Hoping to catch the Net’s latest technology trend, Sun
Microsystems is quietly creating a team of engineers with
hopes of merging Java and the file-swapping technology that
brought Napster to the music-loving masses, reports ZDCOUK.

“The aim of this document is to help you have a working webcam in just a few hours. This … involves re-compiling your kernel. This isn’t nearly as hard as it sounds. If you’re kind of uncomfortable with the idea yet, read either the Kernel Compiling NHF or the Kernel-HOWTO. In my case I was forced to use the 2.2.17 backport, due to the fact that 2.4.0-test9 broke a lot of USB serial stuff (I need *working* USB for my Handspring Visor to sync via USB in Linux.) and at the time of this writing namesys hadn’t released a patch for ReiserFS for 2.4.0-test10.” Check it out at Linuxnewbie.org. –Sensei

MSNBC: “While most Americans were relaxing and
eating leftover turkey on the Sunday after
Thanksgiving, Chuck Mefford was spending
hours trying to fix his Palm V handheld
computer.”

The embattled Internet music-swapping service
Napster announced Thursday it has hired the chief policy adviser to Sen. Orrin
Hatch, R-Utah, as its vice president for corporate and policy development. From Florida Today.

MSNBC reports that Bill Gates summoned
some of the world’s top technology minds to
Microsoft headquarters Thursday, as the
company hosted a conference on the touchy
issue of online privacy. The two-day summit,
with wide-open conversations that have at times
been heated, is designed to help e-commerce
companies iron out their differences with
consumers over privacy issues.

LinuxPR: “Fox on Linux is the latest in commercial Linux applications, providing
businesses with a sophisticated, graphical, proven software package to deal
with their core financial accounting needs.”

From Linuxworld: In the third installment of Joshua Drake’s look at the Common Unix Printing System (CUPS), the Geek discusses configuring CUPS via the KDE/QT interfaces.

Newsforge reader MetaDot writes to tell us that release version 2.5.2 of the MetaDot portal server is now available.Threaded Discussion Board – The discussion board now has the capability of sorting by date and displaying messages in a threaded view.
Special Thanks to a Loyal Fan and Contributor: Rizen (jt@anarchyink.com)

Gizmo Plugable Architecture – The Gizmo architecture is now designed so that new Gizmos can be built and dropped into the Gizmo directory for addition to the My Page tool menus.

Object Oriented Userchannel.pl – The name says it all! Once you upgrade, be sure to install the metadotd.pl daemon or else….

Debug Message Improvement – Debug message logging can now be redirected to a log file by enabling the commented out log file reference. Debug info will not appear in the HTML, but will appear in the debug log file.

Download it here.

In an effort to get ahead in the PDA market, Microsoft is seeking for Palm developers to defect. MSNBC has the story.

IDG Net reports that Hitachi has announced that “it has begun shipping a Transmeta Crusoe-based Internet appliance in Japan.”