"Face it, Windows Vista is just so played these days. With that preliminary biz release under its belt, we're ready for bigger and better things, and luckily a certain "jameskyton" drive-by-blogger has the low-down for us on Vista's successors, Fiji and Vienna". Read more at Engadget.

Judging by details revealed in a chip conference agenda, the clock frequency race isn't over yet. IBM's Power6 processor will be able to exceed 5 gigahertz in a high-performance mode, and the second-generation Cell Broadband Engine processor from IBM, Sony and Toshiba will run at 6GHz, according to the program for the International Solid State Circuits Conference that begins February 11 in San Francisco.

Apple Computer gave Chief Executive Steve Jobs 7.5 million stock options in 2001 without the required authorization of the company's board, the Financial Times reported on Thursday. Records purporting to show that a full board meeting had taken place to approve the remuneration, as required by Apple's procedures, were later falsified, the Financial Times reported, citing people familiar with the matter. The report comes after Apple shares fell as much as 6 percent on Wednesday on a report in legal trade publication The Recorder that federal prosecutors were looking at 'apparently falsified' stock option documents in their probe of Apple's previous grants. Update: Apple released new information about its allocation of stock options on Friday, defending CEO Steve Jobs following speculation that a key document had been forged.

The Russian site Mobile-Review reviews Nokia's second version of their WebKit web browser (which was derived from WebCore/KHTML). This new unreleased-yet version offers WML support, opening links in new windows, display rotation, saving of any image, password manager, offline browsing, ATOM feed support, FlashLite 2.0 (no, this has no YouTube or other fancy Flash support) and much more. The first smartphones to offer WebKit's 2.0 browser will be the Nokia 6290 and N95 (which they will be running the new Symbian S60 3.1 version) that are scheduled to be released around April '07. If we were allowed for our own share of speculation, we would say that Apple's and Google's upcoming phones will be using a port of this open source browser too.

Apart from a new newsletter, ReactOS has also published its sixth interview with one of the developers. Art Yerkes, born in Philadelphia, PA, USA in 1974. He's been involved with ReactOS since 2002 and contributed primarily to the keyboard code in win32k and the network code. Lately much of the work has been networking related, as well as slowly giving birth to a PowerPC architecture port.

"In February 2003, the program 'Open Source and Open Source Software for the Dutch government' started, funded by the Dutch government. One of the main tasks was to make the government independent from single software suppliers, among which are Microsoft and SAP. After three years, the effort starts bearing fruit. Ten big municipalities - together 2.7 million inhabitants and including Amsterdam and The Hague - signed a manifest. I'll try to explain what's in the manifest, what that might mean for the future, and for the monopoly of Microsoft in the Dutch government."