"Samsung Electronics and Microsoft will next month show off the ready-to-market version of a hybrid hard drive which can greatly reduce boot-up time of laptops and desktop PCs. The HHD is the convergence of a flash memory chip and a conventional platter-type magnetic disk drive. To save the time and energy spent spinning a metal disk drive it is designed to use static flash memory when starting a PC."

After making your own up-to-date Fedora install DVD, "creating a yum repo for installing FC5, prepatched, via the network, is also fairly simple. And makes a lot of sense for anyone supporting a Fedora-based environment."

"The Ubuntu team is proud to present the Flight 7 release of Ubuntu 6.06 LTS (Long Term Support). With Ubuntu 6.06 LTS Flight 7 comes many bug fixes, general fixes all around, new version of some key applications and much more. Note: This is still a development release. Do not install it on production machines. The final stable version will be released in June of 2006." Kubuntu and Xubuntu versions have been released as well.

A key consideration in adopting an iterative process is selecting how long your iterations will be. Mike Cohn discusses the issues to consider when determining whether your team's iterations should last two weeks, three weeks, or longer.

Intel has decided to borrow the sequential naming scheme it used for its famous Pentium brand and apply it to the new Core line of chips, the company is expected to announce Sunday. Earlier this year, Intel released the Core Duo processor, and in a few months it will unveil Core 2 Duo processors. The Core 2 Duo name will be used for desktop chips based on the Conroe chip, as well as for notebook chips based on the Merom chip. Merom processors consume less power than Conroe chips, but they're otherwise very similar.

"Security and validation are critical issues in computing, and the next fifty years will be harder than the last. There are a number of proven programming techniques and design approaches which are already helping to harden our modern systems, but each of these must be carefully balanced with usability in order to be effective. In this talk, Alan Cox, fellow at Red Hat Linux, explores the future of what may be the biggest threat facing software engineers, the unverified user."

"In this article I will describe how to monitor your server with munin and monit. munin produces nifty little graphics about nearly every aspect of your server (load average, memory usage, CPU usage, MySQL throughput, eth0 traffic, etc.) without much configuration, whereas monit checks the availability of services like Apache, MySQL, Postfix and takes the appropriate action such as a restart if it finds a service is not behaving as expected."

A group of software developers have created a program to make Microsoft Office work with files in the OpenDocument format, a move that would bridge currently incompatible desktop applications. Gary Edwards, an engineer involved in the open-source OpenOffice.org project and founder of the OpenDocument Foundation, on Thursday discussed the software plug-in on the Web site Groklaw.

"KDE 3.5 is a vivid platform. We looked at some reasons why three weeks ago and also last week. Today, we look at the photo-manager digiKam, the plotting application QtiPlot, the LaTeX-dreamteam Kile and KBibTeX and the upcoming KDE 3.5.3 release."

Various rumours from all around the web are saying that Apple will release the successor to its highly successful iBook product line coming Tuesday. Named the MacBook, it will be slightly thinner than current iBooks, available in both black and white, and slightly more expensive than the current iBooks. In the meantime, in a rare reply to rumours, Apple has denied that it will be ditching Aperture.

"Microsoft has officially released Windows Vista Build 5381.1 today on Microsoft Connect. Internal sources have confirmed that this is 'what will be' Beta 2 - in a couple more days at WinHEC 2006. What we are seeing right now with this build is a feature complete Beta without the performance guarantee. If you want to put it in terms of practical use, etc. this is Beta 2; it will be compiled and recompiled several more times, mini-glitches taken care of, size and speed optimized, and maybe a couple of minor things changed, but for all intents and purposes, those of us that have been dying for another beta ever since the first; it's here." Update: Err, an update.

"There is a speed war on the web. Browsers compete on many fronts; security, standards support, features and speed. Most people are aware of which major browser fails on three of these, but one of them is still open for grabs. Speed." On Windows, Opera was the fastest browser, while on Linux Konqueror performed the best for viewing basic pages (however, as soon as images, scripts or frequent use of back/forward buttons is involded, Opera is faster). On MacOS X, Opera and Safari perform the best. Overall, Gecko-based browsers did fairly poorly.

The micro vs. monolithic kernel debate is now very much alive. Not too long ago, I wrote an article on the merits of microkernels, while a week later we featured a retort. Now, the greatest proponent of the microkernel steps in-- yes, Andy Tanenbaum writes: "Microkernels - long discarded as unacceptable because of their lower performance compared with monolithic kernels - might be making a comeback in operating systems due to their potentially higher reliability, which many researchers now regard as more important than performance." Now, we only need Torvalds to chime in, and it's 1992 all over again.

GTK+ 2.9.0 has been released. This is the first development release leading up to GTK+ 2.10. For completeness: "GTK+ is a multi-platform toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces. Offering a complete set of widgets, GTK+ is suitable for projects ranging from small one-off tools to complete application suites."