Oracle selects the Solaris 10 Operating System as its preferred Open Source 64-bit development and deployment environment.

ExtremeTech is featuring a How-To on building an OSx86 MacIntel machine that boots both OS X and Windows. On the same hardware, OS X booted almost three times faster than Windows, yet was a disappointment when playing certain games. Update: One more article about it.

I recently bought one of the new dual core PowerMacs. Having used the machine for a couple of weeks, I thought I would share some of my observations and feelings about it. First, let me get my biases out in the open. I have, for about four years, very happily used Linux on my desktop. Doing so has made me very comfortable with the UNIX environment in general, and with GNOME specifically. During that time, I have used OS X machines on a regular basis, so I am quite comfortable in that environment as well. Since I switched to Linux, I have not used Windows for anything more than the occasional bit of software testing or lab work, and generally feel quite uncomfortable with it. Thus, this article is very much written from the perspective of someone who finds OS X and Linux pleasing on principle. I implore the reader to make his own value judgments based on my comments.

Graphics performance, which has long been an afterthought for most corporate PCs and many consumers, will move to the forefront with the launch of Windows Vista, Microsoft's next Windows operating system. Vista, due late next year, will offer four different themes, including the well-publicized three-dimensional Aero Glass with transparent windows.

Even as Microsoft readies a host of new ad-supported online services to battle rivals, the software maker has been mulling a plan to offer free, ad-supported versions of some of its desktop products, CNET News.com has learned.

Bill Gates plans on Tuesday to announce Microsoft's foray into the world of supercomputing, though its first operating system for computer clusters remains in beta testing.

Serenity Systems offers a promotional price for eComStation 1.2 until the last of November. This will include a one year software subscription. The subscription implies also that you can participate in the betaprogram for version 2.0 and includes the version 2.0 GA release after betatesting is done.

Apple offered free licenses of Mac OS X for MIT's proposed $100,- (E85,-) laptop initiative, however, the proposal offered by Apple's CEO Steve Jobs was declined because the program was looking for open-source software, according to a new report.

Sun this week is unveiling its long-touted "Niagara" processor, the third major rollout in the past two months for the company, which is aggressively trying to separate itself from its past as a vendor focused solely on its SPARC-Solaris platform for high-end customers. The chip offers eight cores per chip running up to four instruction threads each and addresses the growing issues of energy consumption and heat generation by using only 70 watts of power.

Opera on Monday released a new version of its Web browser for Series 60 based mobile phones, such as those offered by Nokia. Opera 8.5 for S60 includes a new zoom function that lets mobile users view images and text in full size. A password manager has also been added in the update. In other mobile news, rumor has it that Microsoft is working on a mobile version of Office 12.

"What will the Internet look like 10 years from now? Will it look more like one big pay-per-view channel, or more like an open street fair, or will it be somewhere in between? The answer will be heavily influenced, of course, by the competition between the King of Search and the current desktop market leader. On November 2, 2005, Microsoft announced its most major new initiative in 10 years, and although the announcement was vague, it is clear that Microsoft intends to directly take on Google on Google's own terms: search, services and advertising."

"Beyond just having an operating system, it's important to have applications that make the operating system interesting and useful. A long standing problem for yellowTAB's ZETA has been the absence of business software for bookkeeping, accounting, inventory, and other office tasks. One of our developers has had his nose to the grindstone for quite some time now, working almost exclusively on a project to fill this gap."

Sun and Microsoft engineers continue to work on up-the-stack interop between Java and .NET. Sun pledged to enable Java interop to Microsoft’s Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) by developing and distributing open source implementations of key WS-specs.

This article describes in brief how to configure VNC server instances for one or multiple users on a remote machine, how to use VNC to start graphical applications on boot and finally how to enhance security by connecting to the server through encrypted SSH tunnels.