In this article I take a look at Fedora Core 4 Test 2. This review is only intended to preview the change from Fedora Core 3.

Ars Technica has a review that not only looks "under the hood" at Tiger, but takes the engine apart and catalogs all the pieces for us to see. The article takes note particularly of the many improvements in Tiger that will benefit Mac developers, that end-users will only begin to benefit from when the next crop of new Mac apps starts to come onto the scene.

In a world of serial and parallel, it would not be simple for a new device connection to make its mark. Follow the USB standards success story to witness how this meritorious technology carved a place for itself. USB provides many benefits to users and vendors, but also see where it missed the boat.

OSNews reviews Apple's latest OS upgrade. Is it an overpriced, glorified point release or a truly worthy upgrade with major new functionality? Is it a Longhorn killer or just more of the same? We'll take a look, and try to see what's on the surface as well as what's under the hood.

The "two man rule" (also sometimes called the "four eyes rule") has its origins in military protocol although for quite some time it has been welcomed into the stockpile of IT security controls used by organizations around the world. The "two man rule" specifies that there must be two individuals that must act in concert in order to perform some action.

What can we do to make the Windows desktop GUI more efficient? I admit that I'm addicted to "tweaking", which is what I consider to be finding new ways to make myself most efficient with standard tools from Microsoft.

In the Windows world, dashboards became so popular that Microsoft decided to incorporate the concept into its OS as the task bar and task tray. With Tiger, though, Apple is taking dashboards and widgets to a new dimension. When activated, the service appears as a transparent layer over the desktop.

Microsoft has a number of ideas, which it is sharing with its hardware and software partners, as to how to ratchet up Windows desktop revenues by billions per year.

There is an in depth article about Java SWT GUI toolkit. Author discusses the pros-cons of Swing and SWT and myths surrounding them.

In the second part of my Open Source advocacy series, Trust and Zeal in Open Source Advocacy, the article covers the importance of trust and the potential risks of zeal in pushing Open Source forward and creating change.

Shortly after announcing the merger of Mandrakesoft and Conectiva into Mandriva, the newly combined company released a transitional "limited edition" GNU/Linux distribution to bridge the gap between the two parent distributions. Mandriva Limited Edition 2005 may look a little different, but it's the same great Mandrakelinux desktop distribution that you're used to.

"As a test release, Fedora Core 4 Test 2 shows just how good FC4 will be when it's officially releases. Should you punt FC3 and upgrade? Frankly, not on your primary system unless you don't need the guarantees of an official, complete release." Read the rest of the preview here.

Jono Bacon, Stuart Langridge (Aq), Ade Bradshaw, and Matt Revell talk about Linux and whatever else comes along, including The Seth, the Nickell, the Seth Nickell, on usability, interaction design, the Gnome project, and lots of other stuff.

OpenMFG, the makers of open source ERP software, have released OpenRPT, a report writer for ad-hoc Web-based reporting. It creates graphical, embeddable reports, similar to the commercial software Crystal Reports or Microsoft Access report designer, but runs on on Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows. It supports graphs, integrated barcodes, label printing, and watermarks and report definitions can be stored in a PostgreSQL database as XML, or exported to individual files.