EE Times reports: “The Federal Communications Commission said Thursday (Jan. 4) that it
will examine whether frequencies below 3 GHz can be utilized to help speed the
introduction of third-generation and other advanced wireless services.”

Bloomberg via CNET News.com reports: “Royal Philips Electronics, Europe’s largest consumer-electronics maker, will bring in nearly $43 million less
annually when some of its CD patents expire in Asia and Europe this summer.”

At Linux Today, from a post to the Kernel Mailing List: ” In a move unanimously hailed by the trade press and industry analysts as
being a sure sign of incipient braindamage, Linus Torvalds (also known as
the “father of Linux” or, more commonly, as “mush-for-brains”) decided
that enough is enough, and that things don’t get better from having the
same people test it over and over again. In short, 2.4.0 is out there.” Thanks to NewsForge reader tjhanson.

From Info World: “Hewlett-Packard has begun worldwide shipment of its HP 9000 Superdome Unix server, which combines support and services offerings normally reserved for mainframe customers with the option of multiple-choice CPUs and eventually multiple operating systems.”

ZDNet reports that sales of Intel’s new Pentium 4 processor accounted for around 1 percent of all new PCs sold in U.S. retail outlets during December. By comparison, the established Pentium III snagged 8 percent of total new system sales.

From LWN.net: “‘slocate’ is a program which catalogues existing files and allows for
a quick lookup later.
There is a vulnerability present in previous versions. By giving it a
crafted database, an attacker could make slocate execute arbitrary
code as the ‘slocate’ user.
Additionally, a bug which caused slocate to segfault with large
pathnames was fixed.”

“LinuxUsersGroups.org announced today the launch of the new not-for-profit website and home for the LUGs resource project, www.linuxusersgroups.org. This new site is dedicated to providing resources to Linux users groups and the Linux community, planning to offer services to assist with group management, event planning, vendor coordination, and more.” Read the press release at Linux PR.

From ZDNet: “This was the year that open source lost its hype and innocence, coming into its own as a model for software development and distribution, as well as the social movement envisioned by the GNU crowd.”

At Linux PR: “EBIZ Enterprises Inc., the country’s largest vendor-neutral Linux solutions builder, has announced the completion of the JBSi (Jones Business Systems Inc.) acquisition announced in mid-November. Houston-based JBSi is now a wholly owned subsidiary of EBIZ Enterprises Inc.”

Luca Gambetta, a ZioBudda.net collaborator, reviews two italian PHP portal sites: PhpCenter (1) and PhpItalia(2). The response is not so good. (This is an Italian site.) –ZioBudda