Yahoo Inc's board believes Microsoft Corp's unsolicited bid of USD 44.6 billion to acquire Yahoo 'massively undervalues' the company and directors are set to reject the offer, the Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday, citing an unnamed source. Microsoft's USD 31 per share offer fails to take account of the risks that a merger between the world's largest software maker and Yahoo would be rejected by regulators, the paper reported, citing 'a person familiar with the situation'. A spokeswoman for Yahoo, a diversified Internet media company, declined to comment on the proceedings of the company's board of directors.

Comic: "Modal".

"Developers are working to create experimental open-source operating systems with modular microkernels using the C# programming language. The SharpOS and Cosmos projects both announced their first major milestone releases last month, demonstrating the technical viability of the concept. Although some previous research has been conducted in the area of VM-based operating systems, the Cosmos and SharpOS projects break a lot of new ground. One particularly notable prior effort in this field is Microsoft's Singularity experiment, a research project that that began in 2003 with the intent of creating a managed code operating system that uses the Barktok compiler and leverages static analysis and programmatic verifiability to ensure high dependability."

Jorge G. Mare (Kokito) has published an update on the status of Haiku, Inc. "It has been several months since we announced the departure of project founder Michael Phipps from Haiku and the transition period that ensued for Haiku Inc. This is an attempt to give the community a most probably long awaited update on where we stand today, what has been done so far and what remains to be done to bring the Haiku Inc. transition to a successful conclusion."

The second alpha release of OpenSUSE 11.0 has been released. It comes with Linux 2.6.24, KDE 4.0.1, GNOME 2.21.90, OpenOffice.org 2.4 beta, and a whole lot more. OpenSUSE has gotten all modern lately, so the release announcement even includes fancy screenshots. Enjoy.

"It's one of the more popular culture wars in the free software community: GUI versus CLI (graphics versus the command-line). Programmers, by selection, inclination, and long experience, understandably are attracted to textual interactions with the computer, but the text interface was imposed originally by technological limitations. The GUI was introduced as a reply to those problems, but has undergone very little evolution from 1973 (when it was invented at Xerox PARC) to today. So why can't we do better than either of these tired old systems?"

Linus Torvalds, leader of the cult of Linux, took a swipe at Apple's OS X and Microsoft Vista in the same breath at a conference in Australia last week. Speaking at the linux.conf.au conference in Melbourne, Australia, a few weeks ago, Torvalds called Leopard 'utter crap' and bashed the proprietary OS makers for being greedy, according to Australian reporter Nick Miller in the The Age. "I don't think they're equally flawed - I think Leopard is a much better system," Torvalds said. "(But) OS X in some ways is actually worse than Windows to program for. Their file system is complete and utter crap, which is scary." He also scoffed at his rivals' practice of revenue-through-renewal by launching upgrades that require new purchases. "An operating system should be completely invisible," Torvalds said. "To Microsoft and Apple (it is) a way to control the whole environment - to force people to upgrade their applications and hardware."

After reviewing the HDD model, Ars now looks at the SSD variant of the MacBook Air. They conclude: "The USD 1300 question is whether the SSD is worth the extra cash. The answer seems to be no. I experienced only moderate gains in battery life and not very noticeable speed differences. The one major benefit of the SSD model is that it doesn't cause the same types of slowdowns as the HDD model during times of high disk activity, and that's certainly a huge plus. Speedy read times are great, too, but they are balanced out by pokey write times. Still, even if it's more usable, it's hard to justify the huge price difference for the SSD model."

Microsoft is conducting field trials to ensure that a modified version of Windows XP SP2 will be able to run well on the One Laptop Per Child’s XO machine and that it will be able to support customers with a good experience on that hardware. "We are encouraged by what we have seen of Windows on the XO machine so far, and field trials started at the end of January involving about 200 XO machines running a customized version of Windows XP SP2 with a reduced footprint image," Orlando Ayala, senior vice president of Microsoft's Unlimited Potential Group, told eWEEK.

Last month, IBM made an announcement that put an end to any hope of an open source OS/2. Responding to requests from an online community that had previously collected 11,600 signatures in support of its cause, the company confirmed that they would not be releasing the source code of their OS/2 operating system. I used OS/2 as my main operating system for about four years, and unlike some former users, my reaction to the news sits somewhere between disinterest and relief.

Computerworld Australia is running a story with a response from Microsoft to Infoworld's 'Save XP' petition web site, which has gathered over 75,000 signatures so far. Apparently Microsoft is aware of the petition, but says it is "listening first and foremost to feedback we hear from partners and customers about what makes sense based on their needs, that's what informed our decision to extend the availability of XP initially, and what will continue to guide us."

SCALE interviews Bruno G. Albuquerque (BGA) and Jorge Mare (Kokito) of the Haiku project. Haiku will be exhibiting and speaking at the 2008 Southern California Linux Expo. SCALE 6x will be held Feb 8 -10 at the Los Angeles Airport Westin. The interview is a tad bit annoying to read due to the (lack of) formatting, but you'll get through it.

Comic: "U2".

One of the most surprising things about Microsoft's bid for Yahoo is that if successful it will make Microsoft one of the two or three largest users of open source software in the world. Google is certainly the largest. The National Security Agency may or may not be second (only the spooks know for sure), but if it is then by my estimate that would make Yahoo the third.