"San Jose-based startup DeviceVM made waves last year when it unveiled Splashtop, a nearly instant-on Linux environment stored in the flash memory usually reserved for motherboard BIOS. The company previewed an upcoming revision to Splashtop at this year's Consumer Electronics Show in January, then gave us the chance to take a hands-on look at this intriguing system software."

Ars takes a closer look at the Internet Explorer 8 beta (released yesterday), and concludes. "Niggles aside, IE8 is shaping up quite well. Clearly, a lot of work has been done on standards compliance, and it looks like it's paying off. If IE8's development continues down the path it's on, it will finally be a version of Internet Explorer fit for the 21st century."

"The next major update of FreeBSD 7, due this December, is in the running to be one of the most impressive FreeBSD releases to date. The ULE scheduler has now reached maturity, leading to significant gains across the board (particularly in server workloads). This new scheduler brings notably impressive performance improvements to both MySQL and PostgreSQL. In the first section of this article, I'm going to take a look at what's new. In the second section, I will discuss what the future holds for FreeBSD beyond the upcoming FreeBSD 7.0 release, including screen shots of the revamped FreeBSD installer 'finstall'."

The SCO Group plans to emerge from Chapter 11 soon and revealed that not only will it modify its business strategy towards mobile products, it will also replace chief executive officer Darl McBride and pick up the Linux and Unix license lawsuits against IBM and Novell. The new owner of The SCO Group, investment firm Stephen Norris Capital Partners, is planning to open a new chapter in SCO’s Linux lawsuit history, which started back in March of 2003 when the company filed a USD 1 billion suit against IBM. As part of its plan organization, SCO announced that it will appeal the proceedings, which will begin with an appeal against a key decision in favor of Novell from August 10, 2007, which also impacts the lawsuit against IBM.

"If you've been paying attention to the various industry news outlets you've no doubt come across the story about the Microsoft engineer advocating Windows Server 2008 as a 'workstation' OS. According to him, if you make the right tweaks - installing the Desktop Experience feature, adding a few missing utilities, tuning the scheduler - you can turn Server 2008 into a fairly convincing Vista knock-off, one that's faster and more scalable than the original. Curious, we decided to see for ourselves just how well Server 2008 stacks-up to Vista with SP1." In addition, ExtremeTech has an article on Vista SP1 performance.

"Most software packages employ progress bars to visualize the status of an ongoing process. Users rely on progress bars to verify that an operation is proceeding successfully and to estimate its completion time. Typically, a linear function is applied such that the advancement of a progress bar is directly proportional to the amount of work that has been completed. However, estimating progress can be difficult for complex or multi-stage processes. Varying disk, memory, processor, bandwidth and other factors complicate this further. Consequently, progress bars often exhibit non-linear behaviors, such as acceleration, deceleration, and pauses. Furthermore, humans do not perceive the passage of time in a linear way. This, coupled with the irregular behavior of progress bars, produces a highly variable perception of how long it takes progress bars to complete. An understanding of which behaviors perceptually shorten or lengthen process duration can be used to engineer a progress bar that appears faster, even though the actual duration remains unchanged. This paper describes an experiment that sought to identify patterns in user perception of progress bar behavior."

Microsoft decided that due to their new interoperability initiative, they would reverse a previous decision to make IE8 default to the IE7 engine, instead of supporting standards-compliance by default. No article or musing I have yet read has delved into what is increasingly likely, the reason for this sudden change in decision -- and that is this: the mobile web is coming.

"OpenSolaris has launched a new project, Flexible Mandatory Access Control, to integrate the Flask/TE security scheme into their OS. This is the same underlying model implemented by SELinux, and follows other cross-platform Flask/TE integration projects such as SEDarwin and SEBSD. This is very exciting in terms of establishing compatible security across operating systems, particularly for Mandatory Access Control, which has traditionally been narrowly focused and generally incompatible. With FMAC, we're closer to seeing truly ubiquitous, cross-platform MAC security."

"Recently, quantum computing has been heralded as the new cool kid on the block. The point of quantum computing is that, during a calculation, the bits (called qubits) that are being manipulated are never in a definite one or zero state. Instead, they can be thought of as being both a one and a zero simultaneously, which allows a quantum computer to explore many solutions at the same time. The upshot is that, for a limited set of problems, quantum computers may offer a substantial speed up over normal computers. In recent, unpublished research, scientists have made use of the similarities between a certain type of quantum computation and neural networks to construct a very simple quantum neural network. The result may offer a faster and more robust form of pattern recognition."

Microsoft has released source code from the Singularity research project onto Codeplex under an academic, non-commercial license. "The Singularity Research Development Kit is based on the Microsoft Research Singularity project. It includes source code, build tools, test suites, design notes, and other background materials. The Singularity RDK is for academic non-commercial use only and is governed by this license."

Microsoft has admitted that SP1 for its Ultimate edition of Windows Vista will not be made available to everyone in mid-March as originally planned, because of a delay with 31 of its language packs. Vista product manager Nick White said in a blog post yesterday that Microsoft will now ship Vista Ultimate SP1 in two 'waves', with the second one coming 'later in 2008'. Customers running the 'premium' version of the operating system on their computers in English, French, German, Japanese and Spanish will be able to get the service pack shortly, according to White. But the remaining Vista Ultimate computers around the world will not receive the long-awaited update until the 31 language packs, that the software giant is presumably tweaking, are supported in SP1.

"We've decided that IE8 will, by default, interpret web content in the most standards compliant way it can. This decision is a change from what we've posted previously. Microsoft recently published a set of Interoperability Principles. Thinking about IE8's behavior with these principles in mind, interpreting web content in the most standards compliant way possible is a better thing to do. We think that acting in accordance with principles is important, and IE8's default is a demonstration of the interoperability principles in action. While we do not believe any current legal requirements would dictate which rendering mode a browser must use, this step clearly removes this question as a potential legal and regulatory issue. As stated above, we think it's the better choice." Ars has more.

James Cameron is an engineer testing the mesh networking capabilities of the OLPC XO laptop. He lives in a tiny town in the remote Australian outback called Tooraweenah. There is little noise in the radio spectrum in such a remote place, creating a perfect mirror of the environment where the XO will be deployed (rural third world countries). Cameron reveals how the OLPC XO's mesh networking capabilities work by turning the kids into part of the network infrastructure, including the USD 35 solar powered mesh node designed to be deployed on top of a tree or any high area to widen the network's reach. Testing in the Australian outback, Cameron discovered that the range of the XO could go up to 1.6km 'quite easily' at 1.5m above ground.

Microsoft chairman Bill Gates says Google's tools are no threat to SharePoint, and that Google Talk is hardly changing the world. Google really does not understand the special needs of businesses, as its model is based around consumer search, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates told attendees at the 2008 SharePoint conference here March 3. On a related note, Ballmer will retire in nine years.