YouTube has cool video showing Windows games using DirectX running inside VMware Fusion for Mac OS X. This is demonstrating full DirectX 8.1 support inside Windows XP virtual machines.

Samsung is following Apple, MS & LG in the trend where cellphones involve "big, wide touchscreens" as their main look and feel. Their Ultrasmart F700 phone has a qwerty keyboard, 2.8" widescreen, 5 MP camera and 3G support. We are not sure at this point if this is a smartphone which allows you to develop and run native applications or if it's just a glorified "feature phone". The whole interface is based on Adobe's Flash while a recent press release along with the claim of "full HTML browsing" makes us speculate that the phone possibly uses the Opera web browser -- possibly on top of Linux.

Apple plans to crank up the anti-Vista rhetoric at its international chain of retail stores later this week, the latest move in a broader bid by the Mac maker to undermine the new operating system release from rival Microsoft. The campaign, set to get underway this Saturday, will include new store displays and employee t-shirts gently mocking Vista as little more than a washed-up attempt at a modern operating system, those familiar with the matter say. In a multi-page training manual made available through the company's internal retail system this week, Apple challenged its employees to learn and tout the Mac's many existing advantages over Vista-equipped Windows PCs.

"The ROX Desktop is a lightweight alternative to GNOME or KDE built around the ROX-Filer file manager. The project's name is an abbreviation of 'RISC OS on X'. The ROX Desktop's performance is reminiscent of IceWM, and it's noticeably faster opening programs than GNOME or KDE. However, its speed comes at the expense of a needlessly redundant default configuration, and some users may balk at some of the assumptions its design makes about how they prefer to work."

Red Hat today announced the worldwide availability of Red Hat Certificate System 7.2 from the RSA conference in San Francisco. A complete public key infrastructure solution, Red Hat Certificate System 7.2 provides a security framework that guarantees the identity of users and ensures the privacy of communications in heterogeneous environments. The newest release includes enhancements that simplify deployment, management and integration of certificates as a core part of the security architecture in the enterprise.

Microsoft will not close a loophole that offers consumers a cheaper way to upgrade to Windows Vista. Users can install the upgrade version of the new operating system as a fresh installation, even if they do not currently own a licensed copy of Windows XP. The procedure is time consuming, but allows users to save about 35 per cent of the purchase price for the regular Windows Vista.