MSNBC warns that the price of flat panel monitors is dropping, and in a few years’ time may actually be available at a reasonable price. The advice is to hold off until then to buy the light-weight, high-resolution monitors.

Linux Journal is carrying an essay on the effect of the Internet on China, and leads to conclusions that may surprise some readers.

Anandtech looks at the video card industry and its plans for 2001.

The author of the enormously popular freeware network tool PING, Mike Muuss, died in a Maryland car crash last night. The accident happened at 9.30pm (New York time) on route 95 as a result of a previous accident. Mike hit a car stuck in the middle of the road and was pushed into the path of an oncoming tractor.” Full report at The Register.

The Duke of URL reviews BestLinux 2000: “The question, is BestLinux just another clone of RedHat or does it add something that has been missing and fills a need in the community, in this case better language support? Do we really need another distribution to fill this need?”

Computerworld’s Patrick Thibodeau writes: “The problem with last week’s decision by the organization that manages the Internet domain name system to add seven new top-level domains (TLD) is that no one really knows whether it’s a gift or a curse.”

“ghostscript makes use of mktemp instead of mkstemp to create temp files; and also uses improper LD_RUN_PATH values, causing it to search for libraries in the current directory.” Full details at LWN.net.

From LinuxWorld.com: “In a further exploration of the Common UNIX Printing System (CUPS), the Geek tackles configuration — namely adding and managing printers, even unsupported ones, with CUPS’s Web-based interface.” Part 1 of this article is also available.

ZDNet News reports: “Vendors planning to implement the new Document Object Model standard issued by the World Wide Web Consortium earlier this month say the new standard includes additional capabilities for what has become a key driver of the eXtensible Markup Language (XML).”

“If someone puts a backdoor into Linux, someone will eventually find it. Once it is found, I can eliminate it, rebuild the kernel, and get back up and running safely within minutes. With Windows, verifying the existence of the backdoor is nearly impossible. And even if you could, eliminating it yourself would be equally difficult because you don’t have the source code to rebuild the kernel.” More at LinuxWorld.com.