necessario essere registrati).

Annunciato il rilascio della versione 4.1. di VirtualBox

This is a maintenance release. The following items were fixed and/or added:

• VMM: fixed PAE guests running on 32-bit hosts (4.0 regression; bug #9458)
• VMM: fixed INVALID_PARAMETER guru meditation caused by insufficient memory conditions (4.1.0 regression; bug #9240)
• VMM: fixed clobbered CPU registers during stos/lods/ins/outs emulation under rare circumstances
• VMM: another fix for 64-bit guests on recent AMD CPUs
• USB: make device capturing work on Windows hosts with usbhub class filter drivers installed (bug #9298); bugfixes for Windows host USB support
• VMDK: fixed progress indicator when creating split VMDK images
• Floppy: fixed medium size detection for physical mediums (Windows hosts only)
• Main: fixed taking screen shots (e.g. the preview window) for headless VMs if the Guest Additions are active
• 3D Support: fixed incorrect rendering and possible crashes when switching to/from fullscreen with enabled 2D acceleration
• 3D Support: fixed compiz under ubuntu 9.10
• Guest control: Miscellaneous small bugfixes
• Linux / Solaris hosts: don't use hard links in packages (4.1.2 regression; bug #9441)
• Mac OS X hosts: fix installation issues when installed as root (bug #1578)
• Mac OS X hosts: fixed packet capture issues with vboxnetX host-only interfaces (bug #8076)
• Solaris hosts: fixed incoming multicast packets for Crossbow based bridged networking (bug #9532)
• Solaris hosts: fixed starting EFI guests due to missing EFI ROM files (bug #9535)
• Windows hosts installer: fixed ADDLOCAL usage on command line (4.1.0 regression; bug #9488)
• Windows hosts installer: fixed dangling shortcut to the .chm help file (bug #9646)
• Windows hosts installer: try to fix installation error 2869 which appeared under certain circumstances (bug #9664)
• Windows hosts: VBoxHeadless should never open a separate console window (bug #3549)
• Guest Additions: fixed hang while waiting for guest execution output (4.1.2 regression; bug #9446)
• Linux Additions: add support for X.Org Server 1.11 (bug #9519)
• Linux Additions: suppress an incorrect error message and allow a shared folder to be mounted in multiple places (bug #9627)
• Linux Additions: start VBoxService correctly on openSUSE 12.1 (bug #6229)
• Linux Additions: properly finish the installation even if the compilation of the DRM module fails (which is not fatal)
• Solaris Additions: fixed memory leaks and panics while mounting (from console) and unmounting shared folders.
• Windows Additions: fixed swapped mouse cursor hotspot coordinates (4.1.0 regression; bug #9447)
• Windows Additions: fixed PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA BSOD in VBoxDisp.dll when running SnippingTool (bug #9508)
• Windows Additions: make image viewer work correctly with Aero enabled (Vista and Windows 7)
• Windows Additions: fixed incorrect window border blurs under Aero with ATI cards (Vista and Windows 7)
• Windows Additions: fixed incorrect rendering when moving 3D applications outside guest desktop and back under Aero (Vista and Windows 7)
• Windows Additions: fixed guest hangs when switching back from fullscreen text mode apps (bug #9636)