"Intel's plans to overhaul its desktop processors early next year have been detailed almost entirely in a roadmap published today. The lineup is now believed to be headlined by low-powered S versions of the Core i5-750 and i7-860 that will run all four cores at 2.4GHz and 2.53GHz respectively; they should use just 82W of power versus 95W or more and fit into tighter spaces. Each will have 8MB of Level 2 cache, though the Core i7 chips will scale up to 3.46GHz where the Core i5 will stop at 3.2GHz."

Even though I'm not a programmer, I still know that while some programmers like the idea of graphical programming, whereas others shun the concept completely, opting for a more hands-on approach. While Microsoft is quite active in the field of graphical programming, the company's own high-level coders aren't very keen on the idea.

From Free Software Magazine: "Google promises a much needed shift in the way small computers work. Problems like software updates, backups, installation, maintenance, viruses, have plagued the world for too long: a shift is way overdue. To me, however, the change about to happen shows us what many people have refused to believe for a long time: KDE and GNOME shot each other dead."

"IBM likes to go on and on about the transaction processing power and I/O bandwidth of its System z mainframes, but now there is a new and much bigger kid on the block. Its name is the Power Systems IH supercomputing node, based on the company's forthcoming Power7 processors and a new homegrown switching system that blends optical and copper interconnects. The Power7 IH node was on display at the SC09 supercomputer trade show last week in Portland, Oregon, and El Reg was on hand to get the scoop from the techies who designed the iron. This server node is the heart of the 20 petaflop 'Blue Waters' supercomputer being installed at the University of Illinois."

Now this is an interesting case. Late last week news got out that Apple is refusing to repair machines still under AppleCare from customers who smoke, citing health risks from second-hand smoke. Wait, what?

We've got some progress in the other legal case Apple is involved in. The California case, Apple vs. Psystar, is more or less a done deal, but the Florida case, Psystar vs. Apple, is only just beginning. As it promised it would do, Apple has now asked the court in California to either dismiss the Florida case, or transfer it to California. Apple is also asking for a permanent injuction against Psystar. Through this motion, we also gain some juicy insight into Psystar's sales projections - and more interestingly, how many machines the clone maker actually sold.

Distrowatch takes a first look at Fedora 12 and concludes that it is an excellent release with faster package management including yum with the Presto plugin that pulls in delta updates by default, improved security such as a smooth SELinux configuration and hardware support. "After spending several days with Fedora, I find that I'm happy with this release. The live CD by itself was a bit underwhelming, but the distribution as a whole has been excellent. This is probably the most stable and most polished release the Fedora team has put together to date."

A few days ago, we heard about Microsoft planning to include Direct2D acceleration in the yet-to-come IE9, thus leveraging today's poweful GPUs to render web content. Mozilla didn't fall behind: last Sunday, Firefox hacker Bas Schouten revealed a build of Firefox 3.7 with built-in Direct2D acceleration on his blog. His performance tests claim that popular sites like Facebook and Twitter render twice as fast compared to Firefox without Direct2D rendering. More complex sites do not see a lot of benefits, tough. This build requires DirectX 10 and a WDDM 1.0 compatible graphics drive, and thus, Windows Vista or 7. Download it here.

At the Ubuntu Developer Summit, which took place last week, it was announced that the next release of the Ubuntu Linux distribution, version 10.04, will no longer carry the GIMP in its default installation. This actually touches upon somethin I've been wanting to talk about, a problem that plagues both Linux and Mac OS X: Paint.NET is Windows-only.

Genode is a framework for creating custom microkernel-based operating systems, currently supporting four different kernels. With the new 9.11 release, the project moves beyond the x86 architecture by adding initial support for ARM CPUs. Among the long list of further improvements, there is added support for USB storage, a light-weight IP stack, Qt/Webkit, a zero-footprint runtime for Ada programs, and the addition of a paravirtualized Linux kernel to the mainline distribution. These and more changes are described in full detail in the release notes for version 9.11.

Google has opened up its gallery for developers to share Chrome extensions, a step that soon should make it easier for people to customize the open-source browser. Aaron Boodman, a leader of the Chrome extensions effort, announced the move on a mailing list posting Monday, and programmer and "gallery master" Lei Zheng shared details in a blog post. So far, only uploads are permitted. Google plans to let some testers use the gallery to download extensions, too "in the next few days," Zheng said. "We are making the upload flow available early to make sure that developers have the time to publish their extensions ahead of our full launch."

This article describes the various refactorings available in Eclipse Java Development Tools, including what each refactoring does, when to use it, and how to use it. It also explores the refactoring script functionality in Eclipse, which allows library developers to share code refactorings with their clients.

During Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference the company's President of Server and Tools, Bob Muglia, and Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie talked to a select group of reporters and bloggers about a variety of topics - including Silverlight.

Google has put up a very interesting document explaining the security features underlying its Chrome OS. The document also details the underlying guiding principles of Chrome OS' security features.