Mark Wong recently posted a series of benchmark results that show how the Linux scheduler has improved since early on in the 2.5 development cycle. The results were generated with Rusty Russell's Hackbench, a modified 'chat benchmark'. Read the full story at KernelTrap.

There is now a plugin interface in libferris so that the filesystem can use AI to make suggestions as to what emblems a file should have. Currently I have Bayesian (bogofilter) and Support Vector Machine (svm_light) agents. The interface supports anything that can train on selected files and the attachment of emblems and then proffer a fuzzy assertion or retraction given an example file. The agent's beliefs are all collected and resolved to give an overall fuzzy assertion/retraction belief based on how trusted you think the agents are (the trust resolution should allow many resolution paths in the next release).

A ZDNet article has figured out what to do with all that extra processing power that Moore's Law keeps giving us: use brute force to make our computers secure. Encrypting everything, between machines, and also between processes might do the trick. Of course, you can't keep your keys in software, so that's where hardware tricks like "Trusted Computing" come in. So let me get this straight, because we're all afraid of viruses and hackers now, we're going to get back on the processor upgrade treadmill and give up ultimate control over what's on our PC to our motherboard and OS vendors?

Isn't it annoying when you buy a new 160 GB hard drive and when you get it all formatted and ready it'll only hold 152 GB? Well, a couple of guys are not going to take it lying down, and they've sued the major HD vendors (PC Makers) to prevent them from overstating their products' capacities. This issue is similar to that of the "viewable area" of CRT monitors, where manufacturers were eventually forced to admit that a 17" monitor actually has a 15.2" viewable area.

Sun Microsystems is struggling to correct a big mistake - its lack of support for Solaris x86. "One of the biggest mistakes we made a few years back was not supporting Solaris x86," Jonathan Schwartz, executive vice president at Sun, said in an interview. "Scott (McNealy) will tell you the same thing." Read the article at TheRegister.

While DR-16.6-pre7 is out, the much anticipated for years now X desktop environment Enlightenment, sees yet another scrapping of code and rewrite. The team scrapped Ebits and all the applications that depend on it and started development of Edje, its replacement. You can read the rest of the saga here.

Some first pictures of the soon to be released Mini-ITX form factor AmigaOne PPC board have been released here. A round up of recent AmigaOS4 news: Pagestream to support AmigaOS4, AOS4 Tour goes downunder and Amiga recently released another CAM article "ExecSG in detail: Memory" written by Thomas Frieden of Hyperion.

Openwave Systems Inc. the "leading independent provider of open software products and services for the mobile communications industry", today announced the availability of Openwave Phone Suite Version 7 (V7) for Linux at the DEMOmobile 2003 conference.

Bill Gates and IBM Software chief Steve Mills joined together to give an update on their companies' combined work in advancing Web services.

Doug Englebart worked on a project for Stanford Research Institute to develop a manual method for manipulating data on a computer screen in 1963, with a grant from NASA. He'd been mulling over the idea since 1951. Bill English, who actually built the mouse (out of wood) based on Englebart's design, later moved to Xerox PARC, and refined the invention. It took a long time to catch on. Most people never heard of a computer mouse until Apple debuted the Macintosh in the 80's. And nobody can remember who first called it a "mouse."

Slackware 9.1-beta2 is ready for testing, changelog here. The second beta includes security fixes for OpenSSH/Sendmail, updates to GNOME 2.4.0, Galeon 1.3.9, GNOME Office 1.0, KDE 3.1.4 while XFree86 was also updated. Here is a ready-made unofficial ISO of yesterday's Slackware.

DistroWatch reports that Terra Soft Solutions has updated its Yellow Dog Linux product to version 3.0.1: "Yellow Dog Linux v3.0.1 ships with all errata as of 2003/09/04, kernel 2.4.22 (Xserve rev2, PowerBook 17" rev1 sans fan support), and improved installer (no more dual drive bug!). Available now from the Terra Soft Store and YDL.net Enhanced accounts." See the announcement on the distribution's home page and the YDL 3.0 errata page for further details. Yellow Dog Linux 3.0.1 is available from the Terra Soft Store from US$25 or to members of the US$5-per-month YDL.net Enhanced subscription service.

Athene 3.2 is now available for download. In conjunction with this release a port of SDL is available, along with a number of games at rocklytefiles.com. ZTerm has also been upgraded to provide full terminal emulation and is now installed by default in the 3.2 release. Rocklyte Systems also announced that the latest release of the freely distributed Athene for X11 overcomes one of the X Window System's most pressing speed constraints. Testing of the new release demonstrates graphics throughput approximately twice as fast as previous releases of Athene, by bypassing conventional X11 programming techniques and using the 'shared imaging' hack to copy graphics to the X video display.

An easy and smart install, abundant documentation and plenty of configuration options make SuSE 8.2 ideal for the desktop, LinuxJournal says.