A short update at ZDNet reports that graphics hardware maker ATI has lowered the prices on its now-rebranded desktop graphics card. Radeon VE shall now be known as the Radeon 7000, and will sell for $79; the Radeon DDR is now the Radeon 7200 and will sell for $79. The rechristined cards should arrive at a store near you within the next few weeks.

“A day after being sued by rival software maker Novell Inc.
for allegedly making “false and misleading” statements about its
products, Microsoft Corp., said on Tuesday it had already tried to
address the concerns and hoped the effort would be taken in good faith.

On Monday, Provo, Utah-based Novell filed suit in federal court in Salt Lake City, alleging
Microsoft had spread incorrect statements that Novell was shifting away from software
development.

Novell asked the court to order Microsoft to stop the advertising, issue “corrective advertising”
and pay unspecified monetary damages.” Full Reuters story at ZDNet.

Reported at The Register: “The FBI has teamed up with the industry experts to formulate a list of the 20 most
important Internet security vulnerabilities.

Acting as a resource to show which security holes of common platforms should be
prioritised, the list covers general vulnerabilities, as well as bugs specifically
affecting Windows and Unix boxes. A previous chart covered 10 vulnerabilities and
the latest run-down expands and updates that list, which is now over a year old.”

From an article at IBM’s developerWorks: “A pipe is an interprocess communication mechanism available on both Windows and Linux (and UNIX). Pipes originally appeared
in the Bell Laboratories version of UNIX and have remained in all UNIXes and Linux since their inception. A pipe is a stream of
bytes accessed through normal IO interfaces. It is created, and then written to or read from using whatever read or write IO system
calls are available on the operating system. In the UNIX and Linux case, the IO calls are read() and write(). In the
Windows world, the APIs are ReadFile() and WriteFile(). Windows pipes differ from Linux pipes in that a single handle
(analogous to a Linux file descriptor) supports bi-directional IO. Linux pipes return two file descriptors to effect bi-directional IO.”

From a post to the gnome-announce mailing list: “The first pre-release of the GNOME 2 platform is now available for
your downloading and testing pleasure. WARNING: This release does not include anything of use to end
users. It is a technology preview release of the development platform
only. It is also not yet fully parallel installable with GNOME
1.

As soon as the mirrors update, you can get the release from:

ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/pre-gnome2/releases/gnome-2.0-lib-alpha1

Pretty much everything in this release is new relative to GNOME
1.4. A few of the most notable new features are:

* Full multi-lingual text support support and use of unicode text
throughout

* Powerful new tree and text widgets

* Extensive accessibility support

* A new CORBA ORB featuring smaller stubs skeletons, support for SSL,
and and a better overall architecture

* More standards-compliant XML library

* XSLT library

* Improved package configuration scheme

* Unrelated libraries, as well as GUI and non-GUI parts of existing
libraries, have been split into their own packages

* Much cleanup and many other new features throughout the platform


Love,

The GNOME 2.0 Release Team"

From CNet: “Hoping to further entrench its Office business software suite in the marketplace, Microsoft
on Wednesday said it will offer discounted versions through mainstream retailers of Office
XP to students and teachers to use at home.”

Wired.com reports that the Federal Trade Commission now says it won’t try to push through stronger consumer privacy laws.

VNUnet.com has a story saying Code Red and related viruses such as Nimda have
caused over 150,000 IIS-based Web sites on around 80,000
different machines to disappear from the Internet.

ZDNet has a column by HP CEO Carly Fiorina. “Why are market-unifying
standards such as Itanium,
Unix/Linux, NT, open source,
open APIs, and open
connectivity standards so
important in the context of our
merger with Compaq and the
future of the technology
industry? Because
market-unifying standards
will shift the underlying
economics and the basis of
competition in this industry by
leading to more competition,
greater choice and flexibility
for businesses, and better
ease of use for consumers.”

From a column at Byte.com: “This column is really about how some friends and I are turning
left-over Linux boxes plus wireless LAN equipment into instant
neighborhood ‘freenets.’ But first a few observations about the
Open Source ecology in which — or from which — these things swim.

There is little doubt by now that the Open Source business model
(and with it Linux in large part) is becoming a liability for many
companies.”