Read about the design, verification, and making of the 165-million-transistor Xbox 360: a first-pass-good processor with advanced debug and test features, designed to the exacting standards of a gaming platform, with high throughput, low latency, low cost and low power - and very tight deadlines.

What's the next step in creating an easy-to-use Linux-based product for consumers? A touchscreen facade can make back-end Linux applications very usable in such devices as custom digital media centers, DVRs and PVRs, and even control interfaces for household robots. The potential uses are limited only by the imagination. In this article, get an overview for installing an LCD taken from a Sony PSOne, creating a modeline, and installing a touchscreen -- all for Linux.

Every security savvy professional lives with the daily fear of the "never expiring password" being exposed. It's the unspoken taboo, the wide open back door in every corporate network. But no-one ever acknowledges it or discusses it. All applications have got pre-defined passwords that never change. Which means developers, privileged users and hosting third party service providers will all have access to these passwords.

"When looking at desktop Linux by itself, any analysis of the subject quickly leads to this question: why do users choose one version over another? There are as many answers for this question as there are users to give them, but ultimately it should boil down to just a few key decisions which must be made. Considering this, it may be surprising to some people to find out how successful Ubuntu Linux has been relative to other distributions."

How can a company be just about everywhere, and yet nobody knows its name? Just ask Michel Mayer, chief executive of Freescale Semiconductor.

Here is an interview with Ubuntu's Fabio Morzacca, "Ubuntu developer, but also member of the Italian Ubuntu LoCoTeam, father of two children, and for his employment, dealing with company management and reorganizations. We asked him questions about his personal life, his view on Linux and Ubuntu in particular, and about two applications of which he is the developer and maintainer: the BUM graphical Boot-Up Manager, and the Baobab graphical disk-space viewer."

Here is a test concerning NVIDIA SLI on Linux (in this case, OpenSUSE 10.0 OSS). "With our previous article that we published moments ago, demonstrating the performance of the GeForce 7800GTX 256MB under Linux with the 1.0-8174 Rel80 drivers that were finally released today, there's no disputing that the Windows XP NVIDIA ForceWare users can generally see a significantly higher frame-rate with the same hardware components, in addition to other features that aren't yet supported by the proprietary NVIDIA Linux drivers. However, how do NVIDIA's initial Rel80 Linux drivers (1.0-8174) fair in the world of Scalable Link Interface?"

"Although having this reputation, my question was: was a RAID 1 system too slow? Was it slower than not having any RAID? In fact, there are people that say that it is the other way round - these people say that having software RAID 1 is faster than having just one hard disk drive. In any case, who is right?"

"When you've been anticipating something for a long time you often find yourself disappointed when you finally see/touch/use it - that won't happen with the Xbox 360. Microsoft has succeeded in pushing back the boundaries of gaming, and bringing media playback and streaming functionality into your living room. The big question is whether you should spend your money on a 360, and the simple answer is YES!"

"It saddens me to say that Aperture's innovations are only skin deep. If it could deliver on the promise of being both fast and produce flawless results, it would be the dream package. At this point it is an expensive and questionable alternative to Camera Raw, a free extension to Photoshop, and Adobe's Bridge which can batch produce better quality images in arguably less time. For $500 (Photoshop itself retails for $750 ), there is no excuse not to be aware of professional needs like a high-quality sharpen tool, DNG exporting or more basic things like curves, a sampler tool for RGB pixel readings, or retention of EXIF data on output."

Xen 3.0 has been released. "We've been seeing good stability on the XenRT regression tests for the last couple of weeks, and the number of bug reports submitted to bugzilla have dropped right down." Get it here. "Along with the usual binary install tarball, we've created a new live-iso demo CD, and some RPM packages for common linux distros."

"Over two years ago a group was founded to reverse engineer the Broadcom Wireless LAN chipsets to provide Linux drivers. This chipset is used by many OEMs, for example in Apple’s AirPort Extreme in Power- and iBooks, Linksys’ WAP and WRT series of consumer grade wireless routers, various laptops from Acer, Dell, Gateway, HP and others and many more external and internal devices, including CardBus cards. That work has now come (.pdf) to a first milestone as there now is a free (GPL2 or later) Linux driver for a variety of these chipsets."

"Intel was surprisingly talkative when it came to future technologies and products this year. As a result, most of the technical audience is up to date regarding the upcoming micro architecture based on the 65 nm Merom design. We discovered that all of these announcements are the top of a hot iceberg only, because the chip firm intends to deliver almost 20 new processor designs within the next eight quarters; all for the sole purpose of dominating the desktop, mobile and enterprise segments."

"We are pleased to announce the availability of the third full Release Candidate for the upcoming X.Org Foundation release of X11R6.9 and X11R7. RC3 includes many bug fixes and updates. We have tagged both the monolithic and modular trees and have prepared tarballs for you to test."