Along with the stable maintanance release of Mono 1.0.2, Novell released the first beta of the upcoming Mono 1.2: The Mono JIT has been ported to a new architectures: AMD64, SPARC v9, and S390. In the runtime detection, support for side-by-side execution of applications that require different runtime versions was implemented. Mono now will detect the runtime version that an application requires, and will load the appropriate mscorlib.dll and machine.config.

"Firefox just had its preview release last week and already has been downloaded more than a million times. I reviewed the new version, and found Firefox's simple interface gets you the information you want without distracting you with options." Read the review at NewsForge.

Ever used BugZilla? I'm sure you have. Frustrated? Dropped support for ever? Oh yes, I understand.

Computer Sciences Corp. (CSC) has published a 96-page report on Open Source software and its potential benefits to business and government. This whitepaper provides an introduction to the report and its findings.

The Internet went all abuzz last week when a report by Todd Bishop of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer posited that Microsoft was keeping open its legal options against licensees of OpenOffice.org. Commonly known as OpenOffice, the software is a freely downloadable open source productivity suite that constitutes a significant portion of Sun's commercially offered StarOffice. It also exemplifies the threat that the open-source movement poses to Microsoft.

Martin Taylor recently marked his one-year anniversary as Microsoft Corp.'s chief Linux strategist. Taylor, whose official title is general manager of platform strategy, recently spoke with Computerworld about his first year in that job. This is Part 2 of the interview. Part 1 is also available online.

Microsoft's Xbox team has been assigned to the development of Virtual PC's native graphics card support, sources tell AppleInsider.

The Intel C++ Compiler is a full fledged C/ C++ compiler and debugger suite. This 8.1 release features support for the new Intel Extended Memory 64 technology and integration with Eclipse IDE.

This release has 1650 binary packages available now. This includes binaries for KDE 3.1.4 and GNOME 2.4. The package manager has been improved and now includes a versatile system for handling variants. More documentation has been added featuring translations into Japanese, French, and Simpl. Chinese.

"Novell has lifted the lid on enhancements integrated into the next major release of Mono, its development platform for enabling Microsoft .Net applications to run unchanged on Linux. The forthcoming version, due to ship next March, will implement a native Visual Basic (VB.Net) compiler and Windows Forms (WinForms)." Read more at vnunet.com.

Fedora Core 3 Test2 was released today, and so here's a chance to preview the software. I've been eager to try out Gnome 2.8 and KDE 3.3, so I tried to install them on my Core 2 box, which resulted in a severe package dependency crisis, so since Test 2 was released today I figured I would just reformat and install it for kicks, and to get my KDE 3.3. Screenshots from FC3-T2 can be found here.

From ActiveWin: Daniel C. Robbins is a 3D User Interface Designer working at Microsoft Research. His current projects include visual presentation of large information spaces and scenarios for intelligent environments. View and experience research prototypes that span back to the 1990s, yet may give a glimpse of what's in store for future Microsoft products.

IBM's new semantic technology enables companies to make better use of their information by enabling software to be more intelligent, adaptive, and efficient.

After a month of the KDE 3.3 release, userinstinct has put together a usability study with user testing.