Some newsbits from the world of processors. First, IBM detailed power-saving techniques in the new PowerPC 907MP (the dual-core G5). Secondly, "Fujitsu's Sparc64 VI+ processor, code-named Jupiter and due for release in 2008, is a four-core processor with clock speeds of at least 2.7GHz, the company said Tuesday." And to complement today's batch of processor news, IBM unveiled the Xbox 360 processor.

"This is the continuation from our previous article on the latest build, which significantly depicts itself as Beta 2. We'll cover everything we missed in our first installment of the 5231 coverage, but before you continue, we recommend you read the first part of the article to get a better grasp on the new features and changes Microsoft has made in 5231."

"Scientists at UC Irvine have completed the world's highest-resolution grid-based display for visualizing and manipulating massive data sets. The Highly Interactive Parallelized Display Wall (HIPerWall) is a room-sized display that measures nearly 23x9ft (7x2.7m). The HIPerWall system, consisting of 50 flat-panel tiles, provides a total resolution of 200 million pixels (2x that of the 2nd best), bringing to life terabyte-sized data sets. Each panel, with a resolution of 2560x1600 pixels, is powered by a dual-processor 2.7GHz G5 node, with nVIDIA 6800 Ultra DDL graphics, that has access to an initial storage capacity of 10 terabytes."

Many of you will remember the fanfare and bravado surrounding Sun Microsystems' Sep. 2004 announcement of a $1 per hour per processor utility computing plan. What you won't remember is Sun revealing a single customer using the service. That's because it hasn't. More than one year since it first started hyping the "pay-for-use grid computing services" Sun is still weeks away from presenting a customer to the public. The program has proved much tougher to sell that Sun ever imagined.

As scheduled, Wine has officially entered the beta stage today. "This is release 0.9 of Wine, a free implementation of Windows on Unix. After 12 years of development, this release marks the beginning of the beta testing phase." In related news, CrossOver Office 5 has been released, with support for Office 2003 and 'bottles' (multiple Windows environments).

"A file system is something which computer users hear about all the time, but many do not know very much about. This article is going to be a short guide, which goes over the basics of file systems so you will at least know enough to get by. This is a subject which can get as complicated as you want to make it, but a little knowledge can go a long way."

"Bounty Source is a progressive step in project management for Free Open Source Software communities. In addition to the standard tools needed for managing an active community, we allow people to "put their money where their mouth" is by offering monetary rewards (bounties) toward the development of solutions to bug reports and feature requests. The end result of the bounty system is the creation of a catalyst that will increase development activity throughout all projects that choose to take advantage of Bounty Source."

Writing programs that generate other programs may seem esoteric, but once you learn why metaprogramming is so powerful, it's a skill you'll want to cultivate. This article explains why you might consider metaprogramming and looks at some of the components of this art.

Mac OS X 10.4.3 will weigh in at around 100MB and include more than 550 fixes and improvements, although unconfirmed reports have pegged this number at more than 1,000 when smaller, undocumented changes are included in the count. The latest seed added tweaks to CoreGraphics, CoreImage, and OpenGL, as well as iChat and WebKit, among other improvements.

Microsoft plans to discontinue the use of the SSLv2 (Secure Socket Layer) protocol in the coming Internet Explorer browser refresh. In its place, he company will fit the stronger TLSv1 (Transport Layer Security) protocol into IE 7 as part of an overall plan to improve the security and user experience for HTTPS connections.

Mobile-Review posted a multi-screenshot article introducing the UIQ 3.0 user interface for the Symbian OS. Even more screenshots here. The same web site also discusses the foot Nokia tries to put in enterprise communications with its new E series smartphones using Symbian kernel 9.1 and as its user interface the 'Nokia Series 60 v3'.

"DR-DOS released DR-DOS 8.1 in the beginning of this month. But instead of an upgrade of the previous DR-DOS 8.0, it's something completely different. The kernel is a badly patched copy of the Enhanced DR-DOS kernel old version 7.01.06 without any credit to its author Udo Kuhnt. The other programs and drivers included are old versions of some popular open source, freeware and shareware products without licenses, documentation or even credit to their authors. This means that DR-DOS 8.1 is just a bunch of old tools plus a compilation of others' works, obviously sold without permission and in violation of their license terms."

The Measurement Factory and Infoblox today announced results of a survey of more than 1.3 million Internet-connected, authoritative domain name system servers around the globe. The results of the survey indicate that as many as 84 percent of Internet name servers could be vulnerable to pharming attacks, and that many exhibit other security and deployment-related vulnerabilities.

"It's almost mind-boggling that every 18 months or so, regular as clockwork, you can get twice as much computing power. In fact, it is mind-boggling, and these high octane servers can cause some hassles in the data center. In this tip, I explore the standard fixes applied when server shoppers go overboard. These include server consolidation and grid computing. Then, I explore another option: virtualization with Xen."