Apple is wasting no time combating Windows Vista. Today the released a new commercial in their successful “Mac & PC” commercials. I think this is absolutely brilliant!

CNN just posted a very interesting article about the Bush administration applying pressure to mislead the public about the effects of global warming.

“Among those scheduled to make comments were two presidential hopefuls — Sens. John McCain, R-Arizona, and Barack Obama, D-Illinois. Both lawmakers favor mandatory reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, something opposed by President Bush, who argues such requirements would threaten economic growth.”

This just makes me mad! Too many politicians are afraid to take a stand. Take coal for example. Coal is extremely messy to burn, and yet 50% of the electricity generated in the Us is from coal burning plants. Any politician who would take a stand against burning coal would be faced with great opposition from the Coal industry. They would distort facts about global warming, scare those who work and live in coal mining regions, and attack the politician on a personal level. I know that you might not think of the Coal lobby as being very powerful, so let me repeat myself: 50% of the electricity generated in the US is from Coal burning plants. That’s a lot of coal being bought and sold.

The simple fact is, environmental science helps the economy. It’s been a fact of history, new technologies in general promote economic growth. One industry may die, but a new one (or more) takes it’s place.

Example: US car manufacturers can’t sell their products in many foreign countries because they are not “clean” enough. Better fuel efficiency would allow us to sell cars overseas, which in turn helps the economy.

You can read the article on CNN’s website here.

As the CPU wars heat up with the release of quad core processors, AMD has just announced that their quad core chip will be 40% faster than Intel’s.

To quote an article on http://www.earthtimes.org/:

“AMD said it will be integrating four cores on one processor die, compared to Intel’s approach of packaging two dual-core chips in one package. In addition, there are other properties that offer a more balanced system, including the HyperTransport I/O system, an upgrade of SSE128 instructions that quadruples floating-point performance, a cache memory design that offers both dedicated access and pooled L3 cache access for individual cores, and optimizations of the DRAM controller and the cores themselves.

In terms of performance, these improvements will add up to a 42 per cent projected advantage over Intel’s Xeon 5355 based on the SPECfp benchmark, AMD claimed.”

This is great news. This means we can achieve deeper consolidation ratios, thereby eliminating that many more servers from our environment, and as we know fewer servers mean fewer kWh.

Linux Magazine recently named VMware a top company to watch in 2007. VMware’s press release states that:

“The Linux Magazine 20 Companies to Watch list features the vendors that are making a significant impact on the next generation of Linux and Open Source adoption. Linux Magazine selects companies that have the ability to spur Open Source adoption in all facets of IT, are technology and service innovators and develop practical solutions for the Open Enterprise.”

I have to admit, VMware has worked hard to develop and maintain a good relationship with the open source community.

Read the Linux Magazine article here.