Sarien has reached development snapshot 20019090; source can be downloaded at Sarien’s SourceForge site. About Sarien: “Sarien is an open source, portable implementation of the Sierra
On-Line Adventure Game Interpreter (AGI). It is currently under
development; no production-quality packages have been released.
Sarien is able to execute Sierra On-Line AGI games at different
levels of playability. Leisure Suit Larry, King’s Quest II and
Mixed-Up Mother Gooose are some of the games that have been
played from beginning to end with Sarien.

Sarien has features not present in the original Sierra On-Line
interpreter. These extra functionalities include dictionary and picture
viewers, three-channel PCM sound, support to AGDS (a Russian
AGI clone) games and a “Quake console” with integrated debugger.”

Commentary from Eben Moglen: “It was hardly a surprise. George W. Bush told us during the campaign that he thought US v.
Microsoft shouldn’t have been brought in the first place; Al Gore, who could hardly say that,
limited himself to making a campaign appearance at Microsoft’s Redmond headquarters. But
what was surprising about this past week’s announcement was that the decision had become so
easy for the politicians who really made it. The coalition of “campaign contributors” that had
stiffened the Clinton Administration’s spine against Microsoft in the first place had completely
changed sides.”

Paul Emsley posts the latest edition of Kernel Cousin Debian Hurd. Discussions include journalling filesystems, status of OSKit-Mach, and readable debug boot messages.

The Register: “Compaq’s iPaq PocketPC development team seems to be so unhappy with the
upcoming merger with Hewlett-Packard, they have en masse offered their services
to the highest bidder on the online job search site The Vault.

Under the headline “iPaq PPC Engineering Team for Hire”, the “core iPaq
engineering team” says it is “seeking new opportunities and want to design the next
winning PPC for your company. This team is responsible for the original iPaq and
other designs that are yet to be released. Our team will vault your company ahead
of its competitors.”

“Consumer demand for personal computers hit a
four-year low in July, a new survey shows,
casting additional doubt on prospects for even a
modest recovery in the market this fall, Monday’s
Wall Street Journal reported.

The survey of 2,500 U.S. households, to be
released today by the San Francisco research
firm Odyssey, found that only 7% of respondents
said that they were extremely likely to purchase
a PC in the next six months, down from 10% in
January and the lowest level since July 1997.” Read the full report at The Industry Standard.

Reported at The Register: “Cisco’s Intrusion Detection System (IDS)is not the only technology that fails to
protect ISS Web servers against stealth unicode attacks.

An advisory by eEye Digital Security, reports that network and server sensors from
ISS, Dragon Sensor 4.x, Snort (prior to version 1.8.1) and components of Cisco
Secure IDS are affected by the issue. Symantec and Network Associates have
stated that their products are not vulnerable.”

Reported at The Industry Standard: “A recovery in demand for technology goods is
not expected before the second quarter of next
year, according to the latest survey of chief
information officers by Merrill Lynch.

The survey of 65 CIOs, 50 in the U.S. and 15 in
Europe, found IT spending is expected to grow
2.6 percent this year, increasing slightly to a rate
of 4.6 percent in 2002.”

Wall Street Journal (via ZDNet): “Microsoft is drafting a settlement proposal for a new round of talks with
the government this week, aimed at resolving the landmark antitrust suit against it,
lawyers close to the case said.

The overture comes in response to the government’s decision last week to narrow legal issues in
the case and not seek a breakup. It will be Microsoft’s first substantive effort to settle since a
June 28 ruling by the federal appeals court here that upheld the core of the government’s case.
Settlement efforts have failed and the government is continuing to draft a broad set of restrictions
on Microsoft’s business conduct that it will ask a federal court to impose.”

Reuters: “Six of seven new Internet suffixes will get the green light to join
the likes of .com online by November, a top official of the Internet’s standards-setting
body says.

The launches would bring to a close a yearlong process beset by lawsuits, allegations of
trademark fraud, and thousand-page contracts.

Louis Touton, staff counsel for the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers
(ICANN), acknowledged that the slow pace of progress on .pro, .museum, .coop and four other
new domains have frustrated many who would have liked to see the domains made available to
Internet surfers earlier.”

Kelly McNeill writes “Contrary to popular belief, Richard Stallman is actually one of the world’s biggest advocates of copyright laws. Without copyright laws to enforce the GNU General Public License (GPL) or any other license for that matter, all open source code would be in the public domain, free for the taking. Section Five of the GNU GPL says, “You are not required to accept this License … However, nothing else grants you permission to modify or distribute the Program or its derivative works.” Well, not quite, Rich.”