Microsoft has published documentation on how it plans to implement support of the OASIS Open Document Format Version 1.1 in Microsoft Office 2007 Service Pack 2 when it becomes available in 2009.

Microsoft plans to open Office to other file formats, a move the company hopes will placate government and business concerns about document interoperability. Describing this as a step to foster greater transparency, Microsoft intends to document how it incorporated Open Document Format support into Office 2007 Service Pack 2, which is still in beta. That product is expected to ship sometime in the first half of 2009.

That 16GB SDHC card that provides extra storage for your netbook not doing it for you? Not to worry. The SD Association has announced a new specification for SDXC cards, with the XC standing for extended capacity. The new cards will support up to 2TB of storage, and will have higher bus speeds which means faster transfers.

What is fakeRAID? In the last few years, a number of hardware products have come onto the market claiming to be IDE or SATA RAID controllers. These have shown up in a number of desktop/workstation motherboards. Virtually none of these are true hardware RAID controllers. Instead, they are simply multi-channel disk controllers combined with special BIOS configuration options and software drivers to assist the OS in performing RAID operations. This gives the appearance of a hardware RAID, because the RAID configuration is done using a BIOS setup screen, and the operating system can be booted from the RAID.

Intel burst onto the storage scene back in September with its X25-M solid-state drive. This 80GB SSD combined Intel's formidable chip-making prowess with its years of experience in high-performance storage controller design, and the results were impressive to say the least. Indeed, the X25-M was arguably the fastest solid-state drive we'd ever tested, let down only by the comparatively slow write performance of its multi-level cell (MLC) flash memory chips. There isn't much Intel can do about the slow write speeds inherent to MLC memory. However, the company has crafted a new solid-state drive based on single-level cell (SLC) memory chips that aren't plagued by poor write rates. This latest X25-E Extreme boasts the same 250MB/s sustained read speed as the X25-M, but write speeds have been boosted from a paltry 70MB/s to a much more impressive 170MB/s. Oh my.

ID3 tags have caused people problems for years and the first jump from CDs/folder based MP3 players etc to something that sorts by ID3 tag leave a lot of people in shock when the player says "unknown track" for all their music. ID3 tags are basically information tags inside the MP3 file that tell the player all sorts of things. It can be as simple as artist and album or as complex as having 20 high resolution images of the cover and booklet inside the same MP3 file. Read on for a roundup of this feature and a how to on tagging your files.

dotfiles.org is a place to upload, download, and share your dotfiles. Face it: you're proud of that 204-line .bashrc, and you should be! You've fine-tuned your prompt, carefully planned your aliases, and written some pretty time-saving functions over the years. Why not show off your work and, in the spirit of the open source community, share your efforts. You may even learn a few tricks.