"Intel’s Developer Forum (IDF) for Spring 2006 has a rather obvious focus: the announcement of Intel's next generation microarchitecture. Intel’s new core will almost certainly leapfrog arch-rival AMD for integer and commercial computing performance. That alone should make this IDF one of the most exciting in the last several years."

"The PS3’s hard drive 'will be 60GB big, be completely upgradeable, and support Linux OS' plus 'will act as a home server and allow users to store various forms of media to be pulled up elsewhere.' It hasn't yet been made clear if all PS3 systems will come bundled with a hard drive. SPOnG expects that this will be the case, and we will be very surprised otherwise, but watch this space for confirmation."

People love screenshots. It's probably because humans are a very visually orientated species. When it comes to software, people claim to be able to judge entire products, just by looking at a few screenshots. Especially for those people: 85 screenshots of Haiku running all sorts of applications. For the people who've been living under a rock the past 5 years: Haiku is an attempt to recreate BeOS as an open source product. And for the people who don't know BeOS-- click here.

Red Hat announced several moves Tuesday to bring virtualization technology to the mainstream Linux market by the end of the year, a move that the company promises will dramatically increase server efficiency. The company already has promised to include a major virtualization component, the Xen hypervisor software, in its next premium product, Red Hat Enterprise Linux version 5, due by the end of the year.

As part of its monthly patch cycle, Microsoft on Tuesday released fixes for six security holes in Office and one flaw in Windows. Five of the six vulnerabilities in Office are specific to Excel. The most serious flaws could allow an attacker to gain control over a vulnerable PC running the spreadsheet program, Microsoft said in Security Bulletin MS06-012. In all cases, the miscreant would have to persuade the user to open a malformed Excel file, the software maker said. The sixth problem affects a range of Office applications, including some versions of Word, Outlook & PowerPoint. Microsoft's second update deals with an operating system issue that affects Windows XP with Service Pack 1 and Windows Server 2003.

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.

Better late than never: "With more than 1500 improvements since the first beta release of the 1.5 series, the KOffice developers invite the user community for the final round of testing of KOffice 1.5 before the first release candidate. Read the full announcement, the changelog, download the release, and give it some real world testing for us!"

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.

"This is the year... The year that Microsoft releases the newest version of Windows. We are targeting to make Windows Vista generally available in the second half of this year, and the exact delivery date will ultimately be determined by the quality of the product. So what is so compelling that our customers would want to spend money upgrading to the Vista operating system? Let’s take a quick look at all that Vista offers a small business."

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.

Talk of an imminent sale of Sun to Google has been swirling around trading floors and Silicon Valley for more than a week. Shares of Sun, which has a partnership with Google to develop and distribute each other’s technology, spiked up about 4 percent last week as a result of the rumors. The speculation got even more legs after Google purchased Writely, a maker of a web-based word processor that some people viewed as a product to be added to Sun’s StarOffice suite, which Google may help distribute. It’s also convenient that Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, is the former chief technology officer of Sun.

"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."

Company makes plans to move away from prepackaged software and into web-based applications. As the Internet transforms the way people use computers, Microsoft founder Bill Gates has a message for the world's biggest software maker: adapt or die. "We must act quickly and decisively," Gates wrote in an Oct. 30 memo to Microsoft executives. "The next sea change is upon us." More at DetNews.

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.