"Intel invented the first microprocessor, the 4-bit 4004, in 1971. Since then the company has gone on to become a corporate powerhouse, growing almost as fast as the transistor count in their CPUs. However, the company has posted some disappointing earnings results recently, including a 38 percent drop in profit for the first quarter of 2006, and has been losing marketshare and mindshare to its rival AMD, especially in the high-end, 64-bit computing arena. Otellini thinks the best cure for the company's blues is an old fashioned corporate restructuring. The CEO announced the plan at an analyst conference today in New York City."

With Phonon, KDE developers will be able to write applications with multimedia functionality in a fraction of the time needed with one of the above mentioned media frameworks and libraries. This will facilitate the usage of media capabilities in the KDE desktop and applications.

ColorWare, a company which offers pre-coloured (my apologies for using that abomination of an English word) notebooks and desktops using a special coating process, has added the MacBook Pro to their product line up. If you find Apple's standard grey too boring, maybe a red or a black MacBook Pro is your game. They also offer coloured Mac Minis, iBooks, iMacs, Alienware computers, and more. You can also send in hardware you already own. They say they have some magical Wonderland procedure to paint the computers, but whether or not the process creates a tough layer of paint remains to be seen from customer testimonies.

YellowTAB has released Zeta 1.2. "The moment has come: yellowTAB presents the latest version of yellowTAB ZETA 1.2. So many items and features have been improved or changed that is is almost impossible to mention them all. Read on below to find out about the new and exciting changes we have made to yellowTAB ZETA 1.2."

InformationWeek compares the latest IE7 beta to Firefox 1.5, and concludes: "On a straight, feature-for-feature comparison, IE7 stacks up well against Firefox. If its improved security model lives up to its design specs, malware distributors will find it much more difficult to make a dishonest living, and the tabbed browsing features in the new release should make it much easier to deal with multiple pages."

"D-Link and Poul-Henning Kamp announced today that they have amicably resolved their dispute regarding access to Mr Kamp's GPS.Dix.dk NTP Time Server site. D-Link's existing products will have authorized access to Mr Kamp's server, but all new D-Link products will not use the GPS.Dix.dk NTP time server. D-Link is dedicated to remaining a good corporate and network citizen."

Microsoft is to enhance the product-activation programme in its Office software to make it more like that in Windows. And it will extend its 'Windows Genuine Advantage' programme to send alerts directly to users of pirate software, the company said yesterday.

"This research report by a third-year graduate student examines the growing use of desktop Linux among governments in the US and globally. Drawing on published research and comments from industry analysts, the author hypothesizes that desktop Linux may be nearing a tipping point within government settings, after which adoption can be expected to accelerate."

For the last few years, a coalition of technology companies, academics and computer programmers has been trying to persuade Congress to scale back the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Now US Congress is preparing to do precisely the opposite. A proposed copyright law seen by CNET News.com would expand the DMCA's restrictions on software that can bypass copy protections and grant federal police more wiretapping and enforcement powers.

"One of the main reasons that I'm so involved with open source is that I've always been fascinated by figuring out how things work. In this interview, John Baldwin of the FreeBSD project gives some insight on what it is like to be a FreeBSD developer and some of the things that happen behind the scenes of a large open source project."

"With a bit of C and microprocessors knowledge, this article shows it's possible to write your own device drivers in Linux. It might not be the easiest thing to do, but it's great to see that writing device drivers doesn't require black magic - it's just a matter of talking to the Linux kernel!" And a matter of praying that Linux's driver interface doesn't change while writing your driver, of course.

VMware has unveiled a technology consortium of hardware, software and service providers, with the aim to jointly-develop virtual desktop products. Called the Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Alliance, the new consortium counts several technology vendors as members including Altiris, Atos Origin, Check Point Software Technologies, Citrix, ClearCube Technology, Fujitsu-Siemens, Hitachi, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Sun Microsystems and Wyse Technology.

The firewall in Windows Vista will, by default, have half its protection turned off because that is what enterprise customers have requested, according to the software giant.

Version 0.62 of Visopsys was released today, including Qemu support, initial USB support, and some little games and bits of flair, in addition to the usual tweaks and bug fixes. Meanwhile, the offshoot project, "Partition Logic" continues to gain converts in the market for free partitioning tools. Detailed change log and downloads.