Brad Wardell writes us: "Windows Vista Beta 2 is nearly here and now seems as good a time as any to take a look at where things stand with Microsoft's next-generation operating system. As this article makes clear, Windows Vista has a lot of potential - it is a major upgrade. But it also has some major issues to overcome prior to release."

Sun Microsystems' new GNU/Linux-friendly Java license does not go far enough for Red Hat. It says Sun should have open-sourced Java instead. Brian Stevens, Red Hat CTO, told The Register Sun should open-source its Java Virtual Machine (which is licensed by Red Hat) so developers can improve the software's real-time capabilities. According to Stevens, Sun's Distro License for Java - launched at this week's JavaOne conference - will reduce companies' legal costs, but does not satisfy the desire for open source Java. He criticized Sun for being reactive, rather than leading, on the issue of open source Java. "They try to do the minimal amount they can get away with," he said.

"AMD today introduced AMD Turion 64 X2 mobile technology, the first and only family of 64-bit dual-core processors designed for thin and light notebook PCs. AMD Turion 64 X2 mobile technology allows people to get more from their mobile lifestyle through long battery life and outstanding performance, even when using multiple applications simultaneously, including demanding digital media applications."

Here is an article explaining how shellcodes work: "This article is not a guide on writing exploits, nor an overview of popular vulnerabilities. This is a step-by-step guide on developing a shellcode, a crucial point of any exploit software. Hopefully, learning how they work will help conscientious and respectable developers and system administrators to understand how malefactors think and to defend their systems against them."

As expected, the software giant on May 18 unveiled its Windows Vista Get Ready Web site, along with a set of minimum PC hardware guidelines for Vista Capable PCs - which call for at least an 800MHz processor, 512MB of RAM and a DirectX 9-capable graphics processor, but ask for more for those who seek to use all of Vista's features - and a Windows Upgrade Advisor application as part of a campaign to prepare people. on a related note, the WinFS team whetted the appetites of advocates of Microsoft's next-generation file system by sharing information on plans for a new, Microsoft-developed application for WinFS, code-named "Project Orange".

SymphonyOS 2006-05 Beta has been released. This release, based on Debian unstable, is the first with a functional hard drive installer and the first to include the OneClick software installation system providing an easy to use interface to the debian repositories. TuxMachines has already posted a review, and screenshots are available as well.

"The latest 'OS X is slow' meme to impinge on the mass psyche of the Internet comes courtesy of one Jasjeet Sekhon, an associate professor of political science at UC Berkeley. The page has hit digg and reddit and been quoted on Slashdot. Is there any merit to this?"

"We're happy to release the next issue of Mandriva Linux Inside, the Mandriva e-magazine. This issue features a new layout and more contents, including articles on Mandriva One and Mandriva Kiosk, an interview with the founders of Mandriva Brasil, new Cooker Weekly News and more. Due to its increased size, the new issue is a 2MB download in PDF format ."

"In this article, we walk you through the process of constructing a special set of bootable media called a kickstart, designed to help you rebuild systems when and as needed with minimal time and effort. Of course, it does require some planning, preparation and work to build a kickstart, but we'll cover that here."

"SavaJe, a spinoff of Lucent Technologies, threw its hat into the ring at the 2006 JavaOne Conference in San Francisco this week, with the unveiling of a 'sophisticated' handset that runs a unique, Java-centric operating system. The Jasper S20 mobile phone, running SavaJe's Java-based SavaJe Mobile Platform, also garnered JavaOne's 'Device of the Show' honors. But why create a Java-based phone OS, when the mid- and high-tier mobile phone market appears to be locked in a three-way battle among Symbian, Windows Mobile, and Linux?"

"Today I learned about memcached, which I'd heard of before, but never really investigated. From the project's site, 'memcached is a high-performance, distributed memory object caching system, generic in nature, but intended for use in speeding up dynamic web applications by alleviating database load.' So, even though I don't have a huge amount of traffic, I still have dynamic sites, and I'm always looking at ways to speed up my Typo blog. So, using memcached, you can get a big performance boost in databases calls, which sold me on giving it a go."

"PC-BSD aims to be an easy to use desktop operating system, based on FreeBSD. As many Linux users, I have little or no knowledge about FreeBSD. I heard many rumors about it. I read about it and about its history. I even tried it a little while ago and, although I appreciated some aspects of it, I came to the conclusion that it wasn't ready for the desktop. So when I read the announcement of PC-BSD being released, I decided to have a look at it." Read the review at LinuxForums.

Sun Microsystems plans to offer support for the Ubuntu server Linux distribution on its T1 server line, the company said at the JavaOne industry conference in San Francisco. "We will be aggressively supporting the fork work that Ubuntu has been doing," Sun chief executive Jonathan Schwartz said at the conference. "The ideals of that community are relatively familiar to us." More here, while a comparison of Linux and Solaris on a T2000 is also available.

Geek Patrol benchmarks the MacBook against the MacBook Pro, and concludes: "The difference between the MacBook and the MacBook Pro varies between 75% and 115%; sometimes the MacBook is faster, sometimes the MacBook Pro is faster. For CPU-intensive tasks, I doubt most will notice the difference between the MacBook and the MacBook Pro. Unfortunately, Geekbench doesn’t measure GPU performance, which is the biggest difference between the MacBook and the MacBook Pro. For GPU-intensive tasks, most users will probably prefer the dedicated GPU in the MacBook Pro over the integrated GPU in the MacBook."