Burton Smith, a longtime supercomputer designer and chief scientist at Cray, has resigned to take a position at Microsoft. Microsoft announced two weeks ago that it planned to introduce a new version of its Windows software for scientific and engineering users, and that Smith would be involved.

The $100 laptop designed by the Massachusetts Institute for Technology and the One Laptop Per Child association, previewed at the World Summit on the Information Society conference in Tunisia last week, will be using a Redhat Linux variant as its operating system.

"I followed the debate about a successor for the C/C++ combination as the primary language for developing the GNOME core desktop platform very closely last month. There has been discussion about a number of options. What I would like to do on this page is give an overview how a probably less well-known language might be a viable compromise as a C/C++ successor. This language is called Eiffel and exists for over a decade. Eiffel takes the principle of Object-Oriented programming to its extremes and, as a consequence, is a very easy to learn language."

IBM's on-demand model is "crazy" and Open Source is "really a developer phenomenon" that does not stand comparison with "customer experience of Windows Live", said Charles Fitzgerald, Microsoft's general manager of platform strategy, last week. In an interview, Fitzgerald said that there was no comparison between Microsoft Live, which offers on-demand features, and IBM's on-demand strategy. Elsewhere, references to free software and Linux were removed from a UN document after Microsoft claimed that such software aims to 'make it impossible to make any income on software as a commercial product'.

"If you want a desktop or laptop and you want to move to Linux then you're cooked. You have very few options and retailers have used low-cost Linux systems to bait and switch users. Unsuspecting PC buyers will be faced with the need to upgrade to Vista in the near future. So, that bargain PC from Dell will probably keep on costing you money. Do alternatives exist? We like to think so."

Open source behind closed doors: in the first of a two part series (part II) ZDNet looks at why some open source projects remain secret. "Lots of companies are using our products, they just aren't talking about it", is a popular excuse from software companies, particularly those that offer open source software and services. Deployment of open source software, particularly in the private sector, often appears to be a clandestine activity, with few companies prepared to discuss their involvement.

Many people have complained about Firefox's memory use. Federico Mena-Quintero has a proposal for reducing the amount of memory used to store images, which, in his proof of concept code, "reduced the cumulative memory usage by a factor of 5.5."

"Windows has seen many changes in its 20-year career. Here, we look at those versions which have evolved directly from the very first version, see how we got here from there - and what thrilled and chilled along the way."

"Last time I compared the Microsoft covenant not to sue implementers of its XML Reference Schema to Sun's commitment in support of ODF, and found Microsoft's commitment to be less effective. But when compared to its previous LML license terms, Microsoft has made a huge jump. Here's how this comparison comes out, and what it all means to someone deciding which alternative to support."

This article shows how to build an object-oriented graphics layer in PHP. Using object-oriented systems can make building complex graphics much easier than building the graphics using the primitives in the standard PHP library. Plus, you have the option of rendering to any size or type of image you like and the longer-term ability to use the same code to render to different types of media, such as SVG, PDF, Flash, and others.

The osFree project has published its first screenshot. "osFree is an open source free (non-commercial) software development project. Goals of the projects are to replace all (or most) of OS/2's subsystems with open-source analogues. The base compatibility system is OS/2 Warp 4 (Merlin), but that doesn't mean we won't be supporting features of newer versions of OS/2 like OS/2 WarpServer for e-business and eComStation by Serenity Systems."

Maxell will ship its first holographic storage system late next year, the company has pledged. The storage specialist will initially offer a removable system based on 300GB media and capable of transfering data at a rate of 20MBps, Maxell said. However, the company said the technology, designed by InPhase Technologies, is capable of achieving 1.6TB per disk - and that's uncompressed capacity - with a 120MBps bandwidth.

"As desktop Linux becomes ever more professional, and with Microsoft still a year away from shipping its new Vista version of Windows, could now be the time to go open-source on the desktop? Of course, circumstances will vary from company to company, but if you're ready to make the move, there's a good crop of Linux distributions ready to accommodate your needs."

Iguana and NICTA::Pistachio-embedded (yes, the two together), a new open-source operating system for mobile phones and embedded devices has been released by the ERTOS group of NICTA and adopted by Qualcomm for some of their phones. Iguana is a small and secure OS which runs on top of the L4 microkernel. It also runs Linux as an application alongside trusted programs, giving backward compatibility with legacy software. The system currently works on ARM, x86, and MIPS64.