For VMware-based systems, OpenNebula 3.8 improves recovery from infrastructure failures with better handling of crashed virtual machine (VM) images. New drivers improve the management of data stores and introduce native support of VMFS. For KVM-based virtual machines, OpenNebula now supports the SPICE protocol and cgroups which can be used to enforce CPU usage limits. Other improvements allow the toolkit to more easily handle VM migration and creation.

Along with user interface improvements to the Sunstone and self-service frontends, Twin Jet also implements several new interfaces for Amazon’s EC2 service. This makes it easier to create and manage volumes on EC2 instances and enables better encryption key handling.

A complete list of features in OpenNebula 3.8 is available in the release notes. The developers point out that they have made a concerted effort to make the toolkit available in native package formats and in the repositories of as many Linux distributions as possible.

The software can be downloaded from the project’s web site as source or binary packages for CentOS, Ubuntu, openSUSE and Debian. OpenNebula source code is provided under the Apache 2.0 licence.

Experts in Europe discovered Java bugs in August and had used them to launch attacks. Oracle did make amends eventually, but took several days to introduce an update that fixed the flaws. Customers can still obtain Java directly from Oracle if they want to access web content written the widely used programming language.

Java provides universal compatibility to programmers, as it allows them to write code that can run on any kind of machine. Java serves as a bridge that allows web developers to design content that can be viewed on multiple browsers run on different operating systems like Windows, Macs and Linux. It is present in almost every computer on the globe, on every Blue Ray player and on three billion mobile phones.

Through this move, Apple has distanced itself from a platform that receives contributions from the world’s largest development community of over nine million developers.

Both Apple and Oracle have reportedly agreed about two years ago, that that the former will eventually stop providing Java software to Mac users for an undisclosed reason.

At the end of 2016, there will be 2.3 billion computers, tablets and smartphones using Android software, compared with 2.28 billion Windows devices, according to the research.

That compares to an expected 1.5 billion Windows devices by the end of this year, against 608 million using Android.

Android, which reached the market only in 2008, has risen fast to be the dominant smartphone platform, controlling two-thirds of that market. It has taken the No. 2 spot in the fast-growing tablet computer market.

The proliferation of the free software gives Google its edge on the search market — its key profit generator.

Worldwide shipments of personal computers fell by over 8 per cent in the third quarter, the steepest decline since 2001, as more consumers flock to increasingly powerful tablets and smartphones for more basic computing.

Microsoft’s Windows has dominated the personal computer industry for decades, but the company has struggled to keep up with the shift to wireless, and in smartphones its market share is around 3 per cent.

There are also now new graph types, like pie graphs or bar charts. The Countries report shows where users are located on a world map, not unlike what you will find in Google Analytics.

There are new buttons for day, week and month for the timeline graph. Google says these will “allow for more control over granularity when analyzing activity over longer time periods.”

You can choose “Events” on a timeline report graph or select the “Events” report from the navigation to see how specific account changes are related to account performance, Google explains.

Reports are now organized into “Common Reports,” ” Quick Reports,” and “Saved Reports”. Quick reports can be accessed in their own panel instead of having to navigate through the Saved reports panel.

Motorola and Verizon were slow to update their once king of the hill Bionic to the latest and greatest, but now it’s finally available. If you’ve not received the update yet, the notification should be appearing any time now. We heard small reports the update was rolling out on Monday, but today it’s rolling out to the masses according to multiple reports.

As usual you can just wait for the update to arrive, or manually head to settings > about phone > check for updates and pull Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich yourself. The update brings a seriously improved user interface, a neat new clock widget, and tons of improvements to the aging smartphone.

The image below is the full change log right from Verizon on what to expect from ICS on the DROID Bionic. As a reminder, the Android 4.0 ICS update is a rather large one so it could take a solid 10-15 minutes to install. Make sure to have plenty of battery life before accepting the over-the-air update as well, just to be safe.

We don’t need to remind you of the couple’s past, and their reunion has certainly angered Rihanna’s fans over recent months. In early October, Brown and Rihanna partied together in New York City and were caught at Jay Z’s concert at the Barclays Center later that week. A couple of days later, in a video titled ‘The Real Chris Brown,’ the Grammy winner mused, “Is there such a thing as loving two people? I don’t know if that’s possible. But for me, I feel like that. When you have history with somebody, then you tend to fall in love with somebody else, it’s kind of difficult. I’m just being real.” Clearly he dropped the ‘loving two people’ stuff thing pretty soon after, reportedly ditching long-time girlfriend Karrueche Tran over his ‘friendship’ with Rihanna.

Let us not forget, Brown is still on probation for assaulting Rihanna in 2009 though it looks as though the Barbadian chart topper has agreed to forgive and forget.

Vice-president of engineering Mike Schroepfer’s job is to ensure the smooth running of Facebook. Large-scale outages are few and far between, so much so that when they do happen, it makes international news.

“Our goal is to make it not seem hard, so when you use the product it’s very seamless,” he says. “But there’s a lot of technical work behind it to make it scale.

“Everyone using the product gets a totally different experience, and even second by second it’s a different experience. As more people use Facebook, those interconnections get deeper, so there are more things happening in your network, updating more frequently.”

In 2008, Schroepfer moved from Mozilla, where he worked on the Firefox browser, to join the growing social network.

Back then, Facebook had only a fraction of the users it currently boasts. In December 2007, official figures put the site’s total at 58 million users.

“When I was at Mozilla I never thought I’d get the chance to work on something on a bigger scale because we had hundreds of millions of people using Firefox,” he says. “At the time I joined Facebook it was actually smaller in terms of users, less than 100 million. The thing that’s most fun about Facebook is the scale and reach of the products. That’s what drives me every day – the chance to work on something that so many people use.”

Everyone who starts in Facebook’s engineering team goes through a process known as bootcamp, a six-week introduction to the company and how it works.

The bug only manifests when the filesystem’s starting block is zero. This will cause the kernel to truncate the journal when the filesystem is unmounted. This situation occurs if the filesystem is mounted and unmounted so quickly, that the journal log does not have a chance to be written completely. The first time this occurs, the ext4 driver can recover the journal which will not lead to any ill effects. Should the same situation arise twice, though, data from the newer mount session will get written to the journal before data from the older one, leading to metadata blocks that “can end up getting very scrambled indeed”, according to Ts’o.

The kernel developer cited users who shutdown and boot their laptop instead of hibernating them as a possible group which could be hit by this bug, leading to data loss as described by the original reporter of the problem. Ts’o apologised to affected users for not having spotted the bug in the original commit and released a patch. When another kernel developer doubted that the patch completely fixed the problem, Ts’o published a second follow-up patch.

Beyond affecting Linux 3.6.2 and later versions, the problematic commit was also backported to the stable 3.5.x branch of the kernel. It is currently not known when it will be fixed in that release, although the Linux developers are working to resolve this as well.

A lot of us have switched to webapps for our day-to-day tools, like Gmail, Google Docs, and Twitter. Ubuntu’s new webapp feature puts these tools on your desktop as if they were standalone apps, and integrates them in the OS. For example, after you visit Gmail for the first time in Firefox or Chromium, you’ll get a prompt asking you if you want to integrate it with your system. If you say yes, you’ll see Gmail show up in Ubuntu’s launcher, and you can click on it to bring it up in its own window. You can also right-click on it to perform certain actions like composing a new message.

These webapps also integrate with themenu bar—for example, Gmail will notify you when you have new mail via Ubuntu’s indicator icon. Other apps, like Grooveshark or Pandora, will show up in the Sound menu. You can add any webapp to the launcher, but only some have OS integration baked in—Ubuntu has gotten you started with a few, but webapp developers can integrate their own apps if they want, so you should see more support for webapps as time goes on.

Lastly, those of you on netbooks and other low powered devices will notice that Unity 2D no longer exists. Instead, Ubuntu now has one version of Unity, which means installing a separate version and getting everything working is far less of a hassle. Now, if you have a low powered device, Unity will recognize that and switch to the CPU for all your graphics handling. We wish it ran a little bit better on slower machines (it doesn’t seem to be as fast as the old Unity 2D was), but the unified system is a nice change nonetheless.

This deal involves photo-shoots, making public appearances as well as TV and radio advertisements that would feature Christina singing.

The mother of one, who recently hit back at critics of her curvier figure, is said to have received the offer as she recently claimed that she is very comfortable in her own skin, and wants to “empower” other women by showing she is proud of her body.