LinuxWorld: “The only conclusion I can draw is that, like most commercial software developers, many open source
programmers are just plain lazy about proper error handling. But we’re supposed to be better than that, and
it’s time we started to live up to the reputation. I realize that most of these programs are works in progress.
But good error handling is not something that should be left for last. It should be part of the development
process. Although I may not practice it myself, I’m not the least bit ashamed to preach it.”

– By Dan Berkes –
Nasdaq and Dow make major gains from last week, helped in part by inoffensive economic reports. Borland revenues plummet, Big Blue and Sun wage war for server mind and market share, and Apple shows off its new iPod. Oh, and rumor has it that some company near Seattle released an operating system.The Nasdaq’s composite index was off six and a half points from Thursday, ending the week at 1,768.96. That minor loss didn’t offset a gain of nearly 100 points over last Friday’s 1,671 point closing. Over at the Dow Jones Industrial Index, Friday’s business closed at 9,545.17, 82 points better than Thursday, and more than 300 points better than last Friday.

Markets were mixed on today’s session as investors reacted to the latest numbers from two economic reports. The University of Michigan’s consumer sentiment index is at 82.7 for the month of October, slightly lower than the 83.4 preliminary report but somewhat better than the 81.8 reported for the month of September.

Next up was a report revealing housing purchase data for September. Home sales fell by 1.4 percent for the month, coming in for an estimated annual sales pace of 864,000 units. The numbers were 4,000 stronger than early estimates, but not quite as good as the 898,000 analysts expected in August.

Both reports showed nothing spectacular, but they didn’t show anything particularly devastating, so the Wall Street herd continued on its spending spree.

Borland runs the numbers
Borland Software Corp. reported sharply lower profits for its most recent third quarter, announcing net income of $4.7 million or 6 cents a share, compared with the previous third quarter net income of $11.4 million or 17 cents per share. Revenues jumped 16 percent to $55 million from $47.6 million a year ago. Borland cited the Sept. 11 attacks for the lower performance.

Red Hat ships latest distribution
Red Hat, Inc. announced that its Red Hat Linux 7.2 and Red Hat Linux Professional products are now available for purchase in stores. The 7.2 version of Red Hat’s Linux distribution sport the 2.4.7 Linux kernel, ext3 journaling file system, and improved network configuration, user management, and hardware trouble-shooting features. Available wherever copious amounts of shrink-wrapped software are sold.

New mainframes from IBM
Thanks to Linux, Big Blue’s mainframe offerings have enjoyed quite a resurgence in popularity. The company continues to expand its big iron product line, and this week introduced the world to its latest bouncing baby, the eServer z900. This latest iteration of the z900 family, according to IBM’s PR mill, is the first mainframe with the ability to perform 3,850 transactions per second.

The company continues to battle with its competitors in the lower-end server market — primarily Sun Microsystems. IBM is betting that users will flock to mid-range servers based on its new “Regatta” Power4 microprocessors when combined with a four-digit price tag, as opposed to the sobering five figures for similar offerings from Sun.

Sun’s new SPARCs
Sun Microsystems didn’t take too long to respond to IBM’s offerings with its own announcement. Actually, the announcement hasn’t happened yet, but this press release says that the company will raise the curtain on new UltraSPARC III servers on Monday morning. “The new entry-level servers offer superior compute power below Wintel price points.”

New hardware from Apple
Apple Computer this week entered the consumer electronics market with the
release of its new iPod MP3 player. The slim silver device sports a 5GB hard
drive to store up to 1,000 CD-quality songs, a FireWire connection for fast
computer-to-iPod data transfers, and a rechargeable battery that can last for up
to 10 hours of continuous music play.

The company is hoping that the Mac faithful will flock to the device, and most
Apple-watchers tend to agree with that statement. Priced about $150 higher than
the most popular digital music players on the market, it’s going to be tough for
the company to convince non-Mac users to adopt iPod.

Here’s how Open Source and related stocks ended the week:

Company Name	Symbol	10/26 Close	10/19 Close
Apple	AAPL	18.67	18.30
Borland Software Int’l	BORL	12.09	11.30
Caldera International	CALD	0.30	0.30
Hewlett Packard	HWP	17.85	18.27
IBM	IBM	111.16	102.65
MandrakeSoft	4477.PA	e2.61	e2.61
Red Hat	RHAT	4.88	3.99
Sun Microsystems	SUNW	10.40	8.83
TiVo	TIVO	5.38	5.65
VA Linux Systems	LNUX	1.45	1.29
Wind River Systems	WIND	15.70	14.65

The Register reports that AMD and Intel will go head-to-head with aggressive price cuts next week. Look for the pricing on select AMD XP and Intel Pentium 4 processors to drop by 23 to 29 percent. We’re assuming that these cuts, as in every other case, are for volume buyers. Unless you happen to need about a thousand or so chips next week, plan on waiting a few weeks for the price cuts to trickle down to retail.

Reported at The Register: ”

UK internal intelligence service MI5 has been posting various appeals for
information on dissident Islamic Web sites over fears that cells of Osama Bin
Laden’s terrorist network al-Qaeda are active in the UK.”

CNET Singapore: “An international day of protest designed to jam the US-led communications spy system Echelon was a “rousing” success
according to its organisers, who claim that the cyber-demonstration helped to raise public awareness about the surveillance
system.”

ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/alan/linux-2.4/. Intermediate diffs are available from http://www.bzimage.org.

Alan Cox writes, “The usual warnings apply. This is an initial merge against
2.4.13.The patches are still getting smaller which is good.”

2.4.13-ac1
o Merge with Linus 2.4.13

2.4.12-ac7
o Fix i2o_proc locking thinko (me)
o Aiptek tablet driver (Chris Atenasio)
o Update ARM920T support (Russell King)
o Add some additional PCI idents (Tim Hockin)
o Further SA1100/CERF ARM updates (Russell King)
o Reduce printk noise in amd flash driver (David Woodhouse)
o Add missing schedule()
to jffs2 gc thread (David Woodhouse)
o Add license tag to NTFS (Richard Russon)
o PCMCIA suspend fix for SA1100 ARM (Russell King)
o Increase close wait tracking for ip_conntrack (Darrell Escola)
o PCI hot plug support (Greg Kroah-Hartmann)
o Compaq FC driver update (Steve Cameron)
o Fix UP APIC without IOAPIC build fail (Mikael Pettersson)
o Intel 82092 PCI/PCMCIA bridge support (Arjan van de Ven)
| Based heavily on the pcmcia package
o Include buffer size extension in dhcp frames (Andreas Steinmetz)
o Fix u14f/u34f build problem (Andreas Steinmetz)
o Fix trident.c build on Alpha (me)
o Various other Alpha build fixes (Jeff Garzik)
o Simplify serverworks mtrr check (Dave Jones)
o ARM configuration updates (Russell King)
o Update natsemi driver (Jeff Garzik)
o Computone ip2 update (Michael Warfield)
o Fix CONFIG_SIMNOW (Andi Kleen)
o Update 8139too docs (Jeff Garzik)
o Make autofs4 return symlink lengths

2.4.12-ac6
o Fix more preprocessor oddments (Jean-Luc Leger)
o Fix ipconfig build (Mauricio Zambrano)
o Radeonfb updates (7500, 8500, fp support)
(Ani Joshi)
o Excalibur ARM support (Altera)
o Enable SA1110 clock scaling on Cerf (Russell King)
o ARM config updates (Russell King)
o Fix ulong->unsigned long in videodev.h (Felix von Leitner)
o Miscellaneous ARM bits (Russell King)
o Support the Promise SX6000 better (Vojtech Pavlik)
o Fix a problem with ymfpci and civctp (Pete Zaitcev)
o Update the ARM shark maintainer contact info (Alexander Schulz)
o PF_MEMALLOC kswapd death fix (Manfred Spraul)
o Remove now surplus quota ifdefs from ext3 (Andrew Morton)
o USB locking fix (Greg Kroah-Hartmann)
o UHCI fixes (Greg Kroah-Hartmann)
o Add more pegasus driver idents (Greg Kroah-Hartmann)
o Scanner unload race fix (Greg Kroah-Hartmann)
o ARM assabet updates (Russell King)
o Add additional APIC message retransmit handling (Stephen Tweedie)
o Add excalibur ARM include files (Altera)
o RTL8139CP driver (Jeff Garzik)
o Sun network driver license tags (Jeff Garzik)
o Add some new pci idents (Jeff Garzik)
o Sundance alta driver updates
o Airo driver update (Javier Achirica, Jean Tourhilles,
Jeff Garzik, Ben Reed)
o Add license tags to various sound drivers (Frank Davis)

From Newsbytes: “NASA turned 43 this month and marked the occasion by releasing more than 200 of its
scientific and engineering applications for public use. The modular Fortran programs can be modified, compiled and run on most
Linux platforms.

The Robert C. Byrd National Technology Transfer Center in Wheeling, W.Va., and the Open Channel Foundation, a nonprofit unit
of Open Channel Software Inc. of Chicago, are publishing the NASA Classics collection.”

Opera Software ASA today welcomed
Microsoft’s quick about face on denying millions of Opera users access to
their main Web portal, MSN. Microsoft’s abrupt change of mind came after
hostile reactions were reported in the media from many Opera users who
had tried to access the site.

Microsoft claimed that Opera users were denied entry because the Opera
browser “doesn’t support the latest XHTML standard,” according to Bob
Visse, MSN’s director of marketing.

“Opera’s XHTML standard is of the highest quality,” says Jon S. von
Tetzchner, CEO of Opera Software ASA. “In fact, Opera is internationally
acclaimed and renowned for its strict compliance with all international
Internet standards. Maybe Microsoft should take a look at its lack of
respect for the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) international
Internet standards before bad-mouthing others.”

The W3C is the international body created to ensure interoperability
between technologies (specifications, guidelines, software, and tools) to
lead the Web to its full potential.

The irony of Microsoft’s claim to standards support is complete when
you check the MSN.com site for compliance with the XHTML standard. Anyone
can go to the W3C’s standards validation service at
http://validator.w3.org/ and type in www.msn.com. The returned document
demonstrates clearly that not a single document on their site adheres
to W3C specifications, and many of their documents do not use XHTML at
all, e.g. http://careers.msn.com/.

This is not the first time Microsoft has tried to deny Opera users
entry. Before, Microsoft has tried to keep Opera users out from its
IIS-servers by excluding Opera from the browsercap.ini set-up files. That
would exclude Opera users from any Web sites running on Microsoft’s server
solutions.

Opera Software sees Microsoft’s latest behavior as a sign of their
acknowledgement of Opera as a valid threat to its dominance. In the last
year, over 6 million copies of the Opera browser for Windows has been
successfully downloaded and installed from Opera’s Web site by users all
over the world looking for a better Internet experience.

On non-PC devices, the industry leaders in the market are joining
forces with Opera, and the Opera family of browsers is currently the
leading browser choice for embedded devices.

From GamePro: “Are you a New York or Los Angeles-based Microsoft enthusiast eager to get your
grubby hands on an Xbox before its released? They you might want to consider attending
Xbox Unleashed, a 48-hour gaming marathon/competition hosted by Bill Gates’ electronic
empire that features-what else?-a whole slew of Xbox games.”

PC World: “The new Yopy PDA folds open, just like a clamshell-type cellular telephone, to reveal a 3.5-inch
color LCD on the top half and a 40-key keypad on the bottom half. The company is hoping it will
become useful for people on the move, so is also developing a clip-on CDMA (Code Division
Multiple Access) modem to allow users to access the Internet via mobile networks.”