More details are available concerning the successor of Sun's UltraSPARC T1 (Niagara) processor. The Rock processor - due out in 2008 - will have four cores or 16 cores, depending on how you slice the product. By that, we mean that Sun has divided the Rock CPU into four, separate cores each with four processing engines. Each core also has four FGUs (floating point/graphics units). Each processing engine will be able to crank two threads giving you - 4x4x2 - 32 threads per chip.

The desktop metaphor has served our computing needs well for the last decade. It has started however, to show its age over the last years. For office users it is still adequate but for everyone else it is often awkward and slow. Since a computer is no longer confined in the office, but in some cases serves also as the entertainment hub in our living rooms, new User Interfaces are required. In some areas the foundations are already in place while in others users are silently suffering every day, having to cope with inefficient and unproductive UIs.

Gael Duval, creator of Mandrake Linux (now Mandriva Linux), has been fired from the company. The information leaked on the Mandriva forums, and Duval later confirmed it on his own webpage. He says: "Since the information has leaked, I will post a message in the next few days on this website about why this is the end of the Mandriva story for me, and what's next." Since Mandrake was for many the first distribution they ever tried, I think it is only fair to thank him for creating Mandrake, and to wish him the best of luck in any following endeavours.

"The /proc filesystem is a virtual filesystem that permits a novel approach for communication between the Linux kernel and user space. In the /proc filesystem, virtual files can be read from or written to as a means of communicating with entities in the kernel, but unlike regular files, the content of these virtual files is dynamically created. This article introduces you to the /proc virtual filesystem and demonstrates its use."

IBM researchers Singh, Smith & Reed are developing in their free time legacy BIOS support for Intel Macs. "BAMBIOS" is using Boch's BIOS emulation code and has also adapted its graphical BIOSes for the current ATi and Intel graphics chipsets used on the Intel Macs today. The BIOS itself loads as a small EFI-capable OS that then chainloads to a second stage boot manager to then boot non-EFI OSes (editor's note: In the past some unsupported VESA 1.2 PC users used a small DOS partition to load a special DOS-based "VESA 2.0 graphics bios" code that was preparing the way for what BeOS was expecting and then it was chainloading the BeOS from DOS). BAMBIOS is a very promising project to bring Windows and non-EFI Unices to the Mac platform, although the downside is that you most likely need updated versions for it for each new Mac released - if the Mac hardware has changed from its previous models that is. And if the trick used is indeed chainloading, then some quirky re-partitioning of the drive will be required by the user too. Update: Additional info from Amit Singh below.

"Every so often there comes a genre-bending product, and Tyan has one of those on its stand at CeBIT this year. It is called the Typhoon PSC or Person Super Computer, and is aimed at the scientific and HPC set. Typhoon PSCs come either Opteron or P4/PD flavors, and brushed aluminium or black finish. The point of this box is not to make an ultimate gaming rig, it is meant to take what used to be the domain of a data centre and move it to under the desktop." That's 4 dual-socket blades (either P-IV or Opteron) in a stylish case with wheels and handles. Now that's one machine I'd like to play Solitare on.