Microsoft executive Ty Carlson spoke about the future of Windows recently during a panel discussion at the Future in Review 2007 conference held in San Diego, California. Carlson said that future versions of Windows would have to be 'fundamentally different' in order to take full advantage of future CPUs that will contain many processing cores. "You're going to see in excess of eight, 16, 64 and beyond processors on your client computer," said Carlson, whose job title is director of technical strategy at Microsoft. Windows Vista, he said, was "designed to run on one, two, maybe four processors."

"Microsoft has unveiled a new touch-sensitive coffee table-shaped computer called 'Surface'. Designed to do away with the need for a traditional mouse and keyboard, users can instead use their fingers to operate the computer. Also designed to interact with mobile phones placed on the surface, Microsoft says it will initially sell the unit to corporate customers. These will include hotels, casinos, phone stores and restaurants." Instant update: More details and a video.

At its 10th anniversary and after a period of uncertainty for the RPM community, together with a new roadmap towards version 5.0 the project environment of the popular Unix software packaging tool RPM Package Manager was relaunched under the domain rpm5.org by the newly formed RPM project team, further on lead by RPM's primary developer Jeff Johnson. The primary goals of RPM 5.0 are the additional support for the XML based archiving format XAR, an integrated package dependency resolver, further improved portability and extended cross-platform support. Note: Please note that rpm5 is a fork of the 'real' rpm project.

"Details of a controversial patent agreement between Microsoft and Novell have been revealed in Novell's SEC filings. The text of the agreement is now publicly available, but some parts - including one whole page - have been redacted. Although most of the details surrounding the agreement have already been disclosed, there are a few aspects of the deal that weren't previously known. Of particular interest is the language that describes exceptions to the patent indemnification agreement."

"Recently I had a chance to spend some time with Fujitsu's P7230 ultraportable notebook. With a 10.6" LED-backlit LCD and a weight of less than 3lbs the system is just what many mobile fanatics are looking for, but such portability comes at a price. The P7230 is powered but a 1.2GHz Intel Core Solo U1400 processor, something that is great for the battery life, but does not have the power of its Core 2 Duo brethren. The single-core, low-voltage processor works well much of the time but chokes under the load brought on by intensive programs as well as multi-tasking. In attempt to get the most possible from the P7230 I decided to completely remove Vista in favor of Ubuntu 7.04."

"There are a myriad of both subtle and fundamental differences in the basic architecture of Windows Server 2008, which could dramatically change not only the way it's used in the enterprise, but also the logical and physical structure of networks where it's the dominant OS. The abilities to consolidate servers, to manage hardware more effectively, to remotely manage hardware without the graphical traffic, and to radically alter the system security model, could present a more compelling argument for customers to plan their WS2K8 migrations now, than the arguments for moving from Windows 2000 to Server 2003."

Alex Ionescu, one of the lead developers behind the ReactOS project, has published a detailed article on the XP/Vista application compatibility system. "For the last few days, I've been intimately becoming aquainted with a piece of technology in Windows XP and Vista that rarely gets the attention it deserves. It has raised my esteem and admiration towards Microsoft ten fold, and I feel it would be wise to share it, publicize it, and then of course, find (positive) ways to exploit it to turn it into a powerful backend for various purposes."

In yet another set of legal documents in the Amiga-Hyperion court case, it is revealed that AmigaOS 4 was ported to run on the Mac Mini (the PowerPC version, obviously), or, at least, that the port was in a very advanced state. The information was found in an email exchange between Bill McEwen of Amiga and Nicola Morocutti of VirtualWorks, about the latter obtaining a license to sell AmigaOS 4 together with the Sam 440ep board as well as, apparently, to sell boxed copies of AmigaOS 4 for the Mac Mini.

"A startup in Alameda, Calif. plans to release a kind of holy software grail the third or fourth week of June. Lina said its dual-licensed Lina virtual Linux machine will run more or less normal Linux applications under Windows, Mac, or Linux, with a look and feel native to each."

After years of delivering faster and faster chips that can easily boost the performance of most desktop software, Intel says the free ride is over. Already, chipmakers like Intel and AMD are delivering processors that have multiple brains, or cores, rather than single brains that run ever faster. The challenge is that most of today's software isn't built to handle that kind of advance. "The software has to also start following Moore's law," Intel fellow Shekhar Borkar said, referring to the notion that chips offer roughly double the performance every 18 months to two years. "Software has to double the amount of parallelism that it can support every two years."

Microsoft is launching a slew of initiatives to help Web sites identify visitors. First, the company is kicking off four open-source projects to support the development of ID cards for online users. Microsoft is also releasing one of its identity management specs, Identity Selector Interoperability Profile, under its OSP, meaning the specification is clear of licensing fees or patent worries.

"Even while at the top of its game, Apple Inc. can seemingly find faults with just about anything, including a bit of itself. The Mac maker is constantly evaluating the market segments in which it wishes to participate and those which it does not. It's an application of love-hate methodology that inevitably produces its share of casualties." AppleInsider says it has learned from 'reliable' sources that the end is nigh for the Mini. "Ladies and gentlemen, AppleInsider believes in all sincerity that the Mini is dead."

Apple on May 24 released patches for 17 vulnerabilities spanning a host of technologies and a slew of potential unpleasantness: from system takeover to denial of service to password snatching. The patches can be downloaded automatically by enabling Software Update or they can be downloaded at Apple's download site.

"Hoard is a scalable memory allocator (malloc replacement) for multithreaded applications. Hoard can dramatically improve your application's performance on multiprocessor machines. No changes to your source are necessary; just link it in. Hoard scales linearly up to at least 14 processors. The supported platforms include Linux, Solaris, and Windows NT/2000/XP."