Virtualization software that's all the rage today - chiefly VMware, Microsoft Virtual Server, and Xen - lets a single computer run multiple operating systems. Now, a newer variety of virtualization is emerging that employs a lighter-weight approach so that a single operating system can be sliced into independent sections. While details of the concept are just beginning to emerge, it's likely only a matter of time before it shows up in Windows and Linux.

Will the delay in Microsoft's Windows Vista have a domino effect on other planned releases of Windows? Partner sources close to the company said that Microsoft has sketched out plans for Windows 'Fiji' (also referred to by some Microsoft watchers as Vista R2) - the version of Windows set to follow Vista - as for Windows 'Vienna', the successor to Fiji, partner sources close to the company said.

"From time to time over the last few months, I’ve heard an argument along the following lines, often from people who should know better. 'Operating systems are commodities. There’s no special value in them. Operating system A may have a small technical advantage in one area, and operating system B may have a small technical advantage in another area, but there’s little to choose between them.' But there are many, many things wrong this argument."

"Last summer, IBM set up Power,org, to promote its PowerPC chip as what it called 'open hardware.' This year, Sun launched the OpenSPARC.net open source project around the source code for its Niagera microprocessor. But what does "open" mean in the context of hardware? You have to pay to participate meaningfully in Power.org, as well as pay royalties to implement - it's built on a traditional RAND consortium model. To use the Sun code, though, its just download the code under an open source license, and you're good to go to use anything except the SPARC name. All of which leads to the questions: 'what does open mean in hardware, and which approach will work?"

"Be nice to your computers and examine some general guidelines for tuning server performance. A computer is like an employee who does tasks for you - it's a good idea to keep from overburdening them. One way to keep this from happening is to carefully tune the processes that run on it. The UNIX nice command is useful for doing just that."

Serenity Systems has released beta 2 of eComStation 2.0. Improvements include, but are not limited to: ACPI which now works better; SNAP Graphics boots directly from the CD; support for JFS booting; Firefox/Thunderbird replaced Mozilla; Cairo has been added; and much more. eComStation betas are available to registred customers.