An AP item on StarTribune.com reports that Microsoft has been ordered to pay Bristol Technology $3.7 million in legal fees. This comes on the heels of an earlier decision in which the Seattle-based software manufacturer was ordered to pay the company $1 million for engaging in unfair trade practices.

News.com is reporting that Jason Allen Diekman, a 20-year-old cracker from Mission Viejo, Calif., has pleaded guilty to federal charges of infiltrating computer systems at Stanford University and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Dell Canada today announced a special promotion for Linux users who create professional-looking graphics for print or the Web. The offer combines Dell’s Precision workstation with deeply discounted pricing for CorelDRAW Graphics Suite for Linux.

The Register reports that Eazel will release a second preview version of its Nautilus GUI later today. Designed as a network user environment for GNOME, Nautilus promises to tie file management, Web browsing, and system management into a single interface.

To sidestep a European tax on gaming machines, Sony has added YA-Basic, an open source distribution of the classic programming language, to its new gaming system. This bundle will be exclusive to Playstation 2 consoles distributed in Europe. From a report at The Register.

A Reuters story posted on News.com reports that the Republican National Committee’s Web site was cracked just hours before polls opened on Tuesday.

Stock of Santa Clara, California-based Transmeta (TMTA) rose 100 percent to $42 in first-day trading. Shares priced Monday night at $21 each, substantially above a recently raised expected price range of $16 to $18. From Wired News.

InfoWorld.com is reporting that Compaq has confirmed it will not use Transmeta’s low-power Crusoe chip for its next generation of Armada laptops.

Christopher Robato Yao of 32BitsOnline comments on the Rambus legal stragety: “Half of the memory market is the consumer; the other half consists of the devices that interface to the memory. In short, you can’t sell RDRAM if you don’t have devices that use them: processors, motherboard and graphics chipsets. So why isn’t RAMBUS suing the likes of AMD, VIA and nVidia? Perhaps it’s the limitations of financial resources.”

After further review, says ZDNET, security experts last week
said enterprises can glean some new lessons from
the Microsoft Corp. hacking saga. First and
foremost, if you get hacked, don’t do what
Microsoft did.