Recent announcement of Microsoft and Novell pact covers the following grounds:

• Support in virtualization of each other OS to coexist on same hardware.
• Patent covenant so that buyers do not have to worry about patent infringement and related legal issues.
• Better working together of MS Office and Openoffice suites.

There is a new whiff in the air, of an old wine or maybe new wine in new bottle. Books having alluring words like 'code phrases' in their title are coming out.

RedHat has announced application stack with JBoss application server as one of the components along with others like Postgresql, mysql, Tomcat etc. This would benefit the corporate buyers who prefer to have IT deployments as a one-stop affair. Traditionally, deployment of open source based solutions has put the onus of integrating the various components like web server, application server, database on the system integrator or solution provider. Having a single company provide support for a 'stack' of components would assure buyers about one of the needling issues about support solution based on open source components. A single point of contact gives more confidence to buyers and will ease their concern about service and support.

I read an interesting point of view on net about news and google news in particular. It said google news fetches news from other sources, and displays them based on whatever algorithm to rank stories. But however good the fetch and search algorithms may be, the ultimate quality of google news still relies on the original content writers themselves. If the journalistic quality of the original news content goes down, can the quality of google news remain the same ?

Sometime back I had blogged on release of google finance beta. Recently, I searched for an Indian company on google and found a result pointing to google finance in search list. Intrigued, went to check out the stuff and here is the deal as I see it:

A new service from google portfolio! But this one has a few interesting
features, which make it different from other google services.

I received by email a recent newsletter from Oracle Technology Network (OTN TechBlast) which had this announcement of an initiative to consoidate blogs about oracle in one place.

Dear OTN member:

It's clear to us at OTN (and across Oracle generally) that there's great value to the community in "nurturing" customer and employee blogs. For that reason, blogs.oracle.com has recently taken flight.

Information about G-Drive leaked out from a presentation kept on google site. The idea is not entirely new, some vendors e.g. godaddy.com (largest domain registrar, and web hosting provider) provides an online folder service. It costs from $5 to $10 a month depending on storage, which starts 1 GB onwards. If coming from google's stable, however, one would expect a scale and usability of a different order.

IBM recently announced a free version of DB2 database server called DB2 Express-C. This follows after both Oracle and Microsoft had announced free versions of Oracle 10g and SQL Server 2005 respectively few months back.

A recent news says that the H1B limit of 20000 for skilled workers under category of graduating students has already been filled in US for fiscal 2006 (ending Oct 2006). This should suggest that there is good job creation happening in Hi-Tech sectors in US. However, the employment data in US otherwise does not indicate exceptional no of job increases. In that case, it could more likely mean that the job opportunities are better for highly skilled people, who have updated themselves with latest skills demanded in job market. For others who may have many years of experience but declining skills of relevance, it may be tougher in the job market.