Japan's Fujitsu and Sun Microsystems Inc have agreed to combine their server businesses, with high-end models to be made by a Fujitsu unit, a newspaper reported on Thursday. On other Sun news, they are ready to link Solaris x86 boxes into the SAN.

Admit it, you do want to own a Mac. But for some specific reasons --mostly higher prices, especially out of US-- most of the people don't take the big decision to try out Macs. Yesterday Apple released brand new iBooks and updated eMacs, which in conjuction to the existing G4 PowerMacs, come in very affordable prices. Dive in to see some simple feature comparisons between Mac models and prices, which can help you make the big step towards Mac OS X. The time is right, prices are right, feature-set is right too and Christmas is coming soon!

"SUSE unwraps a must-have desktop distribution for power-hungry power users wanting more than the latest and greatest in 32 bits." Read the review at Open Mag.

BSDmall and Wasabi Systems today announced a collaboration to support the NetBSD user community by publishing regular distributions of the open source NetBSD operating system, beginning with the long-anticipated NetBSD 2.0 due early next year.

Microsoft Corp. on Wednesday will announce that it is giving its Most Valued Professionals access to the more than 100 million aggregate lines of Windows source code, which includes all versions, service packs and betas of the Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 products.

It looks like the G3's days are over, as Apple announced today new iBooks and eMacs with a range of enhancements, including G4 processors. The new machines also sport Airport Extreme, Bluetooth, USB 2.0, and slot-loading combo drives. All models ship with Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther). The 12" iBook gets a 800Mhz G4 while the 14" models get a choice of 933Mhz or 1Ghz. The eMac is 1 Ghz.

The New York Times has an update on the progress of the Mac G5-based supercomputer at Virginia Tech University. The cluster, made up of 1,100 G5s with 2,200 processors has been successfuly tested in recent days, but final performance numbers will not be released until next month at a supercomputer industry event. Update: Even more news about it.

Wired has an interesting story on a PCI card from ClearSpeed technologies which contains "a processor capable of performing 25 billion floating-point operations per second, or 25 gigaflops. ordinary desktop PC outfitted with six PCI cards, each containing four of the chips, would perform at about 600 gigaflops (or more than half a teraflop)." Such a PC would qualify as one of the 500 most powerful supercomputers in the world, but only cost about $25,000.

The new OS, still a couple of years away, will change the way developers write business applications.

"Utilities like urpmi, up2date, apt4rpm and OpenPKG may be a step in the right direction, especially if they become widely adopted. Until we have a universal tool for resolving application dependencies, we can't expect casual users to be able to install their own applications." Read the article at NewsForge.

Today, Microsoft Corp. launched Exchange Server 2003, the next edition of its messaging and collaboration server, as part of the Microsoft Office System. Novell also issued a press release stating that Novell's Ximian Connector for Microsoft Exchange enables users of Ximian Evolution groupware suite on Linux and UNIX desktops to function as full Microsoft Exchange 2000/2003 clients.

MandrakeSoft has recently released the latest version of their desktop operating system. Mandrake Linux 9.2 Download Edition is available on their web site across three ISO files for the Club members. The first disk is about 650megs and the following two are ~700.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on Tuesday defended his company's efforts to secure its software and fend off open-source rivals.

The InfoWorld Test Center evaluates the performance of Microsoft's new 64-bit platform, assesses its usefulness for IT today, and reveals what's in store for tomorrow.