Sun Microsystems and Fujitsu engineers on Tuesday promised significant performance increases with two next-generation chips, models that they hope will help keep the Sparc line relevant. Company representatives speaking at the Fall Processor Forum promised significant gains over the chips' predecessors - the first Niagara (now called UltraSparc T1) and the single-core Sparc64 V.

Considering how many industry giants have partnered with Microsoft in WMA and PlaysForSure it would appear that Microsoft is a leader in successful consumer electronics technology. That's not the case. All of these partners hooked up with Microsoft simply because they had no idea of what to do on their own. Few even experimented with their own independent technology plans; they simply picked Microsoft because the company seemed like a safe bet at delivering technology. They obviously didn't do their homework. The big secret they missed is that Microsoft hasn't ever earned significant profits in the consumer hardware business, nor has its executives proven any business acumen in delivering what consumers want in hardware or creative entertainment, excluding, of course, Microsoft's impressive and highly sophisticated keyboard and mouse division.

Microsoft has confirmed that IE7 will be released as an optional download later this month. The long-awaited next version of Microsoft's browser software will be pushed out as an automatic update a "few weeks" later, probably as part of Microsoft's regular Patch Tuesday update cycle in either November or December. Firms not ready to install IE7 will be able to temporarily block the update.

Some nice-looking screenshots of Microsoft's next version of Windows Mobile - codenamed 'Crossbow' - have popped up on the web to show the upcoming operating system's swankier graphics. The images come courtesy of MSMobileNews, which has a selection of shots on offer. Meanwhile, the similarly names MSMobiles has a smaller pic showing Windows Mobile 6.0/Windows Mobile 2007's Vista-like folder icons.

Microsoft's Steve Ballmer said on Tuesday that lines between on-premise software and Internet services are blurring, an industry shift the company is embracing. During his talk, Ballmer said many websites can be described as 'click to run', where a service is delivered via a Web site but runs on a PC. "I do think that we're in a transition where software goes from something that's in its pre-Internet day to something we call Live (Microsoft's hosted services), where you have click-to-run capability on a Web site... But software will still execute on a PC," Ballmer said in response to questions.

A senior Microsoft executive has promised that its new operating system will be more secure than ever. Jean-Philippe Courtois, president of Microsoft International, said that beefing-up security was one reason behind delays to Windows Vista. Microsoft has been criticised for flaws in previous systems that left users vulnerable to attacks by hackers. Mr Courtois said Microsoft had done "tons of work to make Vista a fantastic experience when it comes to security".

"It is rare that you would willingly let vandals and burglars into your home but a controlled environment like a honeypot computer lets you do the technological equivalent in relative safety. The idea of letting the PC get infected was to see exactly what nasty programs hit our machine and how easy it was to recover from infection."

Hakon Wium Lie must feel a special kinship with the "Band of Brothers" soliloquy that Shakespeare reserves for Henry V. "We few we, happy few, we band of brothers..." the king proclaims before his men head into battle. With all of Microsoft's riches and power behind it, Internet Explorer has dominated the Web browser market since Netscape's defeat in the late 1990s. But as CTO of Opera Software, Wium Lie's job is to figure out how to incorporate the best technology possible in his company's software - and in this he's stolen a beat on Opera's much bigger rival.

Many of us use the terms "programmer" and "developer" interchangeably. When someone asks me what I do for a living I tend to describe my vocation as "computer programmer" rather than "software developer", because the former seems to be understood more readily by those unfamiliar with IT. Even when writing pieces for this site, I tend to swap back and forth between the two terms, to try and avoid sounding repetitive. But in truth, there is a world of difference between a computer programmer and a software developer (editor's note: aka engineer and there is also a difference with a software architect).

In the increasingly Google-YouTube-Web 2.0 age we inhabit, it's become fashionable to dismiss Windows as a relic. Ask around the office. You'll hear the Gen Xers sneer about how Microsoft's operating system is, well, so yesterday. Even a fair number of IT greybeards are warming to the notion that the times, they are a changing.

Tomorrow, Terra Soft will officially announce the construction of the world's first Cell-based supercomputing cluster. Terra Soft will use the test cluster 'E.coli' to conduct advanced software development, optimization, and testing with emphasis on Y-HPC and Y-Bio applied to the Cell Broadband Engine. The production cluster 'Amoeba' will be made available to select University and Department of Energy laboratories to further life sciences research. The clusters will incorporate, in part, Cell-based PS3 systems.

"As is the norm (for the most cases) with private software companies, yellowTAB before, and now Magnussoft, have been reserved in commenting what's coming down the road. We know Multi-User is coming and also that GCC4 is part of ZETA's future, but today we're going to bring you a small glimpse in what's coming for ZETA and its users."

Ars reviews Firefox 2 RC2, and concludes: "I personally never managed to get any of the third party spellcheck extensions to work right, and the availability of spellcheck support alone was enough to convince me to use 2.0 pre-releases rather than the 1.5.0.7 build that comes with Ubuntu. All things considered, RC2 adequately meets most of my needs, but doesn't exceed my expectations as major releases have in the past. Hopefully, development on the Places system and other delayed features will make future releases more interesting."

The Inquirer has been looking at the latest release of Microsoft’s Vista operating system. This time, we tackle build 5744, otherwise known as Release Candidate 2. Tested today is the x64 version, which has a date stamp of 03/10/06. So what has changed over RC1 and earlier builds? Elsewhere, Microsoft has said they expect Vista's deployment rate to be twice that of Windows XP. Finally, even though RC2 will be the last public test build, Microsoft still has changes up its sleeve for Vista RTM.