"Windows Home Server 'Vail' Release Candidate goes to testers. For those Windows Home Server loyalists hoping against hope that Microsoft might reconsider its decision to cut Drive Extender from the coming 'Vail' release, your prayers have not been answered. Microsoft is delivering the Release Candidate test build of Vail - Windows Home Server 2011 - on February 3, and there is no Drive Extender included."

Dell has released two servers for the U.S. market that have been customized to run Ubuntu-based cloud services. The company has outfitted its PowerEdge C2100 and C6100 servers with Canonical's Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud, an implementation of the Eucalyptus private cloud software that runs on the Ubuntu Server Edition operating system.

The first of three Fedora project GNOME 3 Test Days is taking place tomorrow (Thursday 2011-02-03) in #fedora-test-day on Freenode IRC. Join others and the GNOME development team to test out GNOME 3 and help make sure it's stable and polished. The testing is easy, can be done from a live image, so there's no need to have Fedora installed or to be a Fedora user, and you can help out with just ten minutes of your time. This blog post has more details on the event and how you can get involved.

"Chrome's usage share for January has made it into double digits: the browser was used by 10.7 percent of Web users last month, up from 9.98 percent in December. It was a good month too for Safari, up to 6.30 percent from 5.89 percent the month before. The WebKit-powered browsers were the big winners: Microsoft's Internet Explorer was the big loser. Internet Explorer reached a new all-time low of 56 percent, down 1.08 percentage points from last month. Though Internet Explorer 8 continues to perform well - up 1.15 points from December - defections from Internet Explorer 6 and 7 to other browsers continue to dominate, with those versions losing 1.63 and 0.47 points respectively. The beta of Internet Explorer 9 made minor gains, rising to 0.50 percent share. Firefox continues to hover between 22 and 23 points; its January share was 22.75 percent, erasing the small gains it made in December. Opera made small gains, up to 2.28 from 2.20 percent a month ago."

There is a falling out between governments & ISPs on the one hand and consumer groups and companies like YouTube and Netflix on the other. Lately more punitive measures affecting these companies and consumers have emerged that include increased throttling, greater per-usage billing and lower internet caps. The internet as whole is struggling to find a self-sustaining business model that supports the rising speed and bandwidth requirements of consumers and online media purveyors. The conflict boils down to who should pay and to what degree they should pay.

"Processor design company ARM has today unveiled two new updates to its Cortex-R range of processors: the Cortex-R5 MPCore and the Cortex-R7 MPCore. While the Cortex-A processors can be found in mainstream consumer products such as cell phones and tablet devices, the Cortex-R chips are meant for deeply-embedded and system-on-a-chip duties. Notably you can find the last generation Cortex-R4 in hard disk drive controllers, wireless baseband processors, and automotive systems."