Google announced today that it's buying DoubleClick for $3.1 Billion in cash. Wow!

This will give Google a big leg up in the display ad market, since AdSense has been primarily driven by contextual text-based ads up until now. This is going to be a big shift for online advertising. Something we're very keen to track at InfoWorld, now that we've shifted to an online-only model.

News travels fast via Twitter, from Scoble.

DoubleSense? AdClick? GooClick? Who knows.

New York Times

The makers of iSquint (a Mac app which converts video files for AppleTV, iPod, etc) had a little fun with their Help menu:

They also make the excellent ($23.32) VisualHub, which offers many more options than iSquint, and is what I use for converting my video. It doesn't have the groovy Help menu though. =)

After using several of the betas of Leopard since WWDC last year, I must say I wasn't too surprised to read that Apple has delayed the launch of OS X 10.5 until October. Apple specifically mentioned a resource drain due to the iPhone in their statement. I'm not sure how true that is since they've known the project timelines for both products for a long time now.

Many of the new features are working well in the betas, but it just doesn't have the polish that you would expect if it was going to be ready in the next couple of months. Beta 9a410 is downloading as I type, so we'll see how much improvement there is. The Known Bugs list in this latest release is still pretty significant though.

Hopefully we'll see most of the "Top Secret" Leopard features at WWDC in June.

Apple Statement

iPhone has already passed several of its required certification tests and is on schedule to ship in late June as planned. We can't wait until customers get their hands (and fingers) on it and experience what a revolutionary and magical product it is. However, iPhone contains the most sophisticated software ever shipped on a mobile device, and finishing it on time has not come without a price — we had to borrow some key software engineering and QA resources from our Mac OS X team, and as a result we will not be able to release Leopard at our Worldwide Developers Conference in early June as planned. While Leopard's features will be complete by then, we cannot deliver the quality release that we and our customers expect from us. We now plan to show our developers a near final version of Leopard at the conference, give them a beta copy to take home so they can do their final testing, and ship Leopard in October. We think it will be well worth the wait. Life often presents tradeoffs, and in this case we're sure we've made the right ones. [Apr 12, 2007]

I think their approach of waiting until it's ready to release, while frustrating for users, is the right way to go when you hang your reputation on delivering quality software. None of the release the beta and then ship a service pack mentality that Microsoft takes on such things.

http://www.apple.com/hotnews

Debian Linux 4.0 (codename etch) was officially released today. Out of all available Linux distros, Debian has the most robust package management and updating system I've ever used. We primarily use Debian (currently 3.1) to run InfoWorld's critical systems and we've been very happy with it for the past 5 or so years.

Go grab a copy via BitTorrent or other means.

From the official release,

The Debian Project is pleased to announce the official release of Debian GNU/Linux version 4.0, codenamed etch, after 21 months of constant development. Debian GNU/Linux is a free operating system which supports a total of eleven processor architectures and includes the KDE, GNOME and Xfce desktop environments. It also features cryptographic software and compatibility with the FHS v2.3 and software developed for version 3.1 of the LSB.

Using a now fully integrated installation process, Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 comes with out-of-the-box support for encrypted partitions. This release introduces a newly developed graphical frontend to the installation system supporting scripts using composed characters and complex languages; the installation system for Debian GNU/Linux has now been translated to 58 languages.

Also beginning with Debian GNU/Linux 4.0, the package management system has been improved regarding security and efficiency. Secure APT allows the verification of the integrity of packages downloaded from a mirror. Updated package indices won't be downloaded in their entirety, but instead patched with smaller files containing only differences from earlier versions.

This release includes a number of updated software packages, such as the K Desktop Environment 3.5.5a (KDE), an updated version of the GNOME desktop environment 2.14, the Xfce 4.4 desktop environment, the GNUstep desktop 5.2, X.Org 7.1, OpenOffice.org 2.0.4a, GIMP 2.2.13, Iceweasel (an unbranded version of Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.3), Icedove (an unbranded version of Mozilla Thunderbird 1.5), Iceape (an unbranded version of Mozilla Seamonkey 1.0.8), PostgreSQL 8.1.8, MySQL 5.0.32, GNU Compiler Collection 4.1.1, Linux kernel version 2.6.18, Apache 2.2.3, Samba 3.0.24, Python 2.4.4 and 2.5, Perl 5.8.8, PHP 4.4.4 and 5.2.0, Asterisk 1.2.13, and more than 18,000 other ready to use software packages.

Upgrades to Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 from the previous release, Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 codenamed sarge, are automatically handled by the aptitude package management tool for most configurations, and to a certain degree also by the apt-get package management tool. As always, Debian GNU/Linux systems can be upgraded quite painlessly, in place, without any forced downtime, but it is strongly recommended to read the release notes for possible issues. For detailed instructions about installing and upgrading Debian GNU/Linux, please see the release notes. Please note that the release notes will be further improved and translated to additional languages in the coming weeks.