“Ever wondered why seemingly sane people would choose to install and use
Linux? Is there some method to this madness? Here’s a geek’s reasons for
leaving the safety of Windows for uncharted territory. What does Linux have
that other OS’ don’t?” From FreeOS.com.

From OSOpinion: “Macintosh users will be experiencing a rather major change in the user
interface (UI) that Apple supplies for its computers. Apple made
available a beta preview of their new OS, MacOS X, for public
consumption.

Accordingly there have been many grievances with the changes Apple
has made. This article will not preach the necessity of the changes
but rather try to explain why Apple has chosen to make the following
alterations.”

Reader’s Digest UK: “In the middle of the night, a scruffy
21-year-old sat in a darkened room at
his mother’s house in Helsinki, Finland,
tapping out a message on his computer
keyboard. “Hello everybody out there,”
he typed, sipping tea and nibbling the
dry pasta he habit-ually ate. “I’m doing
a (free) operating system (just a hobby,
won’t be big and professional)…I’d like
any feedback on things people
like/dislike…”
The young man’s name was Linus
Torvalds. And what he sent out to the world on that August
night in 1991 has transformed the whole landscape of computer
use.”

“As the year drew to a close,
vendors were racing to
one-up each other, each
claiming the best strategy
for delivering on its Web
services promises. In 2001, look for developers and
some bleeding-edge customers to put vendors’ claims —
and early versions of their Web services wares — to the
test.” From ZDNET.

The president-elect has said he opposes a
forced breakup of Microsoft, but that doesn’t
mean he’ll intervene. To begin with, Bush has
bigger problems, reports ZDNET.

LinuxToday posted this opinion piece by Lou Grinzo, editor of Linux Programming: “We’ve all seen the comments from industry pundits and frustrated individual users alike: “Linux needs a
single desktop standard!” they shout. And just in case that isn’t sufficiently incendiary, these same people
usually take sides in our favorite soap opera here in Linux Land, the KDE/GNOME mud wrestle, and
anoint one as being clearly the “right” choice for uberdesktop. This is where such conversations normally
take a Jerry Springer-esque turn, complete with virtual chair throwing.”

“If you’re using Perl, or if you’re interested in learning Perl, you’ll want to know about the
Perl Mongers. Perl Mongers is a network of Perl user groups, like LUGs are for Linux,
where you can meet other Perl users in your area, improve your skills, hear about the
latest developments, or simply find out what Perl is all about.” From Linux.com.

LinuxPlanet opinion column: “There are glimpses of something to do with penguins in some of the old hardcopy
archives that survived 2023. So few comps survived after that era. This one may have made it intact
because of the depth, but all of them we have seen to date have the Windows interface.”

From OSOpinion: “The sweetest way to run UN*X on NT for me is DOSMINIX. Descended from Andrew Tanenbaum’s
venerable, though slightly old, MINIX operating system, DOSMINIX is a full, source-code, BSD
licensed, UN*X powerhouse running in a cmd.exe box on NT (and possibly Win2K).”

LinuxToday has posted this announcement: “This is a beta version of the new MySQLGUI version 1.7.4

This release has two new features, of which one is very important, and it also contains several bug fixes.”