"Apple's iWork '08 boasts improvements to the software suite's word processing and presentation applications, but - more importantly - it fills the suite's spreadsheet hole with Numbers. eWEEK Labs ran Numbers through its paces, and found it to be a strong addition to the productivity software market and a promising alternative to Microsoft Excel."

"Can you imagine a computer history museum that has to be packed up and put away each winter and then unpacked each summer, and which has three potbellied pigs as its mascot? I can, because I've just visited the DigiBarn, a wonderful trip down silicon memory lane that's nestled into a 19th-century farmhouse deep in the Santa Cruz mountains, about 90 minutes south of San Francisco."

"The Debian project has updated the stable distribution Debian GNU/Linux 4.0. This update adds security updates to the stable release, together with a few corrections to serious problems. As always, the first point release also corrects a few issues that have been noticed too late in the release process to stop the release, but still should be fixed."

IBM has introduced a release of its z/OS mainframe operating system with new features that increase the system's security for online commerce and business transactions. IBM officials said the new operating system release is in line with what the company has been calling the renaissance of the mainframe. And as mainframes run a vast portion of the world's financial services, retail and other large businesses, security was a major concern for this latest release, IBM officials said, in Armonk, N.Y.

Both GNOME and GARNOME 2.19.20 have been released. "This is our seventh development release on our road towards GNOME 2.20.0, which will be released in September 2007. New features are still arriving, so your mission is simple : Go download it. Go compile it. Go test it. And go hack on it, document it, translate it, fix it."

An interview with IBM's Vice President of Open Source and Standards about their Open Source Strategy, the recent pledge of its patents for more than 150 open software standards, his take on the ODF vs. XML issue, and much more in The LXer Interview of Bob Sutor.

"Gutmann generated a lot of heat last December with the publication of a paper that called Windows Vista's Content Protection scheme 'the longest suicide note in history'. He updated it in April, mostly to call his critics names, and he updated it yet again yesterday with a top-of-the-page slam at my ZDNet colleague George Ou, who took exception with some of Gutmann's claims yesterday. Gutmann has a flair for melodramatic language and headline-grabbing phrases, but his theoretical arguments against Vista's video subsystem fall apart quickly when they make contact with the real world."

"IBM and Sun Microsystems did indeed announce an agreement for deploying the Solaris operating system on IBM servers, but it wasn't the system we guessed: IBM will deploy Solaris for its Intel x86-based System x and BladeCenter servers. It's a significant move, as it validates the presence of Sun's operating system among a broad customer base that few can mistake as a "niche." As Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz told reporters today, IBM becomes the first Tier 1 reseller of Solaris products and services for x86 platforms." His blog is here.

"The HelenOS project is an effort to develop a complete and usable modern operating system, yet offering room for experimenting and research. HelenOS uses its own microkernel written from scratch and supports SMP, multitasking and multithreading on both 32-bit and 64-bit, little-endian and big-endian processor architectures, among wich are AMD64/EM64T (x86-64), ARM, IA-32, IA-64 (Itanium), 32-bit MIPS, 32-bit PowerPC, SPARC V9 and Xen 3.0. Thanks to the relatively high number of supported architectures and suitable design, HelenOS is extremely-well portable."

Intel on Tuesday said it would release this week eight technical papers describing key findings from the company's work on future programmable multicore architectures. The papers will be published in the Intel Technical Journal and will provide details on how the company expects future microprocessors with simplified parallel programming models to evolve.

In the wake of last week's ruling that Novell, and not SCO, controls the copyrights covering UNIX, Novell is reassuring Unix users that it has no plans to follow in SCO's footsteps. Given that the company is no longer in the business of selling UNIX, it has no reason to pursue any copyright claims.

Citrix Systems is acquiring XenSource, whose founders helped develop the open-source Xen hypervsior, for USD 500 million in a move that caps a significant week in the development of virtualization technology. The XenSource acquisition, which both companies announced Aug. 15, comes just a day after VMware, which has long been the dominant player in the x86 virtualization market, announced an initial public offering of 33 million shares of stock. By the end of its first day of trading, the company's stock closed at almost USD 51 a share.

Microsoft today released its August 2007 security bulletin, which includes nine updates: Six are designated as 'critical' by the software giant and three are deemed 'important'. Two patches affect Microsoft products on the Mac, and one affects Windows Vista. All Microsoft security patches for Windows and Office software are available via Microsoft Update or via individual bulletins.

"Bloomberg believe VMware’s IPO today may the largest technology offering since Google. But doubts have been cast over the company’s supposedly proprietary ESX product, which may be derived from Linux."