CNet reports that Toshiba’s latest laptops are including 802.11b wireless networking, bluetooth, network, and modem all built-in.

MSNBC reports that eBay’s charity auction, which is trying to raise $100 million, is generating controversy and upsetting some users of the on-line auction site.

Noel Davis at O’Reilly.net discusses “a Remote Shell Trojan Linux-based virus, buffer overflows in fetchmail, and problems in the BSD Line Printer Daemon.”

Kelly McNeill writes “Despite the dot-com shakeout, businesses new and old are still rushing to put content on the Internet — movies, music, books, artwork, you name it. And there are hundreds of schemes floating around to extract payment for this content: micropayments, escrow accounts, debit cards, direct account withdrawals, credit cards and many others. But something has happened that the media companies especially have been dreading for years — the content is losing its value even as the cost to produce the content is going up.”

“Lots more merging – it almost looks like there’s a light at the end of the
tunnel.

VM tweaks, notably OOM handling.

And a nasty ptrace bug fixed.” —

Linus

Linux 2.4.10-pre12
Date: Tue, 18 Sep 2001 17:39:30 -0700 (PDT)
From: Linus Torvalds 
To: Kernel Mailing List 


Lots more merging - it almost looks like there's a light at the end of the
tunnel.

VM tweaks, notably OOM handling.

And a nasty ptrace bug fixed.

                 Linus

------
pre12:
 - Alan Cox: much more merging
 - Pete Zaitcev: ymfpci race fixes
 - Andrea Arkangeli: VM race fix and OOM tweak.
 - Arjan Van de Ven: merge RH kernel fixes
 - Andi Kleen: use more readable 'likely()/unlikely()' instead of __builtin_expect()
 - Keith Owens: fix 64-bit ELF types
 - Gerd Knorr: mark more broken PCI bridges, update btaudio driver
 - Paul Mackerras: powermac driver update
 - me: clean up PTRACE_DETACH to use common infrastructure

From Robval.com: ” Based on a solid Linux business plan, my client decided that Linux was a good investment for most of the company’s employees, but will retain a few key Windows computers in the office for specific applications. Connecting Linux and Windows computers on the same network, and sharing Office 97/2000 files between the different OSs, is easy and works well, thanks to Linux Red Hat and Star Office. The primary reason for this decision was a $10,000 saving on his IT budget! For support reasons, he decided to use a local Linux supplier for installation and configuration work.”

“As many of you know, I am no longer a Netscape employee; my position at Netscape was eliminated during the last round of AOL layoffs. Many people have asked what this means for my role with mozilla.org.

First, the focus of my role at mozilla.org will change somewhat. As a Netscape employee, I was in daily contact with a broad range of Netscape management. Some of this interaction was gathering data relating to mozilla.org processes, and some of it was acting as the liaison between Netscape management and mozilla.org. This role as liaison is at an end; it should be performed by a Netscape employee.

I expect to devote more of my time to other activities that are critically important to the Mozilla project.” Full statement at MozillaZine.

From ZDNet UK: ”

Fujitsu is poised to release technical details on Tuesday of a humanoid robot that can walk on its own two legs.

The company began selling the automaton, called Hoap-1, last week. The 48cm-tall robot is shaped like a humanoid, weighs 6kg and has been designed “for wide applications in research and development of robotic technologies”, according to the Japanese manufacturer.

Engineers from Fujitsu Laboratories will disclose the internal architecture of Hoap-1 at a meeting of the Robotics Society of Japan, which will be held at Tokyo University. By revealing some of the secrets of the robot, the scientists hope to encourage users to write original programs for it.”

From Reuters: “Red Hat Inc. , best known as a distributor of Linux operating system, on Monday said it had set a buyback plan, effective immediately, of up to 10 percent of its outstanding common shares over the next year.

Red Hat joins dozens of U.S. companies initiating or increasing repurchase programs in the aftermath of last week’s attacks in New York and Washington. The company’s shares were off 19 cents, or 6.1 percent, at $2.93. Earlier, it set a fresh year low at $2.40.”

Linus releases the latest kernel prepatch; changelog and notes below.

Ok, the big thing here is continued merging, this time with Andrea.

I still don't like some of the VM changes, but integrating Andrea's VM
changes results in (a) better performance and (b) much cleaner inactive
page handling in particular. Besides, for the 2.4.x tree, the big priority
is stability, we can re-address my other concerns during 2.5.x.

This also merges the blkdev in page cache patch, and that will hopefully
make it noticeably easier to do the "do bread() with page cache too", at
which point a lot of the current ugly synchronization issues will go away.

Oh, and it gets the direct-IO improvements from Andrea too.

[ Other small patches from Andrea merged just to make future merges
  easier. ]

The console locking merge with Andrew Morton also moves us a bit closer to
the -ac tree..

Full 2.4.10 ChangeLog appended.

                Linus

------
pre11:
 - Neil Brown: md cleanups/fixes
 - Andrew Morton: console locking merge
 - Andrea Arkangeli: major VM merge

pre10:
 - Alan Cox: continued merging
 - Mingming Cao: make msgrcv/shmat check the queue/segment ID's properly
 - Greg KH: USB serial init failure fix, Xircom serial converter driver
 - Neil Brown: nsfd/raid/md/lockd cleanups
 - Ingo Molnar: multipath RAID personality, raid xor update
 - Hugh Dickins/Marcelo Tosatti: swapin read-ahead race fix
 - Vojtech Pavlik: fix up some of the infrastructure for x86-64
 - Robert Love: AMD 761 AGP GART support
 - Jens Axboe: fix SCSI-generic queue handling race
 - me: be sane about page reference bits

pre9:
 - Greg KH: start migration to new "min()/max()"
 - Roman Zippel: move affs over to "min()/max()".
 - Vojtech Pavlik: VIA update (make sure not to IRQ-unmask a vt82c576)
 - Jan Kara: quota bug-fix (don't decrement quota for non-counted inode)
 - Anton Altaparmakov: more NTFS updates
 - Al Viro: make nosuid/noexec/nodev be per-mount flags, not per-filesystem
 - Alan Cox: merge input/joystick layer differences, driver and alpha merge
 - Keith Owens: scsi Makefile cleanup
 - Trond Myklebust: fix oopsable race in locking code
 - Jean Tourrilhes: IrDA update

pre8:
 - Christoph Hellwig: clean up personality handling a bit
 - Robert Love: update sysctl/vm documentation
 - make the three-argument (that everybody hates) "min()" be "min_t()",
   and introduce a type-anal "min()" that complains about arguments of
   different types.

pre7:
 - Alan Cox: big driver/mips sync
 - Andries Brouwer, Christoph Hellwig: more gendisk fixups
 - Tobias Ringstrom: tulip driver workaround for DC21143 erratum

pre6:
 - Jens Axboe: remove trivially dead io_request_lock usage
 - Andrea Arcangeli: softirq cleanup and ARM fixes. Slab cleanups
 - Christoph Hellwig: gendisk handling helper functions/cleanups
 - Nikita Danilov: reiserfs dead code pruning
 - Anton Altaparmakov: NTFS update to 1.1.18
 - firestream network driver: patch reverted on authors request
 - NIIBE Yutaka: SH architecture update
 - Paul Mackerras: PPC cleanups, PPC8xx update.
 - me: reverse broken bootdata allocation patch that went into pre5

pre5:
 - Merge with Alan
 - Trond Myklebust: NFS fixes - kmap and root inode special case
 - Al Viro: more superblock cleanups, inode leak in rd.c, minix
   directories in page cache
 - Paul Mackerras: clean up rubbish from sl82c105.c
 - Neil Brown: md/raid cleanups, NFS filehandles
 - Johannes Erdfelt: USB update (usb-2.0 support, visor fix, Clie fix,
   pl2303 driver update)
 - David Miller: sparc and net update
 - Eric Biederman: simplify and correct bootdata allocation - don't
   overwrite ramdisks
 - Tim Waugh: support multiple SuperIO devices, parport doc updates

pre4:
 - Hugh Dickins: swapoff cleanups and speedups
 - Matthew Dharm: USB storage update
 - Keith Owens: Makefile fixes
 - Tom Rini: MPC8xx build fix
 - Nikita Danilov: reiserfs update
 - Jakub Jelinek: ELF loader fix for ET_DYN
 - Andrew Morton: reparent_to_init() for kernel threads
 - Christoph Hellwig: VxFS and SysV updates, vfs_permission fix

pre3:
 - Johannes Erdfelt, Oliver Neukum: USB printer driver race fix
 - John Byrne: fix stupid i386-SMP irq stack layout bug
 - Andreas Bombe, me: yenta IO window fix
 - Neil Brown: raid1 buffer state fix
 - David Miller, Paul Mackerras: fix up sparc and ppc respectively for kmap/kbd_rate
 - Matija Nalis: umsdos fixes, and make it possible to boot up with umsdos
 - Francois Romieu: fix bugs in dscc4 driver
 - Andy Grover: new PCI config space access functions (eventually for ACPI)
 - Albert Cranford: fix incorrect e2fsprog data from ver_linux script
 - Dave Jones: re-sync x86 setup code, fix macsonic kmalloc use
 - Johannes Erdfelt: remove obsolete plusb USB driver
 - Andries Brouwer: fix USB compact flash version info, add blksize ioctls

pre2:
 - Al Viro: block device cleanups
 - Marcelo Tosatti: make bounce buffer allocations more robust (it's ok
   for them to do IO, just not cause recursive bounce IO. So allow them)
 - Anton Altaparmakov: NTFS update (1.1.17)
 - Paul Mackerras: PPC update (big re-org)
 - Petko Manolov: USB pegasus driver fixes
 - David Miller: networking and sparc updates
 - Trond Myklebust: Export atomic_dec_and_lock
 - OGAWA Hirofumi: find and fix umsdos "filldir" users that were broken
   by the 64-bit-cleanups. Fix msdos warnings.
 - Al Viro: superblock handling cleanups and race fixes
 - Johannes Erdfelt++: USB updates

pre1:
 - Jeff Hartmann: DRM AGP/alpha cleanups
 - Ben LaHaise: highmem user pagecopy/clear optimization
 - Vojtech Pavlik: VIA IDE driver update
 - Herbert Xu: make cramfs work with HIGHMEM pages
 - David Fennell: awe32 ram size detection improvement
 - Istvan Varadi: umsdos EMD filename bug fix
 - Keith Owens: make min/max work for pointers too
 - Jan Kara: quota initialization fix
 - Brad Hards: Kaweth USB driver update (enable, and fix endianness)
 - Ralf Baechle: MIPS updates
 - David Gibson: airport driver update
 - Rogier Wolff: firestream ATM driver multi-phy support