When Microsoft said it withdrew its offer to buy Yahoo earlier this month, many people figured the acquisition dance was far from over - that the withdrawal and the subsequent letter from Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to his Yahoo counterpart were nothing more than a move in an ongoing strategic battle. It appears those people were right, as Microsoft just issued a statement regarding Yahoo.

It seems like we're really on the subject of filesystems and related technology the past few days. We had an interview with the man behind BeServed, an item on WinFS' current status, and now we - possibly - have news on ZFS coming to Linux. Possibly, because it's all speculation from here on out.

BeOS (and Haiku) has a very powerful filesystem, thanks mostly to its extensive use of attributes and live queries to search through these attributes. In order to access these powerful features over a network, you need a network file system that also supports attributes and queries - cue BeServed, Kevin Musick's network file system. A few weeks ago, the code to BeServed was donated to the Haiku project as open source under a MIT license, so HaikuNews and OSNews decided to interview Kevin Musick together. In addition, Haiku launched the Haiku Code Drive 2008.

Ever wonder what makes a computer tick or how a UNIX server does what it does? Discover what happens when you push the power button on your computer. This article discusses the different boot types, managing the AIX bootlist and the AIX boot sequence. After reading this article, you will better understand what exactly happens when your server starts.

Andrew Min gives a taster of the open source goodies being developed at Google's Summer of Code: a GUI for Aptitude, a GUI for Grub 2, search based menu browsing for GIMP and Audacity file import/export with FFmpeg amongst others. Read (or listen to) to the full article at Freesoftware Magazine

A CIO article examines why WiMax will be very popular among corporate IT managers. In a nutshell, because of its longer range and its presumed wide adoption, it will be cheaper and easier to maintain a WiMax network for a large office than a Wi-Fi one.

Microsoft and the One Laptop Per Child project have announced an agreement to work together on getting Windows XP available on the XO laptop, with trials starting in June 2008, and the RTM date set for August or September. Microsoft also demonstrated Windows XP Professional and Office 2003 running on the XO laptop - fully featured.

In a June 2003 Wired Magazine interview, Martha Stewart said, "Bill Gates' house, for example, is totally out of date now. He built it right before wireless happened. The big tunnels for all his wires - he doesn't need any of that stuff anymore." The article wasn't about networking, or even technology, but I was struck by that statement because it was echoed by several people when I was explaining that I was running many thousands of feet of cable in OSNews' "house of the future." "Is all that cable really necessary now that there's wireless everything?" people said. As much as I respect Martha Stewart's business and design acumen, neither she, nor those people who talked to me, know what they're talking about. When it comes to networking, there's no substitute for a wire, when a wire's available. -- This is the latest entry in our 2008 Article Contest.

There is a group of consistency freaks out there (like myself) who are not very fond of mixing Gtk+ with Qt applications. The reasons for this are not just graphical, but also behavioural; Gtk+ applications behave differently than Qt applications (menus are different, layout is different, etc.). Trolltech obviously can't tackle the behavioural side of this issue, but they can tackle the graphical one. This is exactly where QGtkStyle comes into play.

Last week, on my country's Liberation Day, Sun released OpenSolaris 2008.05, the much awaited first official fruit of Project Indiana. It delivers many of OpenSolaris' major features, such as DTrace, ZFS, containers, and more, in a Linux distribution-like package. The goal is to allow more people to experience Solaris. A few reviews have since hit the web.

Back in November of 2006, I wrote a piece about the One Laptop Per Child Project. I was afraid that the project's focus on creating a whole new paradigm (the Sugar UI) would ultimately intervene with the actual goal of the project: teaching stuff to kids. Ivan Krstic, former director of security architecture at OLPC, wrote an essay in which he heavily criticises the OLPC project.

Opera Software announced the availability of Opera Mini 4.1 for cellphones, which introduces the following new features: Opera Mini 4.1 is up to 50% faster than Opera Mini 4.0. The new Opera Mini will automatically suggest URL completions, making address input easy and intuitive. Web pages can be saved for later off-line viewing (newer Java implementation required). Opera Mini 4.1 gives you quick access to the word or phrase you want in Web pages. Images, ringtones and other content can be downloaded without leaving Opera Mini. You can test Opera Mini 4.1 from within your browser too (if you scroll all the way down on the mobile page of OSNews you can select between our desktop and mobile version).

Rethinking the desktop metaphor, or even improving it in any significant way, is a daunting task, and few dare to take the risk. The end result is that the desktop metaphor that we use today barely changed over the years - which is quite unique for the computing industry, as normally, things change very rapidly.

The Fedora Project has pushed out its 9th release. The release announcement is one of those fancy story ones, without much actual information, but an earlier email by Fedora project leader Paul Frields had some more interesting things to say.