Polypaudio is a relatively new cross-platform networked sound server project. The first release came out in July, 2004, the software has been released under the LGPL. "Polypaudio is a networked sound server for Linux and other Unix like operating systems and Microsoft Windows. It is intended to be an improved drop-in replacement for the Enlightened Sound Daemon (ESOUND)." The main function of a sound server is to allow multiple audio applications to simultaneously share the same sound card, the networking capabilities extend this ability across machines.

"It's not that I despise Apple or the wonderful products it showcases year after year, but the fact that almost every first generation Apple product has serious quality assurance issues bugs me beyond belief. Let's take a look at two of Apple's most successful products, the company's portable music player and its notebook series."

"Last week's announcement of Microsoft's new virtualization strategy at WinHEC 2006 conference brought in big interest. The importance of the announcement and the technical complexity of the products (the so-called Windows hypervisor will be integrated in the operating system itself) also raised customers' confusion, now trying to understand how the new products will address problems they today are solving with Virtual Server. Mike Neil, Virtual Machine Technologies Product Unit Manager at Microsoft, accepted to sit down with VirtualizationInfo and clarify some important points about Windows Server Virtualization, Virtual Machine Manager, the Softricity acquisition and more."

"In this tutorial I will describe how to install and configure mod_cband on an Apache2 web server. mod_cband is an Apache 2 module which provides bandwidth quota and throttling. It solves the problem of limiting users' and virtualhosts' bandwidth usage. The current version can set virtualhosts' and users' bandwidth quotas, maximal download speed, requests-per-second speed and the maximal number of simultanous IP connections."

The inevitable flood of Vista Beta 2 reviews are starting, and today there are two prominent reviews. Tom's Harware UK has spent 500 hours with Vista and given it a general thumbs up in its screenshot heavy review. Ars Technica also takes a look at the progress of Vista, but trivializes some larger Vista features, such as the completely rewritten Windows Mail.

Starter Toolkit for DB2 on Rails is a set of tools that enables rapid building of Web applications with Ruby on Rails and DB2. It comes with a unique, one-click installer for pre-tested and reconfigured installation of not only Ruby and Rails, but a complete DB2 Express - C solution. Several Demos available showcasing the toolkit.

The KDE Project announced the immediate availability of KDE 3.5.3. Unusually for a maintenance release, new features were implemented due to the long release cycle of the eagerly-awaited KDE 4. Significant enhancements include an improved startup time, speedups in KHTML, over 800 minor issues fixed, small new features and new translations.

AMD may be looking to buy graphics company ATI Technologies, a move that would benefit the overall graphics industry, according to RBC Capital Markets. "The synergies of this seem consistent with the recent announcements by AMD to significantly increase capacity over the next few-years," wrote analyst Apjit Walia in a note to investors Wednesday. "We believe ATI is a rare-buy in the semiconductor space right now given the near-term tie-up dynamics."

Sun Microsystems will fire up to 5000 workers this year, as the company tries to cut costs and make it easier to post quarterly profits. All told, Sun expects to cleave off between 11 per cent and 13 per cent of its 37500 person workforce. The firings mark the first mass layoff to take place under new CEO Jonathan Schwartz. Sun has historically been reluctant to let go of staff, despite Wall Street's constant calls to trim costs via layoffs. CNet has more.

"The next version of Firefox will come out of the virtual box with Google's anti-phishing tools built in. While the Googlified security services have been available through use of the Google Toolbar for either Firefox or IE6 for quite some time already, this marks the first default installation. And we all know how much Google values the defaults."

After a year in beta testing, Microsoft on Wednesday took the wraps off Windows Live OneCare, its all-in-one security and PC care subscription service. That package includes antivirus, anti-spyware and PC tuning and backup tools, along with free support for $49.95 USD per year.

The latest bug fix release of GNOME is here: GNOME 2.14.2. You can get release notes and download links from here. Please note that both libxml2 and libxslt tarballs need a patch and that the libxml2 tarball also needs a second patch.

In his Weblog entry last week, Jonathan Schwartz wrote that "despite the cynics, using a GPL license is very much on the table" as a possible option for open source Java. Schwartz also reported that Sun is making serious progress on open sourcing Java. "We're now making serious progress on open sourcing Java (and despite the cynics, using a GPL license is very much on the table), while focusing the debate on what matters most: not access to lines of code (that's already widely available), but ensuring compatibility," said Schwartz.

"Games under GNU/Linux have usually been a lacklustre affair. For every Tux Racer, there are a hundred sub-standard Pac-man clones you'd be embarrassed to advocate. For every commercial version of Quake, there's a hundred other worthy games the publisher elected not to port to GNU/Linux. Without good games, there's no market, and without the market, no effort is spared. And so the cycle continues. In this article, I will look at two of the areas in which GNU/Linux games have succeeded, and a new device that combines them both, which could help expose GNU/Linux to the populous."