The original meaning of the word “hack” was
born at MIT, and originally meant an elegant,
witty or inspired way of doing almost anything. From a BBC report.

An eWEEK columnist reports: “Just a few hours after IBM released its
quarterly financial statement, I got a
call from Oracle’s frenetic PR squad.
They wanted to gloat over IBM’s
financial misses, which they say prove
once and for all that the mammoth is
indeed extinct. This is why I love my job.”

“I remember when I found out that DSL was available in my area. I remember getting that connection and sharing
it out to the rest of my home. And there was much rejoicing. Since then, the party has died down somewhat. I’ve
lost connectivity for more than 48 hours at a time. I’ve been unable to download certain types of files. Tech
support representatives have treated me like a complete moron. And then things really got bad.” From 32BitsOnline.com.

“By far, the greater value to society (albeit one that doesn’t show up in accountant’s dollar figures) of the Net is as a public library and forum for personal connection and discourse. Just as good government in Italy for nine hundred years owed a debt to singing and sports clubs, a better society for all of us can come from groups like the Linux and BSD developers that mostly meet in cyberspace.” –Kelly McNeill

Last month,the Internet Corporation for
Assigned Names and Numbers, the body that
administers the Internet, had its first democratic
election. We hope this signals a new era of openness, says ZDNET.

AsiaBizTech reports that shipments of the Linux operating system are expected to jump
144.4 percent to 41,200 units. This 2.4-fold burst in growth will propel Linux to a 7.8
percent share of the overall server OS market in 2000, compared to a 4.0 percent share
the previous year, IDC Japan said. The Register’s take on the story: Linux is still growing in Japan, but not as fast as in 1999.

“While I do enjoy computing, I don’t believe that a person must know an OS inside and out to use it. A computer to me is just a tool. I don’t use it to stroke my ego. I turn it on and off. I’m not interested in the source code. I’m not interested in CLI. I am interested in whether OSX behaves like a Mac, not a UNIX box, and certainly not NeXTOS … a rejected OS.” –Kelly McNeill

From eWEEK: JYACC Inc., a New York-based enterprise software and
solutions company, will release this week the 1 million
lines of code for its POSSL (Panther Open Source
Software for Linux) technology.

Slashdot reviews Mandrake 7.2 from an installation standpoint.

News that Microsoft has been hacked will give the Microsoft
Unappreciation Society even more ammunition in its war against
the software giant. Not that much more ammunition is needed —
the amount already accumulated would make Colonel Gaddafi
green with envy. ZDCOUK reports.