Toshiba is ending its collaboration with the Intel Corp. concerning the brains of its computers. Now the company is tying the not with AMD.

The world's fourth-largest laptop PC maker expects to put AMD processors in about 20 percent of the notebooks it sells in the United States and Europe.

According to Macquarie Securities analyst this could mean that an era in which Intel took the lion's share of microprocessor profits as the king of PC chips is over.Toshiba plans to put AMD chips in moderate-priced standard models for individual and corporate clients.

Prices of AMD-equipped PCs are expected to sell for up to 10,000 yen ($82) less than comparable models.
Toshiba will install AMD chips in some models to be released this summer, enabling it to reduce parts-procurement costs by at least 10 percent.

A new version of its WebFocus business intelligence tool set was released last week and it improves integration with Microsoft Excel and adds portable dashboards.

WebFocus 7.6.1 adds a plug-in for Excel, called Quick Data, that connects the BI tool’s reporting engine directly to the Microsoft Corp. spreadsheet.
The link will allow users to build BI reports from within Excel and see accurate, up-to-date data when they open Excel.

According to Information Builders the new Active Dashboards feature will let users analyze data in different ways, such as by product or customer segments, without having to be connected to a network.

Information Builders said the new version of WebFocus is also integrated with the enterprise service bus sold by its iWay Software Inc. subsidiary.

Apple Inc. released its 5th major security update for Mac OS X. The security patch takes care of 17 vulnerabilities.If Apple sorted bugs by a ranking system, including Microsoft Corp., most of the bugs fixed by Security Update 2007-005 would be rated less than critical. In eight out of the 17, exploits could do no more damage than to generate a denial of service of, or crash the affected component.

Microsoft typically pegs such vulnerabilities as important rather than critical. Only five of the patched vulnerabilities could result in an attacker executing his own code.

Among the serious bugs is one in how Mac OS X 10.4, known as Tiger, handles PDF files. Another dangerous flaw fixed by this patch exists in the code that maps ports on home networks in iChat, Apple's instant messaging service and software.

An attacker needs only to send a malformed packet to trigger a buffer overflow, which could then be used to add malicious code to the Mac.
The hacker, however, must have access to the local network to exploit the bug.

Other parts of Mac OS X that were patched include BIND , the de facto standard Domain Name System server software, which was patched against four vulnerabilities; the Ruby CGI library and Fetchmail.

The security update can be downloaded from the Apple site or using Mac OS X's built-in update service.

Apple Inc.'s Mac OS 10.3, the three-and-a-half-year-old operating system also known as Panther will probably not run Firefox anylonger.In a thread on the mozilla.dev.planning forum and a proposal posted to Google Docs, Mozilla developers argued whether Firefox 3.0 should run under Panther.

According to the Mozilla Corp. giving support for these versions will result in a significantly higher quality release of Gecko 1.9 [Firefox 3.0] for the vast majority of users on Mac OS X.

Dropping support for Panther would also free up engineering resources. They are already running short on time to deliver a product that works well on Tiger and Leopard.

Still others took issue with the whole idea of abandoning the older operating system. Mozilla isn't afraid of dropping support for older operating systems. On the Windows side, the company has already announced that Firefox 3.0 will not support Windows 98 and Windows Millennium, both of which were dropped from Microsoft Corp.'s own support list last summer. And last week, a Mozilla executive said the new browser, expected to ship before the end of the year, probably won't support older distributions of Linux.

Apple typically offers security updates to just two editions of Mac OS X simultaneously; after it launched Mac OS X 10.4 in April 2005, it stopped posting updates for Mac OS X 10.2, alias Jaguar.

If that trend holds true, Apple will cease security patches for Panther when it launches Leopard.

Linspire has announced recently the availability of its Win4Lin Pro Desktop.
Linspire or Freespire have now a complement and that it offers a way to bring Windows applications to the Linux desktop.

According to president and chief executive at Win4Lin developer Virtual Bridges by allowing users to run Windows productivity applications, they can meet the requirements of their day-to-day computer use while experiencing the benefits of Linux.

Win4Lin Pro Desktop is available immediately to Linspire and Freespire users for US$29.99 (A$36.60).
The technology continued to drive Linux adoption by providing Windows users with the benefits of Linux, while providing access to core Windows programs.

Win4Lin runs Windows 2000/XP applications at "near-native" speed and allows users to display either full desktop mode or "floating" application mode.

It also allows full integration between the Linux Desktop and Windows file systems for user documents and settings.