The personification of the duality-in-man, Paul Thurrot, takes a look at Windows Live. "In this article, I'll examine the genesis of Windows Live, and take a look at how Microsoft plans to capitalize on the integration of Windows with various Web-based services and products. Then, I'll briefly examine each of the Windows Live services that the company plans to ship this year, saving full reviews of each service for their eventual ship dates."

"The BSD Certification Group is a non-profit organization established to create and maintain a global certification standard for system administration on BSD-based operating systems. After a year of work, the group behind the BSD Certification project plans to complete the process for the first certification (BSD Associate) in the first half of this year, with the first exam to be available by the second quarter. We interviewed Dru Lavigne, BSD advocate and creator of the initiative."

"FreeBSD is now, with the notable exception of suspend, a stable functionally complete domU on Xen 3.0. I am currently in the process of adding dom0 support. Suspend support will be turned on as soon as the xenbus + newbus integration work goes in. It is unclear how much sense it would make to post a sparse tree as this is all being done in -CURRENT (the development branch). However, as soon as dom0 support goes in, Xen support will be pulled into RELENG_6, and in all likelihood full Xen support will go out with the release of FreeBSD 6.1."

"Turnabout is fair play, and it is refreshing to see that IBM is beginning to understand that it needs a strategy to try to bring the 100000 partners who write code for Microsoft's Windows platform onto all of its eServer platforms - not just xSeries and BladeCenter servers that run Windows natively on Intel and AMD processors. For a decade, software vendors have been porting their OS/400, AIX, and MVS applications to Windows, or creating whole new application suites that compete against software developed for those platforms. Now, IBM wants to turn the tables on the Windows ecosystem, and it is enlisting the support of Mainsoft to do this."

The Southern California Linux Expo announced today that Peter Quinn, former CIO of Massachusetts, will keynote at the 2006 Southern California Linux Expo. Quinn's keynote will be the opening presentation at SCALE's Workshop on the OpenDocument Format in Government Organizations.

The update to the GNU GPL 2.0, which was some five years in the making, was released this week for a year of public commentary. Richard Stallman, the founder of the Free Software Foundation and author of the current license, sat down with eWEEK Senior Editor Peter Galli at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to talk about his aims, hopes and wishes for the new license.

"All HP blades now support Sun Solaris 10 in 32/64 bit but that's only the beginning. HP's Opteron DL145-G2 is now certified for Solaris 10 32/64 bit too, and sources suggest there's a lot more to come. We'd say that OpenVMS for Opteron is a bridge too far for Hewlett Packard, but additional support for Sun Solaris 10 suggests a degree of cooperation that would have been totally unconceivable two years ago."

"If building infrastructure is the true forte of Free/Open Source Software, why is there so much duplicative efforts to build so similar edifices seen in Office Suites? Would it not be better to put the initial efforts into construction a software scaffold as the first fundamental step in building the structure to allow all suites components to be placed upon it from any interested source? While I do not consider myself a competent software architect, conceptually the proposal in the previous sentence seems reasonable. Moreover, it could attract talent that is more attuned to fundamentals of process control, i.e. information exchange rather than the attributes seen in a keystroke binding to an action upon a gui that a class of users expects from an application."

GNOME 2.13.5 has been released. As always, the odd-numbered branches indicate dev-branches, and as such the 2.13.x series is the step-up to the GNOME 2.14 release, planned for March this year. Release notes: platform, desktop, and bindings; downloads: platform, desktop, and bindings.

Two more articles on Apple's Intel iMac today. "Disassembling the first fruit of the Apple-Intel alliance raises some interesting questions about the model's profit margins." Secondly, PCMag reviews the new iMac: "The differences are all under the hood. The 20-inch new iMac combines a dual-core Intel Core Duo processor with the Mac OS X experience. Casual Mac users, switchers from Microsoft Windows, and iPod aficionados will love the new iMac; however, professionals and people who use graphics apps such as Adobe Photoshop and Final Cut Pro should hold off until the critical app is updated to work smoothly with the Intel processor. For these people, we recommend holding on to your current G5-powered Mac, at least for now."

With the next Itanium chip, Intel has abandoned a feature it once banked on but that never proved successful. Circuitry to let Itanium run software for x86 chips, such as Pentium and Xeon chips, is not present in the forthcoming 'Montecito' processor, according to the 176-page reference manual (.pdf) for the chip published this week. Update: El Reg has more on this story.

"The Java based lightweight implementation of the Internet Engineering Task Force Secure Shell protocol provides secure remote log-in and other secure network services over an insecure network. The protocol has three major components: Transport Layer, User Authentication and Connection. The implementation is lightweight due to using the highly optimized cryptographic library IBM CryptoLite for Java, efficient buffer and I/O handling, memory reuse to avoid excessive garbage collection, and threads are not used."

Today, the Dutch headquarters of Apple held a press conference concerning the announcements made by Apple's CEO, Steve Jobs, last week during MacWorld in San Fransisco. During the conference, the new products would be presented by speakers from Apple Europe, and afterwards there was time to get hands-on with the new products. I got invited to this event, so read on for a few notes.

Genesi has launched their EFIKA developer's program. The EFIKA is a "performance evaluation board based around the MPC5200B PowerPC system-on-chip from Freescale Semiconductor" The only thing you need to do, so it seems, is post a possible use for the EFIKA board on a thread on Power.org.