The Windows 7 craze is barely over, and yet the internet is already buzzing with the next big thing from Microsoft: a project called Midori. The SD Times claims to have seen internal Microsoft documents detailing what Midori actually is, and they say it's the clean-break from Windows many of us have been waiting for. The SD Times article is heavy on the details, and quite technical, but luckily Ars Technica provides a more accessible summary of what Microsoft has in store for Midori.

Not all Linux distributions are made with the same components, which can make it difficult for software developers to write applications for multiple Linux distributions. That's where the Linux Standards Base (LSB) comes into play. For years the LSB has not quite lived up to its full potential. That could all change with the upcoming LSB 4.0 release.

Take a look at the strategy of treating Linux instances as managed objects. Previous generations of management technologies all suffer from the problems of excessive complexity, heavyweight implementations, too fine-grained an approach, and so on. In effect, the area of Linux systems management infrastructure is wide open for a root and branch review.

"The best open source applications and operating systems are more usable now than they were then. But this is largely from slow incremental improvements, and low-level competition between projects and distributors. Major problems with the design process itself remain largely unfixed." Personal Note: I am not sure how many people feel that Free Software has poor usability. As far as the desktop environment, I find most of linux window managers to be the more user-friendly than Windows and OS X.

Early on, it was a bit of a challenge to get Linux natively installed on the PS3. Time has passed, and a great deal has changed. Fedora 7 installs on the PS3 out of the box, with the most challenging installation steps eliminated. This article introduces the basic configuration knobs and widgets specific to the PS3 running Linux, shows you how to use them effectively, and suggests the kind of trickery that gets improved performance.

"The recent release of Intel's Centrino 2 platform means a refresh of notebooks from every manufacturer. Lenovo took this chance to not only update the internals of their ThinkPads, but also to make changes to their naming conventions and release a few new models, including the addition of the ThinkPad X200 to the venerable X series." The X200 brings along a widescreen display (the X was the ThinkPad's last standard aspect ratio series), the Centrino 2 platform with 45nm processor, and an SSD option. The notebook is a bit wider than before but still has that ThinkPad keyboard and with the right battery it will last up to 9 hours."

Today, support for metadata journaling has been added to NetBSD's implementation of the Berkeley Fast File System (FFS), eliminating the need for lengthy file system checks after a crash or power failure. Support for converting existing file systems to use the new journaling capabilities is provided as well. See the official announcement for all the details.

There are probably lots and lots of lawsuits going on every day in the technology world, and generally, they are quite uninteresting to all of us. Exceptions exist, of course, and the case of Apple and PsyStar is definitely one of them. It's a lawsuit that could test one of the most debated issues in the world of software: the EULA issue. To refresh your memory: PsyStar started offering Macintosh clones earlier this year, which caused quite the uproar in the Mac community. Apple was silent on the issue at first, but a few weeks ago the company decided to take legal action against PsyStar, claiming PsyStar violated Apple's copyright and license agreements (EULAs), and motivated others to do the same. While several legal experts agree that Apple's EULA will stand the test of court in The Netherlands, the situation in the US might be completely different. PsyStar seems prepared for the worst, as they have hired lawyers from Carr & Ferrell LLP, a firm who successfully fought Apple in court over IP issues before. I'm breaking out the popcorn, because this is hopefully going to be a big one.

While using an AMD Barcelona server to create a portable benchmarking kit, InfoWorld's Tom Yager discovered something unexpected: "I could incur variances in some benchmark tests ranging from 10 to 60 percent through combined manipulation of the server's BIOS settings, BIOS version, compiler flags, and OS release." Yager put this matter to AMD's performance engineers and was told he was seeing an effect widely known among CPU engineers, but seldom communicated to IT - that the performance envelope of a CPU is cast in silicon, but is sculpted in software. "Long before you lay hands on a server," Yager writes, "BIOS and OS engineers have reshaped its finely tuned logic in code, sometimes with the real intent of making it faster sometimes to homogenize the server to flatten its performance relative to Intel's."

For the first time, you can hit your computer and get a meaningful response! Knock some sense into your computer with a Hard Drive Active Protection System-aware kernel, an accelerometer-enabled laptop, and a Perl script. Double tap to lock the screen, and knock in your secret code to unlock. Tap the display lid once to move your mp3 player to the next track. The possibilities are endless.

I have written about if before: updating programs on your computer - if you're not using a Linux distribution, that is - is a total and utter mess. On Windows and Mac OS X, there are roughly four ways of updating applications. The application notifies of new updates, and then downloads them when you click 'yes', the application updates from within the application itself, or the application requires a special update program running in the background. These are all quite annoying, since they interfere with your workflow (as opposed to, say, running "apt-get upgrade" every morning). The fourth method is the official vendor channel, Windows/Microsoft Update in Windows and Software Update in Mac OS X. Paul Ellis argues that to alleviate the mess, Microsoft should open up Microsoft Update for everyone else - and similar arguments are made concerning Apple's Software Update.

Microsoft appears to be assembling its game plan for the day when the Windows client OS as it has been developed for the past 20 years becomes obsolete. The incubation project, also known as Midori, seeks to create a componentized, Net-centric OS, based on connected systems - one that largely eliminates dependencies between local apps and the hardware on which they run. SDTimes is also featuring an article that has some more details about Midori.

SplashTop is an instant-on Linux environment created by DeviceVM. SplashTop does not intend to provide a full computing environment, but it satisfies a home user's basic needs such as email, VOIP, IM, etc. Asus is the primary partner of DeviceVM and SplashTop started to get bundled with Asus motherboards and Asus notebooks. Now the good folks over at the Phoronix Forums have hacked SplashTop to run from a USB stick on non-Asus motherboards, run custom applications and launch a terminal inside the Linux environment.

Mandriva is proud to announce the release of Mandriva Linux 2009 Beta 1 'thornicrofti'. This beta includes the newest release of KDE 4, KDE 4.1 final, GNOME 2.23.5, Firefox 3, and kernel 2.6.26 final. The new beta also switches to using splashy (rather than bootsplash) for boot and shutdown graphics, and adds synchronization support for Windows Mobile 2003 devices. As always, Mandriva reminds you not to use pre-releases in any critical situation; install them only on a test system or partition, or in a virtual machine. Additionally, they strongly discourage using this pre-release to upgrade from any earlier release of Mandriva Linux, as the transition process from KDE 3 to KDE 4 is not yet fully implemented and you are likely to end up with an unusable system. Please make sure to read the Errata and Release Notes, and file any bugs not covered in those pages on Bugzilla.