Following the opening up of CVS access to contributors, the Fedora project has announced pre-extras, a preview release of the Fedora extras repository. The distributed "global filesystem," or GFS, acquired by Redhat and later open sourced, has been integrated into the Fedora development tree recently as well.

Sun Microsystems is focusing on Opterons and Solaris x86 for a good reason. Sun has figured out a way to make x86 hardware cheaper than anyone else. Sun is hoping that by leveraging its cost advantages the company will be able to ensure the success of its x86 hardware and Solaris.

This story is almost too cool to be true. A contractor working for Apple in the early 90s developed a graphing calculator application that took full advantage of the new PowerPC processor, but his project was cancelled while the software was in its early stages. He was out of a job, but his ID badge still worked. So he kept coming back to work, at no pay, for months, hiding from management, to finish the job, and dozens of Apple employees pitched in to help. In 1994, his app, "Graphing Calculator," shipped with the OS.

Trolltech has released the first Beta version of the upcoming Qt 4.0. The final version is expected to be released in late first quarter of 2005. An updated online Qt Reference Documentation is also available.

The law that governs nonprofit foundations requires that during its probationary period, at least 1/3 of its donations must be in the form of smaller donations from individuals, or it risks losing its tax-exempt status. Ironically, because of some very-generous donations, it now must make up for that with $30,400 in smaller donations by 12/31/2004. More info on their predicament an info on making donations are available on their web site.

There's been a lot of hoopla about Firefox lately, and its security/privacy benefits over IE. However, here this guide can lead you to tools and practices that will make IE safer to use, for those who don't want to stop using IE.