Noksagt writes, "FreeDOS 1.0 has been released only a little bit later than planned. The 1.0 milestone is considered to be 'a stable and viable MS-DOS replacement' and features long filename support, HIMEM and EMM386 management, and CD-ROM support."

Octiaviane writes to tell us that XYZComputing has a review of Lenovo's Thinkpad X60 with a look at not only the current specs but the evolution of the Thinkpad line. From the article: "One constant which has remained throughout the evolution of the notebook computer is the Thinkpad. Processors and operating systems have changed, designs have been updated, and ownership has changed hands, but the Thinkpad remains. This product has never stopped being a top choice for demanding consumers and corporate buyers, whether they are looking for size, power, or features."

slimrabbit writes "LinuxDevices is reporting on a truly silent home theater PC that comes with its own Fedora 5 based quick install Linux DVD capable of installing a fully-configured FC5 system with LIRC, KDETV, TV-Time and Kradio in about 15 minutes. The most notable features are its "church mouse quiet" 14dba power supply, TV-Out (SVideo and composite), component video, DVI and VGA out, and hardware MPEG support(XvMC). The company also supports and engages the Linux community through its sponsorship program. It is sponsoring knoppmyth and the Debian User Project and makes the mechanical drawings of its face plates available under the GPL."

Larsonist writes to tell us that even though AMD's new architecture wont be released until mid-2007 they are still letting people in on what some of the new features will be. From the article: "While clock speeds have not been revealed, each of the four cores will integrate 64 KB L1 Cache and 512 KB L2 cache. The native quad-core architecture will also include a 2 MB shared L3 cache, which may increase in capacity over time. The processor will have a total of four Hypertransport links - up from three today - that provide a total bandwidth to outside devices of 5.2 GB/s. AMD is also thinking about integrating support for FB-DIMMs 'when appropriate.'"

whitroth asks: "Ten years ago, Received Wisdom said that virtual memory should be, on the average, two to two-and-a-half times real memory. In these days, where 2G RAM is not unusual, and many times is not that uncommon, is this unreasonable? What's the sense of the community as to what is a reasonable size for swap these days?"

An anonymous reader writes to tell us FastCompany is reporting on the latest and greatest version of the compact fluorescent light bulb (CFL). While CFLs of the past may have been efficient, they certainly were not effective. However, according to the article, CFLs have come as far as cell phones have since the mid 80s while still maintaining that high efficiency. From the article: "if every one of 110 million American households bought just one [CFL], took it home, and screwed it in the place of an ordinary 60-watt bulb, the energy saved would be enough to power a city of 1.5 million people. One bulb swapped out, enough electricity saved to power all the homes in Delaware and Rhode Island. In terms of oil not burned, or greenhouse gases not exhausted into the atmosphere, one bulb is equivalent to taking 1.3 million cars off the roads."

eliot1785 writes "Stanford's Folding@Home project is reporting that Sony debuted a Folding@Home client for the PlayStation 3 today in Germany. Researchers hope to use the power of the PS3's Cell processor to greatly expand the number of FLOPS of which their network is capable. F@H also announced today that they will release a client capable of running on ATI graphics processors. With these two new developments, F@H hopes to raise the total power of their distributed computing network to 1-10 petaflops. At the upper end of that target, the network would be faster than any current supercomputer, at least in terms of FLOPS." Reader TommyBear points out a collection of papers showing scientific advances made by the F@H researchers.

mdm42 writes "Looks like a theoretical physicist at St. Andrews University in Scotland believes that invisibility may be possible. And its not going to be a potion or a cloak, but will come in the form of a device. " Let's just hope that when the invisible woman arrives, she's played more convincingly than Jessica Alba.

Krishna Dagli writes "The U.S. House of Representatives on Tuesday approved a bill that would make it a federal felony for Webmasters to use innocent words like "Barbie" or "Furby" but actually feature sexual content on their sites. Anyone who includes misleading "words" or "images" intended to confuse a minor into viewing a possibly harmful Web site could be imprisoned for up to 20 years and fined, the bill says." Terrible news for the Barbie/Furbie fetishists out there, to say nothing about being completely impossible to enforce globally.

WinBreak writes "Marketwatch is reporting that, nine months after their announcement, Microsoft and Yahoo! are finally ready to roll out beta IM clients of MSN Messenger and Yahoo! Messenger that will be able to talk to each other." The Windows Live Ideas and Yahoo! Messenger pages have more information; the companies say that the resulting user community will be the world's largest, at around 350 million accounts, and that they'll be using SSL to encrypt the traffic between the systems.

Eh-Wire writes "The University of Alberta and Edmonton are mighty proud to be home to the new National Institute of Nanotechnology. The $52.2-million(Canadian) facility is designed to provide the optimal conditions for nano-scale research and to foster collaboration between researchers. Apparently it is Canada's quietest space and engineered that way to minimize vibration and acoustical noise. Even the electrical wiring has been twisted to reduce electro-magnetic interference. Curiously enough the head project architect, Donna Clare of architectural firm, Cohos Evamy was also the head project architect for Edmonton's highly acclaimed Winspear Centre, a concert hall designed specifically to enhance acoustics. There's likely going to be some big things coming from this state-of-the-art research facility for the really really small."

Arcanimus writes "On Tuesday, the corporate vice president of Windows Live and MSN marketing, Martin Taylor, announced that he is leaving Microsoft. Just three months ago, Taylor was appointed to his new position to manage the marketing of Windows Live. In his 13 years with the company, Taylor even worked directly with CEO Steve Ballmer."

crackman writes "Matasano Security is running an excellent interview with Christopher Vaughan, a lead PM on the IE team. Christopher has worked on every release of Internet Explorer since version 2. He discusses IE7, security lessons learned from IE6, the future of .NET managed code in IE, and more."

Alex Romanelli, Variety writes "Hollywood insiders tell Variety why/how Hollywood is in stalemate with Jobs over movie downloads on iTunes. Jobs wants a flat $9.99 per film download, studios are refusing, insisting upon tiered pricing. On the other side there's a different, longer, analytical story looking at how H'wood executives are still unsure if Jobs should be considered a friend or foe."

venkatg writes "Soon after Apple introduced sudden motion sensors in their PowerBooks in early 2005, Amit Singh had shown how these sensors can be used for creative purposes (covered by Slashdot earlier as Having Fun With PowerBook Motion Sensors and PowerBook As A New Kind Of Human Interface Device). This time around Singh discusses 'Experimenting With Light' in a new article whereby by light he means the ambient light sensors and the illuminated backlight keyboard sensors in Apple's laptops. The article shows (source code is included) how one can measure ambient light and do things with it. It also shows things like how to get/set illuminated keyboard brightness and display brightness or do fade transitions of the keyboard lighting. So now that we have all these motion and light sensors under control, is there a MacBook discotheque in the works?"