Who is ready to make the switch this holiday season?

The Mac vs. PC debate has raged on for years with both sides passionate about their preferred platform. As we’re all aware, an operating system can make or break the whole computing experience. And, with Vista now out for quite some time and Leopard out for only a relatively short period of time, it would be hard and perhaps even unfair for me to compare the two as far as problems encountered with them over time. That said, this article by Scot Finnie, "The verdict: Leopard spanks Vista, continues OS X's reign of excellence" shows that Apple does have the edge. Am I surprised? Not really. I have Vista here in my home (on my son’s computer) and I have plenty of experience "playing" with it. While I think it has its moments, I have to admit that I find Tiger may even be better, let alone Leopard.

Sun builds Constellation of petascale supercomputing

It's so big and diffuse that it's called a Constellation -- Sun has announced a new high-performance computing system that can scale up to 2 petaflops -- 2,000 trillion calculations per second. One installation is already in the works in Texas.

DOJ opposes extension of Microsoft antitrust oversight

The U.S. Department of Justice has joined Microsoft in opposing efforts by several states to extend the 2002 antitrust settlement with the company until 2012.

Shark Tank: Spoilsport!

Help desk pilot fish gets a trouble ticket: A support tech is having a problem with asset management software that isn't reporting properly on a user's PC in a remote office. "After checking several routine system settings remotely, I determined that I needed to log into the user's PC myself," fish says. "In order not to interfere with productivity on this minor issue, I ran a script to check if anyone was logged in to this PC. There was, so I resolved to wait till the next morning to try again."

Modern society relies on 'dangerously fragile' software

Are we ready for a civilization that's based on pervasive computing and increasingly complex "systems of systems," all dependent upon software written by unlicensed people calling themselves programmers? In this Computerworld interview, software guru Grady Booch, chief scientist at IBM Rational, talks about the enduring difficulties of software development and the complexity of today's systems: Software [development] has been and will remain fundamentally hard. Most of the interesting systems today are no longer just systems by themselves, but they tend to be systems of systems. It is the set of them working in harmony. We don’t have a lot of good processes or analysis tools to really understand how those things behave. Many systems look dangerously fragile. The bad news is they are fragile. This is another force that will lead us to the next era of how we build software systems.

Image Gallery: How to troubleshoot Windows Home Server problems

Preston Gralla explains how to overcome common issues with Microsoft's new networking software.