"Intel has started shipping its 65nm dual-core mobile Pentium processor, Yonah, along with Centrino bundles based on the new processor. The five processors are clocked at 2.16GHz, 2GHz, 1.83GHz, 1.66GHz and 1.66GHz (single core), and operate on a 667MHz frontside bus, connecting across a FCBGA6 or FCPGA6 pin-out. All processors sport 2MB of L2 cache." In addition, "Intel has debuted its latest dual-core desktop Pentium D processors. The chip giant this week added four models to its price list; all containing 4MB of L2 cache split into two 2MB chunks, one for each of the two cores in the chip package. All four operate on an 800MHz frontside bus. The CPUs are clocked at 2.8GHz, 3GHz, 3.2GHz and 3.4GHz."

"The saga of Internet Explorer, the piece of software that once brought the Department of Justice to the brink of breaking up Microsoft, continues to eat away at the company. Several Microsoft employees have been reporting on their blogs that they feel the browser is not receiving adequate attention from upper management, and that it reflects badly on Microsoft as a result."

It wasn't too long ago that having technology from AMD was a key differentiator for a systems maker. Now, staying only with Intel chips is setting Dell apart from its competitors. As vendors such as Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems grow their Opteron-based portfolios, and as AMD continues to gain market share, Dell executives say there are no plans to introduce servers or PCs running on AMD processors.

"Rex Dieter has been making the unofficial KDE Red Hat packages for some years now. Since this is a service depended upon by thousands of Red Hat users to get their required latest build of KDE, KDE Dot News interviewed Rex to find out how he got started, why the need for the project exists and how he makes the packages. Read on for the interview.

The LA Times is speculating the arrival of a Google PC running an OS also made by Google. "Sources say Google has been in negotiations with Wal-Mart, among other retailers, to sell a Google PC. The machine would run an operating system created by Google, not Microsoft's Windows, which is one reason it would be so cheap - perhaps as little as a couple of hundred dollars." They also say that Larry Page, Google's co-founder and president of products, will give a keynote speech at CES coming Friday, announcing all this.

In this article, Bjarne Stroustrup (the father of C++) talks about the next version of the widely used general-purpose programming language. This next version, called C++0x for now, will most likely be finished by 2009. The article discusses new language features, for example concepts - which specify the properties required of a type and can be used with templates. Stroupstrup also talks about new standard C++ libraries.

SUSE developer Stephan Binner has released a VMware image of SUSE 10 with KDE 3.5 installed, enabling people to run KDE 3.5 inside any platform supported by the freeware VMware player. "I created an image which contains a standard KDE desktop installation of SUSE Linux 10.0 OSS, upgraded to KDE 3.5 including KOffice 1.4.2 excluding non-KDE applications. It's a fully working installation so don't forget to install and try some additional KDE applications - and to run the security update when you're asked to."

David Reveman has made the latest XGL source code available to download. This comes a few weeks after development of the project was criticised for being done 'behind closed doors'. There have been huge changes to XGL, the most significant being restructuring of the code, allowing XGL's GLX support to function on other drivers than the proprietary Nvidia one. Xcompmgr can currently be run under XGL with full acceleration provided that the proprietary ATI or Nvidia drivers are used. An OpenGL based compositing manager, 'Compiz' is currently in the works and a release is expected in February. David intends to get the code into freedesktop CVS as soon as possible, after which the code should eventually merge with Xorg.

From the Dot: "Welcoming in the new year is People Behind KDE bringing us one of the little known stars of KDE development. Sebastian Trüg is the man behind one of KDE's most successful applications, K3b. Read the interview to find out how K3b started, what KDE needs to conquer the world and what keeps Sebastian motivated to work on the premier CD burning application."

Microsoft is working hard to make sure the latest version of its e-mail, calendaring and messaging server, Exchange 12, appeals to both enterprise IT administrators and end users. The first beta of the product, released earlier this month, offers enhanced administrative controls as well as a unified messaging feature that will deliver fax, voice mail, e-mail and speech recognition.

"Advocacy is a funny old game. Although it seems a loose and inexact science, developing as an advocate demands a range of communicative, philosophical and technical skills. Advocacy is not just about the message, but it is about the tone, colour and dynamics of the communication. As a professional advocate of Open Source, I get email asking about how to advocate efficiently and with a high degree of success."

"There is a curious lack in the Linux community - the number of community-led Linux distributions for commodity mobile phone hardware is zero. As reported two years ago by LinuxDevices, the aim of the Xanadux project is to change that, and this article describes how it's getting on."

A new, deceptive trojan horse program has surfaced. The program is engineered to produce fake Google ads that are formatted to look like legitimate ones. Since the Trojan Horse makes the deceptive ads look like normal Google ads, the program was nearly impossible to detect by the general public. However, Raoul Bangera, discovered the bogus program and contacted the Google AdSense team. Bangera emailed the team a number of cases, including various screenshots, log files of an infected computer and system files as proof. The AdSense team validated the news saying, “We can confirm from the screenshots that these are fake Google ads, formatted to look like legitimate ads. We agree that this phenomenon is likely the result of malicious software installed on your computer.”

I recently saw a post on Neowin which said that Vista will no longer allow the use of region-free DVD drives for movie playback; I found this strange considering in some nations region-coding DVDs is illegal as it goes against consumer rights. Neowin also links against an MS developers blog, where he talks about MS lacking any region-free drives to test legacy code on, and this may lead to lack of support for those drives. So where does this leave consumers who have region-free drives? Well you'll be able to still use DVD-data discs you just wont be able to play encrypted/region-coded DVDs anymore.