"Beryl 0.2.0 will be released shortly and I spent time the last week testing out Beryl 0.2.0 RC2 on Kubuntu's Edgy Eft. The improvements found in 0.2.0 are simply amazing. Improvements in usability features, improvements in the pure 3D eye candy, and even the Beryl Settings Manager has been improved (the layout has become much more logically laid out). As you read through this preview of Beryl 0.2.0 and see some of the screenshots, I think you will get a firm grasp on how impressive Beryl can be. Basically, Beryl makes OS X and Vista look old and antiquated."

Version 1.0 of the LWJGL has been released. "The Lightweight Java Game Library is a solution aimed directly at professional and amateur Java programmers alike to enable commercial quality games to be written in Java. LWJGL provides developers access to high performance crossplatform libraries such as OpenGL and OpenAL allowing for state of the art 3D games and 3D sound. Additionally LWJGL provides access to controllers such as Gamepads, Steering wheel and Joysticks."

"Apple seeded a new build of the Mac OS X 10.4.9 update to developers late last week, Think Secret has learned. According to seed notes accompanying the Intel version (build 8P2125) and PowerPC version (build 8P125) of the update, there are no known issues with the latest seed, suggesting that Version 10.4.9 may be nearing release. The latest seed fixed a handful of bugs, including issues with OpenGL, CoreImage, CoreData, iSync, and the Sync Services engine." The Adium X team also released version 1.0 of their program, which is used by a lot of Mac users.

Distrowatch did the first review of Foresight Linux 1.0. They conclude: "Overall, despite a few early glitches while installing Foresight Linux 1.0, this distribution has turned out to be very usable system with an excellent package management utility and a unique, web based system configuration manager. It is clearly designed for users who enjoy GNOME and Mono software on their desktops or those who want to try the latest versions of these applications."

"A new investor lawsuit against Dell accuses the computer maker of improperly accounting for hundreds of millions of dollars in payments from long-time partner Intel, a plaintiffs' attorney said on Friday. The lawsuit accuses Dell of artificially inflating profits "by secretly receiving approximately $250 million a quarter in likely illegal rebate kickbacks payments" from Intel in return for an exclusive deal to purchase Intel's microprocessors, class-action lawyer William Lerach told Reuters.

"As one of our readers has pointed out to us, the latest (3.5.6) release of the KHTML rendering engine passes all of the tests in our CSS selector testsuite - making the Konqueror 3.5.6 browser the most CSS3-compatible of all. Also in the latest release is the implementation of text-overflow: ellipsis. It really is a shame that only a tiny proportion of web users have access to this excellent browser."

"This series is a guide to those who need a quick XML-and-Perl solution. In a surprisingly large number of cases, you only need one tool to integrate XML into a Perl application, XML::Simple. Part 1 tells you where to get it, how to use it, and where to go next. Once you whet your appetite for working with XML in Perl, the other two articles in this series will help you sharpen your new skills further."

Salon's Scott Rosenberg explains why even small-scale programming projects can take years to complete, one programmer is often better than two, and the meaning of "Rosenberg's Law."

Microsoft executives pondered whether to remove the company's name from a 2002 report done by research firm IDC that touted Windows total cost of ownership over Linux, according to e-mail messages entered into evidence in an Iowa antitrust case. The report, which IDC released in December 2002 and was plugged by Microsoft in its then-new "Get the Facts" publicity campaign against Linux, compared total cost of ownership of Windows 2000 and Linux server software. The IDC study, which was identified as Microsoft sponsored when it debuted, claimed that Windows 2000 offered a lower TCO in four of five enterprise scenarios. Before its release, however, company executives worried that adding Microsoft's moniker would only fuel the fire from Linux partisans.

Apple has given warning that it could be removed from the highly regarded Nasdaq Global Select Market, as the maker of iPod and Macintosh acknowledged for the first time that it was the subject of a federal investigation into its stock option practices. The company, which last June revealed 'irregularities' in its stock option grants and took an USD 84 million (GPB 43 million) charge six months later, said that the investigation by the US Securities and Exchange Commission could lead to further restatements and delays to its financial reporting.

A Microsoft-sponsored open-source project is expected on Friday to release a translator that will convert file formats between Microsoft Office and rival standard OpenDocument, or ODF. Microsoft started the project at SourceForge last year, relying on three partners to develop the code that lets a user open and save word processor documents in two different formats.

"In the February 2007 survey we received responses from 108810358 sites, an increase of 1.93 million from last month. Apache has a decline of 442K sites this month, and sees its share of the web server market slip by 1.47 percent to 58.7 percent. This is the first time Apache's market share has been below 60 percent since September 2002. Microsoft-IIS gain 935K sites, continuing an advance that has seen Microsoft steadily chip away at what once seemed an insurmountable lead for Apache. In our Feb. 2006 survey, Apache held 68% market share, giving it lead of 47.5% over Windows (20.5% share). In this month's survey, Microsoft's share has improved to 31.0%, narrowing Apache's advantage to 27.7%."

A new video showing the touchscreen-based UI of the LG Prada phone has hit YouTube. The phone is going head to head with the iPhone UI-wise and it shows the path that the majority of phones will look like in the years to come. It is not clear if the LG Prada is a smartphone that allows you to run native applications or just a 'feature phone'. On other mobile news, Google released a native Google Maps application for PocketPC and MS Smartphones (screenshots) that works better than the J2ME version.

NewsWeek interviewed Bill Gates about Vista, its reception, and Apple, among other things. On the complaint that some of the features in Vista appear to come from the Mac: "You can go through and look at who showed any of these things first, if you care about the facts. If you just want to say, "Steve Jobs invented the world, and then the rest of us came along," that's fine. If you're interested, Jim Allchin will be glad to educate you feature by feature what the truth is. I mean, it's fascinating, maybe we shouldn't have showed so publicly the stuff we were doing, because we knew how long the new security base was going to take us to get done. Nowadays, security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come out with a total exploit, your machine can be taken over totally. I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine."