From The Register: “Why should the UI matter? And why does it matter so particularly to Apple
loyalists?

Well, satellite guru and erstwhile Kaleidoscope scheme author Lloyd Wood
summed it up pretty sweetly for us. (You might have recall Wood from his
celebrated demolition of Jon Katz).

The Mac had become nothing but a UI, he said, justifying his decision to abandon
the platform. Behind the perfect UI, what technology is there hangs together
thanks to string and chewing gum. And he’s right. The technology behind MacOS
is truly awful and should have been put out to pasture by the early nineties. What
other modern OS goes into a coma when you linger over a menu for a moment too
long?”

It’s at LinuxGazette.com, of course. Among the items: Micro web server: how to save CPU time and hard disk space and Play with the Lovely Netcat.

IT-director.com picks the best products of 2001. Among them: Red Hat Linux and StarOffice.

– By Grant Gross –

The Board of Directors at the Open Source Development Lab, a computing resource center for data-center and telecommunications improvements to Linux, will soon select two members of the Linux community to serve on the board, and they’re looking for suggestions from community members.

Filling those two spots during 2001 were Tim O’Reilly of computer book publisher O’Reilly and Associates and Larry Augustin of software and Web site company VA Software. (VA is NewsForge’s corporate parent). Those two can serve more terms on the board, but OSDL also wants to hear who the Linux community would like to see serve on the board.

If you’ve got some ideas, let OSDL know right away. The board is meeting Jan. 17 to appoint the community-at-large members. Submit suggestions to feedback@osdl.org, and you can also post suggestions at the end of this story. According to an OSDL press release, your input will be presented to the board and be a “primary consideration” in the election of the 2002 community-at-large directors.

Explains Tim Witham, lab director: “The community board members are an important part of the OSDL’s governing structure, as they are intended to help the

OSDL ensure that the development community’s needs are a primary consideration in the day-to-day operation of the lab.”

State law on non-profit organizations requires the Oregon-based OSDL’s board of directors to choose the community-at-large directors, instead of a more democratic means, according to officials there. But the suggestion process from the community gives the corporate-dominated board a different view. The eight-member board has six directors who come from corporations that fund the OSDL.

While the open suggestion process last year gave OSDL staff “all kinds of flames and all kinds of people we’d never heard of,” joked a lab spokesman, O’Reilly and Augustin were also popular nominations from the community.

The OSDL has several active projects at the moment. In October, the facility announced testing for the GNU Bayonne telecommunications application server project. That same month, OSDL added the Scalable Test Platform to its services.

feder writes: “A recent feature article at gamasutra.com argues that game developers should focus on the final product rather than maintaining code and fixing bugs and let the player community assist where they can by means of Open Source. Read more here (free registration required).”

NewsFactor Network writes: “IT professionals are valuable to their companies because they need to be familiar with the business end of things. Conversely, computer science graduates are of less value because their interest lies mostly in the technology itself. What can we do to make hiring managers more aware of this?”

LinuxSecurity Contributor writes: “The following text describes a security hole in the encrypted loop device for linux. Because of it,

an attacker is able to modify the content of the encrypted device without being detected. This text

proposes to fix the hole by authenticating the device. More at LinuxSecurity.

PRNewswire: “Nominations are now open for the

Game Developers Choice Awards, game development’s highest honors. The awards

are nominated and voted on exclusively by game developers, allowing developers

to recognize and be rewarded by their peers.”

Anonymous Reader writes: “Oracle 9i EE Installation: Here is a summary of how I installed Oracle 9i (9.0.1) Database on Red

Hat 7.1 (kernel 2.4.2-2) and on Red Hat 7.2 (kernel 2.4.7-10).”

Wired: “File-sharing programs LimeWire, BearShare, Grokster and Kazaa recently included software that tracks users online. The companies plead ignorance, blaming bundled advertising software.”