Want the fastest Windows XP Core Duo notebook? Then buy a Mac. According to benchmarks carried out by website GearLog, Apple's MacBook Pro running Windows XP is a better Adobe Photoshop rig than any other Core Duo laptop on the market. The site used a recently detailed technique that shoehorns the Microsoft operating system onto Intel-based Macs - a trick that last week won its formulators $13000 in prize money.

"As a long serving citizen of the Internet I have, in my time, accumulated membership to a number of email groups. It was in one of these groups that I first heard reports of a virus (Leap.A) that had started to infect Apple’s Mac OS X operating system. I was not surprised that this had happened; in fact I was quite taken aback that it had not happened before! But I was flabbergasted by the response of the Mac Mafia to this news. The assumption that something is infallible is at best naive and at worst stupid; it can only invite trouble."

Several months ago there was an OSNews article which discussed why browsers should be able to display OpenDocument. It's been a while now and recently Wily Yuen, the reader who submitted this to us, discovered on the OpenOffice.org Wiki that there is indeed somebody working on a Firefox extension called ODFReader, which will display ODF within the browser using XSLT. The extension only reads OOo Writer documents and displays only text so far. You can check it out here.

"This tutorial shows you how to configure BIND9 DNS server to serve an internal network and an external network at the same time with different set of information. To accomplish that goal, a new feature of BIND9 called view is used. As a tutorial it'll walk you through the whole set up, but initial knowledge of BIND and DNS is required, there are plenty of documents that cover that information on the Internet."

Microsoft has officially announced to ActiveWin (over a conference call) the release date of Windows Vista. Windows Vista will be made officially to consumers in January 2007, while making Windows Vista available to businesses only in November 2006. In addition, there will be a feature complete Beta 2 CTP released in the next quarter.

A month after releasing the architecture specifications and hypervisor APIs for its UltraSPARC T1 processor to the open-source community, Sun is putting out more information on the chip. Sun on March 21 will publish the hardware design for the T1 - formerly codenamed Niagara - and the Solaris operating system simulation specifications for the chip. The move is the latest in the company's OpenSPARC project, designed to enable hardware and software developers to build atop the new chip's architecture. The goal is to build an ecosystem around the processor that will expand the reach of the SPARC platform. In addition, Sun's grid will finally launch this week.