Big Blue announced it would use the Cell processor designed by it, Sony and Toshiba in a range of high end servers. Applications that need good processing power and can render graphics are the target of Big Blue's desire. The first systems will become available in the third quarter of this year.

Sun's ambitions have grown another size larger. The server and software company launched its servers based on its own UltraSparc T1 'Niagara' chips in December, a major part of a drive to restore its lost luster and financial strength. But alongside the hardware launch came a more quiet software push: an attempt to make the Linux and BSD Unix open-source operating systems a serious option for buyers of Sparc-based computers. To promote the technology combination, Sun is trying to coax an accompanying software business into existence.

Virtual Iron Software continued on its quest to push Linux and virtualization further into the heart of enterprise data centers today with an announcement that Novell SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 would support its virtualization and data center management platform. Novell will now ship a preconfigured kernel with SLES9 and has guaranteed that all existing independent software vendor certifications will not be affected.

"New releases made by large free software projects usually means that a lot of people want the new release NOW, and the recent Debian and Ubuntu releases are no exceptions. This writeup details how we, Academic Computer Club at Umea University, Sweden, managed to saturate the 2Gbit/s of available internet capacity with a zero-currency budget."

"Serenity Systems International is pleased to announce the publicly available beta of eComStation 1.2R German. The eComStation 1.2 Media Refresh resolves known issues and provides the latest codebase. This version does not significantly change functionality. This release includes fixes to many reported problems, as well as significant enhancements migration and installation."

Parallels launched the beta program for Workstation 2.1, an upgraded version of their desktop virtualization solution. This version adds new features like USB support, PAE-mode support, wireless networking support, and a new tools package. The program runs Solaris virtual machines too. The beta is fully functional for 45 days.

"Linus Torvalds doesn't want to change the Linux kernel's software license, and he said so again last week. For good measure this time, he threw in some inflammatory remarks. "I literally feel," wrote Torvalds, "that we do not, as software developers, have the moral right to enforce our rules on hardware manufacturers. We are not crusaders, trying to force people to bow to our superior God." Since the crusades were a foreign adventure responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands, that's not the most diplomatic response, and FSF counsel Eben Moglen refused to be drawn into retaliation when we contacted him for comment."

Fighting for icon space on the desktop is so 2001. The new frontier on a virgin PC is the browser, and Internet companies like Google are jostling for space on the browsers of new PCs. Dell and Google are evaluating a partnership in which the Google Toolbar, Google Desktop Search and a Google-designed Dell home page are included on new Dell PCs, a Dell representative confirmed.

LowEndMac has an in-depth article on the origins of one of Apple's most elusive products: the Newton. "Sakoman's end goal for Newton was to create a tablet computer priced about the same as a desktop computer. It would be the size of a folded A4 sheet of paper and would have cursive handwriting recognition and a special user interface. To run the enormously demanding handwriting recognition software, the tablet would have three AT&T Hobbit processors." By the way, as most BeOS fans like myself know, AT&T's Hobbit processor has been part of another elusive product.

IBM has carved out a renegade path for the upcoming Power6 processor, opting to crank the chip's GHz much higher while rivals shy away from major clock speed boosts with their products. The Power6 chip will run between 4GHz and 5GHz and has been shown to hum away at 6GHz in the lab. IBM reckons that some process technology breakthroughs have allowed it to kick GHz higher while still keeping heat and power consumption issues under control. All told, IBM claims that Power6 will be twice as fast as competing server processors from Intel, AMD and Sun.

"A firm is showing off a full colour active matrix OLED display prototype at a show today. Universal Display Corporation, which has had part funding from the US Department of Defence, will talk at the Fifth Annual Flexible Displays and Microelectronics conference in Phoenix today. The firm will show off a four inch diagonal display and demo it running full motion video. The display is .1mm thick, and weighs only six grams, compared to a glass LCD which would weigh about 20-30 grams. The firm said that using a metal foil helps thermal and mechanical durability."

"Novell is announcing its contribution of the Xgl graphics subsystem and the 'Compiz' compositing manager to the X.org project. These enhancements open up a whole world of hardware acceleration, fancy animation, separating hardware resolution from software resolution, and more. As a result, Linux desktops will become more usable, end-user productivity will increase, and Linux is firmly positioned at the forefront of client computing technology." Videos and screenshots are included in the press release. And on a related note, Dan Winship of Novell has explained on gnome-desktop-devel why Novell worked on all this behind closed doors-- and this also applies to the striking similarity between Novell's mockups from December and Nat Friedman's videos. The changes made to GNOME will all be released back.

Intel and AMD once again are angling for leadership in virtualization, technology that increases a computer's efficiency by letting it run multiple operating systems simultaneously. Intel is expected to declare this week that its Virtualization Technology is mature enough for testing and about three months away from prime time. But AMD, whose rival "Pacifica" technology won't debut in processors until midway through this year, is trying to set its own technology as a standard for virtualization of computer communications, an element not present in Intel's VT.

As said yesterday, Opera Software today released the second preview of Opera 9. New features include a widget engine, web page thumbnails, syntax highlighting in the source viewer, a content blocker, and much more. Download it for Windows, UNIX, and Mac OS X.