"Ever since the remote control's co-inventor Robert Adler passed away , I've wanted to own one of the first remote controls. After trolling through eBay every now and then, I finally have in my hands a piece of the history of the button. But there's a mystery: which piece?" Entertainingly written piece on the world's first remote controls. I totally enjoy the simplicity of the ultrasonic remote: "All these early remotes are purely mechanical. No batteries at all. When you push the button, a small hammer strikes an aluminum rod, triggering a sound above our hearing range that's picked up by the TV. Each rod is a different length, thus a different frequency, thus distinguishable by the TV." Brilliant.

Apple has updated its line of MacBook computers. "Apple today updated its MacBook consumer notebooks with faster Intel Core 2 Duo processors, 1GB of memory and larger hard drives in every model. The MacBook is just one-inch thin and features built-in 802.11n wireless networking for up to five times the performance and twice the range of 802.11g."

SoftwareInReview reviews Windows Vista, and concludes: "I took down my Mandriva workstation and replaced it with my Vista test machine and tried to work normally for a day. I found it difficult to get good desktop software applications for affordable prices, I had trouble getting my Microsoft mouse to work properly, the unintuitive and strangely rearranged interface drove me crazy, and the system's poor performance was intolerable." Elsewhere, El Reg has more on the file deletion problems in Vista.

AMD says its badly needed quad-core desktop processors are on the way, and they'll arrive bearing a new name. Two quad-core chips will be available in the second half of the year, the Phenom FX and the Phenom X4, and a dual-core chip based on a similar design called the Phenom X2 will also appear by the end of the year.

Last friday, the KOffice team started their ODF meeting in Berlin. Many people showed up at the KDAB office, and spend their time discussing, designing, and hacking on KOffice. They came up with some new things.

IBM's Power6 push began this week with a tweak to AIX support. In a letter to customers, IBM vowed to support future updates to AIX 5.3 for an additional two years. This appears to be IBM's Power6 concession, since the vendor, according to our sources, will announce Power6 systems this month and ship them in the middle of the year but won't have AIX 5.4 available for months. Normally, IBM would like to have a new major release of AIX ready for its new processors and have customers upgrade accordingly. No such luck.

"It's late, but it's finally here. This morning AMD will be formally announcing their long-awaited Radeon HD 2000 series, or perhaps better known as the ATI R600 GPU. The AMD Radeon HD 2000 series features DirectX 10.0 (well, for those that use Microsoft products), Avivo HD, a programmable tessellation unit, CrossFire support, and much more. This morning we have our technology preview of ATI/AMD's next generation GPUs along with what's in store for Linux and the R600 series support." Update: AnandTech has a 31-page review of the R600.

"Free software is great, and corporate America loves it. It's often high-quality stuff that can be downloaded free off the Internet and then copied at will. It's versatile - it can be customized to perform almost any large-scale computing task - and it's blessedly crash-resistant. A broad community of developers, from individuals to large companies like IBM, is constantly working to improve it and introduce new features. No wonder the business world has embraced it so enthusiastically: More than half the companies in the Fortune 500 are thought to be using the free operating system Linux in their data centers. But now there's a shadow hanging over Linux and other free software, and it's being cast by Microsoft. The Redmond behemoth asserts that one reason free software is of such high quality is that it violates more than 200 of Microsoft's patents."

Open source guru Alan Cox has voiced his support for the controversial version 3.0 of the GNU General Public Licence in an exclusive podcast interview with Computer Weekly. Cox was once regarded as the Linux number two behind Linus Torvalds because of his work maintaining the Linux kernel, and he is still a major force in the open source community. But whereas Torvalds has openly criticised GPL 3.0, and said he will not be signing up to the new licence, Cox is fully behind it.

"We now know more details about Red Hat's forthcoming Global Desktop, but there's still no download. In fact, the company doesn't plan to push this new Linux desktop online; instead, you're more likely to see it pre-installed on Intel's white box partners' PCs. Red Hat will be certifying Global Desktop for Intel's vPro PC architecture. The vPro is Intel's attempt to re-invent the business desktop."

Mozilla has released Bugzilla 3.0, with many new features and code improvements. According to the release announcement, some of the new features in this version include custom fields, support for the Apache mod_perl module, per-product permissions, an XML-RPC interface, and the ability to create and edit bugs via email.

What's eating the battery life of my Linux laptop? Which software component causes the most power to be consumed? These are important questions without a good answer... until now. Intel announced the PowerTOP tool, a program that collects the various pieces of information from your system and presents an overview of how well your laptop is doing in terms of power savings. A number of apps, like Firefox, Evolution and Gaim have been modified by Intel to help consume less power and hopefully these patches will be integrated to their main trees or by distros.

"Eben Moglen admits he is a 'talker' and his performance during our brief 30-minute chat does nothing to persuade otherwise. The former general counsel to the Free Software Foundation was at the Red Hat Summit in San Diego on Thursday to put his considerable oratorical skills to use, updating attendees around the soon-to-be-launched third instalment of the GNU General Public License."

"The KDE Community is happy to announce the immediate availability of the first alpha release of the KDE Desktop Environment, version 4.0. The release is a basis for the integration of powerful new technologies that will be included in KDE 4. It has been given the codename 'Knut'." Meanwhile, the KDe HIG team is looking for help with finding applications that violate the (unfinished) KDE HIG.