IDG.net reports on an IDC study saying Microsoft Windows will continue to dominate the desktop, and only Linux stands in the way of it dominating the server market.

From ZDNet UK: “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.”

This isn’t confirmed yet, but Anonymous Reader writes, “[A press release of sorts, though I’m not an official rep of Mozilla…] Mozilla 0.9.4 has been released, and should be appearing on the mozilla.org release page shortly. Close to 1500 bug fixes and enhancements have been checked in since 0.9.3, including the ability to disable javascript window.open() calls during page load and unload, fixes for plugin issues, and the ever-popular performance work.”

Joe Barr writes “http://www.linuxworld.com/site-stories/2001/0914.i rc.html

Big news Web sites couldn’t keep up with the traffic or the
breaking news, but two IRC channels did.”

– By Dan Berkes –
Wall Street remains closed in the wake of terrorists attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. While business has been anything but usual since Tuesday, there are some events that merit coverage in this abbreviated edition of the Open Source stock report.The Dow Jones Industrial Average stands at 9,605.51 from Monday, virtually unchanged from last Friday’s close of 9,605.85. The Nasdaq composite ended Monday at 1,695.37, up a few points from Friday’s close of 1,687.70.

All U.S. financial markets were closed or did not start trading on Tuesday, and have remained closed since that day. Both the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq have told investors that, barring any negative outcome from a barrage of equipment testing and trading simulations taking place this weekend, they will reopen on Monday for normal trading. Most affected by the attack on the World Trade Center is the American Stock Exchange, which reports that its trading floor has been rendered unusable by the collapse of the twin towers. That exchange plans, temporarily, to use the facilities of the NYSE.

The four-day shutdown is the longest period of time that Wall Street has been shuttered since the outbreak of World War I. What will happen to the markets on Monday is anyone’s guess, and not much can be divined by looking at the performance of overseas stock markets this week. European markets dropped like a rock on Tuesday, then gained by leaps and bounds on Wednesday and Thursday, with more muted and mixed results on Friday. In Asia, markets headed south on Friday thanks to fearful investors anticipating steep losses from Wall Street when trading resumes. The Canadian stock market made gains when it reopened on Thursday, but sank in trading on Friday.

In other news:

Caldera’s layoff ax whacks key programmer
Caldera International earlier this month announced that it would layoff 51 employees; apparently programmer Juergen G. Kienhoefer was among those who received pink slips. Kienhoefer helped write the Linux Kernel Personality software that enables Linux programs to run without modification on Caldera’s Open Unix software. Caldera says that layoffs affected all areas of the company, including marketing, development, and administration, and the the company still has key individuals working on the LKP project, which it considers a vital part of its product line.

Sun awards grant to Open Source effort
On Monday, Sun Microsystems announced that it will contribute computer hardware to the Open Bioinformatics Foundation, including servers and a secure storage system. The Open Bioinformatics Foundation distributes, develops, and supports standards-based Open Source tools for life science research and data integration. The foundation plans to use the Netra rackmount servers, a Cobalt RAQ 4, and a Netra ST A1000 to enable more reliable and secure distribution of its software tools and collaborative projects.

EBIZ files for bankruptcy protection
EBIZ Enterprises, the Linux e-commerce provider and system builder, and its wholly owned subsidiary Jones Business Systems filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection late last week. In a letter posted on the EBIZ Web site, CEO Dave Shaw writes “…our plan is to reorganize, not liquidate.” The letter is an updated version of one Shaw posted a few weeks ago, in which he revealed that several funding commitments made to the company had fallen through, and that EBIZ would have difficulty continuing operations without an immediate cash infusion.

Here’s how Open Source and related tech stocks ended Monday:

Company Name	Symbol	09/10 Close	09/07 Close
Apple	AAPL	17.37 *	17.28
Borland Software Int’l	BORL	9.47	9.88
Caldera International	CALD	0.39	0.46
EBIZ Enterprises	EBIZ.OB	0.025	0.045
Hewlett Packard	HWP	17.89	18.08
IBM	IBM	96.47	96.59
MandrakeSoft	4477.PA	e6.18 +	e5.99
Merlin Software Tech.	MLSW.OB	0.25	0.24
Red Hat	RHAT	3.12	3.32
Sun Microsystems	SUNW	10.29 *	10.59
TiVo	TIVO	4.30	4.56
VA Linux Systems	LNUX	1.14	1.07
Wind River Systems	WIND	13.12	13.25

* – Closing price dated September 11, 2001. Some stocks traded briefly on Tuesday before the markets were closed.

+ – Denotes Friday’s closing price. MandrakeSoft is traded on the Euronext Marche Libre, which remained open this week.

Sebastopol, CA–If all goes as Microsoft has planned, sometime in the
next year or so more than five million (and up to eight million) Visual
Basic developers will make the move to VB .NET. Visual Basic is
currently the most widely used programming language around, its success
owing to its simplicity and ease of use. The new VB, that is, Visual
Basic .NET, is a from-the-ground-up rewrite of the language that not
only adds a number of new features, but also differs dramatically from
previous versions of Visual Basic. According to Steven Roman, coauthor
of “VB .NET Language in a Nutshell” (Roman, Petrusha & Lomax, O’Reilly,
US $34.95), sooner or later all Visual Basic programmers are going to
have to wrestle with the decision to upgrade to VB .NET.

"I say sooner or later," Roman explains, "because you may be able to
postpone the decision for some time, perhaps even a year or more. But
the longer you wait, the more likely it is that you will put yourself
in the position of having to upgrade in a hurry." VB programmers,
facing the sharp learning curve associated with migrating to a new
language and programming environment, may have mixed feelings about the
change. Nevertheless, the authors of "VB .NET Language in a Nutshell"
maintain that there are compelling reasons to begin using VB .NET as
soon as possible.

VB .NET appears to offer many changes that VB programmers will welcome.
In addition to being a streamlined and modernized language, VB .NET is
fully object-oriented, with the long sought-after inclusion of class
inheritance and other OOP features. But as Roman, Petrusha an Lomax
explain, "The best news is that at long last Visual Basic is an 'equal
player' in the .NET Framework; Visual Basic programmers have full and
easy access to the features of the .NET platform, just a Visual C++ and
C# programmers do."

To ease the transition to the VB .NET, "VB .NET Language in a Nutshell"
goes beyond the bare details provided in the official documentation to
provide the inside information that programmers will need to solve
programming problems or use particular elements effectively. The book
provides complete documentation for the VB .NET language, including all
of the new language elements. Following a quick introduction, the first
part of the book focuses on the important areas of programming VB .NET,
including variables and data types, an introduction to object oriented
programming, .NET Framework general concepts, the .NET Framework Class
Library, delegates and events, and error handling. The bulk of the book
then consists of an alphabetical reference to the functions,
statements, directives, objects, and object members that make up the VB
.NET language.

Says Roman, "This is a detailed, professional reference to the VB .NET
language--a reference that you can turn to if you want to jog your
memory about a particular language element or a particular parameter.
It's also a reference that you can turn to when you're having
difficulty programming and need to review the rules for using a certain
language element, or when you want to check that there isn't some
'gotcha' you've overlooked that's associated with a particular
element."

"VB .NET Language in a Nutshell" was written to serve as the main
reference for VB 6 programmers who are upgrading to VB. NET.
Considerable space has been devoted to the extensive language
differences between VB6 and VB .NET. The book will also be useful to
developers who are new to Visual Basic, but who have been developing
applications in other programming languages, such as C++, and those who
are learning VB .NET as their first language and would like to have a
definitive reference on their shelf. Regardless of the reason for their
interest in VB .NET, developers will find this to be a book to have
close by, both as a standard reference guide and as a tool for
troubleshooting and identifying programming problems.


An article by coauthor Steven Roman, "To VB .NET or Not to VB .NET" can
be found at:  http://dotnet.oreilly.com/news/vbnet_0801.html

"Appendix A, What's New and Different in VB .NET," is available free
online at:  http://oreilly.com/catalog/vbdotnetnut/chapter/appa.html

For more information about the book, including Table of Contents,
index, author bio, and samples, see:
http://oreilly.com/catalog/vbdotnetnut/

For a cover graphic in jpeg format, go to:
ftp://ftp.ora.com/pub/graphics/book_covers/hi-res/0596000928.jpg 

VB .NET Language in a Nutshell
By Steven Roman, Ron Petrusha, and Paul Lomax
September, 2001
ISBN 0-596-00092-8, 636 pages, $34.95 (US)
order@oreilly.com
1-800-998-9938
http://www.oreilly.com

About O'Reilly 
O'Reilly & Associates is the premier information source for
leading-edge computer technologies. We communicate the knowledge of
experts through our books, conferences, and web sites. Our books, known
for their animals on the covers, occupy a treasured place on the
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other trademarks are property of their respective owners.

Brian Vincent has posted the latest edition of Kernel Cousin Wine. In this release, discussions on Crypto API, Specmaker issues, and window handling additions.

In this edition: OSKit-Mach network issues, making the GNU Match Reference Manual, and update-rc.d gets moved. Posted by Paul Emsley at kt.zork.net.

Reported at The Register: “The European Parliament published its report into the Echelon spying system last
week in which it concluded it did exist, was against the law and that the UK had a
lot of explaining to do.

We’ve sifted through about 100 of the 194 pages and decided that since no one
had yet to officially admit its existence, you may be interested in how the European
Parliament decided it was definitely out there.”

From the Los Angeles Times: “Disaster-recovery experts said Tuesday that most of
the largest financial services firms routinely back up
data and store it in remote locations, ensuring that the
bulk of it survived the attack.

But organizations that heavily rely on paper
documents and smaller companies that do not
routinely back up their information are vulnerable to
significant losses. Among those that depend on paper
records are attorneys and insurers, both categories
that had substantial operations in the twin towers.”