ZDNet asks if hard drive speeds can keep pace with the acceleration of computers, and answers yes: with a move from parallel ribbon-cable ATA hard drives to serial hard drives.

Reuters reports on a study released on Tuesday about the effects of analog cell phone use in the short term, claiming the research could not find a link between that and brain cancer. The study also says more research needs to be done.

NW Fusion reports that Carnegie Melon University is studying the effects of on line shopping on the environment, in the aftermath of the Harry Potter book rush in July.

DebianPlanet reports that Debian/Woody is tentatively set for freeze in May 2001 and release in June of 2001.

NW Fusion reports that a recent WcAfee virus scan update to Windows NT damages the master boot record and forces the user to reinstall.

Carbon is one of the most amazing technical achievements by Apple in the development of OS X. It was originally brought about by developer reluctance in coding solely for the Cocoa API. Faced with the prospect of a developer revolt, Apple developed Carbon as a solution. So what’s so great about Carbon? Well, the main thing is that it allows developers to get their applications working on OS X with the minimum of effort. This is common knowledge, and many major application vendors should (hopefully) already be in the process of Carbonisation, as they have publicly stated they would be, according to a column at OS Opinion. –Kelly McNeill

CNet reports that the World Wide Web Consortium has a stripped-down
version of its replacement for HTML.

The W3C approved Extensible Hypertext Markup Language (XHTML) Basic, a subset of
XHTML that backers hope will “impose some discipline on a proliferation of new Web lingos for small computing devices.”

A recent article in MIT’s Technology Review said that the Crusoe chip had put most of the functionality normally expected in hardware into a software layer. With a 128-bit bus, it was consequently capable of running 32-bit Intel applications at a comparable speed to native Intel hardware. A quick examination of the Transmeta site indicates that Technology Review was merely giving a review of what Transmeta had succeeded in doing. Transmeta had succeeded in placing much of the operating functionality of the commonplace or garden variety silicon into software. The column is at OS Opinion. –Kelly McNeill

From CNet: “A new release of the Aimster instant messaging and file-swapping software, expected as soon as
Tuesday evening, will support new plug-ins that could tap into services such as Microsoft’s MSN
Messenger or even Napster’s chat service.”

LinuxToday has a short article on Red Hat releasing the Beta version of Red Hat Linux for
Itanium-based systems. It’s available for public download at Red Hat’s ftp site:
ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/ia64.