Linus Torvalds has picked up one of Apple's new Intel-based Mac minis to play with, but the Linux creator still prefers Apple's old PowerPC architecture for his primary desktop machine. "I'm actually still running a G5, but I also have a Mac mini," Torvalds revealed today in an e-mail to ZDNet Australia. "I like the design, and it's the right form-factor to be a replacement machine for my wife and daughter, but sadly, Apple screwed up the firmware in various stupid ways."

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.

Microsoft on Tuesday released a slew of patches for Windows and Office, but a glitch prevented the company from pushing the updates out automatically. The patches, which include critical fixes for both Office and Windows, can be manually downloaded from Microsoft's Web site, and the company said it hopes the more-automated tools will have the patch available later on Tuesday. Microsoft said that its technical teams "have been working around the clock" to solve the updating problems.

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.

"iXsystems, an enterprise-class hardware solution provider, announced today its acquisition of PC-BSD, a rock solid UNIX operating system based on FreeBSD. PC-BSD is a fully functional desktop operating system running FreeBSD version 6, with a KDE desktop interface and graphical system installer. Its PBI system, developed exclusively for PC-BSD, lets users download and install their applications in a self-extracting and installing format. iXsystems' acquisition of PC-BSD will provide funding to the PC-BSD project to increase distribution of PC-BSD and develop future versions of PC-BSD. Development is currently underway for a version of PC-BSD that will allow for easy installation and operation on servers, workstations, and laptops."

"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."

Ray Noorda, the son of Dutch immigrants who drove Novell Netware to become the dominant local area network operating system in the 1980s, died Monday at the age of 82 after a long bout with Alzheimer's disease. Noorda was the first to clearly articulate that the many interoperating parts of the computer industry meant that one company needed to cooperate with another to ensure their products worked together. In some realms, they might be both partners and competitors, he noted, in a relationship he summed up as 'co-opetition'.

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).

As computer technology moves forward, you'll already have the established base and experience working with FreeBSD 64-bit. It's not about higher performance except in compiling software, high-end graphics rendering, and math-intensive work such as compressing files or in complex cryptology applications. It's about future-proofing.

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.

Microsoft will end support for Windows XP Service Pack 1 and SP 1a on 10 October, leaving users no option but to upgrade to SP2 if they wish to continue to receive support for crucial components, including security software. The move to drop support for SP1 is in line with Microsoft's stated strategy for support. According to its guidelines, Microsoft guarantees to provide 'mainstream support' for a full product for five years, but will only guarantee to support a Service Pack for 12 months after the launch of the next version of that pack.

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."

Blogger Kiyoshi Saruwatari claims that Nintendo's upcoming Wii console runs on the open source Linux operating system. According to Saruwatari, who claims to be a Nintendo insider, the company reduced development costs by leveraging open source software and incorporating a Linux kernel into the Wii software platform. A wide variety of additional features like web browsing, video playback, file management, and emulation all run on Nintendo's custom Linux operating system, which uses a proprietary interface. Unlike the other specialized software components, the actual games will not run under the Linux platform, and can be played without booting Linux if the user holds down the "A" button while the Wii is starting up.

Learn about the GNU Project Debugger macro capability that allows you to personalize and customize GDB to have just the tools you need. The previous article, 'Fun with strace and GDB', covered the basics of using these tools to explore your system and attach to programs that are already running to see what they were doing.