IBM Virtualization Engine (preview): " ... improves the effectiveness of IT as it treats resources of individual servers, storage, and networking products to function as a single pool or entity, allowing access and management of resources across an organization more efficiently, by effect and need rather than physical location. " Planned for a range of IBM servers running AIX 5L, OS/400, or z/OS, SUSE LINUX, Red Hat Linux, Microsoft Windows, or Sun Solaris, as well as IBM TotalStorage.

Commentary: Sun has plan to shine again: "Sun is expected to announce as early as June that it will bundle more of its technologies together, including hardware, software and services, at a set price per user, per year, in an effort to boost sales and protect margins. A similar program that bundled infrastructure software has had some success at Sun's software division, formerly headed by Jonathan Schwartz, who was named Sun's president and chief operating officer last week. The move would generate more predicable stream of sales, which would go a long way toward doing away with quarterly sales warnings.

Sun is signing business at a profit in many divisions, even in low-end software where Sun is very price competitive with Linux. John Loiacono, formerly in charge of Sun's operating platforms, and the company's newly named head of software, says Sun is selling Unix-based software for $790 a year on an Intel-based server, a price that drops to $540 a year after the first year. In comparison, Red Hat Linux (RHAT) is sold with a service contract that costs $795 a year, he says. 'And I make money on those,' Loiacono says. 'Stay tuned. I'm going to get more aggressive on pricing.'

Sun is very focused right now on what its executives call low-hanging fruit. The company is spending marketing dollars only on specific projects where Sun has its best chance of success.

One near-term sales opportunity is an old, but refined message: Sun's hardware can make hosting mainframe applications cheaper. Companies like Austria-based steel manufacturer Boehler Edelstahl are choosing to host major applications such as its production planning system off of IBM zSeries mainframes and on to Unix-based Sun systems. Sun says such deals are proof that it's starting to see a payoff from mainframe rehosting software it bought from Critical Path in 2001 that's supposed to ease mainframe transitions to Sun systems.

Sun is also targeting sales to some telecom companies, formerly its bread and butter. Revenue is picking up in some areas, Loiacono says. Every time a cell phone company wants to add more features such as instant-messaging or a package of games, it has to write server-based software for it. Sun sells the Java-based infrastructure software that allows companies to more easily deliver such services over wireless networks."

Spyware - Multiple Internet Explorer windows (64): "Clicking on internet Explorer causes multiple windows to appear until a serious error occurs or the machine freezes due to all the memory being used."

Pointers to some tools for keeping track of what's running in your process list and IE scripting extensions, which are helpful for finding adware / spyware.

Jim Rumbaugh of UML fame was appointed an IBM Distinguished Engineer this week...: "My role at IBM Rational revolves around UML, or Unified Modeling Language, the industry standard for specifying, visualizing, constructing, and documenting the artifacts of software systems. Going all the way back to my thesis work, I've focused on modeling. So it's probably not surprising that I think good engineering starts with understanding what you're doing, and then doing it in a systematic way -- as opposed to ad hoc practices that amount to making it up as you go. In other disciplines, it's taken for granted that engineers work systematically. They don't just go out and cobble together airplanes and bridges. They model them first, so they can work out problems before it gets costly to do so. Modeling is quite a simple idea, and the resistance to it among programmers is somewhat surprising. If you told a construction engineer that it was a waste of time for him to use blueprints and to go start banging on metal instead, he'd think you were nuts. But programmers do this all the time. It's not a very mature approach, and it's not the way we're going to create better software products.

Modeling starts with business concepts and works its way down. When you're all done you end up with an application. But when you first talk with your client you don't start by discussing what programming languages you'll use. That would be a sure way to lose them. The beauty of UML models is that even technically unsophisticated clients can understand them. And non-technical stakeholders can readily understand the inherent value of modeling: It gives the project team tools and techniques to ensure they're doing the right thing -- that is, building the system the client actually needs. With modeling, they'll be sure they have the right information flow, the right architecture, the right data structures, and the right algorithms -- before they start worrying about the details of the implementation. "

Yahoo! News - Microsoft Posts First Source Code Under Open Source License: "The source code posted to the Internet was for a tool set, dubbed WiX for Windows Installer XML, that targets developers building Windows installation packages from XML source code. These are the same tools that Microsoft uses internally to create installers for its products, including Office, SQLServer, and BizTalk Server.
Code for the tool set, which consists of a compiler, linker, a library tool, and a decompiler, has been posted to SourceForge.net, a hosting site for open-source projects and code. "