From TheDot: “KOffice falls short of Microsoft Office standard: Updated Linux alternative to Office not ready for corporate big leagues”, the lengthy review takes a close and, perhaps surprisingly, fair look at the strengths and weaknesses of KOffice.” It also mentions another review thet was posted on TheDot itself.

From DebianPlanet: “I’ve decided to make a Pentium optimized Debian distribution, and now here is the result. 80% of the packages are recompiled, you can view this statistic here. This can be used by putting an extra apt line to the /etc/apt/sources.list. If you are intrested please read the README! Any questions, comments, congrats can go to debian@lists.kando.hu.”

From Slashdot: “I’m a highly competent and occasionally respected software engineer, who has worked on several Open Source/Free Software projects; some of my code is in the Linux kernel. Within the OSS community, we maintain that the main point of publicly announcing OSS projects is to invite programmers to join the project and collaborate to make better software. But in about 90% of cases, I’ve found that publicly announced projects in development are not actually open to new members…”

From DebianPlanet: “There has been much hype about journalled filesystems for GNU/Linux in recent months, and Debian Planet has hosted its fair share of articles concerning various alternative filesystems. In this series of articles we will take you through these filesystems, giving background information, history and tips. Furthermore in each article we will install and use the filesystem covered and provide benchmarks (which should only used in comparison with those disclosed within other articles within this series).”

From ZDNet: “To help proliferate the Pentium 4, Intel is effectively eliminating the Pentium III from the desktop market. As a result, computer manufacturers have begun to reduce already-discounted prices on their existing inventories of these computers. By the end of the first quarter next year, Pentium III computers will likely be gone from store shelves.”

From Slashdot: “For those of you out there who admire the portability of Java but want something faster or open source, the answer to your prayers is finally here. The Internet Virtual Machine is open source, fast and supports C, C++, Java and ObjectiveC. “

The folks at the GNU-Darwin project have released a position paper on authentication and encryption. “Personal encryption tools, such as GnuPG, are vital to our strength as a nation, and such tools should be promoted in order to enhance
the security of our individual citizens and of our vital institutions as well.”

O’Reilly’s Onlamp.com has a story on how one person loaded “pure BSD,” not Mac OS X, on an iBook.

Anonymous Reader writes, “After six months of steady development, the Drupal team is pleased to announce that the release 3.00 of Drupal is now available. Drupal 3.00 comes with major improvements and tons of new features as listed here. Drupal is known as a content management and discussion engine suitable to setup a news-driven community or portal sites. It is mostly used as slash-like weblog software and makes a great alternative for Slash, Scoop and PHP-Nuke. It sure has more features. Drupal has also proven to be a valuable building block and has been successfully integrated in sites like NewsIsFree.com and Tipic.com, corporate intranets, and — last but not least — it is being used as a personal blogging tool as, for instance, can be seen at voidstar.com.”

From ZDNet: “The horror of Tuesday’s coordinated attacks on the commercial and military centers of America has prompted the U.S. Congress to call for a global ban on ‘uncrackable’ encryption products.”