Regularly drinking coffee may help prevent or reduce the symptoms of Alzheimer’s Disease:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7326839.stm

And binge drinking can affect memory recall (at least in young drinkers):
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7328863.stm

Ubuntu Linux to be certifiied on some of Sun’s hardware:

http://www.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idUSN0236534620080402

A lot of Linux enthusiasts have taken to Ubuntu, and all of its versions are freely available. I think that this can only help them squeeze into the Enterprise space, as it’s helped them gain mindshare.

Red Hat, for example, is separated into their commerical offering, RHEL, which wasn’t cheap the last time I looked at their prices, and the freely available Fedora.

Fedora is free and open source like Ubuntu and is used by Red Hat as a testing ground for new features and technologies, but isn’t exactly the same as the “for fee” versions. I think this could hurt Red Hat in the long term; the enthusiasts helped bring Red Hat to where they are, but if they can’t easily (or cheaply or freely) get the enterprise products they won’t be using them nor introducing them into companies, instead they’ll be using Ubuntu or even Novell which offers a near complete version of their product for free.

And I’m surprised that VMWare’s market value has dropped by $30 billion, yes that’s billion dollars in six months supposedly due to competition that will arise products that Microsoft has in beta:

http://www.marketwatch.com

The market already seems to have voted. VMware’s stock, which debuted at $29 a share in August, soared past the $125 mark by late October. The shares then sharply reversed — no doubt helped by a general downturn in technology stocks — and have since sunk back below the $50 mark. The stock closed at $51 on the day of its IPO.

But, man I wish I’d gotten some of those share at $29 or $30 and sold and 125 bucks! However, work doesn’t allow us to invest in IPO’s. US financial companies have rules in place to prevent conflict of interests, and there are also Federal Laws in effect. However, it’s not like most of us Techies get any knowledge that would help us in the markets anyway, but I guess they pay us fairly well to make up for this.

OK, back to the point, maybe I should really be surprised that VMWare’s stock price increased so much, from $30 to $125 is a 400% increase. With all the other competitors in the market it would only be a matter of time before any market share they would gain, or gained, would be infringed on.

And with free offering, such as Xen on the server side, and Qemu for virtualisation on the Desktop, and a multitude of other competitors on the desktop side, it’d be hard to take and keep market share.

However, the VMWare folk are a smart bunch of lads and I’d expect some innovations from them in the future.