A couple of days ago kvm-87 was released featuring bug fixes, performance improvements, a preview of irqfd, new support for http protocol using curl version 6., and additional support for port redirection. The most notable of these from the end user perspective is the new http support. A good use case for this new feature is booting a livecd over http with a command like "qemu-kvm -cdrom http://www.sample.com/linux.iso". Awesome!

Apple, LG, Motorola, NEC, Nokia, Qualcomm, Research in Motion, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, and Texas Instruments have agreed to standardise their smartphone chargers in Europe using micro-USB. "The European Commission announced today that 10 mobile phone producers, which represent some 90 percent of the mobile phone market in the European Union, have signed a voluntary agreement to use standardized chargers for mobile phones using a micro-USB connector. The agreement addresses the EC's concern that mobile phone chargers create needless electronic waste." A single charger for everything! It almost brings tears to my eyes. Honestly. Even Apple. There it is. The tear.

With all the talk about Moore's Law, and doomsday predictions of the industry hitting the ceiling of what's possible with regular transistors, you'd almost forget that a lot of people are already thinking about the next revolution in computing: quantum computers. Researchers at Yale have succeeded in producing the first working solid-state quantum processor. Highly intriguing, but way over my head.

"The past few Linux kernel releases have brought a number of new file-systems to the Linux world, such as with EXT4 having been stabilized in the Linux 2.6.28 kernel, Btrfs being merged into Linux 2.6.29, and most recently the NILFS2 file-system premiering with the Linux 2.6.30 kernel. Other file-systems have been introduced too during the past few Linux kernel release cycles, but these three have been the most talked about and are often looked at as being the next-generation Linux file-systems. Being the benchmarking junkies that we are, we have set out to compare the file-system performance of EXT4, Btrfs, and NILFS2 under Ubuntu using the Linux 2.6.30 kernel. We also looked at how these file-systems compared to EXT3 and XFS."

Currently the fastest supercomputer in Europe, the Jugene can process one trillion operations per second, has 294,912 cores that comprise 32-bit PowerPC 450 processors at 850 MHz, has 144 terabytes of RAM, has a bandwidth of 5.1 gigabyte/second with a mere 160 nanosecond latency, and is one heck of a machine mounted on 72 racks. I wouldn't mind having one of these in my basement regardless of the power bill. For pictures and more information, read the linked article.

Tom's Hardware a takes a long look at the history of mainframe computing. Lots of beautiful photos and history snippets. It obviously starts and ends with IBM.