For the first time since Sun was eaten by Oracle there was an email in my inbox today promising news and updates from the transition. As a valued member of the Sun community, we'd like to make sure you keep abreast of all the latest as we transition to Oracle. A lot of great things will be coming from the combination of Oracle and Sun and you'll want to stay informed! Here's your chance to keep up to date. Simply follow the link below and tell us a little more about yourself to receive news and information about products and events from Oracle. Maybe they are finally realising that we won't wait around forever. Time will tell if this will be substantial. The phrase 'a little slow on the uptake' leaps to mind.

Now that I'm done with my internship and ready to take on OSNews again, I figured it'd be nice to start off with something light-hearted. I just read that Google bought an unmanned aerial vehicle equipped with a camera, ready to photograph whatever it flies across. We may consider Google's biggest threat to be privacy, but with all this computing power they have, their Street View cars, and now, unmanned flying drones, they look more and more like SkyNet to me. So, what's your most likely apocalyptic scenario?

Right before the weekend, we have some interesting news from Hewlett Packard, hardware and software maker, but most of all (at least to me) owner of Palm and its assets. CEO of HP, Mark Hurd, has resigned, effective immediately, after the board found out he had behaved "inappropriately" towards a former HP marketing contractor which "violated HP's Standards of Business Conduct". Cathie Lesjak has been appointed interim CEO while the company seeks a new one.

A bunch of figures travelled all over the web this past week regarding Android's remarkable growth. Its growth is indeed remarkable - bigger than the iPhone, bigger than Research In Motion's BlackBerry (in the US, at least). However, as impressive as those figures are, isn't it about time we start comparing platforms instead of devices?

During the fiber boom, Corning became the darling of Wall Street. A decidedly old-school industrial era company that specialized in making glass, Corning is getting rich of another boom -- this time from smartphones like the iPhone.

JoliCloud, the much talked-about cloud client OS, is making its debut today with the release of the official 1.0 milestone, and is now available for general release. JoliCloud is an operating system combined with a user interface that allows people to access web services as if accessing an app on their smartphones.

The 2.6.33 Linux kernel has introduced a useful new service called the DRBD - Distributed Replicated Block Device. This service mirrors an entire block device to another networked host during run time, permitting the development of high-availability clusters for block data. Explore the ideas behind the DRBD and its implementation in the Linux kernel.

The "Macs are too expensive" argument is one of the most tiresome and long-lived flamewars in internet history. Obviously, Apple makes a premium product and charges premium prices, and you can always find a computer from another vendor that seems to match or exceed specs that costs less. But if you look at Apple's Mac Pro line, and compare it not so much to other vendors, but to the past lineup of Mac Pros, you discover some very unpleasant truths that help explain why Apple is enjoying record earnings for their Mac line, but doing so to the detriment of some its most loyal and valuable customers.

Hyperion Entertainment have posted a visualisation of the AmigaOS source code repositry. You can see it grow from AmigaOS 1.0 back in 1985 right through to today.

This article looks beyond Active Directory at a variety of approaches available today to getting Linux and Windows to work together on the network. While still not a job for an average Linux administrator or a Windows Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer (MCSE) who's still wet behind the ears, there are tools available that make the job easier than ever.

Traditional AV vendors continue to lag behind online criminals when it comes to detecting and protecting against new and quickly evolving threats on the Internet, according to a report by Cyveillance. Testing shows that even the most popular AV signature-based solutions detect on average less than 19% of malware threats. That detection rate increases only to 61.7% after 30 days. Even after 30 days, many AV vendors cannot detect known attacks.

Anyone contemplating a new computer purchase (for personal use or business) is confronted with new (and confusing) hardware choices. Intel and AMD have done their best to differentiate the x86 architecture as much as possible while retaining compatibility between the two CPUs, but the differences between the two are growing. One key differentiator is hyperthreading; Intel does it, AMD does not. This article explains what that really means, with particular attention to the way different server OSes take advantage (or don't). Plenty of meaty tech stuff.

RIM announced Blackberry 6 yesterday, along with a new device called the Torch, to be released in the US on August 12. Users of some older Blackberry devices will be able to upgrade to the new OS, but unfortunately the upgrade will not be extending too far back in the product line (Bold 9700, Bold 9650, Pearl 3G). A Cnet article has a nice rundown of the new feature, which are no secret, because RIM has been keeping up a steady stream of information and video demos of the new OS for several months.

Free Software Magazine published an interesting lexicon of terms that are thrown around within the Free Software and Creative Commons worlds that have particular meaning, and might not be familiar to people who aren't open source or free culture advocates.