Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) is not going to survive as a major standard programming model in the next five years, predicts Richard Monson-Haefel, senior analyst with the Burton Group, and SOA is part of the reason.

Mozilla Firefox 2 Beta 1 has been released. This milestone for developers and testers includes several new features including anti-phishing, browser session restore in case of a crash, support for client-side session and persistent storage, ability to re-open accidentally closed tabs, support for JavaScript 1.7, new Windows installer based on Nullsoft Scriptable Install System, new microsummaries feature for bookmarks, new search plugin manager and better support for previewing and subscribing to web feeds. Screenshots documenting the new features can be found here.

Virtual PC 2004 SP1 now is completely free and VPC 2007 will also be free. Also, VMware released VMWare Server 1.0, a free virtualization solution for servers. Update: Here you are, one more for free.

We bring to you an interview with Alvaro J. Iradier, founder and lead developer of AMSN (Alvaro's Messenger), a full-featured MSN compatible client, written in tcl/tk.

Apple, Google and Symantec are among the high-technology companies with the most loyal customers, according to a new report based on data from early last year. The company conducted three separate studies looking at the Online Services, Computing, and Consumer Services sectors of the high technology industry, assessing various companies' commitment to maximizing customer experience and driving revenue growth through customer loyalty.

Darbat, the L4/Darwin port, has just had its second public release. Darbat Release 0.2 boots natively on Apple Intel EFI hardware and offers binary compatibility with Intel OS X applications and IOKit device drivers. Simple Darbat system call performance is comparable with that of Mac OS X 10.4.6. You can download the source or a binary distribution to boot a simple demo on hardware. The release notes contain an overview of the Darbat design and implementation.

This review describes the installation and basic configuration of the latest Kubuntu 6.06 on an AMD64-powered machine. It covers some often problematic features like getting the non-free and binary apps to work in the 64-bit environment. Another article explains how to install the latest Xubuntu on a Gateway laptop.

"With the release of FreeBSD 5.5 and FreeBSD 6.1, the second quarter of 2006 has been productive." The status report contains a lot of information about (for example) DTrace, Embedded FreeBSD, GJournal, XFS for FreeBSD, and the new BSDInstaller.

Intel's Core 2 Duo will be unveiled at an event scheduled for July 27 at Intel's headquarters. The desktop version of the Core 2 Duo, formerly code-named Conroe, will be the focus of the July 27 event. A notebook version, known as Merom, will follow in August.

The European Commission fined Microsoft 280.5 million euros ($357.3 million) on Wednesday to punish its failure to comply with a landmark 2004 antitrust ruling.

Speaking at a forum in South Africa regarding a plan for Microsoft to make major technology investments in the country, Bill Gates said there was an "80 percent chance" Windows Vista would by ready for its planned January launch. He also had no qualms about delaying the OS further if necessary.

Macintouch has done a hardware quality survey among owners of PowerMac G5s (3000 PowerMacs) regarding hardware quality, support quality, and more. The conclusion: "The Power Mac G5's 17% first-year failure rate remains far higher than the industry average of 5%. If Apple is to maintain its premium pricing, it should provide premium reliability. As things stand, high Power Mac prices must include high warranty service costs built-in. With an overall failure rate of 23%, a quarter of which occur outside of Apple's 1-year warranty, and an average of 1.29 repairs per affected unit implying repeat problems, Power Macs are neither cheap for Apple to service after the sale, nor cheap for buyers. Power comes at a cost." Ok. Run Forrest, run!

Microsoft has - finally - announced its version of on-demand CRM software. For more than a year the software giant has nosed around the fact that it's working on customer relationship management as a service, but it wasn't until its annual Worldwide Partner Conference here July 11-13 that Microsoft Dynamics CRM Live made its formal debut.

Sun is coming out with the latest of its Opteron-based Galaxy servers, including its first system that will give the hardware maker a presence in the fastest growing and highly competitive blade space. At an event in San Francisco July 11, Sun officials will introduce not only the new Sun Blade 8000, but also another server that can scale to 16 processors and a system code-named Thumper that combines both server and storage capabilities in a single box. There's even a slideshow.