We won't know the details until next Tuesday, but Microsoft is readying patches for a list of critical bugs that even affect Vista with SP1.
Flaws in Buletooth, Internet Explorer and DirectX are all rated by Microsoft as critical on Vista and XP.
The Bluetooth issue is not applicable to Windows 2000, Server 2003 or Server 2008. The problem with IE only warrants an important tag for version 5.01 on Windows 2000, and moderate for version 7 on Server 2008.
Other issues scheduled to be addressed on June's Patch Tuesday concern WINS, Active Directory and PGM (all with a maximum rating of important) plus a kill bit issue that's rated moderate on most supported operating systems.
The usual update for the Malicious Software Removal Tool is also planned.
More details are available in Microsoft's advance notification (NB the content will be replaced with the actual bulletins on June 10).
Bluetooth, IE, DirectX targets of MS June patches
Wanted: one million Australians
The Climate Savers Computing Initiative has arrived in Australia, and its movers and shakers are looking for one million people to commit to using more aggressive power management settings and to take energy efficiency into consideration when buying their next PCs.
The goal, according to Climate Savers Computing Initiative president Lorie Wigle, is to slash 50 percent from the energy used by PCs and servers by 2010. In Australia, this equates to slashing $100 million from energy bills.
Since around two percent of world energy use is accounted for by IT, a halving makes a significant overall difference. Theo Theophanous, Victorian minister for ICT, points out that the global target "would be like switching off Australia." (No cheap gags, please!)
Most operating systems and existing hardware support power management, so "we just need to leave it turned on," says Wigle. Simply using standby mode can reduce power consumption by 60 percent, she claims.
The initiative has broad support from the local IT industry, with representatives of the Australian Information Industry Association, Intel, Dell, Lenovo, EDS and CSC being present at the launch of the local campaign.
AIIA representative Ian Birks said "ICT must play a leadership role in driving the green transformation." The Climate Savers initiative "has practical targets and real outcomes," he added.
Frank De Petro, representing Dell, points out that most IT energy use takes place in data centres: around 1.5 percent of world consumption, which is roughly the same as that used by the world's TVs.
So if three-quarters of IT energy goes into data centres why make any fuss about desktop settings?
Presumably because it delivers savings at practically no cost. Ensuring computers are switched off over the weekend and set to automatically sleep when idle delivers worthwhile savings with no investment other than changing people's habits.
De Petro suggests notebook systems are now so common that people are used to power management to conserve battery life, and so the issue is now about educating "the big end of town" to use it on desktop systems.
EDS representative Sundeep Khistry says his company manages three million desktops (probably the world's biggest fleet) with between 80,000 and 90,000 of them in Australia. Policy, programs and people need to work together he says, because "every drop counts".
He suggests tailoring power settings to suit different functions. Revenue generating users may need their computers to remain ready for use throughout the working day, while back-office employees may be able to work satisfactorily with computers that go into sleep mode with a relatively short delay.
Another possibility is that some users could be moved from desktops to notebooks, with a corresponding power saving.
But whatever method you think will work in your home or business, "It's time to stop talking about it and start doing something about it," says Intel's Sean Casey.
IBM's Roadrunner sets new supercomputer record
A hybrid supercomputer built by IBM for the UD Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration more than doubles the speed of Blue Gene, previously the world's fastest. And it does so with the aid of the processor used in the Sony PlayStation 3.
The hybrid tag refers to the way Roadrunner was designed to exploit the strengths of the Cell Broadband Engine as well as conventional x86 chips from AMD. This is said to be a first in supercomputer design.
Roadrunner features 12,960 Cell chips along with 6948 dual-core Opteron CPUs. Assembled from off-the-shelf IBM blade servers, the system is housed in 288 "refrigerator sized" racks.
The blades are configured in groups of three, comprising a pair of Cell blades with one Opteron blade. The Cell chips handle the mathematical and other CPU-intensive operations, while the Opterons take care of I/O and other less arduous tasks. With 400 gigaflops (400 billion floating-point operations per second) per tri-blade, the whole system is rated at over one petaflop (one million billion calculations per second).
IBM puts the processing capability into perspective by comparing it with 100,000 of today's fastest laptops, or around 1000 of what was the world's fastest supercomputer in 1998.
Not only is Roadrunner the world's fastest supercomputer, it is also one of the most energy efficient. Performing 376 million calculations per watt, IBM officials expect it to be one of the leaders in the next Green 500 list.
