Ever since Apple launched its 'Get a Mac' campaign, with the accompanying 'I'm a Mac - and I'm a PC' ads, lots of people have voiced their opinions on the campaign; the content has been discussed, the actors, the humour; however, relatively little has been said about the actual goals - and consequently the effectiveness - of the campaign.

Steve Jobs writes: "Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat."

"Windows has been the best OS for gamers for years, and Vista takes that to the next level. That's all well and good for games made with Vista in mind, but what about your existing game library? Last May, when Vista was at the Beta 2 milestone, I wrote a feature in which I installed around 15 games on the unfinished OS, describing how well each one worked. Now that Vista is 'done' (in as much as any OS is ever actually finished), it's time to do it again. This time, I'm going to use the final Vista release, a DX10 video card (not that it really matters with no DX10 games), and all the drivers available upon Vista's launch. I'll also take a look at a lot more games, around 25."

"Last October we had compared the performance of the open-source R300 display driver against the closed-source fglrx driver for ATI Radeon graphics cards. In that comparison a Mobility Radeon X300 was used with X.Org 7.1, but we have decided to take another look at this driver comparison under X.Org 7.2. In this last comparison, the fglrx binary blob had greatly outperformed the open-source driver. While the fglrx driver remains faster, has the performance delta between these two drivers decreased?"

"This DVD release includes all of the 0.5.1 Live CD and adds JDK 1.6, OpenOffice 2.1, Netbeans 5.5 with Visual Web Pack, C/C++ Pack, Profiler and Glassfish AppServer 9, all the OpenSolaris Developer and Administration docs available from the OpenSolaris Documentation Community, and Desktop shortcuts for all these."

"Windows XP introduced Visual Styles as a mechanism for providing more visual appeal to windows and controls. Menus, however, were not rendered using visual styles for Windows XP. With Windows Vista menus now are part of the visual schema and are rendered using the visual styles engine."

Security tools that work with Windows Vista have failed tests to see if they can detect viruses circulating online. Microsoft's Windows Live OneCare security tool was one of four products that failed independent tests carried out by the Virus Bulletin. The security testing group found that Live OneCare missed far more active viruses than any other program tested.

This tutorial shows how to install and use VirtualBox on Fedora Core 6, CentOS 4, and OpenSuSE 10.2. InnoTek VirtualBox is a family of powerful x86 virtualization products for enterprise as well as home use. Not only is VirtualBox an extremely feature rich, high performance product for enterprise customers, it is also freely available as Open Source Software under the terms of the GNU Public License. On a related note, Qemu 0.9.0 was released along with a new version of the Qemu accelerator (the latter's license being changed to GPL).

"Do you have trouble accessing data exported from multiple file servers? If so, try using open source implementations of autofs and Lightweight Directory Access Protocol, with Network File System Version 3, to access data under the same global mount point. In this article, study and compare five different methods to create a uniform namespace using autofs. A handy table with a comparative evaluation is available to help you choose the best technique for your scenario."

Remember PA Semi? The company has just released, as promised, its first chipset. "They are full 64-bit PPC, support virtualisation, and would do Alitvec but that name is copyrighted by Freescale. Instead they do 'VMA'. The three parts run at a max wattage of 25, 15 and 10W for the 2.0, 1.5 and 1.0GHz parts respectively, with typical wattage listed at 13, 8 and 6W. The individual cores are said to have a 7W max and 4W typical power consumption at 2.0GHz." PA Semi was one of the prime reasons why Ars's John 'Hannibal' Stokes doubted Apple's reasoning for the switch to Intel.

"Microsoft quietly raised last week its per-incident support prices across the board for Windows and Office. Support for Windows XP and Windows Vista now costs USD 59 per incident. Prior to the Vista launch, the per-incident support price for Windows was USD 39. Vista users get their first 90 days of support for no charge. Support for Office XP and Office 2007 now goes for USD 49 per incident, compared to USD 35 per incident prior to the January 30 Windows Vista/Office 2007 retail launch. Office 2007 users also get their first 90 days of support for free."

"GPE Phone Edition is meant to develop and deploy a GTK/GPE based implementation of a LIPS compliant software stack. It contains a set of applications, libraries and documentation to build software to be used for mobile phones and similar devices, also see the press release text for more details"

OpenOffice.org 2.0 is close to be released for OS/2 and eComStation. Release Candidate 1 is available for immediate download in English, German, Italian, Spanish, French, Russian and Dutch to all customers of an active Support Agreement for OpenOffice.org for eComStation and IBM OS/2, via their download-area at the Mensys Online Shop.

"At the time, most of us thought Oracle undercutting Red Hat's Linux business with its Unbreakable Linux was a big deal. Would customers flock to Oracle's cut-rate version of RHEL? Would Red Hat be pounded by Larry Ellison's minions? After a few months, the answers appear to be: No, it wasn't a big deal; and no; and no."