"Apple has brought its unique brand of richness and simplicity to servers. OS X Leopard Server is the fifth generation of the software half of Apple's server platform. This time around, Apple took what is a unique and bold approach for a Unix server. Leopard Server continues the OS X Server tradition of delivering platform-independent file/print, e-mail, Web, and network edge services (such as stateful firewall, VPN, proxy, virus, and spam filtering). But it is as easy to set up and run as a desktop. Truly; the typical Mac user could get a Leopard Server going, because the default administrative interface is a match for a Mac's System Preferences."

"The wait is nearly over for the first service pack for Windows Vista, according to sources close to Microsoft. Microsoft has said the highly anticipated service pack would be out in the first quarter of this year, but some say it could be available in the next few weeks, more than a month before the quarter ends on March 31." That's what PCWorld says anyway, BetaNews thinks it will arrive in March. A new build has been released, in any case.

Linus Torvalds has released Linux 2.6.24. "The release is out there (both git trees and as tarballs/patches), and for the next week many kernel developers will be at (or flying into/out of) LCA in Melbourne, so let's hope it's a good one. Nothing earth-shattering happened since -rc8, although the new set of ACPI blacklist entries and some network driver updates makes the diffstat show that there was more than the random sprinkling of one-liners all over the tree. But most of it really is one-liners, and mostly not very exciting ones at that."

"Apple has seeded journalists at three of the nation's most widespread publications - The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and Newsweek - with early MacBook Air review units. The first reviews from these publications began cropping up earlier this morning. A detailed summary of each review, and some observations, follow." OSNews will review the MacBook Air too, as soon as Apple NL has review items to send out.

"VIA's newly launched processor architecture, known for the last three years by its codename, "Isaiah," will keep the company's focus on cost and power intact while taking things in a substantially different direction. In short, this year will see something truly odd happen on the low end of the x86 market: VIA and Intel will, architecturally speaking, switch places. Intel will take a giant step down the power/performance ladder with the debut of Silverthorne/Diamondville, its first in-order x86 processor design since the original Pentium, while VIA will attempt to move up into Intel's territory with its first-ever out-of-order, fully buzzword-compliant processor, codenamed Isaiah. In this brief article, I'll give an overview of Isaiah and of what VIA hopes to accomplish with this new design. Most of the high-level details of Isaiah have been known since at least 2004, when VIA began publicizing the forthcoming processor's general feature list (i.e., 64-bit support, out-of-order execution, vector processing, memory disambiguation, and others). So I'll focus here on a recap of those features and on a broader look at the market that VIA is headed into."

The Firebird RDBMS 2008 Roadmap is now publicly available. During this year, Firebird users can expect two final releases (2.1 and 2.5) and the first alpha of FB 3. Many new features are planned, as described in the roadmap. In addition, RC1 of 2.1 has been released.