Two articles about the Intel Mac Mini: "As a fan of faster computers from Apple, I’m heartened by this week’s release of an Intel-based Mac mini. In fact, with the SPECint_rate_base2000 benchmark indicating speeds of up to four times faster than the Mac mini G4, this new crop of minis sounds just about perfect. I say 'just about', because of one particular issue." And secondly, "Our first Intel-based Mac minis have arrived, straight from the Apple Store, and what was the first thing the cold, cruel alien intellects at Macworld did with one of these innocents? That’s right. We got out our putty knife, popped it open, and spilled its guts out." Here are some XBench tests between an Intel and a G4 Mac Mini.

"With six separate versions of Windows Vista on the way, Microsoft has a marketing challenge on its hands. How will the company properly inform users as to which versions support which features? One part of the plan is now becoming clear: all four 'consumer' versions of the OS will be available to users even after installation. How? They'll all be available for 'instant online upgrade' once Vista is installed."

Apparantly 3D browsers are the latest fad, as after uBrowser based on Mozilla Firefox, there is now SphereXplorer, a 3D browser based on Internet Explorer and SphereXP. Indulge yourself in screenshots, or just download and try it. Then, go to our comment section and explain the usefulness, if there is any.

"Whether you're running a single server with a few accounts or a massive ISP infrastructure, managing more than one domain quickly becomes a boring, time-consuming hassle. But thanks to the magic of open source and the guys at ISPConfig, this no longer has to be the case."

Apple on Wednesday released Security Update 2006-001, available for download through Software Update system preference pane and from Apple's Downloads Web page. The update addresses a recently reported exploit that left Safari users vulnerable to malicious shell scripts, corrects a vulnerability in Apple's Mail software, and also changes the way iChat handles file transfers to help prevent the Leap-A malware.

XYZComputing reviews VectorLinux, and concludes: "VectorLinux is definitely going places. This distribution made a very good impression on me during the time I have spent with it and it will be remaining on my desktop for some time to come. Though it is not really one of the better known Linux distributions it appears to be growing due to its speed and capability."

Alerts went out Tuesday from several security companies warning users of an in-the-wild Trojan horse able to infect nearly any cell phone. The Trojan, named Redbrowser.a by McAfee, F-Secure, and the discovering vendor Kaspersky Labs, can attack any device - smart phone, PDA, or cell phone - that runs Java 2 Micro Edition, Sun Microsystem's version for consumer electronics devices.

"UNIX and Windows data-center market share remain neck-and-neck, according to most analysts, but many in IT perceive UNIX and Linux innovation as slowing to a crawl. We interviewed representatives from Apple, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Novell, Red Hat, and Sun Microsystems who were eager to challenge that perception by highlighting areas in which their UNIX OSs are breaking new ground."

Origami cought some attention this week and now you would expect to see the real thing. Wrong. If you haven't seen the video on Digital Kitchen , you're out of the picture here. The new flash on the Origami Project site further hints on the mobility of this thing, but that's it. We'll have to wait until the 9th of March for the third flash, and maybe, just maybe, some real Microsoft data on the device.

The JNode team has released version 0.2.3 of the JNode operating system. JNode is an open source operating system written completely in Java (with a very small assembler nano-kernel). New features and improvements in this release are many classpath patches, improvements in AWT, Swing and desktop support, various bugfixes in the JIT compiler, ISO9660 support, better support for testing JNode with Mauve (mauve plugins, invoker commands), and more. Screenshots are available.

"On January 26th, 2005, the Itanium Solutions Alliance (Intel, Hewlett-Packard, SGI, NEC, Hitachi, Bull SA, Fujitsu, and Unisys) proudly announced that its members had banded together to invest $10 billion over the next four years to improve Itanium's features and functions and strengthen its market position. This huge investment in this architecture at this time forces us to ask a lot of tough questions about the wisdom of this action... "

The first release candidate for GNOME 2.14 is out. This is the last GNOME unstable release before the big .0 release. Lots of new features and bug fixes have been added during this cycle; Davyd's 'Look at GNOME 2.14' tells you which. Download the platform, desktop, admin and bindings sources.

Microsoft doesn't believe hands are the only vehicle for driving computers. Feet are equally valid for scrolling and cataloging e-mail and photos, among other tasks, according to researchers working in Microsoft's main Redmond research lab. In fact, for those for whom hands are less of an option, as a result of disabilities or injuries, feet might be the optimal solution. Microsoft Research's StepUI, or Step User Interface, is custom-made for these individuals.

"As a Linux user, there are times when you have to play nicely with users of Windows or Mac OS - such as when they send you Microsoft Word files. When you receive a Word file, you can either follow Richard Stallman's advice and refuse it, or bite the bullet and work with it. Modern Linux word processors - such as OpenOffice.org Writer, AbiWord, KWord, and TextMaker - can deal with most Word files. But if you don't want to fire up a word processor in order to read or print the document, you can turn to the command line. A handful of small but powerful Linux command line utilities make viewing, printing, and even converting Word files to another format, a breeze."