Navigation device maker TomTom and Microsoft have resolved their patent dispute by entering into a settlement agreement out-of-court. The outcome of the agreement is that TomTom will license the infringed patents, but that they will remove the encumbered code from their implementation of the Linux kernel within two years.

InfoWorld's Paul Venezia put Intel's new Nehalem to the test and found the technology a "game-changing development". Using an HP ProLiant DL580 with four quad-core Intel Xeon X7350 CPUs running at 2.93GHz per core as a baseline, Venezia's Nehalem system - which ran two quad-core Intel Xeon W5580 CPUs at 3.2GHz per core with HyperThreading enabled - performed roughly 60 percent faster across a battery of tests, including gzip compression, WAV-to-MP3 encoding, MPEG-4 to Flash Video conversion, and mysql-bench. Even more impressive, Venezia found, was that the Nehalem system did all that while serving double-duty as his workstation. "At the same time the Nehalem was executing my battery of tests, it was driving a 30-inch and a 24-inch monitor off an Nvidia Quadro FX 5500, playing an MPEG movie in full-screen on the 30-inch monitor, and running more than 500 processes across four virtual desktops, including dozens of terminal sessions, Firefox browser sessions, Java applications, and streaming audio — and it still put up these numbers."

"If you have spent enough time around Linux it's almost certain you know about the file systems ext2 and ext3, and have probably heard of ext4. Get ready to hear some more. On October 11, 2008, the 'experimental' label for ext4 was removed. While this doesn't necessarily mean that you should change all of your file systems over to ext4 immediately, it does mean that you should consider using ext4 moving forward. With the 'experimental' label gone and openSUSE (among others) considering it for the default file system in a late-2009 release, it's a good time to review ext4 so you have a solid working knowledge of what it is and what features it brings to the table."

The year 2008 will forever be remembered as the year of the off-the-shelf (OTS) supercomputer, thanks to the Los Alamos National Labs (LANL) and IBM team that constructed the world's first machine (Roadrunner) to break the peta-FLOP (1,000,000,000,000,000 floating-point operations per second) barrier. Get an overview of OTS strategies to architect high-performance computing (HPC) systems as well as the methods and concepts behind building HPC systems from OTS components and open source software.

"ThinkPads are well known for the quality of their keyboards. This has long been a strength of the ThinkPad brand, but when we say how good ThinkPad keyboards are we almost always implicitly mean 'relative to the keyboards on other laptops'. That might not be the case for everyone though, because the ThinkPad Full-Size UltraNav USB Keyboard is currently available for sale and it is a testament to how attached people have become to these keyboards."

The past week ranks pretty high on the uninteresting weeks list, with few things of note happening in the tech industry. Still, we learned when the release candidate for Windows 7 will be arriving, the Ubuntu 9.04 beta arrived, the RIAA got a smiling nod of approval from the Obama administration, and, well, that's about it. This week's My Take is about The Cardigans.

Some weeks ago the popular AROS distribution VmwAROS has changed name into Icaros Desktop, for two reasons: to avoid confusion with VMware-related products, and to better focus on the "Live" version, which runs on top of real hardware. This new release, Icaros Desktop 1.1, the first with the new name, has got many enhancements over the previous ones.

On Friday, Intel engineers are detailing the inner workings of the company's first graphics chip in over a decade at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco - sending a signal to the game industry that the world's largest chipmaker intends to be a player. During a conference call that served as a preview to the GDC sessions, Tom Forsyth, a software and hardware architect at Intel working on the Larrabee graphics chip project, discussed the design of Larrabee, a chip aimed squarely at Nvidia and at AMD's ATI unit.

"Two Middle Americans have sued Acer over its low-cost Aspire notebooks, claiming that the Taiwanese PC giant pre-installed Windows Vista on machines ill-equipped to run Microsoft's latest OS. With a lawsuit filed Wednesday in San Francisco, California, two residents of Fostoria, Ohio seek damages and relief from the world's third-largest computer maker after purchasing a sub-$600 Aspire notebook that included Windows Vista Premium and a gigabyte of shared system and graphics memory."

In a move that shouldn't surprise anyone, Microsoft has finally started to run an ad that's a direct attack against Apple. Previous marketing campaigns by Microsoft have always more or less ignored Apple, but the company's latest commercial is a direct attack on Apple in a place where it should hurt Apple the most: price.

Despite the recent emergence of several new ways to actually run AmigaOS 4.0, the supply of machines is still extremely small, and not very future proof. As such, one of the most recurring questions within the Amiga community is why don't they port the darn thing to x86?

Winner of this and last year's PWN2OWN contest Charlie Miller made some bold statements last week, stating that Mac OS X is easier to exploit than Windows. In a new interview with Tom's Hardware, Miller explains that that doesn't mean users should avoid Mac OS X for security reasons. He also gives a little more insight into his winning exploits, and what exactly they do.

"Even though Microsoft has, in the past, made marketing capital from synchronising its releases, group product manager Ward Ralston says that the desktop and server groups are two separate units that do not need to be released simultaneously. Windows 7 will should make its official appearance this year, but that major shift in the desktop experience isn't going to be matched with a similar sea-change on the server Operating System front. Microsoft has settled for only a minor upgrade to Windows Server 2008."

ZFS and unbreakable upgrades were introduced in an earlier article. XercesTech has written a detailed article on how apt-get and zfs join forces to provide a worry-free upgrade experience. "While some operating systems provide the ability to roll back changes, they usually require significant time, or an experienced user with some external repair tools. The goal here is to be instant, if something goes wrong with an upgrade, it should be possible to boot into the old system without running any terminal commands, booting any rescue system or installation disc, or otherwise manually rolling things back."