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."

The Asus Eee PC will get an upgrade. "The next iteration of Asus's highly successful budget subnotebook, the Eee PC, has been unveiled at the CeBIT technology fair in Hanover, Germany. The Eee 900 will feature a larger screen than its predecessor, as well as more RAM, more storage and a larger keyboard. However, these enhancements will mean a slight reduction in battery life and a substantial increase in the cost of the device, relative to the first version of the Eee. The 900 will also come with pre-installed Windows XP as an option."

"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.

As the latest Mandriva release, 2008 Spring, reaches release candidate stage, the What's Coming in Mandriva Linux 2008 Spring page on the Mandriva Wiki is available, providing a summary of all the major new features arriving in the forthcoming release, along with screenshots. New versions of KDE 3, KDE 4, GNOME and XFCE, Asus Eee PC compatibility, PulseAudio, improvements to the Mandriva configuration tools and some new applications all make the list.

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.

"Back in 2004, shortly before the release of Mac OS X Tiger, Delicious Library 1.0 arrived as a slick looking inventory cataloging application designed to manage listings of books, videos, albums and other media. This year, Delicious Library 2.0, currently in beta and scheduled for a March release, will deliver a major update by taking full advantage of features in the new Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. Here's an exclusive preview."

Comic: "PDA".

"You may have remembered that in the past I've talked about some of the development of 64-bit applications on Mac OS X. The gist of it is that Apple changed their position on supporting 64-bit Carbon, the library we depend on for running Qt GUI applications. It became obvious early on that Apple wasn't going to change their position on this, so it left us with two choices: keep Qt Carbon-only and forego 64-bit support, or create a port of Qt that used Cocoa as its backend. Naturally, since we already support 64-bit on the other platforms and since the idea of using Qt is to help insulate you from changes such as this, we decided on the latter option. It did mean that we had a bit of work ahead of us, since we had to re-write some of the internals of Qt (particularly widgets and events), but most of the other modules were already there. I'm happy to say after a bit of work, we've made progress and we're proud to offer an alpha for curious people that want to try 64-bit applications on Mac OS X 10.5."

The fourth pre-release of Mandriva Linux 2008 Spring is here. This pre-release includes the all-new artwork for the 2008 Spring release, further improvements to the Mandriva software management tools, WPA-EAP support in the network configuration tools, KDE 3.5.9 and available 4.0.1, some new default applications in KDE and GNOME, and the latest pre-release of OpenOffice.org 2.4. See here for download information. And URPMI got support for rpm5.

"Ruby on Rails is a popular and powerful open source web framework for rapidly creating high-quality web applications to help you keep up with the speed of the Web. Rails is thriving on Mac OS X, and Leopard comes pre-installed with Ruby, Rails, Mongrel, Capistrano, Subversion, and other tools that help to streamline the development and deployment of Rails applications. This article gives you a full tour of Ruby on Rails 2.0 on Leopard - starting with building a web application using the latest Rails features with Xcode 3.0, and finishing with deploying the application to a production server running Leopard Server."

AndandTech has thoroughly reviewed the new Penryn-based MacBooks and MacBook Pros and concludes: "The biggest improvement by far comes in the battery life department. Just as we had seen earlier, you can expect these new models to outlast their predecessors by a good 7 - 15%. The performance side of things is more of a mixed bag. There are some situations where Penryn is clearly faster than Merom while others show the two with equal performance. It's for this reason that we say the biggest improvement lies in battery life, not performance." This puts to rest any uncertainty over the new laptops' battery life.

"Paul Frields is new to Red Hat, but he's not new to the Fedora Linux community. Frields became the Fedora project leader and a Red Hat employee at the beginning of February. Previously Frields was a US government employee and a contributor to the Fedora community for more than four years. Frields takes over at a pivotal time for Fedora as it gears up for its next major release, Fedora 9. A feature freeze is currently set for March 4, and Frields is already ready to chat about where Fedora is heading."

GNOME 2.22.0 release candidate has been released. "This is the last unstable release before 2.22.0. It's been a pretty fun ride since September. New features. Bug fixes. Translations. Documentation. Lots of bug triaging too. And we're getting ready to start again for 2.23! But before, we need to make sure 2.22.0 will be rock-solid. There's still a few days before the hard code freeze, so it's not too late to fix this last bug you're ashamed of."

"There has been a long standing rumor regarding NASA running Fedora which all of us in the Fedora community have been always intrigued by. Is it true? What are they doing with it there? Why don't they run RHEL. Fortunately enough, a couple of weeks ago, I got to experience NASA behind the scenes, first hand, and hang out with the coolest members of the Fedora community, and find out the answer to these questions and lots more."