Motorola has released the latest update to its PowerPC 8500 - aka G5 - processor that ups AltiVec performance and delivers consistent 1GHz and up clock speeds, TheRegister rumours, based on their Apple sources. "Indeed, the source claims, two of the chips in the sample set of CPUs sent to the Mac maker, clocked at 2.4GHz. Most, however, ran at 1GHz, 1.2GHz or 1.4GHz, and some - a "considerable number", says our Deep Throat - operate at 1.6GHz." In related news, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) has again upped the stakes in its processor performance race with rival Intel. AMD launched the new Athlon XP 1900+, its highest performance desktop processor issued to date.

"Passport and Wallet users are going to be disappointed to learn that these feature-rich tools can't be used until MS fixes a little bug which makes sport of taking over someone else's account. Passport authenticates a user for access to his credit cards and Web site accounts and passwords, to make life easy for on-line merchants and shoppers, and hackers and identity thieves." TheRegister reports.

AMD and Nvidia will make a show of nForce next week, News.com reports. The new Nvidia nForce chipset for AMD Athlon/Duron, announced in June, will make its debut next week in motherboards and desktop PCs, an Nvidia representative said. nForce takes risks in that it aims to create a market niche where none existed before, a middle-of-the-road between high-end chipsets with no graphics and low-price chipsets with integrated graphics. Past integrated graphics chipsets, whether for Intel or AMD, have been aimed mainly at the low end of the PC market, where reducing costs is the primary goal and performance is only a secondary consideration.

"We've already posted our (WindowsXP) review, and we've already posted some tweaks you can do to get your new XP system up and going. Now we're finally posting the one thing you guys probably wanted to see first - the numbers. Raw data on how this puppy performs." FiringSquad is up to the task to measure XP's performance on games, productivity and more.

Open source instigator Linus Torvalds speaks with Charlie Rose in a very interesting interview about the past, present, and future of Linux and technology. Quote from Torvalds: "To get where Bill Gates is today, he needed to be the business guy who knew about technology. I was the technology guy who had no clue about business."

"Red Hat will release its version of Linux for IBM mainframes in the next 30 days, catching the company up to rivals who already have staked their claim in the niche market segment. The Durham, N.C., company's mainframe version of Linux will be sold along with services through the Red Hat Network, Chief Executive Matthew Szulik said in an interview Friday. The product would catch Red Hat up with SuSE and Turbolinux, both of which already have a version for sale." Read the rest of the brief article at ZDNews.

Once upon a time, there was this nice operating system, called GeOS. It first ran on a C64, but it was later ported to Macs and PCs. Today, the OS lives a new life under the name New Deal Office (additional screenshot). Another OS from the same era, RiscOS, is still developed today by its parent company and it is currently in version 4. The OS also runs quite fast under PC emulation as well as in a native RISC PC. These articles can prove a good and interesting read for the weekend, especially for younger readers who did not experience the computer offerings of the '80s.

"Most senior engineers understand the technical details about what it will take to move Linux or FreeBSD or NetBSD or OpenBSD to support enterprise computing environments. What we don't often understand is what the actual competitive advantages of open source systems are, and what the open source communities need to do to help maintain these advantages." The author explains how the two major open source development models work in different ways: the Linux and the *BSD. Read the editorial at BSDToday.

"Surely one of the biggest success stories in technology has been the hard disk drive. Invented in the 1950s, and an absolute requirement for PCs since the mid-1980s, hard disk drives have an impressive record of increasing capacity and speed, shrinking physical size and cost, and finding new ways to shatter barriers to continued progress. If you think storage capacity is amazing now, take a trip with us--three to five years down the road." ExtremeTech features a special series of four articles regarding hard drives and their future.

From CNET|News: "Fewer than 300,000 boxed copies of the new operating system were sold in the first several days of its availability, according to preliminary figures from NPD Intelect, which has polled roughly 80 percent of its retailers and mail-order clients about XP. Although some poll respondents indicated that demand was "healthy," NPD asserts that the final tally of first-week sales will likely be 20 percent to 25 percent lower than what Microsoft saw with Windows 98."

The December's issue of the popular printed magazine 'Doctor Dobbs Journal' features a special series of articles regarding alternative operating systems. Among the OSes mentioned or have extended presentations is NewOS and MenuetOS.

"Officials at the U.S. Justice Department met state attorneys general in the case to discuss a settlement that would allow computer manufacturers wider latitude to load non-Microsoft software on the machines they sell and give other software companies greater access to the code behind Microsoft's Windows dominant personal computer operating system, Reuters reported." Get the rest of the story at ZDNews. Update: Microsoft, Feds reached a deal. The software maker and the Justice Department settle their longstanding antitrust battle, in an agreement with far-reaching implications.

Rocklyte Systems is a New Zealand-based software engineering company and creators of the Athene operating system and Pandora Engine. Athene is an object based operating system that is being developed for use in PC's and embedded systems. The user interface is completely rewriteable and is capable of emulating other interfaces such as the Windows and Amiga desktop environments (developing your own, custom desktop GUI is a matter of writting a script!). The Pandora Engine is an all-purpose object oriented SDK, aimed at assisting developers in all areas of the technology industry and it also the base of Athene. The engine is based on Modular Object Oriented technology, which allows you to create true object oriented programs using almost any language. Athene and Pandora are available for both Windows and Linux. Read more for an interview with Rocklyte's Paul Manias and two new screenshots, showing AtheneOS running under its newly released Windows version.

"SuSE is billed as a complete easy-to use Linux package providing users with a large set of programs. SuSE 7.3 is available in two editions: a Personal Edition and a Professional Edition. The Personal edition is primarily for Linux beginners and has a 'relatively' small set of applications included in the package. This review will focus solely on the Professional Edition." Read the rest of the review over at the FirstLinux web site. Update: Another review of SuSE 7.3 can be found at LinuxPlanet. This particular author found the SuSE upgrade problematic.