CNET News.com reports: “Gaming sites have posted what they claim are the first pictures of Microsoft’s future game console, the Xbox, much to the
annoyance of the Redmond giant.”

Signal Ground takes a look at AOpen’s AK73 Pro and Soyo’s 7VTA-B motherboards, evaluating their use for the Linux market.

“Sendmail, Inc. and the Sendmail Consortium are proud to announce the
release of sendmail 8.11.2. This is a maintenance release which contains
bug fixes for problems found after 8.11.1 was released.” Full details at LWN.net.

In a press release at Linux PR, SGI announced that its digital media software development kit (dmSDK) is now available to the Open Source community.

“Boldly going where no database has gone before, Oracle Corp.’s Oracle8i Release 3 is a lot more than a database. Oracle8i is now also a file, mail, Web and Java2 Enterprise Edition application server.” Review at ZDNet.

Anandtech takes a look at the latest low-cost Celeron chips from Intel. Now shipping with a 100MHz Front Side Bus (FSB), chip performance is expected to increase dramatically.

Ananova reports: “Two men in Los Angeles have been jailed for two years after
they sent 50 million e-mails as part of a scam which almost
brought the largest internet providers to a standstill.”

From CNN: “While some contend that Linux has made
headlines but little else, evidence suggests
that Linux is finding a niche — and quite
possibly a large one. A poll of 2,092 IT professionals by Survey.com
reveals that more than 68 percent of companies have or intend to
deploy at least one Linux system.” (Note: the article mentions VA Linux, the company that owns NewsForge).

In a press release at Business Wire, eSniff, Inc. announced the availability of its Linux-based 1100 appliance, “a unique plug-and-play hardware device designed to end the problem of
computer network abuse.”

From a press release at PR Newswire: “OTG Software (Nasdaq: OTGS), a
software developer of online storage, data access and email management
solutions, today announced DiskXtender(TM) for Linux, new storage software
that supports the Red Hat (Nasdaq: RHAT) Linux platform.”