Carly Fiorina's undoing was her inability to capitalise on the 2002 HP-Compaq merger, seen as her bet-the-company move. HP is on shaky ground at the moment because its product portfolio has become too large and diversified to manage, and lacks organisation-wide synergy. The printing and imaging business account for a disproportionate share of the profits, while its enterprise divisions lag. The options that stand before HP's board range from organisational restructuring, to a complete split of the company. Which of the many strategies is eventually adopted depends on the identity that HP decides to create for itself.

With the latest crop of iPods, Apple is no longer including a FireWire cable in the box. The music players will still work with FireWire, if a cord is purchased separately, but only a USB 2.0 cable comes with the device. The move is part of a gradual shift on Apple's part to standardize the iPod on USB, which is far more common in the Windows world. Nonetheless, some Mac owners were rankled by the move, saying that as recently as a year or two ago many Macs didn't include a USB 2.0 port. My Take: Just bought (a previous generation for cheap) iPod Mini yesterday. It's a truly nicely done product. The FW option seems better than the USB on my 2 year old Powerbook, as it has USB 1.1 instead of 2.0.

The OpenPKG project released version 2.3 of their unique RPM-based cross-platform multi-instance Unix software packaging facility. OpenPKG 2.3 consists of 545 selected (from a pool of over 850) packages. The major technical efforts for this release were spent on the porting of all packages to the now officially supported Unix platform Sun Solaris 10 on both Intel and SPARC architectures.

Part III of Desktop Linux - The Hard Truth is published. In it retired World Bank CTO W. McDonald Buck looks at what the CTO needs to consider in making a realistic desktop switch to Linux (-after- having switched to OS software on Windows & Linux in the server room) in a big company and how to avoid ending up toasted.

According to this press release, European Linux developer Mandrakesoft has acquired the Brazilian Conectiva. Says the release, "This acquisition is expected to increase significantly Mandrakesoft's size and R&D capabilities."

When I joined OSNews in 2001, I did it with a great excitment because of my love for... messing around with many operating systems in order to explore news ways of doing things. Back in the '80s and the '90s there were a lot of OS projects that would draw the attention of the computer users of the time. But in this decade, it seems that other than Windows, OSX, Linux and a very few other much smaller OSes, the scene is sterile. And it's only getting worse.

The third beta of Mandrakelinux 10.2 is out and about for testing.

Here's a comparison by a BSD user between FreeBSD and NetBSD. Elsewhere, the FreeBSD logo competition has just kicked out, officially this time.

Amazing is the recent interest in full, live, operating systems that can fit on a 50 MB CD-ROM. It's totally astounding that they can cram so much onto such a tiny disk. But wait.. let's run back to the days of old.. back to say 1988.

Minimo, the Mozilla browser for mobile devices, is poised to move beyond Linux PDAs and onto Windows CE devices, according to the Mozilla Foundation. Screenshot here (mobile version of OSNews is showing). Elsewhere, the Mozilla chairman Mitch Kapor speaks out.

FOSDEM 2005 will take place this Week-End in Brussels, Belgium.

A number of new OpenZaurus users are having problems getting up and running with OZ. Here is my basic Getting Started guide for OpenZaurus 3.5.2.

The idea here would be to cut the driver layer out of Windows and attach it to Linux directly. This would become MS-Linux. If Microsoft actually produced an MS-Linux that was the standard Linux attached to the driver layer of Windows, giving users full Plug and Play (PnP) support of all their peripherals, nobody would buy any other Linux on the market.

Rasterman talks about other's opinions. As he says, E17 has several of the tecnoologies gnome and others are searching. He adds two videos as a proof with animate backgrounds and other things.Perhaps it's time for the linux desktop world to stop reinventing the wheel and collaborate one with each other. Gnome has things like accesibility and lots of apps, enlightenment has a very powerful rendering engine. It'd be a shame to see people reinventing the wheel.