From PC World: “Companies increasingly deliver their content and services via the Internet to a variety of new devices, such as personal digital assistants, television sets, gaming consoles, MP3 players, and smart phones, creating a situation that makes it more difficult for companies to protect their internal systems their internal systems from attacks and prevent data theft, a Gartner analyst says.”

MSNBC reports “International Business Machines Corp. says it has developed a low-power semiconductor chip that can significantly extend the battery life of cellphones, pocket computers and other portable electronic devices.”

CNET News.com: “Linux seller MandrakeSoft has had to delay shipment of its newest version of Linux
because of problems in moving manufacturing to the United States.

Mandrake Linux 8.1 is available as a download, but the first CDs of the product
were supposed to ship “by the end of September, the company said. In an
e-mail message to those who have ordered the CDs, the company said it ran
into unexpected delays after deciding to move production to the United States.”

The Register reports: “his week Microsoft delayed the imposition of controversial new terms and
conditions for volume purchases.

The start date for the new and potentially much more expensive regime is now 31
July 2002, ten months later than originally planned.

But UK licensing manager Duncan Reid told us today that Microsoft will not review
the terms for the new system. Instead, the company hopes to use this time to explain
to its customers why the licensing scheme is better than the old one.”

Sun Labs, the division of Sun Microsystems responsible for such key company offerings like Java and 64-bit UltraSparc processors almost never happened. CEO Scott McNealy initially opposed the idea of setting up the research and development arm of the company, fearing that Sun would be doing little more than creating a money pit. Thankfully, the labs survived and while R&D probably hasn’t come at a bargain, it has allowed the company to remain independent in the middle of a merger-happy Silicon Valley. Full story at CNET News.com.

From an eWEEK report: “Stung by a flood of criticism, a key Web standards group next week will
consider significant changes to its proposal to establish a formal process for
accepting patented, royalty fee-generating technologies as official Internet
standards.

Among other changes to its original proposal, the World Wide Web
Consortium’s (W3C) patent policy working group will consider granting
exemptions to open source developers so that they could avoid paying
royalty fees on patented technologies accepted as W3C standards.”

Anonymous Reader writes “eWEEK reports that IBM is on the verge of unveiling Sahara, a next-generation PowerPC chip that will debut at up to 1GHz and reportedly introduce new acceleration technology that may leave Motorola’s AltiVec on-chip acceleration in the dust.”

The latest Linux kernel prepatch has been released by Linus and company. The changelog is included below, and you can get the latest release from your favorite mirror site.

pre1:
                   - Trond Myklebust: deadlock checking in lockd server
                   - Tim Waugh: fix up parport wrong #define
                   - Christoph Hellwig: i2c update, ext2 cleanup
                   - Al Viro: fix partition handling sanity check.
                   - Trond Myklebust: make NFS use SLAB_NOFS, and not play games with PF_MEMALLOC
                   - Ben Fennema: UDF update
                   - Alan Cox: continued merging
                   - Chris Mason: get /proc buffer memory sizes right after buf-in-page-cach

Mountain View, CA —- Daemon News announces it plans
to produce a packaged FreeBSD CD product with the release
of FreeBSD 4.5. “It seems that the FreeBSD baton passed
from Walnut Creek to BSDi and then to Wind River is being
dropped by Wind River!”, said Greg Sutter, CTO for the
Daemon News. Based on recent press, Wind River’s involvment
with FreeBSD in the future is uncertain or will be ending.
The Daemon News will now carry the baton. “We have been
supporting BSD and working to be the focal point of BSD
information for several years.” said Chris Coleman
President of the Daemon News. “Now we will continue that
support by producing packaged versions of FreeBSD and
putting them in the distribution channels.”

Daemon News already produces Darwin, the open source
version of Apple’s new Mac OS X operating system, as well
as many other BSD related products and distributes them
to a domestic and international customer base.

Daemon News runs an online shopping mall (http://www.bsdmall.com) filled with BSD Merchandise.

In addition to the production of FreeBSD, Daemon
News also offers subscriptions for FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD
and Darwin. Many long time FreeBSD users will recognize this familiar
service. Current subscribers to a Wind River/BSDi/Walnut Creek
subscription will need to purchase a new subscription from Daemon News
to continue the service.

A subscription ensures that you get sent the latest version of the
operating system on CD as soon as it is released. Its a great way for developers and users to stay current.

Daemon News is a comprehensive resource for BSD, operated in close
contact with the community. Established in 1998, Daemon News provides a
monthly online publication, Daily BSD News, a community based support
forum, and a retail outlet for all BSD related merchandise.

See the Daemon News at the Linux Showcase in Oakland
November 8th to November 10th.

Contact: Deborah Nelson
Daemon News
650-694-4949
sales@daemonnews.org

From a discussion at GNOME Gnotices: “Gnome 2 is coming up fast, most of it will be just porting applications to the new rather nice
platform that was announced recently.
So, what features would people like in GNOME? They might not make them for GNOME 2,
because after all, porting will take time. But from your suggestions we can make a list, and from a list we
can make a website, and from a website we(*) can make GNOME be what you want it to be.” Go on, say something.