John Wolley at Enterprise Linux Today writes: “Linux momentum has been building for a long time now. Linux adoption has been increasing exponentially ever since Linus
launched it in 1991 — it just wasn’t very visible outside the ‘Linux community’ until big commercial vendors started backing it in
1998.”

“Sometimes you can’t justify the time and expense of developing a dedicated hardware platform for your embedded
application. Perhaps the quantities are too small or the market is unproven. However, even under these
circumstances you still don’t want to ship a big klunky box with a hard drive. Hard drives wear out over time, they
draw lots of power and get very hot.” From Linuxdevices.com.

“Red Hat has many different constituencies, ranging from enterprise customers
to ISVs to kernel developers to systems vendors. It would have been great if
GCC 3.0 had been a released compiler and had all the quality, performance,
functionality, and features that our various constituents required. Alas, GCC
3.0 is very much a work in progress, and while we’ve contributed significantly
to that work (many Red Hat engineers are full-time GCC developers), GCC 3.0 is
still quite a ways off.” From FreeOS.com.

From a report at Linux.com: “One of our programmers was talking about Bluetooth and USB development. After some
discussion about the Microsoft development tools, he asked what we should be doing
about Linux development. That’s when he and my supervisor turned, in unison, to look at
me.”

MSNBC shares that: “During an upgrade to Windows Me from a
Windows 95 or 98 installation that includes the
3Com Corporation NIC Diagnostics program, an
error may be dished out indicating the 3Com
NIC Diagnostics program isn’t compatible, and
that it will be removed.”

ZDNET reports that a music and technology forum that ran a $10,000
contest challenging people to crack copyright
protection technologies said Tuesday it was
paying prize money to two contestants.

ZDNet reports on the latest from the SDMI challenge. Two people who took part in the competition will each be receiving $5000 for successfully completing one of the challenges.

Maximum Linux reports that NEC and Hitachi are jointly building a $1.45 billion memory factory in an effort to take a larger share of the market for desktop memory.

Linux Today AU says that Linux is on the verge of mass acceptance, and explains why.

Linux kernel version 2.2.18pre24 is out, according to an email Alan Cox sent to Linux Weekly News, among other sites.