For champions of the open source blogging platform, the latest installment of Wordpress has just been released. Aiming more for polish and bug fixing, it’s surprising the number of features crammed into this release.

Nicknamed “Baker”, most of the changes to Wordpress 2.8 are behind the scenes. The overall back-end system being easier to use for the person in charge of the site, as well as having more customisation features on the Dashboard and post listing pages.

There are also improvements to the Theme selection page – with the ability to search online, according to tickboxes relating to style and colour, for hundred’s of available to download themes. Simply click on the Add New Themes item in the Appearance tab and you’ll be searching in seconds. The Themes also have the ability to install into your blog without you having to upload them manually. The widget management has also been polished up to make things a little clearer and straightforward.

The code editor, if you really like to get your hands dirty with Wordpress, now features syntax highlighting, making it easier to navigate and edit your php & css files. Something programmers have been crying out for!

There are also many bug fixes (790 in all) and an overall speed improvement. If you use Wordpress on your site, I suggest you upgrade immediately! Techsnake.com had no problems and was upgraded within minutes.

This is a project that I wouldn’t mind doing – If I had the time, money, and patience, plus required skill. As I possess none of these, I, like most of us, can only look on with envy..

The desk is constructed from laser-cut acrylic, 7 fans, liquid cooled with glycol (through 15 feet of tubing no less!) PC specs are 4Gb RAM, a quad-core 3Ghz Intel CPU & a GTX 280 graphics card. Personally, I think they could have upped the specs to included a couple of TB of storage, but they settled for two 300Gb drives instead. And then factor in the 13 blue Neon lights, and you can see why the 850 Watt power supply gave up the ghost – the new system needing a whole Kilowatt! Have a look at the steps the guys at Popular Mechanics took to build this beast!

Proof XKCD style, if you needed it, that the weakest link in any security solution is YOU!

It’s easy to slip into the trap of always using technology to help you out – however, what would happen if someone detonated an ECM over your city? It sends shivers down my spine just thinking of the internet blackout..

Courtesy of XKCD

Planned limited copies of Microsoft’s latest OS have been removed. Anyone can now download Windows 7 Beta without restrictions. The beta will be time limited up until the 1st of August – which should be long enough to find all the bugs and get them ironed out.

I’m impressed by Microsoft’s approach to Windows 7. After the disappointing sales and uptake of Windows Vista, it’s good to see that lessons have been learnt at Microsoft. According to the press releases and general feedback from Microsoft staff, Windows 7 is trying to be everything that people wanted with Vista. And they’re actually reading people’s wish lists too. Part of the reason for the widespread beta program with Windows 7 is for people to play with the interface and let the developers know what they think, and what they want changed.

Hopefully with the long beta testing phase there shouldn’t be any of the rushed feel that Vista had – although it was more settled after the first service pack, the OS never really felt finished. With hoards of enthusiastic testers let loose, hopefully the same mistakes won’t be made.

I was recently sent a copy of Partition Manager Server 3.0 from EASEUS so I decided to check it out and see if it was any good.

Firstly, the software itself is simple to install and get up and running. Although aimed really at the techie, the software does have a comprehensive help system, which as well as explaining the operating of the program, it also gives a good introduction into some partitioning terms. Although you could argue that the user would know perfectly well what partitioning was and how it worked, and if they didn’t they shouldn’t be touching this piece of software anyway.

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The "Jaguar" in Tennessee, USA, has been crowned the fastest computer in the world and is to be used for science.

The new champion, consisting of 284 Cray supercomputer cabinets, will be able to crunch an amazing 1.64 Petaflops – 1,640,000,000,000,000 floating point operations per second. Tested so far up to 1.3 Petaflops, the team at Oak Ridge National Lab are hoping to crank the machine up to it’s full potential soon.

Specification:

45,000 Quad Core Opterons (AMD), 362 Terabytes of RAM (that’s 370,000 Gigabytes!), 10 Petabytes of storage (or 10,485,000 Gigabytes)

Performance:

578 Terabytes per second Memory bandwidth, 284 Gigabytes per second bus bandwidth (to move data around the system)

All in all an impressive machine which will knock the current champion, Roadrunner (at 1.34 Petaflops), off the top spot when it’s up to speed. Read The Register article, and also check out the top 500 supercomputers on Wikipedia (soon to be updated I’m sure!)

If you’re like a lot of people, you will be wondering why Microsoft’s latest incarnation of their new OS is going to be called Windows 7. Surely there have been more versions than just the 7? Well yes and no – I think most people are getting confused by the fact that some versions of Windows, weren’t actually major releases but were really evolutions of previous OS’s.

For instance – did you know that Windows 95, 98 and Me were all covered by the same version number? It’s also a surprise when you realise that Windows 2000 and XP are also covered by the same version number. If you have been involved with the system side of those two OS’s, you’ll know that they do share a lot of commonality. So, here is the definitive guide to the numbering of Windows and why Windows 7 is going to be called Windows 7:

As you can see from the table above, the development for the business market, and the home market remained separate, until Windows XP came on the scene – although the two sides shared common version numbers.

Hopefully that clears up why Windows 7 is going to be called Windows 7 and not 8 or 9 or something else.

£1 Billion has already been ploughed into a monitoring system in the UK that could make every user of technology in the country a target for Big Brother.

The system, based in a building in Benhall, and reported by TechSnake in July, is being funded to intercept all email, SMS and internet traffic to the tune of £12 Billion, once running. Reported in a post on the This Is Gloucestershire website, the move has caused councillors and MPs to question the Government’s morality.

I, personally, can’t believe what is happening. In a modern society too. It is the civil right of every person to have private communications with each other without the government spying over their shoulders. This typical attitude by government agencies is of course wrapped up in the “threat of terrorism” cliché, that is starting to wear just a little too thin. Preventing terrorism is important, but not to the detriment of every other law-abiding citizen. The fishing net mentality is ridiculous – the process is already in place whereby a government agency can get a court order to track individual’s messages for potential terrorism involvement – the government doesn’t need to employ this level of privacy invasion. So what can we do about this – in the UK and globally?

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I didn’t know that people were this badly into engineering things out of lego, and trust me this is definitely engineering, in every sense of the word. But, yes, one person, naming himself “barebos” on YouTube, has created a V8 engine (32 valve no less) that took him 4 to 5 months to build from scratch! You can also check out some of his other creations that he’s put up on the popular video-sharing website.