CNET News.com reports: “In a case that could affect other fledgling dot-coms, a defunct online toy store will be paid $50,000 to destroy its
customer database rather than selling it to pay creditors, federal regulators said.”

From ZDNet: “An open-source software release is essentially a milestone — a declaration that what was already available is now stable. Thus, it’s amusing to read uninformed opinions about how 2.4 was “vaporware” and “behind schedule.” In reality, the latest Linux is always constantly available!

At Linux Journal: “So you want to be a Linux geek, huh? You’ve heard about Linux for quite a while now and wondered about all the excitement. You’ve listened to that nerdy
guy at work rave about it. You’ve looked at the screen shots and thought, “It doesn’t look too bad. It looks kind of cool, actually.” Still, why go through all the
trouble? Perhaps it’s the price; perhaps it’s all the software that comes with it. Maybe it’s just the challenge, the intellectual allure.”

From BSD Today: “Wasabi Systems, Inc., a company founded by key members of the NetBSD project, announced a partnership
with OpenForce, Inc. This relationship brings together OpenForce’s expertise in open-source eBusiness
solutions with Wasabi’s know-how in the NetBSD Operating System.”

LWN.net has posted an interview with PostgreSQL core developer Bruce Momjian. Topics covered include last year’s controversial benchmarks, changes to the developer community, and the corrrect way to say PostgreSQL out loud.

ZDNet reports: “Nvidia has hemmed and hawed and issued its share of “no comments,” but the company widely regarded as the current speed leader in PC graphics has finally come to the Mac, and in a big way: Its GeForce2 MX AGP graphics card is now standard in Apple Computer’s new 533-MHz, 667-MHz and 733-MHz Power Mac G4 systems, which the Mac maker announced at Macworld Expo here this week.”

From ZDNet: “Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT) announced at Macworld Expo that it will release a version of Mac OS X Office in the fall, marking the first truly significant software developer to back Apple’s (Nasdaq: AAPL) next-generation operating system.”

A columnist distributed by Nando Times talks about the new operating systems and user interfaces due out this year, including Eazel for Linux and Mac OS X. The article rips the way GUIs work.

From PR Newswire: The PHP Group
today announced that PHP (PHP Hypertext Preprocessor), the popular open-source
Web scripting language, is now found on more than five million Web domains,
according to Netcraft. Netcraft’s authoritative survey of
Web servers showed that PHP passed the 5.1 million domain mark this month,
confirming PHP’s position as one the fastest growing technologies for creating
dynamic Web sites.

Humor site Segfault makes fun of a couple of our favorite sites: “Rumors of KuroDot ‘readers’, as mentioned in an earlier story of Wednesday, January 3rd, 2001, are
now being dismissed as false. ‘Exaggerated, patently erroneous, and other large, multisyllabic words,’
claimed site founder, RustyTaco. ‘You see, it’s funny, because while I was ribbing myself for using big
words, I used a big word,’ he added.

When pressed about the issue, RustyTaco went on to explain that ‘we here at KuroDot are not in the
business of having users. In fact, Hemoshiro is in the process of talking to our lawyer regarding a
patent of the userless weblog. I’ll be damned if anyone is going to profit from our lack of interest!’ ”