Hadoop, the same software that lies at the heart of successful companies such as Google, Facebook, Yahoo!, and others, has been proven time and again with said companies to be a successful data management server, keeping data secure and fault-free spread across multiple servers. It isn't the easiest piece of software to configure, however, which is why the Cloudera company has just announced a freely downloadable and easier to use custom distribution of Hadoop to bring the power of entities like Google to smaller businesses.

Just when you thought that DRM was on its way out, with various music stores abolishing the practice, some company will implement DRM in yet another way that will affect lots of customers in a very negative way. The most recent case of idiotic DRM comes courtesy of a gadget maker from Cupertino. Update: MacWorld provides nuance to the story, with comments from Apple and third-party manufacturers.

As was widely expected, Cisco Systems on Monday unveiled its Unified Computing effort, including the company's move to offer its own server hardware. The networking titan's Unified Computing System targets data centers, facilities where enterprises locate a hefty number of servers that host and run the technology side of their operations. It is designed to unify networking, computing, storage, and virtualization resources in order to streamline a company's resources, to reduce its total cost of ownership, and to "radically reduce" the number of devices requiring management, power/cooling, and other labor and financial expenditures.

It's a bit of a slow newsday at the moment, so I figured we'd pass the time with something special. Let's take a look at some obscure and/or older user interfaces listed in ToastyTech's GUI gallery, and see if there are any interesting ideas that can be found in those old user interfaces that we would like to see in our modern user interfaces.

The GTK+ guys have released GTK+ 2.16. As always, this new release is source and binary compatible with the previous GTK+ release. In case you don't know: "GTK+ is a multi-platform toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces. Offering a complete set of widgets, GTK+ is suitable for projects ranging from small one-off tools to complete application suites."

And the weeks just keep on coming, don't they? Another one has passed, so it's time for a Week in Review. This week wasn't particularly eventful, and was mostly dominated by various newsbits about Apple, but none of them were particularly earth shattering. The usual suspects like netbooks and Windows 7 also showed their faces. My Take is about yet another icy sport.

Fedora Project has been on the forefont of development and adoption of kernel mode setting to enhance the desktop linux experience by making fairly invasive infrastructure improvements that affect the interaction between Xorg and the Linux kernel. In the past, one of the common way to test Xorg performance has been to use glxgears. While that hasn't been a particular good way to do it ever, the switch to kernel mode setting for Intel drivers ahead of the Fedora 11 Beta release to be available shortly has exposed the fallacy of this. In short, don't use glxgears. There are better methods to assess performance.

Ok, so you just got a new laptop. You've been hearing about this whole "netbook" thing that's all the rage these days, and you wonder: am I cool? Do I have a netbook? You launch the internet (that blue E), and you ask Google "Do I have a netbook?" soon, you'll be swarmed by loads of terms that all seem to mean the same thing: a really small laptop. Enter The Register's netbook flowchart.

The whole FAT licensing saga between Microsoft and TomTom just got a whole lot more complicated. Microsoft sued TomTom because the satnav maker had not licensed FAT from Microsoft, even though several others have. This left TomTom in a difficult position: not license it, and face legal penalties - license it, and violate the GPL. The second part, however, is up for debate now: the terms under which Microsoft licenses FAT may not violate the GPL at all. Near-instant update: On Slashdot, Bruce Perens and Jeremy Allison have explained that the FAT terms are still a GPL violation. Allison accidentally emailed the journalist who wrote this story with the wrong information.

Remember Conficker, the worm that wouldn't have been as devastating as it has been had people just kept their machines up to date? Even though the critical patch had already been released way before Conficker started its rampage, the worm became one of the worst infections to date. A Romanian company has found a cure for the worm.

After two years, the relatively popular PCLinuxOS distribution has finally put out a new major release, imaginatively called PCLinuxOS 2009.1. PCLinuxOS is a release originally based on Mandrake (now Mandriva), but which has taken on a life of its own. The distribution has one selling point (for some, at least) few other popular distributions have: it eschews KDE4 (for now).

Following the EU investigation into Internet Explorer's inclusion in Windows, Microsoft made it possible to "turn off" Internet Explorer 8 in Windows 7, by removing the executable and every mention of the browser from the system. According to Opera and Google, this is nice, but not enough.

"Software that for the first time lets users run native copies of the Windows operating systems on a mainframe will be introduced Friday by data center automation vendor Mantissa. The company's z/VOS software is a CMS application that runs on IBM's z/VM and creates a foundation for Intel-based operating systems. Users only need a desktop appliance running Microsoft's Remote Desktop Connection client, which is the same technology used to attach to Windows running on Terminal Server or Citrix-based servers. Users will be able to connect to their virtual and fully functional Windows environments without any knowledge that the operating system and the applications are executing on the mainframe and not the desktop."

One Laptop Per Child is planning to end the production of its XO-1 laptop as well as drop AMD's x86 Geode processor. OLPC intends to replace these with a low-powered ARM alternative in the XO-2 laptop, which is slated for release in about 18 months. Even though the current XO-1 model consumes a mere five watts, OLPC feels thats the biggest problem. "We're seeing some very impressive system-on-chip designs that provide both fundamentally low-power demands and the kind of fine-grained power management ... in the XO-1," said Ed McNierney, chief technology officer at OLPC. Though using ARM architecture will reduce power consumption, it puts using the full-fledged Windows OS on their laptops in jeopardy. The company is currently wrestling Microsoft in order to try to get them to develop a full version of Windows to be able to run on ARM processors. It's not likely Microsoft will budge on the subject as ingrained as x86 is and how seemingly little there is in it for them, but we've been surprised before.