"There has been a lot of talk about possible tainted code in ReactOS and or developers that had access to leaked Microsoft source code. This has caused a lot of speculation about the future of the ReactOS Project. I'm going to try to put those fears to rest and explain what has been going on and where we are going to go from here. There was one issue that started this discussion and it related to clean-room reverse engineering of certain code in ReactOS."

Intel's forthcoming 'Montecito' member of the Itanium processor family will consume 100 watts, a significant drop from the 130 watts of current models and an advantage in an era when power consumption is a top enemy. Intel spokesman Scott McLaughlin confirmed the figure at an Itanium Solutions Alliance meeting here. The change means Itanium will have about 2.5 times the performance per watt of the current Itanium 2 9M model.

"Is Unix dead? My answer is no, it's not dead. As a matter of fact, I think I hear it laughing on its way to the bank. Fewer Unix systems are being shipped, but they're commanding a higher premium than ever. Unix still represents a $2 billion market, the largest operating-system market by far. Despite Windows Server recent gains, it still represents about $1.6 billion , when you're looking at operating system-only revenues. And Linux in terms of revenues represents one-tenth of what the good, gray Unixes combined represent. Granted the future belongs to Linux, but as a $2 billion market, is Unix dead?"

"Apple became a household name in the third quarter of SuperBowl XVIII when it aired the enormously popular 1984 ad promoting the upcoming release of the Macintosh. Apple's PR firm, Chiat/Day, had pitched a similar ad in 1982 to promote the Apple II. The basic premise was that the Apple II would only enable people, and not hinder them with inane commands and hard to understand interfaces. No executives were particularly enamored with the spot, and it was filed away for possible later use."

The second beta of OpenSUSE Linux 10.1 has been released today. Main changes: "Fixes for a number of bugs - but note that most of the bugs reported against beta1 are not fixed yet; further integration and fixing of NetworkManager; SUSE Linux 10.1 Beta1 comes with the Intrusion Prevention framework; AppArmor 2.0 which is started by default in beta2; updated to KDE 3.5.1 release packages." Downloads locations are in the release announcement.

"In the 1990s, world chess champion Gary Kasparov played two historic matches against IBM's Deep Blue supercomputer. He won the first match but lost the second by just a single point. As a graduate student at Stanford writing a thesis on artificial intelligence at that time, I was fascinated by the match. I'd been a computer hobbyist since the 1980s as well as a chess buff. Over the years I've tried practically every commercially available chess program on every platform, including Sargon, Socrates, Chessmaster, and others. I used TRS 80 and Apple II computers, and then IBM PCs running DOS, followed by Macintosh and Windows systems. Since that time I've wanted a chess computer as powerful as Deep Blue - my own world-champion-level sparring partner."