Open-source pioneer and Novell Vice President Miguel de Icaza Thursday for the first time publicly slammed his company's cross-patent licensing agreement with Microsoft as he defended himself against lack of patent protection for third parties that distribute his company's Moonlight project, which ports Microsoft's Silverlight technology to Linux.

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 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.

"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."

"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."

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."