Yahoo Daily News reports that the FCC has started auctionning off more of the airwaves in an effort to stimulate wireless device growth. The auction has netted more then half a billion US dollars on its first day.

Space.com is reporting on NASA’s “secret plan” for human space travel beyond current low-earth orbits.

From Linuxlookup.com: ”

Every few months, the Linuxlookup staff builds a Budget Box, Workstation / Server and
Dream Machine, out of components currently on the market and available to consumers.
These machines each fall into their own categories, which you will find below. We are in no
way saying we own all of this equipment, or have even reviewed it, although we would sell
our souls to get our lil paws on some of this gear *drool*.” -Anonymous Reader

EET.com reports that Red Hat and Cradle Technologies will jointly develop
software for Cradle’s Universal Microsystem platform to deal with the
rising complexity of streaming data in such applications as cameras, set-top
boxes, telephone switching systems, and routers. More from Linuxdevices.com.

At LinuxPR: Zero-Knowledge Systems Inc., the
leading developer of privacy solutions for consumers and business, today
released the most comprehensive and powerful privacy product available for
Linux users, the Linux Freedom 2.0 Internet Privacy Suite. Freedom 2.0’s paid
premium services offer users untraceable private email and anonymous
browsing and chat through the Freedom Network. Freedom’s free standard
features include a cookie manager, ad manager and keyword alert.

At LinuxPR: Linux NetworX, Inc., a provider
of large-scale clustered computer solutions for Internet, industry and research
fields, named Robert Dunoskovic vice president of manufacturing. Dunoskovic
will be responsible for the quality and efficiency of all processes during the
production and integration of Linux NetworX Evolocity cluster systems.

An Inter@ctive Week story talks about Oracle’s plan to become “a supplier of online development technologies,” compeating with VA Linux’s SoureForge and CallabNet, among others. (VA Linux owns NewsForge.)

From LinuxPR: LinuxCertified.com, a leading provider of Linux training, will offer its next
weekend System Administration bootcamp on January 20-21, 2001 in San
Francisco
bay area (south bay). This workshop is designed for busy information technology
professionals and is designed to cover the most important Linux administration
areas.

LWN.net publishes a Japanese interview with Open Source advocate Eric S. Raymond: “Well I can think of a couple of pieces of news that I think are of importance. The first one
that occurred to me was when it was revealed that Andy Hertzfeld and the rest of the original
Macintosh interface designers were going to work explicitly on producing an end user interface,
GUI, for Linux. That was spectacular news.

Another piece of spectacular news was the announcement that StarOffice was going to be open
source as OpenOffice. It’s important because it’s going to take a productivity suite with features
comparable to Microsoft Office to make Linux truly competitive on the desktop, and Open
Office is a very large step towards that.”

TechWeb also has a story about IBM’s love for Open Source: “IBM Corp. chairman Louis Gerstner said the Internet is
forcing companies to look toward open computing
standards rather than the closed systems developed by
technology giants like EMC Corp., Sun Microsystems and
Microsoft Corp.”