Mac World reports: “Apple’s iPod, a 6.5-ounce MP3 player the size of a deck of cards, is one of the most exciting products to come from Apple in years. Powered by firewire, the iPod can hold as much as 5GB of data, providing a compelling balance of size and capacity. However, this combination of features comes at a relatively high price: $399.”

PC World reports: “Microsoft said Monday that users can once again access its MSN.com portal with Web browsers that compete with its own Internet Explorer product, although at least one rival browser appeared to be locked out Monday afternoon.”

Kelly McNeill writes “The California Institute of Technology (Caltech) announced Sunday that alumnus and Intel founder Gordon Moore has pledged two gifts to the institution totaling US$600 million, setting a record for largest amount ever bestowed upon a U.S. university. One gift will come directly from Moore and his wife of 51 years, Betty, and will be distributed over a period of five years. The other $300 million gift will be donated through the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and will be distributed over a ten-year period.”

The Kompany explains what Linux is, where it got its name, what its place in the world is, and why we should use Open Source software.

Two readers told us about this, Mayhem and Dave:

– Andrew Morton: remove stale UnlockPage
– me: swap cache page locking update
pre4:
– Mikael Pettersson: fix P4 boot with APIC enabled
– me: fix device queuing thinko, clean up VM locking

pre3:
РRen̩ Scharfe: random bugfix
– me: block device queuing low-water-marks, VM mapped tweaking.

pre2:
– Alan Cox: more merging
– Alexander Viro: block device module race fixes
– Richard Henderson: mmap for 32-bit alpha personality
– Jeff Garzik: 8139 and natsemi update

pre1:
– Michael Warfield: computone serial driver update
– Alexander Viro: cdrom module race fixes
– David Miller: Acenic driver fix
– Andrew Grover: ACPI update
– Kai Germaschewski: ISDN update
– Tim Waugh: parport update
– David Woodhouse: JFFS garbage collect sleep

http://www.kernel.org/mirrors/

Kelly McNeill writes, “Microsoft’s browser may have started out as an application, but by the end, it was part of the operating system. You could download Internet Explorer over the Internet, but you have to recognize that this wasn’t an application you were downloading; it was an operating system upgrade. Windows Movie Maker may be really nice, but there’s no way it’s part of the operating system. It may be included on the operating system CD, it may take advantage of some multimedia support in the operating system, and it may be featured in the ad campaign for the operating system,but it’s an application.” More at osOpinion.com.

The Register compares Windows XP and Red Hat 7.2, and apparently doesn’t like either one of them. On Red Hat: “Repeated three more times. No joy. This OS is nowhere near ready to compete with
XP. And that really is a pity, since it outclasses it by a mile.

Fit-and-finish. If these OS’s were cars, XP would be the Warner Brothers Special
Edition minivan, and 7.2 would be a Yugo well on its way to becoming a KIA.”

From MacObserver.com: “If you thought the Easter Egg Era at Apple was over, you were wrong. MacityNet … is reporting that
Breakout, the classic game written by Steve Wozniak (and technically Steve Jobs) for Atari before the
founding of Apple lies hidden in Apple’s new MP3 player.”

ZDNet reports that Charlie Northrup, chief executive of software developer Global Technologies, holds one of
the earliest patents that “describe how diverse computer systems can talk to servers connected to
the Web and run software on multiple platforms.” Sounds like .Net to me.

VNUnet.com has the commentary: “Hacking does not cause terror. It makes people angry; it costs
money; it can be offensive; it induces trepidation. But no one is
likely to say a computer hack induces terror. Take a current TV
advert, in which the website of a cheese manufacturer is hacked by
a French cheese maker. It’s funny! It’s not terrifying, and that’s what
most hacking is like.”