"HP is pleased to announce the availability of OpenVMS Version 8.4 Field Test. OpenVMS Version 8.4 will be a generally available release for the Integrity servers and Alpha platforms. This release builds upon the capabilities provided by OpenVMS Version 8.3 for Alpha and Version 8.3-1H1 for Integrity server systems."

Apple is usually quite the secretive company, revealing little of itself or its practices. With the App Store under heavy criticism, the company felt it needed to break the silence, and as such, Apple's senior vice-president for worldwide product marketing, Phil Schiller defended the company's App Store policies.

Phoronix talks about an upcoming feature in Fedora 13 (scheduled to be released on April 2010) that provides system rollback support via the Btfs filesystem.

It is no secret that Microsoft is doing whatever it can to eat away at Google's immense market share of the search market, with Bing being its most ambitious effort yet. Well, it seems the battle just got a whole lot dirtier, as The Financial Times has uncovered news that Microsoft has approached several news content providers, offering them money if they "de-index" their sites from Google.

Geeks.com, home to cheap laptops and discounted netbooks sent us over the Acer Aspire One AO751h for a review. The AO751h is in-between of a small laptop and a netbook and so it makes it an interesting item to investigate.

A new version of the learning tool OS MikeOS is available, sporting a new BASIC interpreter with 24 instructions. You can run BASIC code from inside the text editor by pressing F8. See the App Developer Handbook for a guide to the BASIC dialect (somewhat similar to old 8-bit BASICs, nostalgia fans), and the User Handbook for info on running MikeOS from a USB key, floppy or CD.

"The Growl for Windows Project developers have released version 2.0 of their Windows-compatible port of the Mac-based Growl global notification application. The major update includes a number of bug fixes, performance improvements and new features."

"Dell reported its third-quarter earnings results Thursday, showing a small improvement over the last quarter, but revenue was down 15 percent over the last year, and profits fell 54 percent. The company reported revenue of $12.9 billion, within analysts' expectations between $12.8 billion and $13.5 billion. Earnings were 17 cents per share, when excluding 6 cents of pretax expenses and amortization. That's 54 percent off the 37 cents Dell recorded a year ago. Besides its acquisition of Perot Systems last month, there weren't too many positive signs in the recently completed quarter. Shipments were also down 5 percent across its businesses."

Now this is one to ponder. This year, the Nobel Peace Prize went to Barack Obama, president of the United States. The prize has been given to both politicians and non-politicians alike, and Keith Lofstrom thinks its time to hand over the Peace Prize to a non-politician once more: Linus Torvalds.

One of the main reasons why Firefox has become so successful is its extension framework, and the large community of extensions developers that has grown around it. What many users are not aware of, however, is that extensions are a bit of a security nightmare.

Earlier this week, a senior National Security Agency official told US Congress that the NSA had worked on Microsoft's latest operating system, Windows 7. This spurred a flurry of rumours about the NSA building backdoors into Windows 7, but Microsoft has today categorically denied these claims.

Jacob Moller*, founder and CEO of Kiloo, the maker of the Commodore 64 emulator in the Apple App Store has kindly answered a few of my questions regarding App Store controversies, and most importantly, porting to other platforms and future projects.

"Microsoft, which has been pursuing concurrent improvements for its Visual Basic and C# programming languages, plans to open up compilers for the languages and add capabilities for asynchronous programming and immutability. Discussed at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles, the blueprint for the two languages will feature compilers as services and accommodations for multicore processors, said Luca Bolognese, program manager for the languages group at Microsoft."

"Microsoft's Ray Ozzie significantly blew past the basic Exchange, SharePoint and SQL database hosting services with the Azure announcements at PDC 2009 yesterday. The announcements also blow right past Amazon EC2 and targets Microsoft at Google, Force.com (Salesforce.com's cloud), OpSource and others offering hosting on demand, web services and bus interconnection services in the cloud. Microsoft peeled back last year's Azure onion, showing us how Microsoft wants to do much more than just offer computing platforms or hosted Microsoft products."