Rumors abound that Intel is designing 64bit extensions to it's Pentium line, in case Itanium turns out to be a flop: "Intel's decision to back the novel Itanium architecture had upset a small group of Intel engineers in Oregon, who preferred to build on the x86 legacy. When AMD released the specifications of its upcoming 64-bit chips in the summer of 2000, these ``cowboy'' engineers decided that Intel needed to match its rival. They began developing their own 64-bit extensions to the Pentium line, making sure the code was compatible with AMD's design." Update: MercuryCenter has an article about this too.

"There are alternatives to the ubiquitous applications suite, but in most cases, they're not worth the trouble. Do you need to have Microsoft Office on your PC? Because Word, Excel, and PowerPoint have become the de facto standards for word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations, it's tough to do any sort of business on a computer without being able to read and edit files in those formats. But if you're willing to make some compromises, there are alternatives." Read the rest of the editorial at BusinessWeek. In a related note, Gobe released a new demo of gobeProductive3.

"As the Linux community prepares to congregate next week in New York for the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo, the center of attention, as always, will be Linux creator Linus Torvalds. A little more than a year ago Torvalds released the 2.4 kernel and has spent much of the year working on numerous 2.4.x versions to further stabilize and strengthen Linux. After handing the 2.4 kernel over to Marcelo Tosatti to maintain late last year, he turned his attention to the 2.5 development tree. Torvalds took time out to exchange e-mail with eWEEK Senior Editor Peter Galli about his work on and vision for 2.5." Read the interesting Q&A at eWeek.

Caldera is releasing the source of some of the historical Unices it inherited through its acquisitions, including 16 bit UNIX Versions 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 for the PDP-11 and 32-bit 32V UNIX. However, the more "interesting" UNIX versions, UNIX System III and UNIX System V (and their descendants) are purposely omitted (probably to prevent competition with UNIXWare and OpenServer, or to harvest the relevant technologies from them that Caldera wants to keep in its pocket.) A PDF of the license is available for viewing. The archives of the various historical UNIX ports is here.

The BeOS version 5.1d0 seems to have been extensively leaked on the web the last few days (please respect the OSNews policy and do not post direct download URLs of the illegal beta on our forums). Dianne Hackborn, ex-Be engineer, now at PalmSource, gives more information on what is included in this version of BeOS. There is hardware OpenGL (update: GL is 'broken' on Dano), new networking stack, window decors, XML kit, new USB stack, brand new Printing Kit (and lots of printer drivers for it), new font engine, column list view, tooltip support, updated Media Kit, Interface Kit and app_server, and more. And of course, brand new drivers, like support for the Adaptec U160 SCSI controllers, better SB128 support etc. Reportedly, this BeOS version has some issues with many existing BeOS applications, mostly because of the changes in the app_server. The only peculliar thing is that, as far as we know, Palm's legal department did not take any action against the owners of the servers that carry the leaked beta.

"Partha Narayanan, from IBM, recently posted some benchmark perfomance results for Ingo's O(1) Scheduler. The tests were run on an 8-way 700Mhz Pentium III, with several comparisons. The end result is around an 18% improvement with a single CPU, around a 45% improvement with 4 CPUs, and around a 187% improvement with 8 CPUs. Pretty impressive!" Read the rest of the article and see the benchmark results at KernelTrap.

Craig from Gui-Lords.org engaged Joseph Cheek, CTO of Redmond Linux (recently renamed 'Lycoris'), in a 10 question interview. Along with some nice screen shots, Gui-Lords invites you to learn about this new distro.

The news break was yesterday, with AOL suing Microsoft over the Netscape-IE issue which resulted in Netscape losing its market share (from ~90% in 1997 down to ~7% today). While this is not surprising news, we wonder why AOL/Netscape is suing today, and not 4 years ago.

"I have been a Linux user since 1995. It has been my desktop and server of choice since about 1997. But there is more in the Open Source operating system world than just Linux. So, I decided to play with the Wasabi Systems' distribution of NetBSD. The basic distribution comes on two CDs with a small instruction booklet." Read the rest of the NetBSD review at NewsForge.

The surprising truth about Disney's 1982 computer-game sci-fi film, Tron, is that it's still visually impressive (though technologically quaint by later high-definition standards) and a lot of fun. Tron was the first movie to use CGI (computer generated graphics & special effects) incorporated into the normal film. To celebrate 20 years of the breakthrough in both Hollywood's and computer's standards, Disney has released the "Tron - 20th Anniversary Collector's Edition" DVD with 5 hours of extra material on the making of the classic movie.

Two slides of an AMD presentation were leaked to a Czech web site and they show the SPECInt 2000 CPU benchmark performance results of the upcoming AMD 64-bit CPU, Hammer. In the two charts you will see the Hammer scoring best performance among Intel, HP, IBM, Alpha and other CPUs. The Hammer CPU is expected to be released at the end of 2002, after slipping the original release date of March 2002.

BusinessWeek features an extensive set of articles, editorials & interviews with key Apple people regarding the future of Apple and MacOSX. A very good read overall. In the meantime, MacUserUK and MacMinute revealed that Tuesday 22nd of January is the most likely day that Apple will announce three new, top of the line, PowerMacs: 800, 933 and dual 1 Ghz, with all models "shipping immediately." Pricing and additional specifications are unclear, although sources suggest that Apple may make the SuperDrive standard on all systems.

"If you're a Net junkie like me, you've probably seen screenshots that reportedly expose upcoming user interfaces for the next two versions of Windows (code-named "Longhorn" and "Blackcomb"). You might have heard of internal alpha builds of either OS, and maybe, just maybe, you've seen the infamous Blackcomb movie that's making the rounds as well. I've spent the past few months investigating all of these things, and after speaking with several Microsofties and uncovering the truth behind the wild stuff that's available on the Internet, I thought I'd provide a little heads-up on what's really going on with the next version of Windows." Read the rest of the story at Windows SuperSite.

"In Part One and Part Two of this series we delivered an overview of the embedded processor market and key product families. We also looked at Java chips and other custom embedded processors. Then we reviewed some of the microarchitectural and programming features that differentiate embedded processors from mainstream CPUs. And we described some performance measurement techniques and issues. In this final segment, we'll dig into DSPs, media processors, and power saving techniques." Read the third installment of the interesting article at ExtremeTech.