We've got some progress in the other legal case Apple is involved in. The California case, Apple vs. Psystar, is more or less a done deal, but the Florida case, Psystar vs. Apple, is only just beginning. As it promised it would do, Apple has now asked the court in California to either dismiss the Florida case, or transfer it to California. Apple is also asking for a permanent injuction against Psystar. Through this motion, we also gain some juicy insight into Psystar's sales projections - and more interestingly, how many machines the clone maker actually sold.

A few days ago, we heard about Microsoft planning to include Direct2D acceleration in the yet-to-come IE9, thus leveraging today's poweful GPUs to render web content. Mozilla didn't fall behind: last Sunday, Firefox hacker Bas Schouten revealed a build of Firefox 3.7 with built-in Direct2D acceleration on his blog. His performance tests claim that popular sites like Facebook and Twitter render twice as fast compared to Firefox without Direct2D rendering. More complex sites do not see a lot of benefits, tough. This build requires DirectX 10 and a WDDM 1.0 compatible graphics drive, and thus, Windows Vista or 7. Download it here.

Genode is a framework for creating custom microkernel-based operating systems, currently supporting four different kernels. With the new 9.11 release, the project moves beyond the x86 architecture by adding initial support for ARM CPUs. Among the long list of further improvements, there is added support for USB storage, a light-weight IP stack, Qt/Webkit, a zero-footprint runtime for Ada programs, and the addition of a paravirtualized Linux kernel to the mainline distribution. These and more changes are described in full detail in the release notes for version 9.11.

This article describes the various refactorings available in Eclipse Java Development Tools, including what each refactoring does, when to use it, and how to use it. It also explores the refactoring script functionality in Eclipse, which allows library developers to share code refactorings with their clients.

Google has put up a very interesting document explaining the security features underlying its Chrome OS. The document also details the underlying guiding principles of Chrome OS' security features.

Microsoft has delayed the open source release of their Windows 7 USB/DVD tool, which contained GPL code. "As you know, Microsoft recently committed to making the source code as well as binaries for the Windows 7 USB/DVD Tool available this week, under the terms of the General Public License v2 as described here. While we worked extremely hard to try and get the code ready for release by today, we still need to test and localize it. Our goal is now to release the tool in all languages on the same day in the next few weeks. We appreciate your patience and understanding as we work to make the Windows 7 USB/DVD Tool available once again."