Apple held a special event for the press today. Most of the event was about iPods; prettier colours, bigger capacities, you know the drill. For the really interesting stuff, you had to sit out the whole thing: Apple gave us a sneak peek of a product coming in 2007. In Q1 2007, Apple will release a settop box, half the size of the Mac Mini, to which you can stream content. It has a built-in power supply, USB, ethernet, 802.11 'wireless component video', optical audio, HDMI ports, and old RCA stereo audio ports. It sports a Front Row-like interface, and can be controlled using the Apple remote. Its codename is 'iTV'; a different name will be chosen. It will work with iTunes on Macs and PCs, and it will cost USD 299. Update: Eugenia and I both blogged about the product announcements. Eugenia loves the gapless playback, and I miss adherence to industry standards.

USB support has been (re-)added to SkyOS, including of course the USB stack, a UHCI driver, support for control, interrupt, and bulk transfers, a USB HUB driver, a USB HID Keyboard driver, a USB HID Mouse driver, a USB Mass storage driver for CBI devices, including USB Harddisks, card readers, etc. The USB stack has been written from scratch and a new release containing USB support is expected.

"The difficulties in developing Vista stemmed from its monolithic structure and the need for 'backwards compatibility', ie ensuring that software used by customers on older versions of Windows will work under Vista. This vast accumulation of legacy applications acts like an anchor on innovation. The Vista trauma has convinced some Microsoft engineers that they will have to adopt a radically different approach." I said something similar months ago.

OSWeekly takes a look at how Microsoft and Apple each handles the blogging phenomemon. They conclude: "With all of this going on, it's easy to wonder what efforts Apple is making and I wish I could tell you, but I don't see anything worth mentioning. Instead of accepting blogging for what it is, Apple would rather sue bloggers for talking about what they're doing. Microsoft is only one of the big companies that has embraced blogging, and we can see similar efforts by Google and Yahoo!, just to name a few."

The endless stream of Ubuntu derivatives just refuses to end. "Fluxbuntu is a Ubuntu-based derivative that uses FluxBox as the desktop environment. It is lightweight, swift and efficient compared to Gnome or KDE. These features makes Fluxbuntu suitable for vast range of computers, from low-end to high-end." There's a screenshot gallery as well. Laugh at me all you want, but I want a ROXbuntu. I'm not kidding. Anyone?

Examine how to configure Secure Shell on IBM System p and System x computers to run commands in parallel in a cluster without being prompted for a password. This will allow you to perform activities more easily and quickly, and gives you flexibility to perform activities in parallel on more machines.

DesktopBSD is a version of FreeBSD customized for the desktop. Building upon FreeBSD 5.5-PRE, ver1.0 comes packed with desktop-oriented features such as KDE 3.5.1 and the DesktopBSD Tools, which include a graphical interface to the FreeBSD ports system. Read the rest here.

This is a feature release of Subversion, featuring BDB 4.4 and repository auto-recovery support, a new tool for synchronizing repositories (svnsync), major speed enhancements in the versioned filesystem and the working copy, and of course the usual host of bugfixes and minor enhancements. Additionally, check this article on how to Set up Subversion and websvn on Debian.

A few days ago we reported on the fact that applications which have administrative rights in Vista (given by the user, of course) can disable User Account Protection altogether. This was seen as a security flaw; Ars, however, begs to differ: "When UAC is disabled, Vista gripes loudly about it. The Windows Security Center immediately notes that UAC has been turned off, and it prompts you to turn it back on using a system tray notification. From our own testing, it appears impossible to disable UAC without the Security Center noticing it, which makes it rather unlikely that a user is end up in a less secure state."

A consortium of investment firms was near a deal late Sunday night to acquire Freescale Semiconductor, a former unit of Motorola, for more than USD 16 billion, according to people briefed on the negotiations. The deal, if completed, would be the largest leveraged buyout ever in the technology sector, surpassing the USD 11.3 billion sale of SunGard Data Systems last year.

Paul Thurrot (you know!) has published part 3 of his review of Vista RC1. This part focuses on upgrading to Vista from XP. "As with compatibility, the upgrade scenario appears to be another big win for Windows Vista. Granted, I've only upgraded one system. But it was a wonderfully real-world system, full of all kinds of crud. Yes, it's early yet: I will wait at least a few more days before declaring this a total victory; but so far so good."

After you have Apple Remote Desktop installed, you can use it to interact with users by text chat or one-way messages and alerts. Find out how to respond to user problems, observe one or more remote computers, and take control of Mac workstations remotely to improve security, enhance classrooms, and improve teacher/student interaction or help desk operations. It's all part of Ryan Faas' series on learning how to use and get the most out of the robust features of Apple Remote Desktop.

Intel is getting ready to introduce a chip communications technology called Common System Interface (CSI) and also an integrated memory controller that mirrors an approach central to recent successes of rival Advanced Micro Devices.

Wondered how Parallels works and how to actually get it going? This article is an overview of the Parallels vitalization software and a simple guide on creating a virtual machine.