An anonymous reader notes an Inquirer story reporting on something of a breakthrough in virtual machine management — a demonstration (not yet a product) of migrating a running virtual machine across CPUs from different vendors (video here). "Red Hat and AMD have just done the so called impossible, and demonstrated VM live migration across CPU architectures. Not only that, they have demonstrated it across CPU vendors, potentially commoditizing server processors. This is quite a feat. Only a few months ago during VMworld, Intel and VMware claimed that this was impossible. Judging by an initial response, VMware is quite irked by this KVM accomplishment and they are pointing to stability concerns. This sound like scaremongering to me ... All the interesting controversy aside, cross-vendor migration is [obviously] a good thing for customers because it avoids platform lock-in."

An anonymous reader writes "I am a biomedical researcher interested in having general-purpose, scientific programs developed and released as open source. Interface design and reusability of the code are of primary importance to me. For my purpose, Cocoa applications relying on Core Data seem to be the best way to get the job done quickly. While I have some programming experience, I have few connections to the industrial world. So my question to Slashdot readers is: how do I find someone (individual or business) to write high-quality programs? Are there reputable contractors experienced in Cocoa? What sort of rates should I expect, to use as a starting point in negotiations? Would a requirement that programs are released as open source make it more or less difficult to find someone to do the job?"