Sony's PS3, scheduled to be released near the end of this year, has been slated to have a hard drive that will support and will even include preinstalled Linux. This could be a breakthrough event not just for Linux but also for other alternative operating systems as well. The PS3 will almost certainly sell millions and millions of units, providing a unique opportunity for people to try something that would be more difficult on their regular computer.

News has leaked that Microsoft has enabled support for OpenGL to work with the Vista compositing desktop, as of the most recent preview build. Previously Microsoft's plan had been to force OpenGL to be translated to Direct3D, reducing performance by 50% and locking the OpenGL version to 1.4 only.

"Apple have shown some absolutely stellar benchmarks with the Core solo and Core Duo processors outperforming their G4 based predecessors by quite a considerable margin in most areas, heavily vectorised applications are seemingly the only exception. The story is not quite so clear with the G5 based iMac but there is a difference even there. These benchmarks can be considered no doubt as justification for the decision to switch to x86 processors. However, in typical Apple style there is some slight of hand, in particular as regards timing of the switch. Making the transition 6 months early is no mistake, it was absolutely critical to get those benchmarks."

Linus Torvalds has released Linux 2.6.16 today. "Not a lot of changes since -rc6, but there's various random one-liners here and there (a number of Coverity bugs found, for example), and there are small MIPS and PowerPC updates. It looks like both Fedora and SuSE end up using a kernel that is pretty close to this 2.6.16 release, so let's all hope it's good. Give it a good testing, please."

"One of the beauties that comes with Mac OS X is the Keychain that helps you manage your authorization needs as it acts as a depository of passwords. By using the Keychain you don't need to remember a myriad of passwords but rather just the Keychain password. Don't worry about losing your passwords either, since the Keychain can be backed up with ease."

"Now that the mystery is finally resolved, and we’ve seen the Origami from a number of companies at CeBIT 2006, it’s about time we face reality. The Origami needs no introduction, so I’ll get right to the point. Just like the Tablet PC, Microsoft’s Origami doesn’t stand a chance as a mass market device, and for good many reasons. Let’s break them down, shall we."

Does a reinvented Novell matter anymore? As the company prepares to trumpet its focus on serving the open enterprise at its annual BrainShare conference this week, industry observers remain mixed on whether the former networking powerhouse has a relevant place in today's corporate software market.

"Become more productive with your own code and others by utilizing Eclipse's syntax highlighting, code completion, and other amenities. It runs on any UNIX platform with a JRE (1.4 or newer) and an SWT port, such as Linux, Solaris, AIX, and HP-UX. It's easy enough to start a new project using Eclipse or to import an existing Eclipse project, but how do you bring existing code into the IDE? And what if you need to get an existing project compiling right away without modifying its existing makefile or configure script? Read along for the answer to all of these questions."

In a bid to simplify its product lines and get an edge on competitors, Cray plans a multi-year strategy to unify four different supercomputing technologies into a single, versatile machine. The company plans to announce the concept Monday with its multi-year, three-phase "adaptive supercomputing" plan, said Jan Silverman, senior vice president of corporate strategy.

After receiving several comments to his November 2005 article on hating UNIX, David Chisnall offers his responses and further insight on his continuing disdain.

This chapter begins with a historical perspective of the Mac OS X graphics system and the evolution of technology behind Quartz 2D. It also explores crucial aspects of the graphics technology that is shaping the graphics architecture of the Macintosh.

It's all too easy to place operations code inside class definitions (that is, code that does create/delete/modify). In many cases, such an approach is not necessarily a reflection of real world objects. But there are other reasons for abstracting operation code. Stephen Morris spells out these and other advantages of using the command pattern.

Have you heard the pitch for the tool that gives a 600% productivity improvement, or the new programming language that will solve all of your problems? Matt Heusser explains that confidence games abound in software development—and suggests what to do about them.

Fedora Core 5, 'Bordeaux', has been released to mirrors. The release notes are posted, along with sets of screenshots of the installation procedure and the resulting desktop, by Linux-Noob, so boys and girls, rejoice. The main new features of Fedora Core 5 are the latest GNOME and KDE desktops (2.14 and 3.5 respectively), integration of early work on the Fedora Rendering Project, Mono installed by default, new pakage manager front-ends, better sleep/hibernate support, and much, much more. Update: Screencast and screenshots.