"On June 15, Bill Gates announced that he would be retiring from Microsoft in July 2008, and everything changed. It may be two years away, but when a giant the size of Gates moves, the world moves with him. And, in that movement, in this period of change, Linux may have its best chance ever to seize the marketplace momentum from Microsoft."

PC-BSD has just released their roadmap en route to PC-BSD 2.0. They want to focus on making the PC-BSD specific tools integrate better with the rest of KDE, while also doing a lot fo work on the installer. The team also released a list of open volunteer positions for those willing to help.

An hour or so ago Sun Microsystems made good on an earlier pledge to issue further 'non-assertion covenants' in support of open standards. This type of IPR tool facilitates easy implementation of new standards, and also makes open source implementations possible. The new NACs relate to the OASIS Security Assertion Markup Language v2.0 standard and two 'single sign-on' specifications co-developed with Microsoft.

Microsoft senior vice president Bob Muglia opened up TechEd 2006 in Boston Sunday evening by proclaiming that Windows Vista was the most secure operating system in the industry. But a bold statement can only go so far, and much of this week's conference has been spent reinforcing that point.

A lot of people seem to have this idea that Windows Vista looks an awful lot like the MacOS. LifeHacker.com sets some screenshots side-by-side for comparison, and even though they refrain from judgement ("We're just saying"), I do wish to make a few sidenotes about this issue. Read more for a mini-article on the issue.

"Linux distributions such as Ubuntu, SUSE, and Linspire are making headway in the desktop market, but if you want to try something really different, you can find other, less-well-known alternative operating systems. While these OSes may not be the most stable, or have the greatest hardware support, they offer some unique ideas." SkyOS, Haiku, Syllable and Visopsys are reviewed.

The 2006 Windows Hardware Engineering conference presentations have been posted. They include a vast number of topics ranging from the devices, drivers, storage and servers. There are details on Microsoft's new hypervisor and virtualization architecture, as well as a lot of details on optimizing hardware for Vista.

"Parallels today announced that its Desktop for Mac virtualization software is available for purchase for $79.99, following the conclusion of a Beta program that generated more than 100000 testers from 71 countries and has resulted in the current stable, high-performance version. As a special incentive to new customers, the company will make the product available for $49.99 for 30 days following today’s announcement."

In in Part 1 of this series, you'll learn how to use the LDAP Tools for Eclipse to configure Geronimo's built-in Apache Directory LDAP server. In Part 2 you'll query the LDAP server and update the Web page using Ajax. You'll also get familiar with some of the techniques to build LDAP-centric applications using the toolsets available in the Java platform and Ajax.

Microsoft's delay with the release of Windows Vista has left enough wiggle room for other players to pursue the desktop operating system market. An old Microsoft rival, Novell, is angling to seize the day with the release of SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10, a desktop OS geared to beat Vista in cost, manageability and features.

It has long been said that one of Microsoft's greatest challenges has been to support the wild and unpredictable PC hardware market, stemming from the fact that unlike Apple, Microsoft has little control over the hardware that its OS comes to reside upon. True or not, one thing is certain: a bad driver can turn an otherwise stable system into a nightmare. To help put an end to this, Microsoft is turning to a Driver Quality Rating system that it hopes will motivate both OEMs and device manufacturers to increase their commitments to driver quality.

"Currently there are 2 solutions for Mac owners with an Intel chip for running Windows XP on their machine. First up is the solution from Apple called Boot Camp and secondly is the Virtual Machine (with Virtualization) from Parallels. So what's the difference? With Boot Camp Windows will be running 'natively', this means it will be running on the machine as if it was running on any regular PC from any manufacturer. This means full access to the CPU, Graphics and all other aspects. With Parallels Windows XP will be running on a 'Virtual Machine', this means that OS X will be running like normal with WinXP running inside a separate application, in effect two operating systems running at once."

"Apple extended the courtesy of meeting with me one day after my column on the closing of the OS X x86 kernel source code was published online. To sum up Apple's objections, they felt I had given a year-old story a fresh coat of paint and sensationalized it for an audience that wasn't affected by it. Yet no story is more timely, or more broadly relevant, than this one." Tom Yager, who raised concerns over the closed-source Intel half of the MacOS, details why he was so concerned. "The kernel will open up again, this tempest will fade away, and I'll be glad for it. What will continue to concern me so deeply is that Apple thought it would be OK, that nobody would notice or care." Note: The 2nd link was incorrect, it is fixed now. Excusez-moi.

This paper tries to compare Linux vs. Solaris. Its author comes to many conclusions, among which this is one of the more interesting: "All-in-all Solaris is a powerful, stable, conformant-to-standards OS that can run many open source applications as well as Linux, and some (mainly multithreaded applications) better than Linux. Like in the cases of Red Hat and Suse, the cost of support is extra, but it is more reasonably priced. Security patches are free which makes Solaris similar to Windows."