"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."

Sources close to the joint efforts between Google and Sun say rampant speculation about hosted desktop productivity offerings and common operating systems is way off base. Insiders with knowledge of the joint plans to promote and enhance the OpenOffice.org desktop productivity suite say it is far more likely that Sun and Google will find ways to promote both OpenOffice.org and Google Toolbar, including having Toolbar included as part of OpenOffice.org, StarOffice, and even OpenSolaris and Sun's branded Solaris products.

P.A. Semi, a 150-employee chip startup, wants to make name for itself through attention to detail. The Silicon Valley chip startup, run by chip legend Dan Dobberpuhl-Dobberpuhl, its CEO, presided over the development of the Alpha processor while at Digital Equipment Corp. lifted its veil of secrecy Monday. The company will begin offering a new family of low-power, multicore, PowerPC architecture processors in 2006.

"MySQL 5.0.15, a new version of the popular Open Source Database Management System, has been released. The Community Edition is now available in source and binary form for a number of platforms from our download pages."

"Someone has started rearranging content on the Internet to suit their own purposes and the culprit might be a convicted monopolist. This article examines some compelling evidence and asks Congress to investigate."

"Once my original Mini-ITX project was completed I finally had a chance to sit back and use the computer. Knowing how simple my needs were, the Mini-ITX project computer was orginally designed to be as basic and quiet as possible. This meant no hard drive, no extra accessories- just a stripped down system. While this suited my needs well at the time, its lack of versatility soon became an issue. This meant it was back to the drawing board for a retooling of the Mini-ITX project computer."

Rink Springer would like to see his Xbox port migrated into FreeBSD-current. He is looking to import his FreeBSD/Xbox within the FreeBSD/i386 port, bringing support into FreeBSD-CURRENT. He is proposing a prioritized plan in order to accomplish this goal and is looking for your comments and feedback.

"I've updated the Firewalling with PF manuscript, mainly for the tutorial I gave at the AUUG2005 conference. New sections: Info on bruteforce protection; Wireless net setup; authpf with wireless net. Updates to the spamd section and traceroute section."

Ars Technica has posted a lengthy article on the new promising Microsoft Command Shell. It looks at MSH from the point of view of both coders and Windows admins.

"This is a true gem for developers. SkyOS got a lot of under-the-hood work, the Integrated Streaming System and the networking stack have been reworked, the API has been standardised, missing libraries and functions have been added and a lot of bugs have been resolved. I think what we're seeing is a quasi-feature freeze. This actually serves its purpose, SkyOS is now much more stable, reliable and responsive than before."

There are more than 50 GUI controls available in the .NET Framework Class Library. This chapter takes a selective look at some of the more important ones. They all derive from the System.Windows.Forms.Control class that provides the inherited properties and methods that all the controls have in common.

Testing time/date-specific functions can be complicated. Unfortunately, because of this, many companies don't bother testing these functions. This chapter will help you understand why testing these functions is critical, and how you can go about getting it done.

Mockup 0.2.0 Alpha 1.1 has been released. Again, this release is solely for developers and not for the faint of heart. A roadmap is available in the release announcement. A guide on installing this latest Mockup snapshot can be found here.

"I have started to port the linux ACPI subsystem because ACPI is becoming more important now and slowly replaces subsystems like the pci routing table, multi-processor table and apm. The Linux ACPI code is based on the os independent intel reference implementation and so the port has been very easy (and fast to do) so far. Currently the ACPI busmanager contains the basic acpi code (about 90% of the code)."