Whimsical story at cbs.com says pretzel lovers are lively and energetic, tortilla chip lovers are perfectionists, and cheese curl munchers have high integrity. (There will be a brief break in NewsVac posting while the editor on duty refills his bowl of tortilla chips.)

Fortune.com column asks, “Should Palm regret licensing its software to its strongest competitor in the surging market for handheld devices?”

“On Tuesday, Apple CEO Steve Jobs told a rapt audience at the Seybold Seminars publishing conference that
the first public beta of Mac OS X will be released on September 13 at Apple Expo in Paris.”Story at Wired.

From [Linux] Kernel Mailing List, spotted at LinuxToday, Linus annouced, Ok, there’s a test8-pre1 out there in testing.

Serguei Miridonov annouced V 0.5 of the Linux driver for Miro/Pinnacle Systems Inc. DC10plus and some DC10 cards on Aug 28, 2000.

The RTC Group and LinuxDevices.com have released the technical program of the second Embedded Linux Expo & Conference, to be held October 27th, in Westborough, MA. The main keynote address will be given by Alex Morrow, IBM “Fellow,” and project leader of IBM’s Linux Wrist Watch Project. The press release is at Linuxdevices.com.

Online auction house QXL has been fined £34,000 by the U.K.’s Business Software Alliance for using 200 pirated software packages from Microsoft, Adobe and Symantec. QXL said in a statement that it had been using the software “unwittingly” and had now rectified the problem. But, according to Mike Newton, campaign relations manager for BSA UK, this is a widespread problem now that companies allow employees to download software freely from the Internet. IT Wire reports.

Magex, a global digital commerce service, has announced the beta testing of its digital rights management product for publishing content online. Magex’s digital commerce service provides a trusted payment infrastructure, allowing consumers to make fast and safe payments for the delivery of digital content such as music, business information, video and books via the Internet. The Magex product offers persistent copyright protection – from a book chapter, to corresponding graphics – via InterTrust’s digital rights management software platform. The full press release is at Internet Wire.

Macromedia demonstrated working prototype versions of its Web products and technologies
running on Mac OS X during Steve Jobs’ opening keynote Tuesday at
Seybold San Francisco 2000. The demonstration featured development builds of
Macromedia Dreamweaver, Fireworks, and the Macromedia Flash Player, all
running on an early build of Apple’s next-generation operating system.
The press release is at PR Newswire.

ZDNet UK reviews the Rio MP3 player: “A stunner of an MP3 player, but it’s low on memory and prone to the odd incompatibility tantrum.”