Kelly McNeill writes “Fans of the Be operating system let out a sigh of relief and a sigh of frustration after the up-and-down roller coaster that was Be, Inc. came to an official end. The end came with last Tuesday’s announcement by Be that its stockholders approved the sale of substantially all its intellectual property and other assets to a subsidiary of Palm. Although the sale of Be to Palm was met with enthusiasm by its investors, it could not have come at a more awkward time for the company, as the decision was confirmed only a couple days after Palm’s chief executive — Carl Yankowski — announced his resignation.”

CNet reports that “in her harshest attack yet, Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina blamed “lazy reporting” and Wall Street analysts who are too “focused on the short term” for many of the woes facing the computing giant.”

PC World reports that Transmeta is confident in spite of new competition from Intel and delays in its latest processor, according to CTO David Ditzel.

Bruce Schneier responds to Microsoft’s anti-disclosure movement in this week’s issue of Crypto-Gram (on Counterpane): “Culp [manager of the security response center at Microsoft] compares the practice of publishing vulnerabilities to shouting “Fire” in a crowded movie theater. What he forgets is that there actually is a fire; the vulnerabilities exist regardless.”

Linux PR has a press release announcing the creation of a German-speaking Linux portal.

Dave writes that Linux kernel 2.4.15-pre5 has been released. Read more for the changelog.
– Greg KH: enable hotplug driver support

– Andrea Arcangeli: remove bogus sanity check

– David Mosberger: /proc/cpuinfo and scsi scatter-gather for ia64

– David Hinds: 16-bit pcmcia network driver updates/cleanups

– Hugh Dickins: remove some stale code from VM

– David Miller: /proc/cpuinfo for sparc, sparc fork bug fix, network fixes, warning fixes

– Peter Braam: intermezzo update

– Greg KH: USB updates

– Ivan Kokshaysky: /proc/cpuinfo for alpha

– David Woodhouse: jffs2 – remove dead code, remove gcc3 warning

– Hugh Dickins: fix kiobuf page allocation/deallocation
Download:
http://www.kernel.org/mirrors”

Kelly McNeill writes “Fossil’s new wrist PDA may not allow you to frag your network-buddies in an all-night gaming session of Quake, but it will store important information like phone numbers, appointments, addresses and the like. It uses the same beaming technology found in most palmtop devices. The thing that makes this miniature PDA especially cool is that it looks not unlike a standard wristwatch. It seemed like a natural transition to me. Despite its small size, the average PDA isn’t as portable as a wristwatch, nor is it as easily accessible.”

Corel, according to CNet, announced new software titles for Mac OS X and pledged to bring all future Corel software to the operating system.

CNet reports: “A new crop of Linux handheld computers could soon satisfy the appetites of open-source software fans, with the long-awaited Yopy from GMate now on display at Comdex. Hewlett-Packard is also reported to be preparing a new Linux handheld.”

ZDNet reports: “When Hewlett-Packard canceled its venerable 3000 server line Wednesday, it began aggressive programs to keep customers from fleeing the company altogether. But keeping customer loyalty in an environment where some customers feel betrayed will be a challenge for the computing giant.”