castrox writes "Ars Technica is reporting that Dell may be considering bundling virtualization on some of their motherboards. No more dual boot or VMs inside the running OS? 'Any way you slice it, though, putting the hypervisor in a chunk of flash and letting it handle loading the OS is the way forward, especially for servers and probably even for enterprise desktops. Boot times, power consumption, security, and flexibility are all reasons to do this ... The big question is: which hypervisor will Dell bundle with its machines? Vance suggests hypervisors from XenSource and VMware as two options, but I think that VMware is the most likely candidate since it seems to be the x86 virtualization solution of choice for the moment. However, if Dell doesn't try too hard to lock it down, this system could easily be modified in an aftermarket fashion to include almost any hypervisor that could fit on the flash chip.'"

Rahul writes "Fusion is a new VMware product that enables Intel-based Macs to run Windows and Linux in virtual machines on Mac OS X. The Mac virtualization market is presently dominated by Parallels and it will be worth watching if VMware can gain the mindshare despite its late entry. Ars Technica reports: 'The nice thing about VMWare Fusion is that it already supports some of the stuff that the Parallels Beta2 released yesterday just added, such as USB 2.0 and most USB devices, CD/DVD drive support, and drag-and-drop between environments (unless the guest environment is Linux, that is). You can also run multiple Fusion environments at once or assign multiple processors to your virtual machine(s), if you're into that sort of thing.'"

The site Computer and Videogames has up an (unverifiable article) stating that several anticipated Wii titles are going to be delayed until late 2007. Specifically, they mention Super Mario Galaxy and Metroid Prime 3: Corruption as being out of our hands until the Christmas season next year. They report this information via 'reliable sources', and Nintendo is unwilling to confirm or deny the claims as of yet. N'Gai at Newsweek reminds us that Reggie Fils-Aime denied the possibility of a 'Nintendo drought' in an interview they conducted back in October. Here's hoping he doesn't live to regret these words: "... The third example I would give you is Mario Galaxy, another from-the-ground-up Wii game that we are strategically timing the launch to make sure that we continue driving momentum through 2007. So N'Gai, how do I answer the question, 'Will there be no drought,' and 'How will we make sure that there are fantastic titles for Wii?' The answer is Zelda, Metroid and Mario. Which is a pretty darn good lineup."

edmicman writes "Wired News has an interesting article about what would make the perfect voting machine: 'With election season upon us, Wired News spoke with two of the top computer scientists in the field, UC Berkeley's David Wagner and Princeton's Ed Felten, and came up with a wish list of features we would include in a voting machine, if we were asked to create one. These recommendations can't guarantee clean results on their own. Voting machines, no matter how secure, are no remedy for poor election procedures and ill-conceived election laws. So our system would include thorough auditing and verification capabilities and require faithful adherence to good election practices, as wells as topnotch usability and security features.'"