Merom, a notebook processor and the third leg of Intel's Core architecture triumvirate, will also get a thorough airing at a launch party planned at the chipmaker's headquarters this Thursday. Merom will represent additional improvements in performance and power consumption. Like Conroe, it also will use the Core 2 Duo brand, with model numbers in the 5000 and 7000 range that will indicate performance.

Politicians. They are a certain type of people. I do not like them. Many do not like them. I think if there's one thing all of man has in common, whether he be Christian or Muslim, black or white, young or old, American or European, is a dislike of politicians. But then-- why on earth do we allow politics to complicate software? Note: Sunday Eve Column.

A new version of the official Qt book, "C++ GUI Programming with Qt 4", has now been published. The book is officially approved by Trolltech and has been reviewed by many Qt developers. It contains 560 pages of new and updated instructional content covering end-to-end cross-platform development.

Toby Richards wrote an opinion article for NewsForge, claiming that for him, Linux won't get mainstream until Evolution - or another capable Outlook-like client - gets optimized and offers 100% compatibility with Exchange. In the comments section of Newsforge readers offered more reasons as to why Linux is not mainstream, offering a view on their needs. My take: While for my personal, home usage of Linux my needs are different, I agree with Toby that companies won't switch their desktops if full Exchange compatibility isn't reached and if Evolution stops being the memory beast it currently is.

In the early days of the 1970s, computer games were little more than a fantasy to most of the world’s population. Only the very few hardcore computer tech specialists had even the faintest inkling that computers could be used for more than calculating complex equations and filling huge rooms with noise, heat, and the faint stink of unwashed code math majors.

Dell grappled with apparently severe overheating problems in scores of notebooks for at least two years before it announced a recall of 22000 notebooks last year, according to a source close to the company. The source allowed CRN to review documentation of investigations into the notebook problems, and the source said that documentation was supplied to Dell executives. The evidence, which included photographs of damaged notebooks, came to light in the wake of reports of one Dell notebook exploding in front of cameras during a conference in Japan.