Google has quietly announced Fusion Tables, a new online database designed to sidestep the limitations of conventional relational databases. Fusion Tables, announced on Google's Research Blog, has been built to simplify a number of operations that are notoriously difficult in relational databases, including the integration of data from multiple, heterogeneous sources and the ability to collaborate on large data sets, according to Google. Under the hood of Fusion Tables is data-spaces technology, a concept has been around since the early 1990s and that Google has been developing it since it acquired Transformic in 2005.

Yesterday, Microsoft dropped a bomb by announcing that all versions of Windows 7 released in Europe would ship without Internet Explorer pre-installed. This was in answer to the EU antitrust investigation currently under way regarding possible illegal bundling of Internet Explorer with Windows. The first reactions to this news are coming in, with Opera and the EU both lamenting the move.

"Although OS X is relatively new, it is built on top of technology that has been under development since Steve Jobs founded NeXT in the mid '80s. Erik Buck, author of Cocoa Design Patterns, has been working with this platform for over two decades. His perspective on the development of Cocoa, from its beginnings in NeXTSTEP and its evolution through the OpenStep specification, provide some interesting insights."

In a move to basically outflank the EU antitrust investigation, Microsoft has announced that all version of Windows 7 shipped in Europe will not include Internet Explorer 8 by default. This is reminiscent of the Windows XP N editions, which did not include Windows Media Player, but the difference here is that Microsoft will not ship versions of Windows 7 with Internet Explorer 8 in Europe.

The second beta for KDE 4.3 has been released. The highlights of this release are the integration of many new technologies, such as PolicyKit and Geolocation services, new window animation effects, a more usable run command popup, many new and improved addons in Plasma, Many bugfixes and improvements across all applications, and more integration of features coming with the KDE 4 platform.

Fedora 11 comes with many improvements in package management including a update version of RPM and Yum that reduces memory consumption and performs faster. Fedora 11 also includes the presto plugin for Yum that downloads the binary deltas for updates and typically saves over 80% of the download size. Linux Mag takes a look with some interesting benchmarks that show modest improvements overall.

With Snow Leopard finally been given a release date and a price, the comparisons with Windows 7 are starting to pop up all over the place, especially focussing on the price aspect of things. While Apple's move to price Snow Leopard at 29 USD for Leopard owners is a very welcome one, the move doesn't mean that Microsoft is getting a price beating from Apple.

This series is aimed at programming language aficionados. There's a lot of very abstract writing about programming languages and a lot of simple minded "language X sux!" style blog posts by people who know next to nothing about programming. What I feel is sorely missing is a kind of article that deliberately sacrifices the last 10% of precision that make the theoretical articles dry and long winded but still makes a point and discusses the various trade offs involved. This series is meant to fill that void and hopefully start a lot of discussions that are more enlightening than the articles themselves. I will point out some parallels in different parts of computing that I haven't seen mentioned as well as analyze some well known rules of thumb and link to interesting blogs and articles.

"Let's take a look at SquashFS. SquashFS is a read-only compressed file system that has a variable block size. The primary intent of the file system is for constrained block device/memory systems. The classic example targets SquashFS for embedded systems but there are other uses for it that fall outside of the embedded world, and could surprise you."

Futurama is coming back! The animated series, loved by many geeks, is the second show in the history of television to be brought back to life after a cancellation (the other one's Family Guy, also by Fox), mostly due to strong fan demand and very good sales from the series of direct-to-DVD films. Comedy Central ordered 26 new episodes to be made, and airing will start in mid-2010. Matt Groening, one of the two show's creators, said: "We're thrilled 'Futurama' is coming back. We now have only 25,766 episodes to make before we catch up with Bender and Fry in the year 3000."

"Just when it appeared Windows and its associated services were looking more stable month after month, Microsoft chose June to tackle a plethora of vulnerabilities including no fewer than 14 that its security engineers believe could be exploitable within the next 30 days. Microsoft Security Response Center engineers Adrian Stone and Jerry Bryant were audibly panting as they delivered the news to Microsoft customers today."

Linus Torvalds has announced the release of version 2.6.30 of the Linux kernel. "I'm sure we've missed something, and I know we have some regressions pending. At the same time, we do need the coverage of a eral release, and on the whole it looks pretty good. We've fixed a few regressions in the last few days, and there's always 2.6.30.x." The list of changes is interesting.

"As seen here, PF is now enabled by default. The default pf.conf will now pass in all traffic, except for TCP port 6000 normally used by remote-X11. By having the X server still listen on port 6000 but let PF block incoming packets that aren't coming from localhost you can still use local X sessions that needs to talk to the TCP port or runs through a port forward from remote, but at the same time don't expose your machine on the network. Recent changes to PF, like having packet reassembly enabled on all packets by default, will now help clean incoming traffic."

Between all the updated MacBooks and Snow Leopard news items across the web, you'd almost forget that Apple also has its own server operating system which will also got updated from Leopard to Snow Leopard yesterday. It benefits from the same improvements as the client version, but of course also has a set of its own, server-specific improvements.