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.”

Anonymous Reader writes: “According to this story at VNUNet, some ninja-type hackers are using the SSH1 hole to get into Linux boxes and possibly create a ddos network.”

– by Tina Gasperson –
Universal Music Group (UMG), whose recording artists include Trisha Yearwood, Counting Crows, Nine Inch Nails, Bon Jovi and the Bee Gees, is working on a possible deal with MidbarTech to include the Cactus Data Shield anti-copy technology on all new CDs. Not to worry, says MidbarTech’s marketing veep: The CDs will still play on your PC, as long as it’s a Windows PC, that is.
According to this PCWorld.com article, UMG, the largest music company in the world, plans to begin using the scrambling on a small scale by the end of the year. The report says that the protected CDs won’t play on PCs at all, but Noam Zur, v.p. of marketing for MidbarTech, told NewsForge that the CDs will contain an embedded, proprietary player that allows for replay (but not copying) on Windows computers.

Zur says that Midbar does have plans to create players for Linux and Macintosh, but that a projected timeline is not available. Besides, “we are developing a Web-based player,” he says, that should eliminate any problems for alternative-OS users who want to play their CDs on home or work computers. He did not say when the Web interface would be available.

BusinessWeek: ” Companies that compete head-on with Microsoft often suffer a very strange fate. Once-dominant players such as Word Perfect, Borland, and Lotus Development assisted in their own downfall by somehow losing their ability to make sound strategic decisions while caught in Redmond’s basilisk stare.

The latest player to show serious signs of the Microsoft Muddle is Palm Computer (PALM ), whose future looks increasingly uncertain, even as products it makes or licenses continue to hold more than 70% of the worldwide market for handheld computers.”

The Register: “The background to this will naturally have been the marketing droids being told to go and get a record-breaking fact ot two for Bill to announce. When it comes to Windows sales this obviously gets progressively more difficult to do, but they’ve cracked it quite well this time, and (relatively) honestly. Fib number one is that in “just two weeks.”

Kelly McNeill writes: “The U.S. government is giving itself more power to cyber-snoop on citizens and suspected terrorists, but in the wake of heightened fears of possible attacks on the country’s critical information technology systems, its own computer security is getting worse instead of better, according to a government report. A House panel responsible for reviewing government security systems gave an overall grade of “F” to the 24 agencies it scrutinized.”

ZDNET: ” Compaq Computer and Hewlett-Packard will introduce early next year new “ultra slim” Pentium 4-based desktops with minimalist, space-saving designs. The companies previewed the new machines Monday at the Comdex Fall 2001 trade show.”

Kelly mcNeill writes: “IBM said Friday that the second supercomputer in its “Blue Gene” project will be 15 times faster than ASCI White, the current speed king, and that the focus of the ambitious project is expanding from government and military applications into possible commercial uses.”

Slashdot is talking about the new ad system for Limewire – do the banners carry the nefarious spyware?

– by Robin “Roblimo” Miller –
I have had experiences with Mozilla and earlier versions of Netscape that, to put it kindly,
were less than satisfactory. As someone who works online all day, a browser is
my single most important piece of software, and browsers have been my biggest
disappointment in Linux. Now I’m using Netscape 6.2 and, for the first time in
years, I am happy with the browser on my screen.First, let me explain that I am a big-time software luddite. I got dragged into
graphical computing (from DOS to Windows) only when it became impossible to view many
useful Web pages in Lynx and other text-only browsers. I was happy with DOS and
it was happy with me. But as my writing appeared online more and more, and the
WWW became a more and more useful research tool, I had to modernize. I replaced
my old 286 with a (used) 386 and started running Windows 3.1 and Netscape 2. I
got cute pictures online, yes I did, and I loved them. The idea of just pointing
and clicking to move around not only the Internet but also my local hard drive
was also very nice. I liked this a lot more than typing text commands every time
I wanted to open a Web page or a piece of software.

But in return for a cuted-up Web and easier computer use in general, I had to
accept the fact that now and then my computer would suddenly stop working for no
apparent reason. I found this irritating, and since this seemed to happen more
often than not when I was writing on a tight deadline, it was often costly. The
money I spent on Windows was nothing compared to the money and time I lost from
Windows crashes. This was what started me on the quest for a non-crashing
operating system that led me to Linux.

But Netscape, at that point the only “full-featured” graphical browser for Linux, still
crashed frequently — and this forced me to type text commands to shut it down
and restart it. Yech. Two steps forward, one step back. Or I could take two steps back and use Lynx; I still had a shell account and used Pine for all my email back then, so it wouldn’t have been a big deal for me if all those nasty Web designers hadn’t insisted on making more and more sites that only worked really well in a graphical browser.

At one point I thought about giving up on Linux and using Windows plus Explorer. But Explorer, at that point, was even worse than Netscape on the reliability front, and then I would have had Windows crashes to contend with along with browser failures. Double yech. So I clenched my teeth, stuck with Linux, and watched everything about Linux get smoother and easier for ordinary desktop users like me.

Except the browser.

Yes, Opera is wonderful and Konqueror is coming along nicely, and I am happy to see both of them working to provide alternatives to AOL/Netscape and Microsoft. But I rather preferred Netscape’s display style, and had gradually gotten accustomed to having my Web browsing and email all tied up in one neat package, especially after my original ISP got sold and my shell account disappeared.

Except for the crashes, I was basically satisfied with Netscape. What I really wanted in a browser was Netscape — only better. I tried a couple of Mozilla builds. Crashville. “Don’t worry, the next one will be better,” I heard over and over, but I still got more crashes and problems than I got with (by then) Netscape 4.7X. Eventually I gave up and mentally told Mozilla, “I’m 49 and in poor health, and I’d like something that might work in my lifetime, so I’ll see you later.”

Netscape 6.0 came out. I tried it. After I went and got some breakfast it had finally loaded. I called up a Web page, got a coffee refill, and finally saw that page on my screen. Yes, I’m exaggerating here, but not by a whole lot. Netscape 6.0 was amazingly, painfully slow, while Explorer had become reasonably quick and reliable. Was I going to be forced to run Windows through VMWare so I could use Explorer? Was that the only way I could both run Linux and have a decent Web-browsing experience? Triple yech.

My attitude toward Netscape 6.1 was “watch and wait.” My wife downloaded and tried the Mac version. She was not impressed. Other people I knew tried the Windows and Linux versions and told me it was better than 6.0, but not quite “there” yet.

Then came Netscape 6.2. And last week, in a frenzy of stupidity, I managed to wipe out my /home partition during an ill-advised attempt at a system upgrade. (Don’t ask me what I did; it’s too humiliating to talk about in public.) It seemed like as good a time as any to try Netscape’s latest. I certainly wasn’t going to lose any data, was I? And I was too depressed by my stupidity to do any real writing, and needed to do something to work myself out of my funk.

Surprise! Netscape 6.2 installed nicely, loaded rapidly, accepted my favorite plugins smoothly (including Crossover with Quicktime and Shockwave), and popped Web pages up on my screen more rapidly than any browser since Lynx. I have seen fewer page rendering glitches than I got in 4.78. And best of all (knock on plastic), it hasn’t crashed on me yet. Not once. Not even after looking at a whole bunch of pages in a row full of badly-written Javascript, an action that killed Netscape 4.78 pretty regularly.

It took me a little time to get used to the new mailbox features, but the time was worth it. Netscape 6.2 gives me more flexibility than any other email program I’ve used in the past, in any operating system.

I think we have a winner here. I haven’t tried the Windows or Mac versions, but if Netscape 6.2 runs as smoothly in those operating systems as it does in Linux, and if AOL/Netscape promotes 6.2 correctly, perhaps even makes it the default browser for AOL (as they should; it’s plenty good enough), we may yet witness the end of Microsoft’s Web browser domination.