Sun's ambitions have grown another size larger. The server and software company launched its servers based on its own UltraSparc T1 'Niagara' chips in December, a major part of a drive to restore its lost luster and financial strength. But alongside the hardware launch came a more quiet software push: an attempt to make the Linux and BSD Unix open-source operating systems a serious option for buyers of Sparc-based computers. To promote the technology combination, Sun is trying to coax an accompanying software business into existence.

Someone claims to have found Vista's release date by using a clever trick. "How do I know? Well, Microsoft EMEA has put up a website where you can guess the launch date for Windows Vista. After you submit a date, it plays a hint video. There’s actually a bunch of videos, some of which are quite funny. Anyway, here comes the interesting part: If you take a look at the page source, the videos are hosted on a Microsoft server in Switzerland. And depending on your guess, they are being loaded either from a subdirectory /early/ or another one named /late/. By simple iteration I quickly found that 'early' ends Nov 30th while 'late' starts Dec 1st. So either one of these will be the launch date. If this all is not a dirty little trick from the webmaster, of course..."

"New releases made by large free software projects usually means that a lot of people want the new release NOW, and the recent Debian and Ubuntu releases are no exceptions. This writeup details how we, Academic Computer Club at Umea University, Sweden, managed to saturate the 2Gbit/s of available internet capacity with a zero-currency budget."

"Today Borland announced plans to seek a buyer for our IDE product lines that include Delphi, C++Builder, C#Builder, JBuilder (and Peloton), InterBase, JDataStore, nDataStore, Kylix, and our older Borland and Turbo language products and tools. The goal is to create a standalone business focused on advancing individual developer productivity using the people inside Borland who are focused on the success of these award winning products."

Parallels launched the beta program for Workstation 2.1, an upgraded version of their desktop virtualization solution. This version adds new features like USB support, PAE-mode support, wireless networking support, and a new tools package. The program runs Solaris virtual machines too. The beta is fully functional for 45 days.

"Assuming that 'because it's a Mac, it's safe' is no longer wise" is probably one of this book's most important themes. It has been my experience that too many Mac users "know" that OS X is secure and therefore they have nothing to worry about. This book shows just how wrong that attitude is.

Fighting for icon space on the desktop is so 2001. The new frontier on a virgin PC is the browser, and Internet companies like Google are jostling for space on the browsers of new PCs. Dell and Google are evaluating a partnership in which the Google Toolbar, Google Desktop Search and a Google-designed Dell home page are included on new Dell PCs, a Dell representative confirmed.

Microsoft plans to ship a new security product in June, charging $49.95 a year to shield up to three PCs against viruses, spyware and other cyberthreats, the company said on Tuesday. Called Windows OneCare Live, the product marks Microsoft's long-anticipated entry into the consumer antivirus market, which has been the domain of specialized vendors, led by Symantec and McAfee. Microsoft announced its intent to offer antivirus products in June 2003 when it bought Romanian antivirus software developer GeCad Software.

IBM has carved out a renegade path for the upcoming Power6 processor, opting to crank the chip's GHz much higher while rivals shy away from major clock speed boosts with their products. The Power6 chip will run between 4GHz and 5GHz and has been shown to hum away at 6GHz in the lab. IBM reckons that some process technology breakthroughs have allowed it to kick GHz higher while still keeping heat and power consumption issues under control. All told, IBM claims that Power6 will be twice as fast as competing server processors from Intel, AMD and Sun.

Chip firm Intel presented a 65 nanometre dual core multithreaded Xeon with a shared 16MB on die level three cache at the Solid State Conference. The Xeon has 1.328 billion transistors, a 1MB unified L2 cache per core, and has a die size of 435mm2. It delivers 3.4GHz at 1.25 volts and 150 watts TDP, and comes with a 667 and 800MT/s three load front side bus interface. This chip is compatible with existing chipset designs and Intel claims it has the largest cache and device count for an X86 processor.

"Novell is announcing its contribution of the Xgl graphics subsystem and the 'Compiz' compositing manager to the X.org project. These enhancements open up a whole world of hardware acceleration, fancy animation, separating hardware resolution from software resolution, and more. As a result, Linux desktops will become more usable, end-user productivity will increase, and Linux is firmly positioned at the forefront of client computing technology." Videos and screenshots are included in the press release. And on a related note, Dan Winship of Novell has explained on gnome-desktop-devel why Novell worked on all this behind closed doors-- and this also applies to the striking similarity between Novell's mockups from December and Nat Friedman's videos. The changes made to GNOME will all be released back.

"If you are about to take the plunge into converting from Solaris to Linux, or just want to see how easy it is to make the change, then take a look at this well written Solaris-To-Linux Migration technical roadmap. It gives you everything you need to get the job done the right way, the first time, and will eliminate all the quirks and gotch-yas that come with operating system migrations."

As said yesterday, Opera Software today released the second preview of Opera 9. New features include a widget engine, web page thumbnails, syntax highlighting in the source viewer, a content blocker, and much more. Download it for Windows, UNIX, and Mac OS X.

The Mozilla team has set February 10th as the release date of the next major Firefox version. Some of the more notable features to be included in Firefox 2 are in-line spell checking, some sort of anti-phishing functionality, and improvements to tabbed browsing. Elsewhere, Asa Dotzler made a posting about his thoughts on the preview of IE 7 Beta 2.