"One of the many new technologies for KDE 4 is the often mentioned, but seldom explained Solid hardware API. Hardware has always been a bit of an annoying element of using Linux and other UNIX-like operating systems, but Solid hopes to fix that for KDE 4. In many ways, Solid is like Phonon, in that it's a Qt/KDE style API around already existing components at the lower level, such as freedesktop.org's HAL. It is already quite functional in the backend, and it's already affecting visible KDE components."

Paul Thurrott reviews the latest CTP of Windows Home Server. "I remain excited about WHS and while one might easily come up with a number of features they'd like to see added to the product - a server-based version of Media Center comes to mind - know this: This is the initial version of WHS, Microsoft plans to keep improving it over time, and they're listening to your suggestions and ideas. As with the first version of Media Center, the technology is in a nascent stage but is already quite compelling. If this first version of WHS is so good, I can only imagine what the future holds."

"More than half of the 1.2 million lines of code for the real-time kernel technology have been moved into the mainline Linux kernel over the past year, Tim Burke, the director of emerging technologies at Red Hat, said at the Linux/Open Source on Wall Street conference on April 23."

A month ago I wrote a review on Ubuntu's 7.04 version and in it I promised a second look once the final version was to released. Feisty Fawn was released last week and as it seems so far, it is one of the most (if not the most) successful Linux distro release ever. This means that we can't help it but compare it with XP and Mac OS X, after having tested it in 3 laptops and 2 desktops in my lab.

"Jailing is a mechanism to virtually change a system's root directory. By employing this method, administrators can isolate services so that they cannot access the real filesystem structure. You should run unsecured and sensitive network services in a chroot jail, because if a hacker can break into a vulnerable service he could exploit your whole system. If a service is jailed, the intruder will be able to see only what you want him to see - that is, nothing useful. Some of the most frequent targets of attack, which therefore should be jailed, are BIND, Apache, FTP, and SSH. SSHjail is a patch for the OpenSSH daemon. It modifies two OpenSSH files (session.c and version.h) and allows you to jail your SSH service without any need for SSH reconfiguration."

The prototype for a revolutionary new general-purpose computer processor, which has the potential of reaching trillions of calculations per second, has been designed and built by a team of computer scientists at The University of Texas at Austin. The new processor, known as TRIPS (Tera-op, Reliable, Intelligently adaptive Processing System), could be used to accelerate industrial, consumer and scientific computing. Professors Stephen Keckler, Doug Burger and Kathryn McKinley have been working on underlying technology that culminated in the TRIPS prototype for the past seven years. Their research team designed and built the hardware prototype chips and the software that runs on the chips.

"Today, IBM announced a public beta trial of a virtual Linux environment that will let x86 applications run on its System p Unix servers without modification. The new IBM System p Application Virtual Environment technology will allow x86 binaries to run as well without modification, removing the biggest barrier against effective virtualization for some companies. As a result, customers will be able to consolidate dozens, if not hundreds, of servers into one virtual environment."

"When free software supporters participate in the French presidential election on April 22 for the first round of voting, they will have information that may be unique in the world: position statements from all major parties on issues about free software, copyright, patents, and digital rights. Even more surprisingly - at least from a North American perspective - a majority of the candidates have heard of these issues and developed positions on them."

"Clive Sinclair's ZX Spectrum is a quarter of a century old today. The machine that really launched the UK IT industry hit the streets of a depressed Britain on 23 April, 1982. Dark days, then. But lo, along came bespectacled Messiah Sir Clive Sinclair with the successor to his 1981 release, the black-and-white ZX-81. The ZX Spectrum boasted a visual cortex-melting eight colours at 256 x 192 resolution, blistering 3.5MHz CPU, and crucially, a crisp-repelling vulcanised rubber keyboard."

Jon Stokes writes over at Ars: "At some point, I'm going to write my very last e-paper/e-ink article for Ars. After almost a decade of thin, flexible, low-power displays being "three to five years away," I can finally see that the time for e-paper's mass-market debut is almost upon us. A case in point is Fujitsu's new FLEPia portable tablet, samples of which are now available in limited supply as of this past Friday."

"CentOS is an enterprise class GNU/Linux distribution based on the publicly available source packages of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Just like RHEL or Debian stable, CentOS focuses on stability and security, sacrificing the 'latest and greatest' packages. Is CentOS 5 really that stable? And does it fit on the average Joe's desktop? This is what I'm gonna find out."

If you shout something loud enough and many people are saying it, does it become true? Some groups of people (include tech journalists and Linux advocates, such as Steven J. Vaughn-Nichols) have a psychological need to find Vista lacking. Mr. V-N has predicted that Vista will have all manner of problems, so his clear interest is to point out everything that is wrong with the OS. Who cares if he has to even make some stuff up?

The Shiira Project has announced the release of latest version of their Mac OS X Web browser, Shiira 2.0. Shiira is a web browser based on Web Kit and written in Cocoa. The goal of the Shiira Project is to create a browser that is better and more useful than Safari. All source code used in this software is publicly available. One of the features of Shiira is Tab Expose. Tab Expose shows all open tabs the same way that Expose shows all open windows (similar to IE7). Shiira 2.0 requires Mac OS X 10.4.

"Full merge of 1.5 generics work. Bootstrappable with OpenJDK javac compiler. URLConnection timeout support. TimeZone can use platform zoneinfo file when available. The Collection classes, lang.management and util.spi have been updated to 1.6. Addition of 1.6 ServiceLoader. Speedup for cairo and freetype Graphics2D support. The ASM library is now included. Better detection of browser plugin mechanisms for gcjwebplugin applet support in mozilla, iceweasel and firefox." See also the full announcement and some nice screenshots.