AlexGr writes to tell us that Jeff Gould has a somewhat jaded look at the commercial push of Open Source and what that may be doing to the overall Open Source movement. "I've been a Linux fan for years, but lately I wonder if the drum beating from the big IT vendors in favor of open source hasn't finally slipped over the edge from sincere enthusiasm to meaningless — or in some cases downright hypocritical — sloganeering. The example that brought this gloomy thought to mind was a recent IBM press release touting a 'new open client solution' as an 'alternative to vendor lock-in'. Wow. Imagine that. An alternative to vendor lock-in."

An anonymous reader writes "InformationWeek pits Ubuntu Linux versus Windows Vista in a detailed comparison. They run down a number of points for this comparison, including installation, hardware support, software, and backup. For IW, backup was a crucial feature. As a result, the conclusion are unusual for this type of review because it straddles the fence. The verdict is: 'a tie, but only because both platforms fall short in some ways. Vista's roster of backup features aren't available in every SKU of the product; Ubuntu doesn't have anything like Vista's shadow copy system and its user-friendly backup tools are pretty rudimentary.'"

diegocgteleline.es writes "Linus Torvalds has released Linux 2.6.21 after months of development. This release improves the virtualization with VMI, a paravirtualization interface that will be used by Vmware. KVM does get initial paravirtualization support along with live migration and host suspend/resume support. 2.6.21 also gets a tickless idle loop mechanism called 'Dynticks', built in top of 'clockevents', another feature that unifies the timer handling and brings true high-resolution timers. Other features are: bigger kernel parameter-line, support for the PA SEMI PWRficient CPU and for the Cell-based 'celleb' Toshiba architecture, NFS IPv6 support, IPv4 IPv6 IPSEC tunneling, UFS2 write, kprobes for PPC32, kexec and oprofile for ARM, public key encryption for ecryptfs, Fcrypt and Camilla cipher algorithms, NAT port randomization, audit lockdown mode, some new drivers and many other small improvements."

jenwren1010 writes to mention that IBM has just announced the new open beta version of their virtual Linux environment that allows users to run x86 Linux programs on POWER processor-based IBM System p servers. "Designed to reduce power, cooling and space by consolidating x86 Linux workloads on System p servers, it will eventually be released as the [rolls-off-the-tongue] 'IBM System p Application Virtual Environment (System p AVE).' With a 31.5% global revenue share during 2006, IBM hopes to build on System p UNIX success and extend firmly into the Linux marketplace. Considering there are almost 2,800 applications that already run natively on Linux on System p servers, the chances are good that it will succeed."

For the most part, Tuesday offered insights into independent games, and their growing influence in the games industry. Tuesday was also, for at least part of the day, a chance to get caught up on upcoming offerings from Microsoft Game Studios. Though MGS doesn't have a keynote at this year's Game Developer's Conference, representatives from several of the company's first and third party studios were on hand to demonstrate the future of Microsoft gaming. I had the chance to sit in on demos for Mass Effect and Shadowrun. Additionally, Peter Molyneux was there to offer up a very unusual slice of gameplay from Fable 2: an adventurer and his dog. Read on for my impressions of these anticipated titles.