The Register: “If ever there was a moment when Silicon Valley’s new money sought to bury the old, it came yesterday, with a classic assassination piece about Walter Hewlett, HP board member and the son of co-founder. Citing a “source familiar with the board’s actions”, Hewlett Jr. is portrayed as a rich dilettante who’d rather attend the annual Bohemian Grove plutocrats gathering than attend a crucial HP board meeting.”

“Apple has updated its AirPort wireless networking system, with new, version 2.0 software and a modified base-station to improve network security and accessibility.

The updated software adds 128-bit encryption to protect data transmitted across the network. AirPort, which is based on the standard IEEE 802.11b specification, used Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) to encrypt transmissions. Previously, AirPort supported only 40-bit encryption.” The Register.

ZDNet “The NV17M promises improved video playback and DVD processing for notebooks but consumes less power thanks to PowerMizer, a technology that allows it to shut off areas that are not in use. NV17M is currently in production and will ship in notebooks in early 2002…”

“The rollout of the first new global Internet domains in 15 years can hardly be called smooth.

Lawsuits, delays, fraud, muted public interest and charges of unfairness have dogged the introduction of the two new domains – .biz for businesses, and .info for information.” Computer News Daily.

ZDNet: ” This is the third and final installment of my OS X 10.1 saga. For six weeks now, I have attempted to use 10.1 exclusively during my workday. When I first embarked on this adventure, I knew it would take several weeks to thoroughly test-run the news OS. In part two of my empirical extravaganza, I revealed software that I’ve found indispensable under 10.1, and admitted that I cheat daily by rebooting into 9.2.1 to perform backups. Now, I will present my final conclusions.”

Reuters: “International Business Machines Corp. IBM.N said on Tuesday that it has begun selling groups of server computers with system management software and the Linux operating system in a move that the computer giant says will expand the use of Linux.”

Posted at PR Newswire: “Compaq Computer
Corporation (NYSE: CPQ) and OSDN, a subsidiary of
VA Linux Systems, Inc. (Nasdaq: LNUX), today announced the launch of the
first-ever Clustering Foundry on SourceForge.net, the world’s largest Open
Source development Website. The SourceForge.net Clustering Foundry makes
Compaq’s 20 years of research and expertise in the area of compute and
high-availability clustering available to the Open Source community.”

“I know this sounds like something of an absurd project, but then again, there once was a day when building a desktop PC was an absurd project.” Slashdot helps a reader assemble his own laptop from scratch.

– By Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols –

Linux companies haven’t had an easy time of it lately, but Linuxcare
has had it worse than many. In April and May 2000, the CEO
and CTO left under a cloud, the company was racked by
internal power struggles, employees were laid off at a rapid pace
and a much ballyhooed IPO had been put off indefinitely. And
all of this was before the stock market fell apart.

Since then, the company has shrunk to about 50 employees from a high
of approximately 280 and endured a February 2001 merger with
TurboLinux that was called off in May in what could be called a
corporate annulment rather than divorce. So why is Avery Lyford, former
consultant in McKinsey & Company’s Business Building Practice, CEO
of Athena Communications Systems, and the man who launched IBM’s
PC Server product line, pleased as punch to be Linuxcare’s first
permanent CEO since Fernand Sarrat left in April 2000?

Because, he still believes in Linux. Lyford says, “Linux really is the best
way to solve enterprise projects. This is like the early days of
PCs — Linux is the better way to get things done. We were in a place
where we needed to have more faith than facts. Now, the facts support the
faith. IBM’s blessing of Linux has made it accepted in the church of
enterprise computing.

“I’m a geek and proud of it.”

Before Lyford arrived, though, Linuxcare had changed its mission.
It’s no longer the support company it was in 1999 and early
2000. The change began in June 2000 as David Sifry, co-
founder of Linuxcare and then CTO, said that Linuxcare was
moving into helping original equipment manufacturers (OEM),
system integrators, and independent software vendors (ISV) to
create custom mixes of Open Source software and hardware.
At the time, Sifry predicted that this would prove an important future
revenue stream.

He was right. By the end of the TurboLinux marriage, Art Tyde, another
co-founder and then temporary Linuxcare CEO, announced that the
company was abandoning its technical support business plan.

Today, according to Lyford, “Linuxcare is not a technical support call
center. We’re a service company that’s also into custom programming. If
someone wanted to port Linux from the PowerPC to the PA-RISC
architecture, we’d be there to help.

“If it’s a trivial problem, then it’s not a Linuxcare
problem.” Linuxcare today is about “building products to manage and
use Linux on the enterprise business application level. We’re not in the
embedded or small-to-medium business space.”

That doesn’t mean that Linuxcare won’t provide any support. Its
Deltabase program, a knowledge base of Linux and Open Source
operational equipment specifications and driver support, is still available
for corporate customers.

The company will also do some direct support. Lyford says, “We’ll
still be there for people at the end of their technical support rope.” In
return, Linuxcare learns “what the real problems are that Linux has with
real business.”

Despite its messy past, Lyford says, “Linuxcare still has good
relationships with IBM, Dell, Compaq, Sun, and we’re going to keep
them.” But the San Francisco-based company is not looking to be
bought out or for other mergers. Lyford says, “There will be no more
TurboLinux partnerships.”

However, in the right situation, Linuxcare might buy another company.
Sources close to the company reveal that in spite of its recent difficult
history, Linuxcare remains relatively cash wealthy. Before Linuxcare
would make such a move, though, there would have “a customer need
that would be best served by buying another company,” Lyford says.
“If someone needed us to work in the long term on, say IBM mainframe
S/390 capacity problems,” Linuxcare might buy a small company with expertise
in this area.

Linuxcare might also hire individuals to help with specialized
long-term projects, but the company is not looking for
employees. Lyford says, “We’re not going to do binge-and-purge hiring. We want to build a team and that takes a while to
build it. We’ll only do very selective hiring for very targeted skills
around our customers’ needs.” If a customer has a short-term
need, Linuxcare will hire on former staffers and other Linux
experts as contractors.

As for the future for this enterprise-solution-building
Linux company, Lyford says, “we’ll stay private. Many
companies use the IPO as the end of the race. We’ll do an IPO
when it makes sense. Right now an IPO would be a bad
approach.”

An IPO is the last thing on Lyford’s mind. Instead, he
says that while “financially Linuxcare is in good shape with good solid
backers, we’re going to run lean and mean and only spend money on
where it matters to the customer.” In a breath of fresh air from the CEO of
a technology company even in these days of recession, Lyford says,
“Like, I fly coach. People who run startups who fly first class blow my
mind.”

And where is Linuxcare going in 2002? Lyford says, “We’re going to help
drive the enterprise to Linux. We want to prove Goldman Sachs [which
found that Linux servers rank near the bottom of spending priorities in a
recent survey of Fortune 1000 companies] is flat wrong not by debating
them but by proving Linux in the marketplace.”

Kelly McNeill writes: “How committed is Apple to doubling its market share and making the Mac hub the best hub? One of the lesser-known facts about a corporate vision is that it is usually the beginning of a new corporate strategy. When Steve Jobs announced the digital hub vision, he was actually declaring publicly a very condensed synopsis of a new Apple strategy.”