With HP's high-flying CEO Carly Fiorina departing, the company's woes are well known. But how did a firm with such a storied history and vast assets get headed down the wrong path, and what do they need to do to set their course straight?

An eWeek article reports that "more than a year after PalmSource Inc. released its Palm OS Cobalt operating system, only one handset manufacturer has announced plans to bring a Cobalt-based device to market." This is despite the fact that version six of the PalmOS has been in developers' hands for more than a year. But even PalmSource's corporate sibling, PalmOne, has no Cobalt-based devices in sight.

MenuetOS 0.78 is released. Changes: New Panel and Menu system, new options for Windows, automatic memory detection, .ICO support, and faster rendering, updated JPEGVIEW application; Displays jpeg image as backgound, new launcher application; Startup applications, PCNET32 Ethernet Driver, it now works with VMWare, TCP/IP bug fixes to TCP retransmissions, window resizing/moving.

According to a CRN article, Intel has "has made good on its vow last year to rewrite its product road map to focus on dual-core and multicore processors." In addition to imagining chips aimed at mobile, lightweight, and other boutique applications, the processor giant also (with MIcrosoft's backing) reiterated its commitment to move desktop processors to 64 bit with all possible haste.

Novell and OSNews are sponsoring the memory reduction project led by Novell's Ben Mauer by providing bounties to developers to help to clean up bloat in GNOME and related programs. If you are a developer and you are interested in some extra cash or prizes by making Gnome more usable on machines with 128 MBs of RAM (very usual configuration in developing countries or even European businesses), please read here. Related post here.

Ongoing discussions on improving the kernel release structure and naming has caused the kernel developers to have a more fine grained release number for major fixes.

Zones are one of the many useful new features in Solaris 10, both for adminstrators and developers. This article gives an example of using zones to replicate a multi tiered environment for use in development.

Tipping points aren't made out of technical reality. They're made out of perceptual change. Thus, it was the legend of Torvalds, not the reality of his actions, that gave Linux the patina of political correctness needed for it to gain widespread public acceptance. Read the editorial here.

The NetBSD Foundation has published a press release reporting on the benefits of the NetBSD/xen port, initially committed by Christian Limpach as previously reported. Since then, much progress has been made, and the NetBSD Project is now using NetBSD/xen internally. See the press release for further details.

AmigaWorld.net is hosting a translated OS4 pre-release review from the latest issue of the popular Swedish computer magazine DatorMagazin. Also Michael "The Terminator" Rozeboom has written an article for IntuitionBase.com within which he tries to explain why the PPC platform is currently a good choice for AmigaOS4.

With a rapid succession of people moving towards Open Source, advocacy and evangelism is increasingly important in helping organizations to move over. The O'Reilly Network have started publishing a series of articles about Open Source by Jono Bacon that teaches how to approach advocacy sensibly and more productively. Read the first article here.

I have interviewed the author of the fascinating software Contiki OS, lwIP, uIP and protothreads, and asked him questions about the software itself, the way he develops on embedded platforms, as well as his interests in sensor networks and opensource.

MacWorld posted some basic benchmarks of Doom 3 on the Mac.

Microsoft is aiming to have its first cluster version of Windows ready in time for a supercomputing conference this fall.