Sometimes, the smallest of things can amaze me. I'm a sucker for details, which probably lies at the base of my slightly obsessive-compulsive traits of keeping things organized, tidy, aligned, and neat. It's great to see some companies are suckers for details too. Unless the details just become too insignificant. Note: Sunday Eve Column. Short, this week, though.

Intel has decided to borrow the sequential naming scheme it used for its famous Pentium brand and apply it to the new Core line of chips, the company is expected to announce Sunday. Earlier this year, Intel released the Core Duo processor, and in a few months it will unveil Core 2 Duo processors. The Core 2 Duo name will be used for desktop chips based on the Conroe chip, as well as for notebook chips based on the Merom chip. Merom processors consume less power than Conroe chips, but they're otherwise very similar.

Jasjeet Sekhon benchmarked Linux and MacOS X on the MacBook Pro using his statistical software, and finds that "Linux is found to be much faster than Apple's OS X for statistical computing. For example, in one benchmark Linux is more than twice as fast." Earlier, he ran tests on a G5 and an Opteron, and conlcuded: "Those results were terrible for OS X and not particularly good for the G5 (970) chip. For example, my 2.7 pound Pentium-M Linux laptop is faster than my 44 pound G5 running OS X. The floating point performance of the 970 chip leaves much to be desired, but OS X makes the performance problem significantly worse."

"In this article I will describe how to monitor your server with munin and monit. munin produces nifty little graphics about nearly every aspect of your server (load average, memory usage, CPU usage, MySQL throughput, eth0 traffic, etc.) without much configuration, whereas monit checks the availability of services like Apache, MySQL, Postfix and takes the appropriate action such as a restart if it finds a service is not behaving as expected."

The A9home is officially on sale to the public with the first orders expected to ship by next month. The published specification says the A9home is just 168mm by 103mm by53mm (roughly 6" x 4" x 2") in size. Inside its blue aluminum case is a 400MHz Samsung ARM9 processor with a Silicon Motion chipset, a 40GB hard disc, 128MB of SDRAM and 8MB of video RAM. The operating system is 32bit RISC OS Adjust, and the box runs off a 5 volt 20W power supply. It features four USB 1.1 ports, 2 PS/2 sockets, an ethernet network port, and an audio out socket.

"KDE 3.5 is a vivid platform. We looked at some reasons why three weeks ago and also last week. Today, we look at the photo-manager digiKam, the plotting application QtiPlot, the LaTeX-dreamteam Kile and KBibTeX and the upcoming KDE 3.5.3 release."

Andrew Morton, the lead maintainer of the Linux production kernel, is worried that an increasing number of defects are appearing in the 2.6 kernel and is considering drastic action to resolve it. "I believe the 2.6 kernel is slowly getting buggier. It seems we're adding bugs at a higher rate than we're fixing them," Morton said, in a talk at the LinuxTag conference in Wiesbaden, Germany, on Friday.

"Microsoft has officially released Windows Vista Build 5381.1 today on Microsoft Connect. Internal sources have confirmed that this is 'what will be' Beta 2 - in a couple more days at WinHEC 2006. What we are seeing right now with this build is a feature complete Beta without the performance guarantee. If you want to put it in terms of practical use, etc. this is Beta 2; it will be compiled and recompiled several more times, mini-glitches taken care of, size and speed optimized, and maybe a couple of minor things changed, but for all intents and purposes, those of us that have been dying for another beta ever since the first; it's here." Update: Err, an update.

"We have been overwhelmed with requests to take a serious look at the frame-rate performance differences between the various open-source and proprietary contenders. Our first article on this topic, which will likely be the first of a series of examinations, is looking at the differences between the X.Org open-source ATI Radeon driver and that of ATI's official but proprietary fglrx display driver."

The micro vs. monolithic kernel debate is now very much alive. Not too long ago, I wrote an article on the merits of microkernels, while a week later we featured a retort. Now, the greatest proponent of the microkernel steps in-- yes, Andy Tanenbaum writes: "Microkernels - long discarded as unacceptable because of their lower performance compared with monolithic kernels - might be making a comeback in operating systems due to their potentially higher reliability, which many researchers now regard as more important than performance." Now, we only need Torvalds to chime in, and it's 1992 all over again.

The Acorn brand will be used to launch a range of PC laptops at a computer show next week. The lack of connection shown between the new company behind the apparent revival and the Acorn of old is unclear, provoking a furious reaction from a number of RISC OS users. Acorn Computers Ltd, which was incorporated on January 28 this year, will be attending the CTS 2006 event at the NEC in Birmingham while promoting a 'new range of Acorn Notebooks'.

MadPengiun has a review of the PepperPad, a Linux-powered competitor to Microsoft's Origami concept, and concludes: "Overall, the Pepper Pad is a sleek ultra mobile PC in a nice form factor with a great touchscreen for navigating, launching applications, watching video and surfing the web. With the advent of AJAX web-based applications for calendaring, editing video, word processing, creating spreadsheets, and more, you can have some good fun with the Pepper Pad and get a wee bit of work done as well. The Pepper Pad won't replace a Sony PSP-type game platform, or a PDA, or a notebook, but it will do some things that those devices won't do."

Andy Updegrove interviews Inge Wallin, KOffice's promotions lead, about how KOffice is different from the other major office productivity releases that support ODF, which users may find it most appropriate to their needs, in what directions future development will proceed, and much more. Meanwhile, FreeSoftwareMagazine takes a look at the three major OpenDocument capable office suites/word processors.

"This famous controversy is there ever since I became aware of operating systems known as GNU/Linux. The GNU General Public License, which is used by Linux as well as most GNU software, armors both characters. GNU/Linux is the term coined by the Free Software Foundation, Richard Stallman and people who support FSF, for operating systems composed of the FSF's GNU software and the Linux kernel; such systems are generally called Linux."