Wired: “Judging from the lack of people on the trade show floor, streaming media has lost its luster in Europe.”

MSNBC: “The world’s largest PC maker said its SmartStep PC, which comes as
a one-size-fits-all system complete with monitor, aims to woo U.S. customers
that typically shop for PCs in chain stores. Starting at $599, the PC is the
lowest-price home PC the Austin, Texas, company has ever sold.

The PCs will be built by Taiwanese PC maker Mitac International Corp.,
which has supplied low-cost desktop PCs or hand-held computers to Dell
rivals Compaq Computer Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co. Mitac will ship
directly to customers to avoid inventory costs.”

CNET: “A patent held by a little-known programmer from New Jersey may complicate–at least temporarily–the grand
visions of Web services touted by titans such as IBM, Microsoft and Sun Microsystems.

Charlie Northrup, the 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. Sound familiar? That’s just the kind of service Microsoft is pushing with its .Net strategy, a wide-ranging plan
for moving business computing applications such as calendars, word processors and e-mail onto the Web.”

CNET: “Sun Microsystems will debut a new eight-processor server Monday as part of its successful effort so far to
keep Microsoft and Intel from extending their dominance in the desktop market into higher-end systems.

The Palo Alto, Calif., server seller will begin selling its UltraSparc III-based V880, which has been code-named
“Daktari,” an important upgrade to the popular E450 that will help spur adoption of the new chip and its
accompanying operating system, Solaris 8.”

Web architect Ganesh Prasad has written an entertaining but comprehensive LinuxToday commentary piece about the future of Web services. Prasad (surprise!) has no love for Microsoft’s .NET initiative. But he has no great affection for Java, either; the article’s next-to-last sentence says, “So take a deep breath, and hiss through clenched teeth, ‘All right, I’ll work with this %$&*(&*^ Java for now, but after we beat Microsoft…'”

– By Grant Gross –

The SourceForge.net email archives at Geocrawler.com are not going away, as some users fear. Instead, they’re just moving — to SourceForge itself.

A message on Geocrawler last week, saying the site was no longer being maintained (since taken down), caused some nervousness among SourceForge users. In particular, Advogato.org posted a story worrying about alternatives to SourceForge should it fall victim of bad economic times. Advogato’s evidence of problems at SourceForge: The Geocrawler list, a “core service” of SourceForge, was no longer being maintained. (NewsForge, SourceForge and Geocrawler are all owned by VA Linux.)

The author of the Advogato piece suggested that Open Source project leaders should explore alternatives to SourceForge: “SourceForge has been an incredibly valuable resource over its lifetime. It would be quite a shame to see it go, and this cat sincerely hopes they find a way to stay afloat in these turbulent seas. That said, it’s never a good idea to be vulnerable to the failure of one server, or one company. It’s also not the free
software way. The need to keep good backups is as strong as it ever was.”

It turns out that Geocrawler was simply the victim of bad wording on that message. Patrick McGovern, site director of SourceForge.net, says those SourceForge email archives are moving to SourceForge, to make it easier for users to find them. The move should be complete in about a week.

The SourceForge team is still evaluating what to do with the rest of the email archives at Geocrawler, McGovern says. Right now, those lists continue to be updated.

McGovern also posted a comment on Advogato about the concerns over SourceForge’s future and corporate parent VA Linux’s future. “SourceForge.net is not going away,” he wrote. “VA is not going away. The company, as well as the technology sector, is having a hard time right now, but the company has the money and resources to be around for the long haul.”

McGovern noted, both on Advogato and in an interview, that SourceForge continues to grow. The number of registered users should hit 300,000 by SourceForge’s second anniversary Nov. 17; that’s up from 50,000 users on its first anniversary.

“The site is getting additional resources (not less) to be successful,” he wrote on Advogato. “We recently added 70 servers. We’ve added systems to the compile farm. We are adding to the number of download servers. We are hiring. I need talented folks to work on the site. If you are a skilled DBA send me your resume.”

Slashdot: “Once in awhile a story comes along that warrants mention just so that people know to be careful. Mosfet is a KDE coder (who has
had tension with KDE in the past and left some ill will over there). He was hired by Future Technology to continue work on his Liquid
KDE style and theme (my personal favorite). But they never paid him, so he removed their name and mentioned it in the
Changelog. Now FT is threatening legal action to get the Changelog off the net. But it’s more bizarre because MandrakeSoft is the
host, and the site remains up. Keep reading if you’re interested in a few more bits.”

proclus@iname.com writes: “One step install. OSX.1 users can now install the GNU-Darwin base distribution automatically with one command (as root). Darwin-only users will have to take a few extra steps to fetch wget or curl to their computers. The beta sources are the first addition to our new BSD-style source
tree. We hope to eventually mirror the Apple’s Darwin source code there, but in BSD src tree format.
In other news, we also have a new Fortran distribution for Darwin and OSX.1 users.”

– By Grant Gross –

Sometimes, it seems Open Source and Linux news is fused to news from that closed-source software giant from Washington state. This week especially, some of the biggest news about Linux in particular was about ways to make parts of it work with Windows.

Early in the week, TransGaming and MandrakeSoft announced a partnership to provide subscriptions to the WineX project and to sell the Mandrake Linux Gaming Edition, which the companies promise will allow Linux gamers to run Windows games on their machines. The plan isn’t without its controversy, though, as Scott Draeker of the Linux game porting company Loki Entertainment questioned why Linux users would want to run Windows games in the first place.

Later in the week, MP3.com founder Michael Robertson announced the ambitious LindowsOS project, which he says will run both Windows and Linux programs. The operating system is due out shortly; we’ll be interested to see how it works.

Of course, it was hard to ignore the release of Windows XP this week, even though we tried. But some security and privacy concerns are already surfacing. XP’s anti-piracy features have already been cracked, and a first-day accessory for XP was 20 MB of security and glitch-fix updates.

MSN: We don’t need no stinkin’ non-Microsoft browser

Microsoft also made news this week when its redesigned MSN.com locked out Mozilla, Opera and several other browsers that aren’t named “Internet Explorer.” Microsoft later backpedaled, but not before some anti-Microsoft groups brought up that nasty “antitrust” word again.

Anti-terrorism bill gives U.S. police broad powers

Among the groups protesting the passage of the “anti-terrorism” Patriot bill, which gives U.S. law enforcement broad powers to conduct searches without warrants, both online and off, was the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The Free Software Foundation’s Richard Stallman can say he warned you about this law.

Gartner comes around?

IT analyst Gartner Group hasn’t been the biggest supporter of Linux and Open Source software for a long time, although a new report seems to have the consultancy inching toward a more positive view. From the report: “Linux is at a crossroads. Gartner has detected serious interest from large enterprises. Yet, most IT executives also recognize that Linux works on a different model and that whatever gains they can achieve will be dependent on the support relationships with vendors and the breadth of application software — not just system infrastructure.” Not exactly a ringing endorsement, but, hey, some people see the light more slowly than others.

New in NewsForge

Stories reported first in NewsForge this week:

Tina Gasperson’s story about the Disney Channel using its The Proud Family cartoon as propaganda against online music trading got a load of readers. Some readers suggested Disney’s tactics smack of dirty pool.

Also worth a look is Mike Newlands’ comprehensive look at the “flood” of Linux PDAs coming out of Asia. This story is a complete roundup of what’s coming from Japan, Korea, and China.

Robin “Roblimo” Miller comments on the Mozilla project’s mistakes and how other Open Source projects can avoid them. Too much corporate influence may spoil the soup.

From Slashdot: “Victor Matsuda, Vice President of Sony’s Entertain Robot America (makers of AIBO), sent a letter to Aibopet.com citing the Digital Mellennium Copyright Act. You can read the letter here. Aibopet is the website of an AIBO owner who enjoys researching AIBO. He also provides free software programs to improve and add features to the robots.”