Although Asus has said that the Windows XP version of the EeePC will be available only by "special tender" (government and education), the writer of this article has been told by Asus' sales agents in Australia that it will be available to electrical retailers. This could be bad blow to Linux adoption on ultraportables if the price is the same.

For a man who just got fined more than a billion dollars for antitrust violations, Steve Ballmer is feeling plenty of competitive heat.

An anti-market has grown up around Windows Vista that was made possible largely by its haphazard design and high price tag. But that works well for Linux, which is enjoying some strong sales growth at Novell.

"More than ten million customers of the UK's three largest ISPs will have their browsing habits sold to a company with roots in the murky world of spyware..."

If there's one thing to be said for Microsoft, it's a shrewd player. They've done in just a few years what takes some companies decades to do. They've cornered the desktop OS market. All of this success has caused some of their detractors to call them dishonest, unethical, and in some cases just downright evil. All of this has come from their efforts to make a few bucks. Well, a few billion in their case. But as of late, Microsoft has gone an extra step further in expanding and maintaining, or in some cases grabbing dominance in every market they can get into, if they aren't there already.

In the world of computing, six years is a lifetime, and no one should be stuck with the same operating system that long, and now because of the failure of Vista, one-time rational people are still not considering the alternatives as much as they should; a lot of them are saying you should wait it out another two years? three years? who knows how long for another potential Vista. The following is my two cents on the matter, and why I think it's time everyone considered the alternatives.

The 20th February 2008 was one of those 'Microsoft moments', when suddenly, the world changed. Just like when they 'got' the network (and we got NT), or they 'got' the Internet (and we got 'Internet Explorer'). This time they 'got' Open Source and Open Standards and the company is about to make another of their legendary radical transformations... or so they would like you to believe.

Here’s an interesting bit of news from the blurred line between open and closed source software. Ubuntu sponsor Canonical has announced that it is reselling IBM’s DB2 Express-C database as both a standalone software package and as a software appliance with VMware. While Express-C is free as in beer, it is not free as in speech. Of course, if you want support it is not free at all.