A Geeks.com article examines the latest in virtualization technology, and the hypervisor, a hardware execution layer contained in modern processors from AMD and Intel.

When Vista was released, and the first reviews started to trickle in, it became apparent that Vista was a massive release - not only in terms of money spent on it by Microsoft and the amount of promotion, but also the operating system itself. It was huge, and it felt as such too. Despite what many have been saying the past year, Vista is, in fact, much more than just XP with a new theme. Basically every framework and feature has been rewritten, lots of new ones have been added, and, according to some, the process of modularisation has started with Vista (and Server 2008). It may come as no surprise that all these changes resulted in a whole boatload of bugs and breakage, which led many people to conclude that Vista was simply not as "done" as it should have been when released. Steve Ballmer confirmed these sentiments in a speech at Microsoft's Most Valuable Professionals conference in Seattle.

Novell's Nat Friedman told InternetNews.com: "The basic concept here is that the standalone operating system is dead." Friedman is Novell's Chief Technology Officer. He added: "The days in which people buy operating systems on their own and then build a stack from there will look like home-built automobiles in the future - people aren't going to do this anymore." This is not the first time some big company predicts the end of the traditional operating system.

Back in September 2003, when Red Hat discontinued its home-oriented Red Hat Linux desktop and offloaded that market to the community-driven but Red Hat-sponsored Fedora Project, many people were left wondering if Red Hat would ever again offer a product aimed at home desktops. We have the answer now.

Linus Torvalds has released version 2.6.25 of the Linux kernel. "It's been long promised, but there it is now. Special thanks to Ingo who found and fixed a nasty-looking regression that turned out to not be a regression at all, but an old bug that just had not been triggering as reliably before."

Microsoft has laid out a new roadmap for the development of Windows Embedded at the Embedded Systems Conference Silicon Valley 2008. The Embedded roadmap outlines the "renaming of its family of products and plans for new solutions in key device categories". Kevin Dallaes, general manager of the Windows Embedded Business, explains: "With today's strategic road map announcement, our aim is to present the evolving Windows Embedded product family in an intuitive fashion, making it easier for our customers to choose the right platforms and tools for their needs."

After a long gap and lots of things happening behind the scenes, the BeleniX team is pleased to announce the availability of BeleniX 0.7, an OpenSolaris-based community distribution. This release marks a considerable change in the evolution of BeleniX. Read on for the details.

LWN reports: When kernel developers talk about problematic hardware vendors, Atheros often appears near the top of their lists. So this announcement from Luis Rodriguez, a developer of the reverse-engineered ath5k driver, is intriguing: "I write to you to inform you that I have decided to join Atheros as a full time employee, as a Software Engineer, to help them with their goals and mission to get every device of Atheros supported upstream in the Linux kernel." What will come of this remains to be seen, but if it truly signals a change of heart at Atheros, it is a most welcome development.

IBM researcher Mark Dowd has outlined a Flash vulnerability that could allow for a rare cross-platform web-based exploit. Matasano Chargen uses a Super Mario metaphor, an example we can all relate to, to illuminate it.

Yankee Group's second annual Server Operating System Reliability survey polled 700 users from 27 countries worldwide. The latest independent, non-sponsored Web-based survey revealed that all versions of UNIX -- which typically carry very high workloads -- are near bulletproof, achieving 99.999% reliability. IBM's AIX UNIX led all server operating systems for reliability with just over 30 minutes of per server annual downtime but Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems also got high scores.

As further evidence of the growing interest in Macs among enterprise customers, IBM's Research Information Services launched an internal pilot program designed to study the possibility of moving significant numbers of employees to the Mac platform. The study has already found an enthusiastic response from participants and is helping to drive Mac support for IBM's business applications.

"What Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away. Such has been the conventional wisdom surrounding the Windows/Intel (aka Wintel) duopoly since the early days of Windows 95. In practical terms, it means that performance advancements on the hardware side are quickly consumed by the ever-increasing complexity of the Windows/Office code base. Case in point: Microsoft Office 2007, which, when deployed on Windows Vista, consumes more than 12 times as much memory and nearly three times as much processing power as the version that graced PCs just seven short years ago, Office 2000. Despite years of real-world experience with both sides of the duopoly, few organizations have taken the time to directly quantify what my colleagues and I at Intel used to call The Great Moore's Law Compensator (TGMLC). In fact, the hard numbers above represent what is perhaps the first-ever attempt to accurately measure the evolution of the Windows/Office platform in terms of real-world hardware system requirements and resource consumption. In this article I hope to further quantify the impact of TGMLC and to track its effects across four distinct generations of Microsoft's desktop computing software stack."

"I came away from the second annual Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit with mixed feelings. I mean, it's hard not to support the group that pays Linus Torvalds to spend his time continuing to lead the poster-boy project for free and open source software. But at the same time, those golden chains are my biggest concern about the Linux Foundation."

PreUpgrade is a new feature being developed for Fedora 9. It allows a user to do all the tedious work of a safe Anaconda upgrade in a running system that is still usable. This is the answer to every user who has ever wanted to do a live upgrade with yum, but been worried about the safety of doing this. Fedora 9 will also get kernel modesetting.