One in five Nature readers -- mostly scientists -- say they up their mental performance with drugs such as Ritalin, Provigil, and Inderal. when asked how they felt about professional thinkers using drugs to enhance their cognitive performance, nearly 80% said it should be allowed. While this report reaches a different part of science, the usage of these drugs can be utilized by software developers alike. What is your opinion on this, somewhat new, development?

"Symantec's comprehensive security report on the malware industry from July 1 to December 31, 2007, is now available in its 100+ page glory. Symantec broke down information on patch development time by operating system and by the type of vulnerability encountered. Surprisingly, Microsoft had the shortest time-to-patch over both halves of 2007. In the first part of the year, Microsoft released 38 patches (two of which involved third-party applications) with an average deployment time of 18 days. From July to December, Microsoft released 22 patches with an average patch time of six days. Red Hat came in second, at 32 days for the second half of the year and 36 days in the first half. That's quite a bit higher than Microsoft's average, but of the 227 vulnerabilities Red Hat patched in 2007, 226 of them involved third-party applications. Apple, Sun, and HP all lag well behind Microsoft and Red Hat, though the gap for each company differs significantly between the first and second halves of last year."

Microsoft Research and EuroSys have awarded the 2008 Roger Needham prize to Contiki OS author Adam Dunkels for his open source Contiki OS, protothreads, and the uIP and lwIP embedded TCP/IP stacks. Dunkels is famous for writing code that runs in extremely small amounts of memory.

Comic: "Copyright".

"In a session at the Gartner Emerging Trends conference today, analysts Neil MacDonald and Michael Silver identified many reasons that Windows (and thus Microsoft) are in trouble. Microsoft's operating system development times are too long and they deliver limited innovation; their OSs provide an inconsistent experience between platforms, with significant compatibility issues; and other vendors are out-innovating Microsoft. That gives enterprises unpredictable releases with limited value, management costs that are too high, and new releases that break too many applications and take too long to test and adopt. With end users bringing their own software solutions into the office... Well, it's just a heck of a sad story for Microsoft."

GNOME 2.22.1 has been released. "This is the first update to GNOME 2.22. Come and see all the bug fixing, all the new translations and all the updated documentation brought to you by the wonderful team of GNOME contributors! A lot of work has been done in the stable branch to make it even more solid than it was."

And yet another release of the GNUstep live CD, version 1.8 this time. "GNUstep (this is a live CD, an operating system, a distribution) contains a lot of software for GNUstep, a free implementation of the OPENSTEP framework (which was also the base as Cocoa in Mac OS X)."

Sun Microsystems is today officially debuting its two new 'massively threaded' servers based on the UltraSPARC T2+ processor. The major advancement in Sun's new CMT SPARC Enterprise T5140 and T5240 servers is that both systems support two processors - whereas previous offerings topped out at a single socket. Each processor - part of the 'Niagara' line - is equipped with up to eight cores and 64 threads, which is par with the chip's predecessors. But with a fresh ability to double-up, a single machine is able to process 128 instructional threads at the same time. Sun heralds the chip consolidation as leading to better performance per watt and space efficiency.

"Atom is the brand name for Intel's newly-launched ultramobile processor line, but it could just as well be the name for Intel's next-generation 45nm microarchitecture. This new core microarchitecture, codenamed Nehalem, forms the basic building block from which Intel will assemble the brains for everything from high-end servers to svelte notebooks. Insofar as Nehalem represents a lot more than just a new processor, it's a significant shift for Intel at almost every level. In this article, I'll give a general overview of Nehalem, focusing on the major changes and big new features that the architecture will eventually bring to Intel's entire x86 processor line. A more in-depth examination of Nehalem from me will show up later in the spring; for now, read on for the highlights. Here's what you need to know about Nehalem."

Mandriva Linux 2008 Spring has been released. This new release brings features like full support for the Asus Eee, easy synchronization with Windows Mobile 5 and later, Blackberry, and Nokia devices, a new parental control utility, the Elisa multimedia centrer, Codeina for easy installation of necessary media codecs, and PulseAudio by default. Software updates include KDE 3.5.9 (with 4.0.2 available from the official repositories), GNOME 2.22, OpenOffice.org 2.4, Linux kernel 2.6.24.4, X.org 7.3, and Compiz 0.7. You can download the One (live/install CD) or Free (traditional installer, 100% free/open source software) editions of Mandriva Linux 2008 Spring right here. BitTorrent download links can be found here. The main 2008 Spring page on the Mandriva Wiki has more information.

Lennart Poettering from Red Hat who develops and maintains PulseAudio has written a detailed explanation about the underlying technical improvements in the upcoming version of PulseAudio. "A while ago I started development of special branch of PulseAudio which is called glitch-free. In a few days I will merge it back to PulseAudio trunk, and eventually release it as 0.9.11. I think it's time to explain a little what all this 'glitch-freeness' is about, what made it so tricky to implement, and why this is totally awesome technology."

"Microsoft will make available the preliminary versions of technical documentation for the protocols built into Microsoft Office 2007, SharePoint Server 2007 and Exchange Server 2007. This documentation, which defines how these high-volume Microsoft products communicate with some of its other products, is 14000 pages and is in addition to the 30000 pages posted when the software giant first introduced its new Interoperability Principles last month. They will be made available April 8."

"I am very happy about the direction in which the Mac OS X GUI is going, although sadly many Mac users aren’t interested in (or don’t know about) the “lower levels” of the Macintosh Operating System. Have you ever wondered why the Terminal greets you with the words “Welcome to Darwin”? Why do BSD and Mac OS share certain bits of code? Why does Wikipedia describe Mac OS X as a graphical operating system? Today we’re going to take a look at the underlying open source technology which powers your fancy Leopard OS - the hidden core set of components, named Darwin."

IBM is discontinuing the System p and System i server brands and changing the name of the i5/OS operating system to "i" or "i for business." An IT Jungle article notes that "servers developed and manufactured by its newly christened Power Systems division with the name--drum roll please--"Power." As in Power 520, Power 550, Power 570, and Power 595, whether the machine is running AIX, Linux, or the operating system formerly known as i5/OS."