FSM has an article about improvements coming our way in X.org. "There's more coming our way than 'mere' graphical goodness: Xorg developers are about to unleash upon us more performance and ease of use than X ever knew before. Not only that, the work being done now will allow older hardware to perform better and new hardware to be supported faster."

It's a big day in processor land today, as both Intel and AMD announced several new chips. Both Intel and AMD launched a number of chips targeted at the segment just above netbooks, which are generally slightly larger and a bit more powerful. In addition, AMD launched its six core Istanbul server processor, as well as a new Athlon II X2 dual-core processor, and a new high-end Phenom II X2.

Where do we begin in choosing good topics for discussion for the podcast with so many big articles this week? We settled on tackling the contentious issues: Thom's Hackintosh, the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard, Mono and then ran out of time. See if you can work out where this week's title comes from in the show! Bonus points if you can count how many times I say "you know...", and then proceed to kick me for each one, good grief I need more tea.

The team at Sun behind OpenSolaris has unleashed OpenSolaris 2009.06 upon the world. This new release comes packed with new features, changes, improvements, and fixes, and is the first release of OpenSolaris for SPARC, adding support for UltraSPARC T1, T2 (Sun4v), and UltraSPARC II, III and IV (Sun4u). Read on for some of the improvements that stand out.

Qualcomm showed off a previously unannounced Eee PC running Android at Computex in Taipei. The machine has a 10-inch screen, built-in webcam, and a universal 3G radio that supports all UMTS and CDMA networks on all frequencies used around the world. The 'smartbook' runs on Qualcomm's Snapdragon, a 1GHz ARM processor core that marks a shift away from Intel Atom x86-based netbooks. A second Android-based netbook -- a prototype by contract hardware maker Compal Electronics -- was also demoed at the show. Google, meanwhile, declined to discuss what steps it is taking to adapt the smartphone OS for laptops.

I don't think we've ever done this before, but we're going to promote a set of items currently up for bids on eBay. Why, you ask? Well, it's a complete collection of rare BeOS items - from t-shirts and software all the way up to a BeBox and a very rare BeIA web tablet. This is a goldmine for BeOS fans.

Microsoft is really making it hard not to distrust them, aren't they? We already talked about Mono and Moonlight this weekend, and now we're notified of something else. Apparently, the Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1, released earlier this year, installs a Firefox extension which could not be uninstalled easily (registry hacking was needed). To make matters worse, this extension came with a pretty big security hole (at least, that's what everyone says). A newer version of this extension has been pushed out in May, which can be uninstalled the proper way. As it turns out, Firefox apparently has a limitation in that extensions installed at the machine level (instead of the user level) cannot be uninstalled from within the extensions GUI.

Yes, it's been one busy week here at OSNews. We published a guide on how to build a computer that can run Mac OS X using an unaltered retail disc, and this guide became one of the most often-visited stories in a matter of days. On top of that, we had countless interesting and insightful discussions about Mono and Moonlight, the Linux Unified Kernel, switching to Mac OS X, the future of the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard, and lots of other interesting stuff. Due to me being engulfed in university work, there is - again - no My Take this week. It might take a few weeks before I can get My Take back into the game - my apologies for that.

Even though we make fun of Wikipedia, and even though any serious scientific piece shouldn't cite Wikipedia, fact remains that the community-created and maintained encyclopaedia has turned into an impressive database of knowledge. Even though I don't think you should trust it blindly, it's usually an excellent starting point for information, especially when used in a casual setting. Still, its open nature is also a threat to Wikipedia, this week exemplified by the Wikipedia Arbitration Committee banning Scientology from editing Wikipedia pages.

If there is one technology in the Linux world that ruffles feathers whenever it's mentioned, it's Mono, the open source .Net clone. Since .Net comes out of Microsoft, and has some patents encircling it, it is said to be a legal nightmare. Supposedly, you can obtain a "royalty-free, reasonable and non-discriminatory" license from Microsoft regarding the patents surrounding Mono. iTWire decided to look at just how easy (or hard) it is to get such a license. Turns out it's kind of hard.

Google predicts that some 18 to 20 phones, from eight to nine manufacturers, will come with Android OS installed on them by the end of the year. Although Android is open-source, manufacturers will be able to sign distribution deals with Google in order to pre-install their phones with more options such as Google Apps. The Android OS is widely predicted to also make the jump to mini-notebooks soon.

Lots of people who are testing the various Windows 7 builds have already reported that Windows 7 is faster and snappier than Windows Vista, and some even say that it approaches Windows XP. Apparently, web browsers in particular will benefit from running on Windows 7 instead of Windows Vista SP2. BetaNews ran tests of all the major browsers on both Vista SP2 and Windows 7, and concluded that in general, browsers are round and about 12%-18% faster on 7 than on Vista.

Ask OSNews is apparently quite popular among you guys; the questions just keep on coming in. Since David took on the first two, we decided to let me handle this one - it's an area I've personally covered before on OSNews: file system layouts. One of our readers, a Linux veteran, studied the GoboLinux effort to introduce a new filesystem layout, and wondered: "Why not adopt the more sensible file system from GoboLinux as the new LSB standard?"

Looking at the amount of ex-Apple people working at Palm, this shouldn't be a surprise: the Palm Pre works with iTunes on the Mac (not Windows), out-of-the-box. You can plug it, and the iTunes Store will treat as any iPod or iPhone. It obviously can't handle iPhone applications, and songs encumbered with Apple's DRM won't work either, but for the rest you're on your merry way. Apple didn't want to comment on this little tidbit.