Sharky's Notebook

Yesterday it was announced that GNOME 3.0 is delayed till next year. The extra time has given the Shell Developers some more time to play around with new concepts and they have come up a new mockup. Here are the new mockups.

A provocative editorial at The Register makes this suggestion: "Microsoft should consider acquiring Novell's SUSE Linux business and focusing it completely on mobile. Novell has a seat at the Linux Foundation's MeeGo table, and Microsoft should embrace that operating system rather than its myriad (but universally unsuccessful) mobile variants of Windows."

AMD plans to start shipping the USB 3-equipped chipset in the fourth quarter of 2010, beating Intel to the post. Intel hasn't announced its official plans for integrated USB 3 support yet, but various sources say it's not expected until we're well into 2011.

As Nvidia falters, Advanced Micro Devices' ATI graphics unit is on the rise, spurred by "radical" shifts in the market, according to Mercury Research, which tracks the market for GPUs or graphics processing units.

Microsoft had its annual financial analyst meeting on Thursday, and Steve Ballmer answered questions about what the company's answer to the iPad was going to be, and whether Windows Phone 7 was going to be a part of that product strategy. He said, "We're coming . . . We're coming full guns. The operating system is called Windows." Ballmer and Microsoft so don't get it. I can't believe Steve Ballmer is making me feel sorry for Microsoft.

Several talks at the Black Hat security conference this week in Las Vegas will focus on tools that could make software safer by automatically searching for bugs--and pinpointing the ones that could be most dangerous.

Richard Stallman, who's still taking on the role of the extremist who says extreme things so other Free Software advocates can look moderate in comparison, answers Reddit readers' questions. But there's some good stuff in there, and it seems he's dialed back the nutty a bit.

Oracle has announced that rival hardware vendors Dell and Hewlett-Packard intend to certify and resell its Solaris and Enterprise Linux operating systems as well as Oracle VM on their x86 servers. The announcement "demonstrates Oracle's commitment to openness," company co-president Charles Phillips said in a statement.