Red Hat Enterprise Linux will soon be available through Amazon’s ‘Elastic Computing Cloud’ (EC2) online service by the year’s end but is in private beta currently. Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Amazon EC2 will be a web-scale virtual computing environment, and will have everything needed to develop and host applications: compute capacity, bandwidth, and storage.

Pricing for the Red Hat EC2 option will cost $19 per month plus $0.21, $0.53 or $0.94 per hour, depending on computing and storage capacity, plus $0.11 per gigabyte transferred in and 19 cents per gigabyte transferred out.

Each computer being rented is actually a virtual machine, a slice of a physical server that’s running several using virtualization software. The ‘Small’ Red Hat Enterprise Linux instance gets you 1.7GB of memory, 160GB of storage, and Amazon’s virtual equivalent of one 32-bit processor core; ‘Large’ gives you 7.5GB of memory, 850GB of storage, and two 64-bit cores; ‘Extra-Large’ gives 15GB of memory, 1690GB of storage, and four 64-bit cores. Press release

Phoenix Technologies’ is currently looking to collaborate with OEMs to provide what is being described as a starting point for “PC 3.0″. The new platform is essentially a BIOS-based virtualized environment. Appropriately named ‘Hyperspace’, the platform enables instant-on booting which bypasses Windows for quick access to your most frequently used applications.

Phoenix has described this as “an innovative platform that promises to ignite a PC revolution.” Not only would this “instant-on” method save time, it could offer a significant increase in battery life because this virtualization process bypasses the core operating system. Press release

The Windows Vista successor formerly known as ‘Vienna’ is now codenamed ‘Windows 7′. According to Seattle PI’s Todd Bishop, the Microsoft secret sales meeting revealed that ‘Windows 7′ is “due out in approximately three years.” and “Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has vowed that the company will never again take so long to develop a new Windows version as it did to produce Windows Vista.”

This would put it at 2010. Well, they’re already behind apparently since Microsoft ’s executive vice president of development Ben Fathi said this in February: “You can think roughly two, two-and-a-half years is a reasonable time frame that our partners can depend on and can work with.” A release date change from two to three years? In only 5 months? I think we can count on more pushback for this OS too.

If you use Windows Vista, then you should know that over 20 Windows Vista features and services are collecting and giving your personal data to Microsoft. Microsoft should have these things listed out (like below) and put right in front of every Vista user’s face before they install the OS.

Which programs collect your data and send to Microsoft? Windows Update, Web Content, Digital Certificates, Auto Root Update, Windows Media Digital Rights Management, Windows Media Player, Malicious Software Removal/Clean On Upgrade, Network Connectivity Status Icon, Windows Time Service, and the IPv6 Network Address Translation (NAT) Traversal service (Teredo).

Read [Softpedia]

“Longhorn Reloaded” is a project to revive an earlier beta of Windows Vista from before the company’s reset of the Vista project on August 27, 2004. And Longhorn was ‘alive and kicking’ until Microsoft recently sent them a friendly cease & desist letter. The “Longhorn Reloaded” team took the pre-release Build 6.0.4074 of Longhorn, which still has features like WinFS, to “finish off what Microsoft started” and release new versions of it. Obviously we can see why Microsoft would not be thrilled about this, but they should at least acknowledge the programmers interest in preserving some cool Windows functionalities left out of the current Windows Vista.

A new series of videos has been posted at Brightcove of OS X Leopard demonstrations. The tour shows off some of the most anticipated features of the upcoming Leopard like Screen Sharing, Safari 3, Front Row 2, Stacks, Spaces, and more.

Via TUAW

Knew it would/could happen sooner or later. It’s a 6GB download which, at the moment, no one has finished downloading yet from the Oink torrent site. So this could be a fake, but we’ll keep you posted.

According to CrunchGear, “the site’s forum is red hot with activity and the file already has 205 comments.” One comment said, “Please do not talk about this torrent file outside of OINK.” Hmm.

If you are part of the smug group that uses a minority OS, then you have to let people know. If you use a Mac then it’s clear to see, but if you run Ubuntu it’s not so obvious. How can you let Windows users know that you are better than them?

System76 are offering free Ubuntu stickers, all you have to do is send them a stamped addressed envelope. Now you can let your inner nerd shine forth proudly.

Paul Nowak of Sys-Con looks at what happens when he switches from Windows to Ubuntu on his Thinkpad T60. Nowak says, “Three prior attempts over the years at using Linux as my daily desktop OS had me primed for failure. Well, Ubuntu takes Linux where I’ve long hoped it would go — easy to use, reliable, dependable, great applications too…”

He goes in depth examining real Linux values that trump MS Windows to the death. His main points:

1. Viruses - I no longer worry and I no longer need to check my PC - that’s a relief. You can pick nits here about security but the bottom line is Ubuntu is orders of magnitude better.
2. Vulnerabilities - Windows is like Swiss cheese with so many vulnerabilities that it’s sick - you can’t connect XP to a public Internet connection (i.e., behind a router is OK but direct to the net isn’t). Ubuntu? It’s Linux - no worries.
3. Thanks to #1 and #2, I’m free from products like Symantec and Norton and the dollar expense, the complexity of administering them (those pop-ups are annoying and a productivity hit), and wondering when they expire next.
4. Software updates for the entire collection of software on the machine are simple in Ubuntu.
5. Backups are automatic.

Read the rest [linux.sys-con.com]

Windows Longhorn has been revived and is now available for download at the Longhorn Reloaded site. Longhorn was the codename for Windows Vista prior to it’s announcement on July 22, 2005.

“Longhorn Reloaded is a Project dedicated to the revival of the Operating System known as Code Name “Longhorn”. To put the projects aims simply, we aim to finish off what Microsoft started before the operating system was canceled. It is a modification of Windows 6.0.4074, which was originally released during the 2004 Windows Hardware Engineers Conference,” - Longhorn Reloaded official site

Longhorn Reloaded M1 Technical Refresh is the second public release of Longhorn Reloaded. The serial required is (like this): TCP8W-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-99FBW. Read [Softepedia]