Joanna Rutkowska, a security researcher known for her work on virtualization security and low-level rootkits, has released a new open-source operating system meant to provide isolation of the OS’s components for better security.

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Intel will release its fastest eight-core Nehalem-EX server processor later this month, a company executive says.

The processor will be targeted at four-socket servers, says Shannon Poulin, Xeon platform director at Intel. Each physical core will be able to run two threads simultaneously, giving the chip 64 virtual processing cores on servers.

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With Microsoft becoming increasingly marginalized in areas like mobile media, DirectX is becoming less of a must-use toolset and more of a gaming-specific one. The other side of the coin is, of course, the increasing relevance of standards like OpenGL, OpenAL, and OpenCL: powerful cross-platform systems for graphics, audio, and parallel processing. You may remember OpenCL from its debut on the Mac in Snow Leopard, and OpenGL ES of course powers the UI on the iPad. OpenAL is still a ways from being brought under the public eye, but it’s getting there. In the meantime, OpenGL 4.0 was announced today at GDC, and clearly it has DirectX in its sights.

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Mozilla’s high-performance TraceMonkey JavaScript engine, which was first introduced in 2008, has lost a lot of its luster as competing browser vendors have stepped up their game to deliver superior performance. Firefox now lags behind Safari, Chrome, and Opera in common JavaScript benchmarks. In an effort to bring Firefox back to the front of the pack, Mozilla is building a new JavaScript engine called JägerMonkey.

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After a long time on the sidelines, Intel rival AMD is getting into the netbook game with a dedicated chip designed specifically for computers with screens 12 inches or smaller.

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Hardware hacker Christopher Tarnovsky just wanted to break Microsoft’s grip on peripherals for its Xbox 360 game console. In the process, he cracked one of the most heavily fortified chips ever put into a consumer device.

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Google has a history of removing language barriers, but the company hasn’t yet made its web-based translation service especially easy to access or use from a mobile device. We knew that Toshiba was actually working on a translation phone, but now the same company responsible for Android and the Nexus One is apparently doing the same thing. Anyone want to guess how this will end?
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One does not need to be a wizard or a medium to realize that the relationship between Apple and Adobe have slowly but surely switched from an undercovered to an opened conflict. This is especially true after the recent comments made by Steve Jobs during the introduction of the iPad, when he said that Adobe engineers were too lazy and that HTML 5 will take over Flash; clearly pouring oil onto the already burning fire.  In summary, Apple made it clear that Flash will never exist as such on the iPhone nor the iPad.

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IM Flash Technologies is a joint venture between Intel and Micron that is targeted for producing NAND flash memory. With a focus on research and development, IMFT has doubled NAND density approximately every 18 months. In 2006, they started production with a 50nm process, then moved to a 40nm process in 2008. This co-development inevitably lead to smaller, more affordable NAND flash-based products featuring higher capacities, much like we have witnessed in the SSD market and with USB flash drives over the past couple of years.  February 1, 2010 will mark the official announcement of IMFT’s 25 nanometer NAND technology–a major advancement for the company. Intel and Micron now lay claim to the smallest production ready semiconductor process technology in the world. The companies describe their collective efforts as such…

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And yet another item on the iPad? Are we serious? Yes, we are, since this one is about something that even geeks who aren’t interested in the iPad itself should find intriguing. Steve Jobs said yesterday that the iPad is powered by an Apple A4 processor, but contrary to what many seem to think – it wasn’t designed in-house at all.

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