According to the Daily Radar, until now there were uncertainties as to whether the
build-your-own-civilization game Cultures, developed by
German-based Funatics, would hit American shores. A
THQ spokesperson has assured FGN Online that “it will
be published over there [America] but it is not decided
yet whether THQ will be publishing it.”

TheBurglar.com lets burglars anonymously
contact their victims by e-mail and negotiate
a price for the return of their stolen property. From ZDNET.

While not so vast as the LinuxWorld Expo, the Fourth Annual Linux Showcase’s floor is all a-buzz with upcoming
events and goings on. MaximumLinux reports.

From MaximumLinux: While vendors show off their wares and boast great things surrounding Linux, someone else is travelling the floor
showing off a different OS. Plan 9 is another “alternative OS” which, if Vita Nuova has its way, will be the OS of
the future.

NFS, or Network File System, is a technology that was introduced into the Unix world by Sun Microsystems. It allows a
computer to mount a remote filesystem as if it were a local filesystem. The mounting of a remote filesystem can be useful
in many ways. From LinuxWorld.

bsdtoday.com report says, “A new core team has been elected for FreeBSD. Its main responsibility is recruiting developers.”

“As part of its $135 million investment in ailing software maker Corel, announced last week, Microsoft has secured an avenue for
translating key parts of its recently announced .Net’ software architecture for the Linux operating system,” says CNet.

No doubt about it, says Chairman Bill! Even if desktop PCs have a slowly-disintergrating position in the marketplace, the big M is gonna do fine forevermore. Read it at InfoWorld.

Direct from the RIAA: “WASHINGTON, D.C., October 12, 2000 – The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) announced today
that it has launched a new project to develop a standardized system for identifying digital files of sound recordings.
This identification system, to be used in sound recordings world-wide, will build on and integrate with identification
systems already in use. A primary benefit of the project will be to facilitate and accelerate the growth of digital delivery
of music on the Internet.”

ZDNet focuses on failures of free ISPs in Latin American countries; of many that started within the last few years, only a few are left, and those few are also having problems staying in business.