"Qt 4.1.3 - the latest maintenance release to the Qt 4.1 series - is now available, incorporating numerous bug fixes and optimizations. Qtopia Core 4.1.3 has also been released to Qtopia Core customers. For detailed information, please consult the changes-4.1.3 file found in the package."

"The latest 'OS X is slow' meme to impinge on the mass psyche of the Internet comes courtesy of one Jasjeet Sekhon, an associate professor of political science at UC Berkeley. The page has hit digg and reddit and been quoted on Slashdot. Is there any merit to this?"

The second development release en route to GNOME 2.16 has been released. "GNOME 2.15.2 works well and you should definitely try it to see how well it works. So go download it. Go compile it. Go test it. And go hack on it, document it, translate it, fix it." The various download locations and NEWS files are listed in the release announcement.

"In this article, we walk you through the process of constructing a special set of bootable media called a kickstart, designed to help you rebuild systems when and as needed with minimal time and effort. Of course, it does require some planning, preparation and work to build a kickstart, but we'll cover that here."

"There are dozens of other massively multiprocessor projects - known alternatively as distributed computing, grid computing, or volunteer computing - that can take advantage of your otherwise unused CPU cycles in an effort to do things like predict global climate change, calibrate particle accelerators, or develop drugs to combat cancer and AIDS. We decided to look into whether these projects have actually accomplished anything or were just spinning CPU cycles unnecessarily and making their users feel virtuous."

"Today I learned about memcached, which I'd heard of before, but never really investigated. From the project's site, 'memcached is a high-performance, distributed memory object caching system, generic in nature, but intended for use in speeding up dynamic web applications by alleviating database load.' So, even though I don't have a huge amount of traffic, I still have dynamic sites, and I'm always looking at ways to speed up my Typo blog. So, using memcached, you can get a big performance boost in databases calls, which sold me on giving it a go."

"Thanks to pirates, or rather the fear of them, the Intel edition of Apple's OS X is now a proprietary operating system. Mac developers and power users no longer have the freedom to alter, rebuild, and replace the OS X kernel from source code. Stripped of openness, it no longer possesses the quality that elevated Linux to its status as the second most popular commercial OS."

Sun Microsystems plans to offer support for the Ubuntu server Linux distribution on its T1 server line, the company said at the JavaOne industry conference in San Francisco. "We will be aggressively supporting the fork work that Ubuntu has been doing," Sun chief executive Jonathan Schwartz said at the conference. "The ideals of that community are relatively familiar to us." More here, while a comparison of Linux and Solaris on a T2000 is also available.

Xfree 4.6.0 has been released. New features include security updates, driver updates and fixes, input driver enhancements, Xinerama improvements, and much more. Read the release notes, readme, and installation notes.

Nested Archive Toolkit for Java is a tool that provides the layout details of archives, including nested or J2EE archives, so that users can efficiently open and update selected archive contents. This technology builds on existing Java APIs for accessing ZIP and JAR files and uses advanced techniques for opening and scanning nested archives.

"Although Apple's machines are more expensive than PCs, one Wall Street researcher says the price of a Mac isn't that much more than a comparable Windows-based computer. Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster said that his research shows an average price difference of only 13 percent for desktops and 10 percent for laptops, once you factor in the same components that Apple uses." Run, Forrest, run!

"FreeBSD 5.5-RC1 is now available for testing. Things had been going well with the 5.5 BETAs up to the point we suspended making them so we could focus on the balance of the 6.1 release so we think 5.5 is pretty much ready to go. Unless big problems are reported with this RC we will start the 5.5 release builds this coming weekend and do the release early next week."

Sony will ship its Vaio UX UMPC on 27 May, the consumer electronics giant said today. The successor to the company's U series of handheld mini PCs will ship as the retail-oriented UX-50 and as the Sony-sold UX-90S and UX-90PS. As expected, the UX-50 will contain a 1.06GHz ultra-low voltage Intel Core Solo U1300 processor backed by 512MB of 400MHz SDRAM and a 30GB, 4,200rpm hard disk. The unit's display is a 4.5in, 1,024 x 600 panel driven by Intel's integrated GMA950 GPU - the chipset's a 945GMS. The handheld PC runs Windows XP Home Edition. Connectivity comes courtesy of Bluetooth 2 and 802.11a/b/g Wi-Fi. There's an integrated webcam and a fingerprint sensor.

"Sun today announced that Java Platform, Standard Edition 5 is now available for redistribution by GNU/Linux and OpenSolaris operating system distributors under the new Operating System Distributor's License for Java (also known as the 'Distro License for Java' or DLJ). Developed in consultation with, and for use by, the various GNU/Linux communities, the new license allows distributors to ship Sun's Java SE 5.0 Java Development Kit and Java Runtime Environment as installable packages for their operating systems." At the same time, Sun also promised to open-source Java.