VMware To Enter Apple market, Support MS Virtualization Products

"Immediately after the release of new Virtual Infrastructure 3, Virtualization.info had the pleasure to reach Raghu Raghuram, Vice President of Platform Products at VMware, to ask him details about the just launched products, the recent Akimbi acquisition announcement, the secret VMware Integrity product, a planned presence in the Apple operating system, and further steps in the virtualization market leader's strategy. From his answers a revelation came out: VMware is going to partially support Microsoft'svirtualization technologies."

DB2 9 Express-C Released

The no-charge version of the IBM database DB2, is now available for download in its 9th revision. DB2 9 Express-C is a no-charge relational database that can be run on up to 2 dual-core CPU servers with up to 4 GB of memory. Available for Windows (32bits, 64 bits coming soon) and Linux (Intel/AMD and Power; 32 and 64 bits)

A Kernel of Truth

"There's been a lot of talk about the Mac OS X kernel in the past few months. When Avie Tevanian left Apple in March, there was much speculation that Apple had plans to abandon the Mach microkernel that underpins Mac OS X, and that Avie helped to develop many years ago. There were two lines of reasoning to support this, both pretty silly." Update: Follow-up has been posted. Thanks to eMagius pointing that out.

Why Ballmer Should Leave Microsoft

Now that Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates has started his two-year goodbye from a day-to-day role at the company, it's time for CEO Steve Ballmer to set a resignation date, too. Since Gates stepped down as CEO in 2000 in favor of Ballmer, the company has floundered technically and strategically. As the company's chairman, chief software architect and supposed visionary, Gates deserves blame for missing the wave of Web-based software that has propelled Google and Yahoo. But Ballmer has made gaffes of his own in his longtime role as head of the company's business side. In addition, Microsoft has started a wiki-like thing to allow its employees to ventilate ideas to the higher echelons of the company.

Switching from MacOS to Linux

It seems that some well-known users are switching from MacOS to Linux, often after a lifetime of involvement with Apple's products. From Tim Bray's blog: " as I stood in the Apple store last weekend and drooled over the beautiful, beautiful hardware, all I could think was how much work it would take to twiddle with the default settings, install third-party software, and hide all the commercial tie-ins so I could pretend I was in control of my own computer. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and to my eye Apple isn't beautiful anymore."

Microsoft Preps Ultramobile PC for Second Chance

Despite having been on the market only a few months, ultramobile PCs, the keyboard-less handheld computers capable of running Windows XP, have already been panned by analysts and many reviewers. Now they're being targeted by the likes of Sony and startup OQO, who are offering their own diminutive computers for businesses. But Microsoft and partners - the UMPC has been backed by Intel and VIA Technologies - expect to see more diversity in the UMPC space in the near term.

Mandriva One 2006: Reviews

Two reviews of Mandriva One 2006. "ReviewLinux.Com takes a quick look at the new and free Mandriva One 2006 LiveCD. This review is full of pictures to show everyone the ease and use of this Linux distribution. This distribution is only one cd and perfect for anyone that maybe new to Linux." MintLinux starts: "After Ubuntu 6.06, Fedora Core 5 and SUSE 10.1 were released in the first two quarters of this year, I started to wonder about Mandriva. Was there still any reason for people to use Mandriva over Fedora, SUSE and Ubuntu? Had the distribution become outdated?"

Review: Google Spreadsheets

"Google Spreadsheets are in the 'sneak peek' phase. The two big questions seem to be a) why would anyone want to use a potentially non-secure spreadsheet with limited capabilities, and b) how will we refer to the primitive era before online spreadsheets, which revolutionized life as we know it (which, of course, leads to a related question: what kind of silver jumpsuit is most comfortable when you're crunching numbers?)?"

Linux 2.6.17 Released

The Linux kernel version 2.6.17 has been released. Not a lot of changes since the last -rc; the bulk is actually some last-minute MIPS updates and s390 futex changes, while the rest tend to be various very small fixes that trickled in over the last week. The changes are listed at KernelNewbies (don't look at me for the name).