During Hewlett-Packard's Business Critical Systems conference in Macau this week, executives described a recent offer by Sun Microsystems' boss Scott McNealy to merge Solaris with HP-UX as "almost laughable".

Insiders at Taiwanese phone maker BenQ say that Apple procurement executives have been talking to various Taiwanese phone makers during the past few months in an effort to cut a manufacturing deal on an iPod Phone. My take: Just for kicks, here's my iPhone mockup.

Want the fastest Windows XP Core Duo notebook? Then buy a Mac. According to benchmarks carried out by website GearLog, Apple's MacBook Pro running Windows XP is a better Adobe Photoshop rig than any other Core Duo laptop on the market. The site used a recently detailed technique that shoehorns the Microsoft operating system onto Intel-based Macs - a trick that last week won its formulators $13000 in prize money.

The much-talked about PhysX processor by Ageia is now finally obtainable for consumers-- sort of. Dell has launched the XPS 600 Renegade: a limited edition computer with four GeForce 7900 cards connected via SLI, Intel Pentium D 965 Extreme Edition (overclocked to 4.26 Ghz), and 2GB of GDDR3 memory, and of course the PhysX processor. That's a $10000 gamer's wet dream. Alienware couldn't watch silently by the sideline of course, and it also equipped some of its digital solitare machines with the PhysX processor.

"As a long serving citizen of the Internet I have, in my time, accumulated membership to a number of email groups. It was in one of these groups that I first heard reports of a virus (Leap.A) that had started to infect Apple’s Mac OS X operating system. I was not surprised that this had happened; in fact I was quite taken aback that it had not happened before! But I was flabbergasted by the response of the Mac Mafia to this news. The assumption that something is infallible is at best naive and at worst stupid; it can only invite trouble."

Yesterday ActiveWin had the exclusive of Windows Vista's official release date. Today, Microsoft confirmed all that by updating its release schedule and making an official press release. "Microsoft today confirmed that Windows Vista, the next generation of the Windows client operating system, is on target to go into broad consumer beta to approximately 2 million users in the second quarter of 2006. Microsoft is on track to complete the product this year, with business availability in November 2006 and broad consumer availability in January 2007."

Several months ago there was an OSNews article which discussed why browsers should be able to display OpenDocument. It's been a while now and recently Wily Yuen, the reader who submitted this to us, discovered on the OpenOffice.org Wiki that there is indeed somebody working on a Firefox extension called ODFReader, which will display ODF within the browser using XSLT. The extension only reads OOo Writer documents and displays only text so far. You can check it out here.

"Newer software does try to be sexier by doing flashy things such as the talking paperclip. This causes a tendency for the software to bloat to the point of saturation, i.e. until it performs at barely acceptable speeds. But application programming seems to get worse with faster processors. Even with more memory, faster disks and multiple CPUs, your average web application runs slower. Is it possible that the faster hardware has made us worse programmers?"

"This tutorial shows you how to configure BIND9 DNS server to serve an internal network and an external network at the same time with different set of information. To accomplish that goal, a new feature of BIND9 called view is used. As a tutorial it'll walk you through the whole set up, but initial knowledge of BIND and DNS is required, there are plenty of documents that cover that information on the Internet."

Microsoft will bring some of the graphics destined for Windows Vista to the Macintosh, phones and older versions of Windows next year through a user interface toolkit. Company executives at the Mix '06 Web developer conference on Monday provided anticipated dates for delivery of Windows Presentation Foundation Everywhere, or WPF/E, a user interface design software for operating systems other than Windows Vista.

Microsoft has officially announced to ActiveWin (over a conference call) the release date of Windows Vista. Windows Vista will be made officially to consumers in January 2007, while making Windows Vista available to businesses only in November 2006. In addition, there will be a feature complete Beta 2 CTP released in the next quarter.

French lawmakers approved an online copyright bill Tuesday that would require Apple to break open the exclusive format behind its market-leading iTunes music store and iPod players. The draft law - which also sets new penalties for music pirates - would force Apple, Sony, and others to share proprietary copy-protection technologies so that rivals can offer compatible services and players. An analyst expects that Apple is more likely to leave the French market, than to open its format in France. My take: Just buy CDs. They play in every CD player, and have no weird restrictions. In case you forgot, CDs look like this.

A month after releasing the architecture specifications and hypervisor APIs for its UltraSPARC T1 processor to the open-source community, Sun is putting out more information on the chip. Sun on March 21 will publish the hardware design for the T1 - formerly codenamed Niagara - and the Solaris operating system simulation specifications for the chip. The move is the latest in the company's OpenSPARC project, designed to enable hardware and software developers to build atop the new chip's architecture. The goal is to build an ecosystem around the processor that will expand the reach of the SPARC platform. In addition, Sun's grid will finally launch this week.

Novell will support its NetWare network operating system at least until 2015. However, its focus will be open source. "While not abandoning its current NetWare users, Novell officials on Monday made it clear that the company's focus is on open-source and open-standards computing. Kicking off the annual BrainShare conference at the Salt Palace, Novell Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Jack Messman and others praised how open source and open standards - and Novell products based on them - can help businesses work more efficiently, provide them flexibility and agility and save them money."