IDG.net reports that Inprise/Borland will join the GNOME Foundation Advisory Board, which fosters development of the GNOME desktop environment. Also, Slashdot readers discuss the announcement, and possibility of Inprise releasing Kylix.

From ZD Net: Backers of the KDE Linux desktop environment are expected to announce a corporate-backed group to push KDE as an alternative of GNOME, during Comdex Wednesday.

Steven Adler has just finished his writeup up on my trip to Dallas where he attended Super Computing 2000. You’ll find content on Teraflop computing for the year 2009, IBM’s Blue Gene Teraflop machine, some insights into the seti@home project as well as the Open Source panel discussion where issues relating to Open Source, high-performance computing and government funding agencies were discussed. You can find the writeup at ssadler.phy.bnl.gov. You can also visit Adler’s photo gallery of the cool stuff he found on the show floor – Submitted by Stephen Adler

A group of scientists at the Australian National University have won the 2000 Gordon Bell Prize for their efforts at creating a low-cost supercomputer. The winning creation is Bunyip, a 196-processor, 214-gigaflop parallel computer running Linux as a Beowulf cluster. Australian IT reports.

A Nando Media story on startribune.com reports on the war of words brewing between the Java and Microsoft C# camps: “Scott Hebner, director of marketing for IBM’s WebSphere project, said Microsoft’s .NET initiative is a recognition that the emphasis has moved away from Windows desktops and onto the Internet. Hebner said Java is the standard for Web applications. “Why is Microsoft trying to create C#? Why not adopt Java?” Hebner asks. “If Sun had turned Java into a true open standard, it would be an interesting discussion with Microsoft.”

Issue 21 of Georg Greve’s GNU projects newsletter is hot off the presses. Among the new projects discussed are a graphical front-end for the Common UNIX Printing System, two new fax programs, and KBasic.

Wired News reports: “A pair of British inventors has developed an electricity-conducting fabric that could lead to washable, wearable phones, keyboards and other devices. The pair have already made a cloth keyboard for handheld computers and a spongy cell phone that will go through the wash.”

Record companies should stop worrying about security and start giving people what they really want: Music, anywhere, anytime. Commentary by Salon’s Janelle Brown.

From an advisory at LWN.net: “A local root exploit has been found using kernels compiled with kmod and modutils > 2.1.121. Kernels without kmod and systems using modutils 2.1.121 are not affected.” The message includes a patch to fix this problem.

From a press release at PR Newswire: MandrakeSoft S.A., publisher of
the Linux-Mandrake operating system today announced the appointment of
Jay Beale as Security Group Director. Prior to this appointment, Jay has helped guide the Bastille Linux Project as Lead Developer, where he was responsible for the design and development of the high profile Open Source project. He has led the effort to secure or “tighten” Linux systems and currently consults on general Linux security, from firewalling and VPN design to host-level lockdown.