Monday was theoretically the day that, over protests and despite its popularity, Windows XP was retired as a way of pushing people to adopt the widely reviled Vista operating system before the very Vista-like 'next-generation' Windows 7 arrives, supposedly at the end of next year or at least by January of 2010.

Univa UD announced it has named industry veterans Alex Brown and Kent Purdy to lead its data center automation business division and retool its product suite. The announcement comes as Univa UD officially launches Reliance as its cornerstone product for service-based management of application delivery environments.

Following the launch of Windows Server 2008, Microsoft reached another milestone with the release of Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, the hypervisor-based virtualization technology that is a feature of select versions of Windows Server 2008. The nearly 1.5 million copies of the Hyper-V beta version that have been distributed demonstrate how customer interest in virtualization is moving from evaluation to production environment deployments.

SemanticSpace announced its acquisition of 100 percent of Prolifics, a distinguished systems integrator specializing in IBM technologies. Prolifics complements SemanticSpace's offering with its high-value services focused around the IBM brand - making the combined entity a truly Global organization with a strong and balanced presence across the U.S., Europe and Asia Pacific. Together Prolifics, SemanticSpace Technologies, and Arsin Corporation will operate as SemanticSpace Group, creating a new overall organization of 1500 employees with more than $100 million in revenue on a proforma basis.

Apani announced that EpiForce VM is now shipping. EpiForce VM is a software-based solution that secures corporate networks, containing both physical and virtual servers, from a single platform. EpiForce VM is part of Apani's comprehensive security software product family and leverages the latest platform of the company's flagship product EpiForce 2.5.

Specifically created for Citrix XenDesktop and with knowledge workers in mind, the all-new Wyse Viance high performance desktop appliances are designed to both maximize the user experience and minimize administration across a virtualized infrastructure. Wyse Viance desktop appliances immediately connect to Citrix XenDesktop sessions, delivering their users rich multimedia (such as smooth video and audio playback) decoded locally on the appliance, multi-display support, and broad USB peripheral compatibility that's virtualized in the data center through the built-in Wyse TCX software suite. In summary, Wyse Viance desktop appliance users gain simple, fast access to their virtualized desktops, their applications of choice and documents without compromising data security or performance.

LISA Virtualize (formerly LISA Virtual Service Environment) allows teams to decouple themselves from dependency on live or unfinished systems and components throughout the lifecycle of building and testing SOA applications. LISA Virtualize models the expected functionality of any Service within SOA applications, whether that is a Web Service (WSDL), an integration layer such as an ESB, or an implementation layer such as an EJB, mainframe or database, and represents that Service virtually, with a high level of dynamic input and output capabilities and performance characteristics that simulate the real-world behaviors of complex systems. A Virtual Environment instance in LISA saves the team more than 90% of the cost of producing a replicated environment by other means, and allows teams to work in parallel instead of being constrained by each other's lifecycles, which increases agility and quality.

Embotics announced its U.S. expansion with a new office in Charlotte and the appointment of U.S. Sales Director, Adam Kurtz. The U.S. expansion is a result of customer and partner growth, helping to increase visibility as well as support of Embotics' virtualization management and automation technology deployments.

Vyatta delivers complete, ready-to-deploy, open-source networking solutions that make it possible for anyone to own an enterprise-class router/firewall/VPN for a fraction of the cost of traditional closed-source, proprietary products. By combining the features, performance and reliability of an enterprise-class router, firewall and VPN with the cost savings and flexibility of open-source solutions, Vyatta software enables customers to build routing and security solutions using hardware of their choosing, ensuring that the network will always meet performance requirements and scalability needs.

Cisco Systems has released new products and professional services, designed to assist customers with virtualization efforts for data center operational and energy efficiency. The company states that the new offerings make the virtual network an efficient platform for delivering data center services - accelerating, providing security, and orchestrating application delivery networks, servers, virtualized computing, and storage, while providing greater responsiveness and resource conservation.

Mario Heiderich has released qUIpt, a library that uses the window.name property to store away useful data, in this case JavaScript. How does it work? It checks for the contents of window.name while your page is being loaded. If there’s nothing inside the window.name cache the JS files defined by you are fetched via XHR The [...]

Microsoft has come out with a road map for the Ajax side of ASP.NET, which has been simplified to be just: Framework and tools in one versioned package; Ajax components will be released separately on Codeplex. There is a bold goal at the beginning of the document (why is the doc a PDF/.doc and not just [...]

What does your CEO do? Paul Colton, CEO of Aptana, gets his fingers dirty. He just wrote a post about accessing COM objects from JavaScript with Jaxer. This is possible as the JavaScript is running on the server, and this server is running on Windows. You can download the source code to check it all out. PLAIN [...]

What if you could encode a Jar file as an image and trick the browser to run it? This is what Ben Lorica reported from a black hat briefing webinar: During a recent webinar to promote the upcoming Black Hat briefings in Las Vegas, a group of hackers announced the creation of a hybrid file that [...]

The IE8 team has created a blitz on its blog with a slew of posts on security. There is a ton of great stuff here, and is well worth going into detail on each post: IE8 and Trustworthy Browsing At first they set the scene: This blog post frames our approach in IE8 for delivering trustworthy browsing. The [...]

Michal Zalewski, of Google, has released ratproxy, a tool to test your Web application against attacks such as XSS and XSRF: Ratproxy is a semi-automated, largely passive web application security audit tool. It is meant to complement active crawlers and manual proxies more commonly used for this task, and is optimized specifically for an accurate and [...]

OpenLaszlo is a fascinating project, and got even more interesting when they went meta, and allowed you to general Ajax applications as well as SWF ones. The 4.1 release is a big one, as it brings full parity to the Ajax side of the house: OpenLaszlo 4.1 is a major release bringing full support for both [...]

James Coglan wrote a piece on There is no such thing as a JavaScript plugin that uses jQuery as a use case for how simple it is to have a plugin contract. When you think about plugins in many environments, you have strict contracts through interfaces that you have to implement. With jQuery, you can just [...]

Dojo is a framework that you can bend for your needs. You have very fine grained control on what you want in your base dojo.js, how other components are loaded, and a final custom JavaScript file. Brad Neuberg showed a project, SearchTools, that added local search via Gears, and had a custom Dojo that wasn't Dojo [...]