VMware Tuesday said it will offer the small-footprint version of its ESX virtualization software free, responding to pressure from Microsoft and other companies that are threatening VMware’s lead in the virtualization market.

The next version of ESXi, which will come in about two weeks, will be available at no cost, said VMware CEO Paul Maritz on a conference call Tuesday to discuss the company’s second-quarter earnings. ESXi is a basic hypervisor, which is technology that separates the OS from server hardware so multiple OSes can run virtually on one physical server.

Maritz said the move to make the already low-cost product free is part of VMware’s plan to make its virtualization and network infrastructure products “as freely available to everyone in the industry” as possible as it diversifies its products beyond merely enabling virtualization. A former Microsoft executive, Maritz replaced VMware cofounder and former CEO Diane Greene, who was ousted in a sudden move two weeks ago.

VMware is facing some of its toughest competition yet as Microsoft and other companies seek to commoditize the core virtualization technology on which VMware’s business was built by offering it as part of the OS.

Speaking about his “alma mater” Tuesday, Maritz called Microsoft a “formidable” competitor, but “not an invincible” one.

On Monday, Symantec opened two of its Norton 2009 products to public beta. Both Norton Internet Security 2009 and Norton Antivirus 2009 feature new code that not only makes the scans and services run faster, but consume fewer system resources, says Tom Powledge, vice president of consumer product management.

As an example, Powledge said that where Norton Internet Security 2006 consumed roughly 300MB of hard-disk space, the 2009 version is coming in around 100MB. Symantec has achieved this, in part, by reducing a number of redundancies introduced over the years. For example, previous versions of NIS contained multiple copies of the antivirus signature database.

For antivirus protection, faster and lighter has been achieved by focusing only on the files that have changed. As hard drives fill with digital photos and songs–files that typically do not change–Norton is able to mark them as trusted and then ignore them on subsequent scans. Powledge says this results in big gains in speed, reducing the time it takes to scan large drives.

Also, in order to keep up with the ever-changing malware loose on the Internet today, the 2009 products with be updated every 15 minutes or so with new signature files.

Although Microsoft officially stopped selling Windows XP as of June 30, retailers can keep selling it as long as they have copies.

Perhaps as a result of its potentially impending scarcity, XP is near the top of Amazon.com’s software list, with the full version of XP Home at No. 15 and the full version of XP Pro at No. 21.

The highest ranked Vista edition doesn’t crack the top 25, although it does come on nearly all new PCs these days so most people don’t need a boxed copy.

For those keeping score, Apple’s Mac OS X Leopard is No. 7 on the software list, while the highest ranking Vista version is the update version of Windows Vista Home Premium, at No. 41.

Adobe Systems’ popular portable document format, or PDF as it’s more well-known, has become the latest International Organization for Standardization (ISO) standard as of Wednesday morning.

Adobe has been the key developer and patent holder of the technology, and on Wednesday passed over the entire specification of version 1.7 to the Geneva-based ISO. This comes just a year and a half after Adobe made plans to open up by giving the specification to the Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM) which was to lay the groundwork for ISO certification.

The ISO has issued a press release about the new standard (named “ISO 32000-1:2008″), along with a quote from Adobe Chief Technology Officer Kevin Lynch about the move expanding the PDF universe. “As governments and organizations increasingly request open formats, maintenance of the PDF specification by an external and participatory organization will help continue to drive innovation and expand the rich PDF ecosystem that has evolved over the past 15 years,” Lynch said. It’s nearly verbatim with what he said back in the AIIM hand-off, but holds true to what typically happens when any file format is ISO certified. They’ll typically become more attractive to governments and large corporate customers.

Adobe released on Tuesday the first Reader application to bake movies and animation into the Portable Document Format.

With Adobe Reader 9, users can play Flash movies, Shockwave animation, and other rich media content without needing to open a third-party player.

PDFs are reaching new levels of interactivity with this release. Past versions of the nearly ubiquitous and free application, by contrast, have enabled dynamic forms but served largely to open print-ready PDFs.

The update is supposed to load more quickly than version 8, addressing the gripes of many users who felt that Reader slowed down Web surfing.

Adobe has described this release as potentially leading to a one-size-fits-all media player. Acrobat 9, released in June at between $299 to $699, will embed video and animation within PDFs.

A major consumer group, insurers together with Google Inc and Microsoft Corp said on Wednesday they have agreed to standards intended to speed adoption of personal electronic health records.

The electronic medical record field remains in its infancy. While U.S. privacy laws govern actions by medical providers such as doctors, there is little in the way of other established privacy, security and data usage standards despite decades of industry efforts.

Backers, which also include some doctors and employer groups, said they hope to break a stalemate in moving medical records online, sparked by consumer fears that their personal information will be abused, or held against them.

“A policy and privacy logjam … has constricted some of the consumer uptake of these services,” said James Dempsey, deputy director at the Center for Democracy and Technology, a privacy rights group that accepts some industry funding.

Principles for personal health records include an audit trail to track use of the data, a dispute resolution process for consumers who believe their personal information has been misused and a ban on using data to discriminate in employment.

Also signing on to the principles are WebMD Health Corp; Consumers Union, which publishes Consumer Reports; seniors’ lobbying group AARP; and America’s Health Insurance Plans, representing big insurers such as Aetna Inc.

Only 8 percent of developers are targeting Windows Vista according to a new report from analysts Evans Data Corporation. 49 percent of developers are developing for Vista’s soon-to-be-discontinued predecessor, Windows XP, and even Linux is beating Vista, with some 13 percent of development focused on the open-source OS.

The headline finding of the report, compiled from a biannual survey of North American developers, could point at continued problems for Microsoft. More than a year after its release, Vista is still failing to make significant inroads into the enterprise, with businesses preferring to stick with the tried-and-trusted Windows XP. John Andrews, president and CEO of Evans Data, claims that developers are taking a “wait-and-see” approach to Vista, as “the new operating system has had more than its share of problems”; driver issues, software incompatibility, and steep hardware demands.

A new Web browser from Norway’s Opera Software ASA addresses Internet users’ growing tendency to use multiple computers and devices.

Opera 9.5, released Thursday for Windows, Mac and Linux computers, includes the new Opera Link feature, which lets you bring your bookmarks wherever you go. It works with Opera’s desktop browser as well as Opera Mini, the browser for mobile phones.

The new browser also adds a note-taking ability. By logging in, you can jot down shopping lists or copy directions for access on another computer or handset.

A new version of the Firefox Web browser is scheduled for release Tuesday with improvements in security, speed and design.

Many of the enhancements in Firefox 3 involve bookmarks. The new version lets Web surfers add keywords, or tags, to sort bookmarks by topic. A new “Places” feature lets users quickly access sites they recently bookmarked or tagged and pages they visit frequently but haven’t bookmarked.

There’s also a new star button for easily adding sites to your bookmark list - similar to what’s already available on Microsoft Corp.’s Internet Explorer 7 browser.

Other new features include the ability to resume downloads midway if the connection is interrupted and an updated password manager that doesn’t disrupt the log-in process.

As the virtual machine is connected to a private network internal to VirtualBox and invisible to the host, network services on the guest are not accessible to the host ma-chine or to other computers on the same network. However, VirtualBox can make given services available outside of the guest by using port forwarding. This means that VirtualBox listens to certain ports on the host and resends all packages which arrive on them to the guest on the ports used by the services being forwarded. To an application on the host or other physical (or virtual) machines on the network, it looks as though the service being proxied is actually running on the host (note that this also means that you cannot run the same service on the same ports on the host). However, you still gain the advantages of running the service in a virtual machine – for example, services on the host machine or on other virtual machines cannot be compromised or crashed by a vulnerability or a bug in the service, and the service can run in a different operating system to the host system.

You can set up a guest service which you wish to proxy using the command line tool VBoxManage. You will need to know which ports on the guest the service uses and to decide which ports to use on the host (often but not always you will want to use the same ports on the guest and on the host). You can use any ports on the host which are not already in use by a service. An example of how to set up incoming NAT connections to a ssh server on the guest requires the following three commands:


VBoxManage setextradata "GuestName” “VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/Apache/Protocol” TCP

VBoxManage setextradata “GuestName” “VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/Apache/GuestPort” 80

VBoxManage setextradata “GuestName” “VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/Apache/HostPort” 8880


The name Apache is an arbitrary one chosen for this particular forwarding configuration.
The name GuestName is the name you gave your virtual machine.
With that configuration in place, all TCP connections to port 8880 on the host will be forwarded to port 80 on the guest. Protocol can be either of TCP or UDP (these are case insensitive). To remove a mapping again, use the same commands, but leaving out the values (in this case TCP, 80 and 8880).

It is not possible to configure incoming NAT connections while the VM is running. However you can change the settings for a VM which is currently saved (or powered off at a snapshot).

NAT limitations

There are four limitations of NAT mode which users should be aware of:

• ICMP protocol is very limited: Some frequently used network debugging tools (e.g. ping) rely on sending/receiving messages based on the ICMP protocol. The ICMP protocol cannot be used directly by normal applications such as VirtualBox, as it would, at least on Linux hosts, require root permissions (more precisely CAP_NET_RAW). Since this is not desirable, no attempt has been made to support ICMP to addresses other than 10.0.2.2 and 10.0.2.15. If you try to ping any other IP address you will not get any response.
• Receiving of UDP broadcasts is not reliable: The guest does not reliably receive broadcasts, since, in order to save resources, it only listens for a certain amount of time after the guest has sent UDP data on a particular port. As a consequence, NetBios name resolution based on broadcasts is not always working (but WINS always works). As a workaround, you can use the numeric IP of the desired server in the \\server\share notation.
• Protocols other than TCP and UDP are not supported: This means some VPN products (e.g. PPTP from Microsoft) can not be used. There are other VPN products which use simply TCP and UDP.
• Forwarding host ports < 1024 impossible: On Unix-based hosts (e.g. Linux, Solaris, MacOS X) it is not possible to bind to ports below 1024 from applications that are not run by root. Therefore if you try to configure such a port forwarding, then the VM will refuse to start.

These limitations normally don’t affect standard network use. But the presence of NAT has also subtle effects that may interfere with protocols that are normally working. One example is NFS, where the server is often configured to refuse connections from non-provileged ports (i.e. ports not below 1024).

A nuclear power plant in Georgia was recently forced into an emergency shutdown for 48 hours after a software update was installed on a single computer.

The incident occurred on March 7 at Unit 2 of the Hatch nuclear power plant near Baxley, Georgia. The trouble started after an engineer from Southern Company, which manages the technology operations for the plant, installed a software update on a computer operating on the plant’s business network.

The computer in question was used to monitor chemical and diagnostic data from one of the facility’s primary control systems, and the software update was designed to synchronize data on both systems. According to a report filed with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, when the updated computer rebooted, it reset the data on the control system, causing safety systems to errantly interpret the lack of data as a drop in water reservoirs that cool the plant’s radioactive nuclear fuel rods. As a result, automated safety systems at the plant triggered a shutdown.

Adobe Systems Inc. is launching a new version of its document sharing software Acrobat on Monday, and this time it can package videos.

Acrobat allows users to package documents so they can be read across different hardware and operating systems.

Acrobat 9 comes with Adobe’s video-enabling software Flash. Users can include Flash-based videos when they create and share documents with the portable document format, commonly known as PDF.

With a professional version of Acrobat 9, for example, users could package a Power Point presentation not just with images, but also with an audio of the presenter’s voice.

“You can now send someone a presentation that speaks on its own all through a PDF,” said Adobe spokesman Kevin M. Lynch, who is not related to the company’s chief technology officer with the same name.

Adobe also launched Acrobat.com, which will host Web-based software services to support document creation and sharing.