It's a bit of a slow newsday at the moment, so I figured we'd pass the time with something special. Let's take a look at some obscure and/or older user interfaces listed in ToastyTech's GUI gallery, and see if there are any interesting ideas that can be found in those old user interfaces that we would like to see in our modern user interfaces.

Recently, AMD spun off its manufacturing business in a partnership with the Abu Dhabi government into Global Foundries. Apparently, Intel isn't very happy about this, and has said in correspondence to AMD that the patent cross-license agreement from 2001 has now been broken by AMD.

And the weeks just keep on coming, don't they? Another one has passed, so it's time for a Week in Review. This week wasn't particularly eventful, and was mostly dominated by various newsbits about Apple, but none of them were particularly earth shattering. The usual suspects like netbooks and Windows 7 also showed their faces. My Take is about yet another icy sport.

PolishLinux has an editorial on program installation on Linux systems, and even though it's a bit hard to wade through (the author's native language sure isn't English) it does make a number of very good points in favour of the way most Linux systems handle things. Still, as always in the discussion on program installation, it always feels a bit like listening to a discussion between a deaf and a blind man about whose condition is the easiest to live with.

Ok, so you just got a new laptop. You've been hearing about this whole "netbook" thing that's all the rage these days, and you wonder: am I cool? Do I have a netbook? You launch the internet (that blue E), and you ask Google "Do I have a netbook?" soon, you'll be swarmed by loads of terms that all seem to mean the same thing: a really small laptop. Enter The Register's netbook flowchart.

During the 1970s, the Palo Alto Research Center was the hotspot for computer technology, with various important technological advances in computing coming from these Xerox labs. One of those advances was a humble cable and associated protocols: ethernet was born. El Reg interviewed one of the inventors and the driving force behind ethernet, Bob Metcalfe.

Remember Conficker, the worm that wouldn't have been as devastating as it has been had people just kept their machines up to date? Even though the critical patch had already been released way before Conficker started its rampage, the worm became one of the worst infections to date. A Romanian company has found a cure for the worm.

"They won't say when it'll arrive and they won't say how much it'll cost, but representatives from Palm and Sprint on Thursday were willing to talk about stuff like service plans for the wildly anticipated (though not anytime soon) Palm Pre. It'll be the Everything plans for would-be Pre users: The available individual service plans, according to company officials will be for 400 minutes, 900 minutes, and the $100 all-you-can-eat Simply Everything option. For families, the options are 1500 minutes, 3000 minutes or (again) Simply Everything for $190."

Following the EU investigation into Internet Explorer's inclusion in Windows, Microsoft made it possible to "turn off" Internet Explorer 8 in Windows 7, by removing the executable and every mention of the browser from the system. According to Opera and Google, this is nice, but not enough.

Engadget reports that Apple will be detailing iPhone 0S 3.0 at a March 17 event. Because the event is being billed as an "advance preview," it's unlikely we'll see the new OS for some time, however, across the internet, hopes are high that the new OS will include many of the most commonly requested features, such as cut and paste, MMS, A2DP, Push notifications, and background tasks.

One Laptop Per Child is planning to end the production of its XO-1 laptop as well as drop AMD's x86 Geode processor. OLPC intends to replace these with a low-powered ARM alternative in the XO-2 laptop, which is slated for release in about 18 months. Even though the current XO-1 model consumes a mere five watts, OLPC feels thats the biggest problem. "We're seeing some very impressive system-on-chip designs that provide both fundamentally low-power demands and the kind of fine-grained power management ... in the XO-1," said Ed McNierney, chief technology officer at OLPC. Though using ARM architecture will reduce power consumption, it puts using the full-fledged Windows OS on their laptops in jeopardy. The company is currently wrestling Microsoft in order to try to get them to develop a full version of Windows to be able to run on ARM processors. It's not likely Microsoft will budge on the subject as ingrained as x86 is and how seemingly little there is in it for them, but we've been surprised before.

Kristian Hogsberg, Red Hat Xorg developer started a new project for creating a display manager called Wayland a while back. Now, a Clutter backend has been developed for it. Last month, Wayland got DRI2 support which itself was initiated by the same developer. Direct Rendering Infrastructure improvements are among one of the key Fedora 11 features.

To further prove that analysts' projections are just informed guesses, two major analyst firms just presented a completely different outlook on the netbook market and where it is going. Even though both project major growth, one of them sees a very bright future for non-Intel netbooks, while the other sticks with Atom.

For the past several months, Microsoft has engaged in an extended public mea culpa about Vista, holding a series of press interviews to explain how the company's Vista mistakes changed the development process of Windows 7, InfoWorld reports. Chief among these changes was to 'define a feature set early on' and only share that feature set with partners and customers when the company is confident they will be incorporated into the final OS. And to solve PC-compatibility issues, Microsoft has said all versions of Windows 7 will run even on low-cost netbooks. Moreover, Microsoft reiterated that the beta of Windows 7 that is now available is already feature-complete, although its final release to business customers isn't expected until November.