The final release of FreeBSD 5.3 should be up on the mirrors within the next two weeks. In all likelihood, this will be the first "production release" of FreeBSD 5.x series, so perhaps this is a good time to take a look at the new features in this much anticipated release.

In most cases, functors and ranges cause a minor issue of too many keystrokes, but in some cases, they can cause a serious impediment to maintainability. This chapter will teach you to deal with this problem while it's still a minor one.

Wired aims to be a professional music production and composition software running on Linux.

Both Eclipse 3.0 and IntelliJ IDEA 4 are feature-rich, Java IDEs that provide syntax checking, code assistance, and code generation for coding. In addition, they both provide support for refactoring, Ant, unit testing, and CVS. And soon, the Eclipse Visual Editor 1.0 for building GUIs using either AWT/Swing or SWT will be available. But some important differences exist between the two. This article briefly compares the features, ease of use, and stability of Eclipse and IDEA.

Brad Parker has announced a working emulator for the MIT CADR Lisp Machine. The CADR used a microcode which was designed to run an early version of MacLisp. Many things are working, including ZMacs, its version of Emacs.

Beginning this month, Microsoft will start to publish details about upcoming security updates in a newsletter available to the general public. Previously this information had been available, but only to those who knew about it and would sign a confidentiality agreement, which ended up being a handful of its largest customers.

Fedora Core 3, codenamed Heidelberg, was released this morning. FC3 features Gnome 2.8, KDE 3.3, and Linux kernel 2.6.9, as well as the introduction of Firefox and Thunderbird in Fedora. The ISO's can be found on the many mirrors, and the torrent is here.

Novell is announcing a new Linux desktop today, called "Novell Linux Desktop 9: Powered by SUSE Linux." More info at Newsforge and News.com.

As always after a minor OSX revision, Apple has posted updated sources for Darwin.

CrayCore is a CRAY YMP-EL Emulator. Currently, CrayCore executes instructions one at a time, through a command line interface. Future plans are to slowly add features until CrayCore is fully able to run Unicos. CrayCore version .3 has been released, in two packages, a source.zip, and a win32 binary. New features include light memory support, vector support, and many more opcodes. Be sure to check OpcodesTwo.txt, included with both packages for status on which instructions are implemented, and how to use them.

There are a couple of ways you can try Linux before installing it on your hard drive. One way is to use a live cd, another way is to run it on Windows. Damn Small Linux has a version designed to run directly from Windows. Read more.

FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE is now officially available. This release marks a milestone in the FreeBSD 5.x series and the beginning of the 5-STABLE branch of releases. New features from 4.x include massively upgraded SMP scalability including the new KSE M:N threading implementation, and the new ULE constant time scheduler (currently switched off per default). All in all these features bring scalability of kernel features on SMP systems (at least small to midrange systems) more or less on par with the Linux 2.6 kernel series with the NPTL threads library.

IT-Enquirer has a three-part special on Mac OS X 10.4: Part 1, 2 and 3. Update: I declare the comments section on this news item to be a disaster zone. It can't be saved. Just stay away.

Although it is not an official build, PearPC .4pre has been released on Richard Goodwin's site. You can pick it up here.