Operating systems: The Aero interface of Windows Vista is a step up from the XP GUI, true, but by no means it is flawless. “It’s a CPU hog,” Randall Kennedy explains in this Enterprise Desktop post. “Turn on the ‘bling’ and you toss nearly a quarter of your CPU bandwidth out the window.” Mr. Kennedy arrived at this conclusion by using the recently updated DMS Clarity Tracker Agent. Columnist’s corner: The x86 has parallelism limits that virtualization and heavy multi-threaded software are exposing, Tom Yager points out in Where x86 hits the wall. “The weaknesses of the x86 approach to superscalar operation are starting to show,” he writes. “Although I am impressed by multicore x86 efforts, I wish that Intel and AMD would put as much sweat into holistic platforms that take architecture up a notch.” Related: x86 still rules server roost, but change is afoot. The news beat: Analyst firm IDC says that Acer could potentially overtake Lenovo for the third ranking among PC vendors. The Liberty Alliance issues new specifications for protecting identity information that travels via mobile devices. Google expands its pay-per-action ads test to more advertisers and publishers. And Fortran’s father John Backus dies at 82 years of age. Software Development