IBM Mainframe

Due to arrive in consumers' hands in late November when the Xbox 360 is planned to debut, IBM said that the chips offer dual-source processing capability and feature a wide range of specialized technology developed in tandem with Microsoft. The processors are being built at both the company's East Fishkill, N.Y. fabrication facility and by contractor Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing in Singapore.

Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft is betting on the Xbox 360, which will retail starting at $299, to help fuel its push into the digital living room. While its current Xbox console is focused purely on games and online multiplayer capabilities, the Xbox 360 will offer a range of entertainment applications, including the ability to download music and television programming, and exterior ports for interfacing with portable media devices such as rival Apple Inc.'s iPod and Sony Corp.'s PSP.

Middleware is more than just .NET and J2EE. That's the message coming from Zend Technologies, the corporate backer of the open source scripting language.

Zend and its partners announced a new PHP collaboratio Project that will buid a new PHP Web application development environment.

The Zend-led effor to drive PHP adoption as a middleware alternative to .NET and J2EE is not the first effort from the group. nd its partners announced a new PHP Collaboration Project

There are many fancy reasons that OpenOffice.org is a great choice for your office work. For example, it's open source and it supports an open format document standard, OpenDocument. I've been running a late beta of OpenOffice.org 2.0 on both my SuSE 9.3 a 10 Linux boxes and on Windo

I've started writing with vi on Unix and WordStar on CP/M. Over the years, I've used Lotus Word, WordPerfect and, yes, every version of Microsoft Word for Windows from 2.0 to 2003. Along the way, I've also used spreadsheets starting with VisiCalc, with many years spent on Lotus 1-2-3 and Quattro Pro and for the last five years, Microsoft Excel.

Just in time for Halloween, the staff at the computer store at the University of Arkansas have created a seasonally appropriate PC.

Road maps won't be finalized until the agreement with NEC is completed in the first quarter of 2006, and any migration away from CMOS will depend on Intel Corp.'s ability to provide a processor that delivers performance at least as good as the CMOS chip, said Guy Esnouf, a spokesman for Blue Bell, Pa.-based Unisys.

"Obviously, we're not going to do anything until we're happy the Intel processor technology is where it needs to be," said Esnouf. "We foresee a time when customers will be able to make that switch without any degradation of performance. In time, we would plan that ClearPath would run on Intel rather than on the current CMOS. But we're not going there now."

Interface: Nothing much has changed since the 5129 build, as the UI appears to be more or less set in pattern, though we do hope that Microsoft makes the color scheme a bit more cheery than a hybrid of translucent colors.