Wired.com reports on fears that ‘Tens of thousands of computer systems may have been secretly invaded by “zombies” that could suddenly spring to life over
the upcoming holiday weekend.
The zombie computers, controlled remotely by crackers, will then eat the brains of the Internet.” That paranoia is brought to you by the National Infrastructure Protection Center.

Reuters reports that 2001 may not turn out any better for Microsoft than 2000 did. Profit warnings from 2000 could carry over, and there’s still that little anti-trust legal matter hanging over the company’s head.

Reader garym sends this tidbit: “As much as I hate to slant someone’s poll, this one is too prominent to ignore: The Globe and Mail Technology site, easily one of Canada’s most influential and well-read business technology news sources, has just announced it’s new reader poll asking, ‘Have you ever used the Linux operating system?’ “

It’s a brave new world out there, reports ZDNET.co.uk – MIT’s Technology Review
magazine predicts what groundbreaking technology will lead
us into our cyberfuture

From ZDNET.co.uk: “Notebook manufacturing is rapidly migrating to mainland China, a
move that will inevitably lead to lower laptop prices.

The major Taiwanese notebook makers — which design and
manufacture a substantial portion of the notebook PCs sold
worldwide–have recently detailed plans to produce notebook
components and perform partial assembly in China next year.
These companies also are lobbying for laws that would allow them
to produce complete notebooks on the mainland — right now, it’s
illegal.”

Motor is a great new IDE for programming under Linux. In this
second part of the series, the author looks at more advanced issues
including debugging using the gdb front-end, CVS and some of the
new features in Motor 2.0. Tutorial here on FreeOS.com–Mayank

From ZDNET.co.uk: “IBM on Thursday proclaimed itself fastest of the fast in low-end
Unix uniprocessor workstations.

The company announced a pair of additions to its entry-level
RS/6000 44 P Model 170 Unix workstation, which the company
claims will make the machine fastest in its class.”

Apache Week holiday special feature: This is the first of two articles by Joe Orton on WebDAV, the distributed authoring protocol for HTTP. The first article explains what WebDAV is, and the current state of client and server support. The next article will describe how to add WebDAV support to your Apache server.

Linux Today provides a space for you to post your birthday greeting to Linus Torvalds.

The end of the year is a time of reflection. This week, News.com staffers took a break from journalism, at least for a
nanosecond, to write poems that summarized the year in technology.

Some themes that were on their minds: plummeting stocks prices, layoffs and the dot-com shakeout. They tried haiku, limiting
themselves to five syllables for the first line, seven syllables for the second line and five for the third line.

Should News.com staffers stick to their day jobs? You decide.