From ZDNET: “Last week my ZDNet colleague Mary Jo Foley asked
publicly why Linux backers don’t fear its new big friends.
With many members of the traditional high-tech industry
jumping on the open source bandwagon — including
IBM, Intel, Dell and others — she wants to know why
Linux users aren’t protesting. Or predicting doom. Or
even complaining.”

From LinuxToday Australia: “Author Shirley Conran once said, ‘Life is too short to stuff a mushroom.’ And so it is. Life is also too short to evaluate
umpteen different Linux distributions. Nevertheless, over the past 18 months I’ve done exactly that.

Testing a range of distributions is not as daft as it might appear. In my case, I can partly justify my actions because I
write about Linux and need a more complete understanding of the market. I also have very specific needs so finding the
optimum distribution required trial and error. The other thing is that I’m just plain curious.”

Linhardware reports: “Palmisano is also one of IBM’s biggest Linux advocates, placing the alternative flavor of the Unix operating system near the center of a broad plan to catch the second wave of technological revolution.”

From The Register: “Interviewed at Comdex, Burney said he was ruling nothing out and nothing in in his
attempts to find a solution to Corel’s financial woes. Burney specifically said that
one option under consideration was the sale of one or more Corel divisions,
including the Linux operation.”

“When most people think of Linux, they think of running it on an Intel x86-based (or compatible) PC. That’s largely due to the perception of Linux as a threat to
Windows systems. However, Linux distributions are often able to run on computers built around other processors, and Windows isn’t the only graphical OS standing in
the way of wider acceptance of Linux–there are plenty of Macs out there, too.” From CNET.com.

Salon: “In the year 2049
today’s under-30 geeks are still
hacking code. They’re even still
wearing the same faded T-shirts they
always did, which still sport the logos of the likes of Microsoft, Oracle and
that silly penguin. But these code-geek geezers are far from redundant —
their T-shirts are actually advertisements for their particular set of still
very useful skills. After all, you never know when the Communist Party of
the U.K. might need you to hack into some ancient system in the U.S.
that’s still running a 50-year-old copy of FreeBSD.” The story turns into a discussion of how Linux company stock prices are not the heart of the Open Source movement. (VA Linux, mentioned in the story, owns NewsForge.)

From Linux.com: “So all of your friends seem to have the IRC thing figured out, and maybe you do too, but
you’re used to Windows-compatible applications like mIRC and pirch98. Have no fear.
Although some Linux tasks may prove daunting to those accustomed to Windows, using
X-Chat is not among them. As an IRC client for the X windows environment, and it’s at
least (if not more) easy to use than most other IRC clients.”

Most of the 24,000 attacks and unauthorized intrusions that took place this year are due to poor security practices and known vulnerabilities that have gone unfixed, the Defense Department said in this ComputerWorld report.

Intel Corp. is planning to ring in the New Year with
a host of new chips, including a more budget minding version of the Pentium 4, ZDNET reports.

From O’Reilly.com: “OpenGL isn’t open source, but it has open source virtues: It’s cross-platform, robust, and carefully documented. Tim O’Reilly writes that the success of open source has less to do with licenses and more to do with collaborative software development over a wide area network.”