Trolltech has announced the availability of the second Qt 4 Technical Preview. Key highlights include support for AT-SPI, bringing accessibility to the Unix and Linux desktop for people with disabilities.

After reading Adam Scheinberg's original article "The Paradox of Choice" and Kevin Russo's response, I want to add my personal comments to this discussion. I will quote Adam and Russo several times and pick up their arguments.

Sometimes you just need to show that you are doing something, even if you can't say how long it is going to take. One effective way of illustrating this state is to display a cyclic animation. Building your own progress bar is probably the easiest part of this column; understanding how to use it in your own applications is the real trick. This article describes how to create a visualizer, using the Visual Studio 2005 Beta 1 release, which enables you to customize the way data is displayed when you are debugging through managed code.

This series introduces you to R, a rich statistical environment, released as free software. It includes a programming language, an interactive shell, and extensive graphing capability. What's more, R comes with a spectacular collection of functions for mathematical and statistical manipulations -- with still more capabilities available in optional packages.

Along with the stable maintanance release of Mono 1.0.2, Novell released the first beta of the upcoming Mono 1.2: The Mono JIT has been ported to a new architectures: AMD64, SPARC v9, and S390. In the runtime detection, support for side-by-side execution of applications that require different runtime versions was implemented. Mono now will detect the runtime version that an application requires, and will load the appropriate mscorlib.dll and machine.config.

"Firefox just had its preview release last week and already has been downloaded more than a million times. I reviewed the new version, and found Firefox's simple interface gets you the information you want without distracting you with options." Read the review at NewsForge.

Ever used BugZilla? I'm sure you have. Frustrated? Dropped support for ever? Oh yes, I understand.

Computer Sciences Corp. (CSC) has published a 96-page report on Open Source software and its potential benefits to business and government. This whitepaper provides an introduction to the report and its findings.

The Internet went all abuzz last week when a report by Todd Bishop of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer posited that Microsoft was keeping open its legal options against licensees of OpenOffice.org. Commonly known as OpenOffice, the software is a freely downloadable open source productivity suite that constitutes a significant portion of Sun's commercially offered StarOffice. It also exemplifies the threat that the open-source movement poses to Microsoft.

Martin Taylor recently marked his one-year anniversary as Microsoft Corp.'s chief Linux strategist. Taylor, whose official title is general manager of platform strategy, recently spoke with Computerworld about his first year in that job. This is Part 2 of the interview. Part 1 is also available online.

Microsoft's Xbox team has been assigned to the development of Virtual PC's native graphics card support, sources tell AppleInsider.

The Intel C++ Compiler is a full fledged C/ C++ compiler and debugger suite. This 8.1 release features support for the new Intel Extended Memory 64 technology and integration with Eclipse IDE.

This release has 1650 binary packages available now. This includes binaries for KDE 3.1.4 and GNOME 2.4. The package manager has been improved and now includes a versatile system for handling variants. More documentation has been added featuring translations into Japanese, French, and Simpl. Chinese.

"Novell has lifted the lid on enhancements integrated into the next major release of Mono, its development platform for enabling Microsoft .Net applications to run unchanged on Linux. The forthcoming version, due to ship next March, will implement a native Visual Basic (VB.Net) compiler and Windows Forms (WinForms)." Read more at vnunet.com.