At the Intel Technology Summit in San Francisco on Wednesday, an executive described the imminent mobile future, including a major refresh of Netbook silicon, better-designed "ultrathins," and turbo-powered high-end laptops.

Netbooks may undergo the biggest change. Models that appear after Windows 7 ships in October will see the most significant overhaul internally since the Netbook category debuted back in the spring of 2008. Intel's new "Pine Trail" Atom silicon will collapse most of the core chips onto one piece of silicon, improving the power efficiency and boosting performance.

"There will be integrated graphics inside the same (processor) core so you get better performance," said Mooly Eden, general manager of the Mobile Platforms Group at Intel, describing how the graphics processor and main processor will be grafted onto the same chip--an Intel first.

The segment just above Netbooks is ultrathins. These sleek, sub-$1,000 laptops should appear in greater varieties from more PC makers later this year, according to Intel--about the same time Windows 7 hits the streets. Aesthetics will be crucial. "You can't sell a keyboard and a screen," Eden said, describing the ideal ultrathin laptop design. "You have to sell something that somebody will desire. We need to go beyond the great CPU, great performance...to something that a normal consumer can look at say 'I want that.'"

One of the challenges for Intel is making sure these sub-one-inch-thick designs don't overheat. Eden described the use of laminar air flow technology to cool a laptop's outer skin. "This is the difference between thin comfortable and thin uncomfortable," he said.

Intel is also designing new fans that are better at getting hot air out faster. "We are putting a lot of effort into designing fans," said Eden. Intel demonstrated the fan technology at the conference Wednesday.

And how does Intel see these segments breaking down into screen sizes? Netbooks will have 10-inch class displays, while the "sweet spot" for ultrathins will 13.3-inch, though some larger ultrathins may have 15.6-inch screens, according to Eden. He also said there may be "some experimentation" with 11.6-inch designs.

Higher up the laptop performance scale are Core i7 mobile processors, also due around the same time that Windows 7 hits the streets. Eden showed how the gigahertz speed--or "clock speed"--of individual mobile processor cores will instantly spike in performance to accomplish a task then, in the next instant, go idle--what Intel calls HUGI or Hurry Up and Get Idle.

HUGI is a power-saving technology: the faster a task is accomplished, the faster the processor can return to idle mode--a state that uses only the bare minimum of power. Along these lines, Eden did a demonstration of Turbo Boost technology.

In the demonstration, one of the cores (inside, let's say, a mobile quad-core chip), would jump well over the processor's rated speed. For example, a processor rated at 2.0GHz, for example, may run one of the cores at 2.60GHz (or higher) while the other cores are idle. In the gaming world, this is referred to as overclocking.

A common theme of all these laptop designs was power efficiency, above and beyond Intel's traditional message of performance. All-day computing--on battery power only--seems to be one of the major rallying cries within Intel.

Microsoft's proposed "ballot screen" that would let users in Europe choose which browser they want on their PC.

(Credit: Microsoft)

It looks like there won't be a browserless version of Windows 7, after all.

Microsoft said late Friday that it won't ship the Windows 7 "E" version of Windows even though Europe has yet to sign off on its revised plan. The plan calls for the company to ship Windows 7 with Internet Explorer, but present a ballot screen in which users in Europe can decide whether they want Internet Explorer or another browser.

The software maker had originally proposed shipping Windows 7 in Europe without a browser at all--the so-called "E" version of the operating system. However, European regulators indicated that might not satisfy its concerns.

Microsoft announced last week that it was open to the "ballot screen," but said that it would wait to can the browserless "E" version until European regulators approved its plan.

The software maker said late Friday that it decided to ship the same version of Windows 7 for Europe after PC makers complained that having to use the browserless version of Windows 7 for a short period of time would be a pain.

"In the wake of last week's developments, as well as continuing feedback on Windows 7 E that we have received from computer manufacturers and other business partners, I'm pleased to report that we will ship the same version of Windows 7 in Europe in October that we will ship in the rest of the world," deputy general counsel Dave Heiner said in a statement.

The commission had said it "welcomed" Microsoft's move, also giving the software maker some confidence that it could ship Windows 7 with the browser included. If the commission accepts Microsoft's proposal, it will fully implement that proposed ballot screen to Windows 7 buyers in Europe.

"One reason we decided not to ship Windows 7 'E' is concerns raised by computer manufacturers and partners," Heiner said. "Several worried about the complexity of changing the version of Windows that we ship in Europe if our ballot screen proposal is ultimately accepted by the Commission and we stop selling Windows 7 'E'. Computer manufacturers and our partners also warned that introducing Windows 7 'E', only to later replace it with a version of Windows 7 that includes IE, could confuse consumers about what version of Windows to buy with their PCs."

The move also solved a challenge for Vista users in Europe, who under the previous plan would have had to do a clean install to move to Windows 7. It also allows Microsoft to sell an "upgrade version" of Windows 7 in Europe. Microsoft had previously said it would only sell a full version of the OS, though it had said it would sell that at the upgrade price, at least for a time.

Those who pre-ordered Windows 7 "E" through a recent discount offer will get the full version, as Microsoft had promised. However, Microsoft plans to now sell Windows 7 upgrades in Europe and also offer a higher-priced full version (for those without an earlier copy of Windows)--similar to what it is doing in the rest of the world.

Offering a free clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux turned out not to be such a simple matter after all.

The CentOS project aims to reproduce Red Hat's tested, supported, and certified version of the operating system, without its per-server subscription fees. Because RHEL is open-source software, it's theoretically possible for an outsider to select the same software packages, apply the same patches, and produce a version of the Linux product that works the same.

But several lead programmers in the project went public on Thursday with complaints that CentOS founder Lance Davis is threatening the project with his reclusive ways. They also raise the prospect of mutiny, in effect, if Davis doesn't respond.

"You seem to have crawled into a hole, and this is not acceptable," the programmers wrote. "Please do not kill CentOS through your fear of shared management of the project. Clearly the project dies if all the developers walk away."

Conventional proprietary software products are hardly immune to problems such as corporate owners going out of business or canceling products. But the CentOS situation shows that the informal, free-wheeling ways common in the open-source realm can have their own pitfalls. To be fair, though, many open-source projects also have formal controls such as foundations and governance committees.

The open letter, augmented by several individual blog postings, was published Thursday on the CentOS mailing list and Web site. Authors include Russ Herrold, Ralph Angenendt, Karanbir Singh, Tim Verhoeven, and several other members of the CentOS development team.

Davis didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

The authors object that Davis maintains sole control over the CentOS.org Internet domain and IRC chat channel. And Dag Wieers, who works on the security, Web, and infrastructure aspects of CentOS, is among those concerned about money paid to the project through Google AdSense ads, Web site sponsorship, and users' donations through PayPal.

"For at least three years people were donating money and sponsors were paying for Web site ads while the money was not flowing into the project. Where it went to I can only guess," he said in a blog post. "Once the financial issues are resolved, there is a lot of work to turn the project into a real community project that can release even when one person is out of office, that is owned by a foundation, and that makes the best use of the power of its the community."

"The project depends on one person in too many ways...a person who doesn't answer calls, isn't available as meetings, doesn't publish things he promised to do," added Angenendt. "As Lance hasn't answered requests regarding that over the last few months, the remaining team now has put a stop on that. For the moment all ads have been removed from Web site and wiki, and we are not accepting any PayPal donations anymore."

The CentOS developers also implied that the developers could pick up the project and move it elsewhere. "Please contact me, or any other signer of this letter at once, to arrange for the required information to keep the project alive at the 'centos.org' domain," Herrold said in the letter.

Open-source software is developed under licenses that permit others to share and modify the underlying source code. That means that, unlike with proprietary software whose rights holder doesn't grant permission, programmers with serious disagreements can "fork" software into a new project. That's a powerful freedom, but it can produce chaos when the resulting divergence means software users must choose among different incompatible versions of a project.

Big forks are rare, though. Dissatisfaction with the Mambo content management system led developers to spawn their own version, Joomla, in 2005. FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD all stem from the same BSD Unix roots. NeoOffice was spawned from the OpenOffice.org project, which initially didn't support Mac OS X gracefully. The GCC compiler, a software tool used to convert human-readable source code into machine-readable format, competed for a time with the EGCS fork starting in 1997, but the two projects merged again in 1999.