Sun Microsystems engineers have begun designing Niagara 3, a second sequel to the company's ambitious lower-end processor. John Fowler, executive vice president of Sun's server division, confirmed the development in an interview Tuesday and suggested it will continue Sun's push to squeeze more processing cores onto the chip. This new member of the Sparc family will be built using a manufacturing process with 45-nanometer circuitry elements, he said.

The long-touted Microsoft Vista/Office 2007 tandem launch is on for the last week in November in New York, sources said. This event will focus on business usage and scenarios. The new client Windows operating system and Office client and server applications have been promised for volume business customers by year's end and for consumers by early 2007. Jeff Raikes, president of the Microsoft Business Division, would not comment on a specific launch timing or venue but said the company remains on track for the two promised delivery windows. He applied the usual caveat: Microsoft will not ship the code if it's not ready.

"As presented at the Opera Backstage event in London today, Opera 9.1 will include enhanced fraud protection. Today we display the name of the certificate owner in the right end of the address field when you're on a secure site. In 9.1 we will reuse that field to display more information about the trust level of the site you visit."

"A couple of weeks ago, Apple invited me to its campus to get a close-up look at Apple's Xserve Xeon. It is a marvel of physical design, so much so that I find that it implausible that Xserve Xeon and Xserve G5 could have been designed by the same company. Xserve G5 was pretty tight, but Xserve Xeon makes its predecessor, not to mention ever PC 1U rack server I've seen, look slapped together. I was struck by perfectly Xserve Xeon was designed, and in particular by how easily it comes apart. I have high standards in this regard. I told a friend that I will only buy or recommend servers that I can install, remove, disassemble and repair with one hand, a TSA-approved butter knife and no instructions."

"A fortnight after announcing plans to share the RISC OS 5 source code, developers Castle have slapped a 69 quid price tag on their latest OS upgrade. The news has lead to some confusion over the future direction of the operating system, and fuelled concern that crucial components of RISC OS 5 will remain closed source as chargeable updates."

"To make Linux applications usable worldwide, with no inequity between Western dialects and the rest of the world's many languages, you must be able to deliver localized versions that input, store, retrieve, and render any language, no matter how complex. The multilingualization library, or m17n, provides a single internationalization solution for all languages on UNIX-like platforms."