Microsoft has launched Windows Azure, the previously unofficially named “Windows Cloud” OS. It is a cloud services operating system that acts as the development, Web hosting and service management environment for the Azure Services Platform.
Being a bear of very little brains, I had to lookup the meaning of the word Azure one of the meaning is the blue color of the clear sky which I guess is what Microsoft are thinking, but did you also know that:

In heraldry, azure is the tincture with the colour blue, and belongs to the …

Linux.com has published an excerpt from the book of Hi-Tech Squad’s Gary Sims. The excerpt is called “Configuring storage in FreeNAS”… Here is an excerpt from the excerpt!!!
The essence of the FreeNAS server is to provide storage that is easily accessible from the network. To this end, it is important to understand how FreeNAS handles hard disks and how they can be configured and used to provide the best and most reliable storage for your network.
Read more here: Linux.com :: Configuring storage in FreeNAS
Tweet This Post Digg This …

It was going to happen and now with the first Android phone coming to market, Google has made the source code to Android available as open source. Developers can now do much more than create applications that will run on Android. They can help improve the operating system overall by submitting potential new features, bug fixes, or other ideas.
Android is the first free, open source, and fully customizable mobile platform. Android offers a full stack: an operating system, middleware, and key mobile applications. It also contains a rich set of …

The PC-BSD team have been busy and after much hard work and testing they are to announce the availability of PC-BSD 7.0.1, i.e. the first upgrade in the 7 series, with FreeBSD 7.0 under the hood.
Version 7.0.1 contains a number of bugfixes and improvements. Some of the changes are:
KDE 4.1.2
AMD64 version
NTFS write support
Adobe Flash 9 support (Linux -flashplugin9)
Better WIFI support
Updates to the System Updater
PC-BSD is a free operating system with ease of use in mind. Like any modern system, you can listen to your favorite music, watch your movies, …

The looming shortage of IPv4 addresses, and the need to start using IPv6 addresses, is a frequent topic these days, and it was addressed this week at an EU ministerial conference in Nice, France, a conference organised as part of the French presidency of the EU.
The conference was told there needs to be an orderly transition to IPv6 with a recent policy paper from the European Commission suggesting that by 2010, at least 25 per cent of internet addresses in Europe should be updated to IPv6.
The EurActiv article on which …

Could this be what a new Mac with touch screen could be like? A YouTube user has managed to successfully load OS X on a Gigabyte M912X.
The Gigabyte M912 series of computers have the same basic specs as many netbooks, including a 1.6GHz CPU, 1GB of RAM, and an 8.9 inch display. But there are two things that set the M912 apart from most other netbooks. First, it has a touchscreen display that can be folded down on top of the keyboard for using the PC in tablet mode. And …

Hi-Tech Squad’s Gary has written another article for Linux.com, this time about PC-BSD.
Until recently FreeBSD lacked an easy-to-use desktop version. In 2005 the PC-BSD project was started to provide just that. This month PC-BSD version 7 was released. I downloaded and installed it to see how it squares up to user-friendly Linux distributions like Ubuntu.
I had high expectations of PC-BSD, as much is said of FreeBSD’s stability and security, and having used FreeNAS, which is based on FreeBSD, I knew that FreeBSD has lots to offer. The idea of …

The Copyright Royalty Board announced on Thursday last week that it would maintain the same royalty rate for CDs and downloadable songs, thus averting what could have been a protracted conflict over music royalties at iTunes and other online venues. Apple had gone so far as to announce that, if the royalties rate had been changed, they might be forced to shut down the music store portion of their site. Aidan Malley of Apple Insider reports, “A three-person panel of judges determining the changes for the Board …

With the recent release of Picasa 3 Beta for Linux, Google has contributed more code to the WINE project.
WINE is an Open Source implementation of the Windows API on top of Linux (and other Unix-like operating systems). It can be thought of as a compatibility layer for running Windows programs on Linux. WINE does not require Microsoft Windows, as it is a completely free alternative implementation of the Windows API consisting of 100% non-Microsoft code. With WINE you can run such programs as Microsoft Office and games like Counter Strike …

The Linuxbsdos.com website has a worth reading comparison of FreeNAS and OpenFiler.
But the LearnFreeNAS.com web site has pointed out a simple, but yet fundamental, mistake in their review.
In the conclusion Linuxbsdos.com writes, “The main difference between FreeNAS and Openfiler is that one is a network-attached storage (NAS) server, while the other serves as both a NAS and a SAN (Storage Area Network) server. The SAN feature of Openfiler is what makes it appealing to enterprise and business users.”
The reason for this is that the reviewer didn’t know that FreeNAS also …