As readers can see, we’ve changed our “daily links” to twice-a-week Tuesday and Thursday links. This way we can provide a bit more commentary on each link instead of just listing them with little to no analysis. We invite our readers to give their opinions on this new format, and we’ll be looking to incorporate changes. One important note – if you have a link that you’d like to submit, please use the “submit a story” link on the left column of this page – we’ve been inundated with comment-spam and we wouldn’t want to accidentally delete your suggestion.

ZDNET: AMD versus Intel: CPU wars roadmap

George Ou at ZDNet graphs out the next two years of projected developments in CPU design over the next two years from Intel and AMD.

According to Kanter, the big reason for AMD's problem was Intel's manufacturing lead. While Intel was producing 65 nm processors all of last year, AMD was outputting 90 nm parts and barely got their first 65 nm product out by the end of the year. The significance of this is that 90 nm manufacturing with small 200 mm wafers produces less than half the number of wafers compared to a 65 nm process on 300 mm wafers. That means that while the price wars of 2006 put a damper on Intel's profits, it tore in to AMD financials because of higher chip fabrication costs.

Obviously the processing speed of the server will have an impact on request times, and if more data can be processed on the server side from more users, there will be more demand for Web-based apps – which could impact both application development and demand on network resources. Additionally, more computer cores means that there’s more room for virtualization… which you can read more about below.

Ars Technica: Buying OEM versions of Windows Vista: the facts

Ken Fisher has information about buying OEM versions of Windows Vista – you can get Vista Home Premium for $119, vs. retail at $239, but OEM versions cannot be reused with new motherboards.

OEM software is also tied to the motherboard it is first installed on. Unlike the retail versions of Windows which can be transferred to a new computer, OEM versions are not transferable. What about upgrading hardware? Microsoft says that anything is fair game, except the motherboard. Replacing the motherboard in a computer results in a "new personal computer," which the company considers to be synonymous with a transfer. It's not permitted with an OEM edition of Windows.

IT departments will tend to use OEM versions either because they’ll be buying computers with the OEM versions installed or they’ll be budget conscious, so it’s a good idea to know the limitations of the OEM versions versus the Retail versions.

VMWare: Convert Physical Machines to Virtual Machines – Free!

Okay, imagine this scenario – you want to move to virtualization, but you have no idea whether or not you can switch over from a real server to a virtual one. Secondly, you’ve spent hundreds – if not thousands – of man-hours configuring and tweaking all the server’s settings for performance optimization, and you really don’t relish doing that again, multiple times.

VMware Converter quickly converts Microsoft Windows based physical machines and third party image formats to VMware virtual machines. It also converts virtual machines between VMware platforms. Automate and simplify physical to virtual machine conversions as well as conversions between virtual machine formats with VMware Converter.

Additionally, for the home user, being able to clone their existing installation of Microsoft Windows and then use it in the free (as in beer) VMWare player in Linux is a major stepping stone towards Linux migration.