Sun Microsystems announced Monday that its longtime chief executive Scott McNealy is stepping down from the helm and will be succeeded by the struggling computer and software company's No. 2 executive, Jonathan Schwartz. McNealy, 51, a Silicon Valley luminary for years, will continue as chairman of the company he co-founded in 1982. Schwartz, 40, will keep the title of president.

Microsoft told a European Union court on Monday that regulators had completely misunderstood thriving competition in the software market in issuing a landmark antitrust ruling against the giant U.S. company. But an internal Microsoft memo presented by a coalition of critical companies suggested founder Bill Gates was told that a strategy used to crush the rival Netscape browser could also take down the leader in streaming media, RealNetworks' RealPlayer.

The ECB_AT91 is a new Colombian SBC with a 180 MHz ARM9 processor that runs Linux. It supports up to 64MBytes of SDRAM, has a SD/MMC slot, a 10/100 Ethernet port and an USB 2.0 interface. It was inspired by Darrell Harmon's and Flavio Ribeiro's SBCs. Debian runs on this board without problems. More information and pictures can be found at the ECB_AT91 website.

"The Free Standards Group will unveil Linux Standard Base 3.1, the first LSB version to include explicit Linux desktop application support, April 25 at the Desktop Linux Summit in San Diego. The standard has already been endorsed by Linux leaders Red Hat and Novell, along with other major Linux players such as AMD, Asianux, CA, Dell, HP, IBM, Intel, Mandriva, RealNetworks, Red Flag, and Turbolinux, according to the FSG."

After the Why I like microkernels article, I thought it'd be useful to have a view from the "other side" of this endless war. While some of the reasons given by microkernel fans are true, the big picture is somewhat different and it's what I think it keeps traditional-style kernels in the top. Note: please take note that the author is not a native English speaker, so forgive any grammar or spelling mistakes.

The 17" MacBook Pro has just been released. The 17" model has Firewire 800 and 8x dual layer Superdrive, both of which the 15.4" version lacks. The new MacBook Pro was presented during the NAB2006. The machine will cost $2799,- in the US, or round and about EUR 2879,- (differs per country) in the EU, or GBP 1999,- if you live in the UK.

"Learn about using a UNIX system as a primary domain controller and file repository, including an anonymous, read-only shared area accessible by anyone with a Web browser. To be a good citizen on your local network, you need to integrate your favorite UNIX system with the networking features of client systems, generally running Windows XP or Mac OS X. This makes it easier for the users of those workstations to take advantage of the centralized authentication and storage facilities you can provide."

"These days, the 'revolution' is all about Linux. The word alone has become a catchcry for everything anti-establishment, anti-Bill, and anti-licensing fees. If you listen to the hype, it's being used everywhere, in businesses of all sizes, to do everything but make the coffee. Just because everybody's using Linux, however, doesn't mean everybody's happy for that fact to be known, as I found recently while looking for potential candidates for this special report about companies that had made the switch from Windows and Linux, and vice versa."

A senior Oracle executive has backed the reasoning behind the software vendor's mooted move into the operating system sphere and illustrated the depth of chief executive Larry Ellison's allegiance to Linux. Ellison recently told the Financial Times the company was "missing an operating system" and it would make sense to "look at distributing and supporting Linux" since ongoing maintenance and services fees were becoming an increasingly important part of Oracle's revenue stream.

Before tackling a seemingly complex code problem with lots of functions and complex logic, Jeff Cogswell recommends trying a finite state machine - a set of states and appropriate rules and actions that go with those states - to greatly simplify your coding. Service oriented architectures sound complicated and daunting, but they're not so hard to implement. The concepts involved are actually fairly simple, and this article describes them by using examples drawn from the networking domain. Software consultant Stephen B. Morris describes some of the principles of service orientation in the down-to-earth contexts of C++ and networking.

x64bit.net has a review of the (K)Ubuntu Dapper Drake beta. "Please note Ubuntu/Kubuntu 'Dapper Drake' is not yet a final product and the available previews do not reflect the quality of the final product. This quick review is not meant to divide Ubuntu and Kubuntu into separate distros. They are almost identical to each other, except the default desktop for Ubuntu is Gnome, whereas KDE is Kubuntu's default desktop." Lots of screenshots, boys and girls.

"Why tune my system? This is probably the first thing you want to know. When a distribution is packaged and delivered to clients, it is designed to be fully compatible with most of the computers available in the market. This is a very heterogeneous set of hardware (hard disks, video cards, network cards, etc.). So distribution vendors like Red Hat, SuSe, Mandriva and the rest of them choose some conservative configuration options to assure a successful installation. For instance, probably you have a very advanced hard disk with some special features that are not being used due to standard configuration settings. To summarize: your Linux distribution goes well... But it can go even better!"

"This tutorial shows how to configure a MySQL 5 cluster with three nodes: two storage nodes and one management node. This cluster is load-balanced by a high-availability load balancer that in fact has two nodes that use the Ultra Monkey package which provides heartbeat (for checking if the other node is still alive) and ldirectord (to split up the requests to the nodes of the MySQL cluster)."

"Microsoft Vista Build 5365 has been released. We are downloading it at the moment, screenshots will follow in our spanking new image gallery. This is a Vista-only release, i.e. no Longhorn Server attached, which is a shame. According to Microsoft, this is another 'refresher' build, with bug fixes rather than new features. We have been informed that regional fixes for IME, time zones, etc., have not yet been implemented; those will ship in all post-5370 builds." Microsoft released a FAQ alongside this build, get it in .doc or .pdf format.