Kelly mcNeill writes “Motorola scientists say they have designed a procedure for shrinking chips from today’s 157 nanometer width to less than 100 nanometers wide, enabling more circuitry to be added to conventional-size microchips. The announcement comes as chipmakers search for ways to extend the lifespan of photolithography, the technology used to create microchips, which is expected to reach its limit by the next decade.”

From Linux Insider: “One of the dirty little secrets of the publishing world is that the vast majority of Linux books are written using Word for Windows.”

From ZDNet: “Turbolinux Inc. Thursday announced new proprietary software, PowerCockpit, which makes it easier for users to automatically deploy and provision their Linux servers and enables the instant reconfiguration of computing systems.”

Kelly McNeill writes “Twice this month, Internet security consultant Jeremiah Grossman, 24, poked gaping security holes in Hotmail and Passport, Microsoft’s free Web-based e-mail and identity-authentication services. It took just three lines of code for Grossman to breach Hotmail filters and access Passport ID and credit card data. The second time it took just one line. And the former Yahoo security auditor says he could do it again given 8 hours.”

SecurityFocus: “It’s incredible that in this day and age some of the most popular security products, products that are marketed as
protecting you from the evils of computers, are so badly designed.

Case in point: The many antivirus products that failed to detect and stop the highly effective SirCam worm, even
when updated with the latest signatures and when configured correctly.”

JigSaw writes “A brand new GUI environment was released, called Qube, by Interactive Studio, which can be installed on top of DOS, Linux or any other text-based OS and it is aiming to replace QT/Embedded and even XFree for the desktop and the embedded market. First version supports DOS (can be ran under Win9x/ME as well) while a Linux version is underway and a priority for the company. The main person behind the project is Michal Stencl, who is well known in the demoscene and also for creating the SEAL GUI Environment for FreeDOS. The interview with Michal over at OSNews shades light on Qube, its design and goals while the article also features two screenshots of the (slick I must say) UI.”

Kelly McNeill writes “Linux hasn’t really moved its desktop presence much over the past six to eight months. I believe we have been going about evangelizing the transition the wrong way. Many are mistakenly highlighting the wrong aspects of Linux, and trying to sell promises that simply aren’t true yet. I think it’s time for the open source operating system to take a revised path. We all know it’s free, reliable and robust, but for greater widespread adoption, the most oft-asked question from most consumers needs to be addressed: “What can I do with it?””

The Register: “The Federal Communications Commission has decided it doesn’t like wireless
devices from Palm and Handspring after all, and officially withdrawn its approval.

Not that is has anything to do with the kit itself. Rather, both companies asked the
FCC to do so. The reason? To get details of the Palm i705, and Handspring Treo
k180 and g180 pulled from its public Web site.”

Reuters: “TiVo, which offers digital video recording service, reported on Thursday a
narrower-than-expected loss for its second quarter.

The company’s revenue also rose by 28 percent from the previous quarter, boosted by subscriber
growth.

San Jose, Calif.-based TiVo reported a loss of $34.5 million, or 82 cents a share, in the quarter,
compared with a loss of $38.9 million, or $1.09 a share, in the same period last year.

A consensus of analysts were expecting a loss of 94 cents per share, according to First Call.”

ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/alan/linux-2.4/ – Intermediate diffs are available from http://www.bzimage.org.

2.4.9-ac5
o       Make pae i386 compile again                     (Russell King)
o       Add MODULE_LICENSE tagging                      (me)
o       Clean up aztcd (phase 1)                        (me)
o       Fix aztcd subchannel error reporting bug        (me)
o       Reformat cdu31a pending cleanups                (me)
o       Reformat cm206 pending cleanups                 (me)
o       Reformat gscd pending cleanups                  (me)
o       Reformat isp16 pending cleanups                 (me)
o       Reformat sjcd pending cleanups                  (me)
o       Reformat tpqic02 pending cleanups               (me)
o       Add tags in drivers upto and including drivers/char/*
        | lots more to add yet...
o       pl2303 oops fix                                 (Greg Kroah-Hartmann)
o       Sony clie updates for clie OS 4.0               (Greg Kroah-Hartmann)
o       Fix elf loader for prelink binaries             (Jakub Jelinek)
o       Make xconfig fix                                (Robert Love)
o       Add reparent_to_init, fix pnp and 8139 zombies  (Andrew Morton)
o       Update Configure.help                           (Steven Cole)

2.4.9-ac4
o       ns83820 driver fixes and updates                (Ben LaHaise)
o       Configure.help updates                          (Steven Cole)
o       Add generic pgtable_cache_init()                (Russell King)
        | and remove pae ifdefs from init/main.c
o       Fix X.75 with new hisax drivers and an isdn     (Kai Germaschewski)
        disconnect race
o       Remove now defunct directory offset cast        (me)
o       Make several vm behaviours tunable for now      (Rik van Riel)
        | This is so we can study behaviour patterns not for
        | the long term
o       Merge an additional ide-floppy fix              (Sam Varshavchik)
        | Fixed the ide floppy I/O error funny on some drives
o       Pull dac/adc rate setting into ac97_codec.c     (me)
o       Update mips64 makefiles                         (Ralf Baechle)
o       Complete the missing bits of the proc           (Ralf Baechle)
        infrastructure using constant HZ to userspace
        | This has been partial for a long time, with the mips tree
        | it actually needs to be completed...
o       Avoid oops in rivafb when using 15bit depth     (Steve DuChene)
        on riva128
o       Indent seagate scsi into linux format           (me)
        | Changes pending so do this in two steps..
o       pl2303 updates                                  (Greg Kroah-Hartmann)
o       Orinoco update                                  (David Gibson)
o       IRQ stack value fix                             (John Byrne)
o       Enable DMA on 20268R                            (Zygo Blaxell)
o       Add missing -EFAULT return to se401             (Pavel Machek)
o       Voodoo 1/2 frame buffer console                 (Ghozlane Toumi)
o       Update cache size reporting errata              (Dave Jones)
o       Fix nasty oops and deadlock in i810_audio       (me)

2.4.9-ac3
o       Fix config glitch in drivers/video/Config.in    (Steven Cole)
o       Kaweth endian fixes                             (Brad Hards)
o       Update the MPT fusion drivers                   (Steve Ralston)
o       Possible floppy probe fix                       (Paul Gortmaker)
o       Add the KT266 agp to the table                  (Kris Kersey)
o       Start convering ia32 and x86_64 mtrr code       (Dave Jones)
o       Account ramdisk in out of memory code           (Russell King)
o       Possible fix for cardbus allocation failures    (Andreas Bombe)
o       Clean up other cases of const initdata          (Dave Jones)
o       Update the keyboard rate code to be more        (Dave Miller)
        flexible (needed for sparc)
o       Configure.help fixes                            (Steven Cole)
o       Pegasus USB driver fixes                        (Petko Manolov)
o       Fix i810 audio pops on speed changes            (Scott Herod)
o       GPIO driver for the ITE board                   (Hai-Pao Fan)
o       Philips Nino port update                (Steven Hill, Pavel Machek)

2.4.9-ac2
o       Last small bits of the PPC merge                (Paul Mackerras)
o       Fix compile bugs in airport driver              (David Gibson)
o       ITE8172 ide updates                             (Steve L)
o       Add i2c drivers for the ITE board               (Hai-Pao Fan)
o       AC97 register naming fix                        (Ralf Baechle)
o       TI 3912 serial driver                   (Harald Koerfgen, Jim Pick,
                                                         Steven Hill)
o       ITE general updates                             (P Popov)
o       Remove double init of SGI streamable device     (Ralf Baechle)
o       Update SGI indy drivers                         (Ralf Baechle)
o       Qtronix keyboard driver updates                 (P Popov)
o       Add tx3192 frame buffer support                 (Steven Hill)
o       MIPS frame buffer updates                       (Ralf Baechle)
o       Move vino.h into driver directory               (Ralf Baechle)
o       Ocelot updates                  (Jun Sun, G Lonnon, S Kranz, Steve J)
o       DDB5 updates                                    (Jun Sun)
o       MIPS jazz update                                (Ralf Baechle)
o       SGI wd33c93 update                              (Ralf Baechle)
o       Baget updates                                   (Ralf Baechle)
o       SNI updates                                     (Ralf Baechle)
o       Alchemy Au1000 support                          (P Popov)
o       MIPS eval board updates         (Ralf Baechle, Carsten Langgaard)
o       Update Decstation serial support                (Maciej W. Rozycki)
o       NEC Vrc5477 audio driver                        (Steve L)
o       General MIPS32 updates          (Jun Sun, Ralf Baechle, Matt Porter,
                                         Kevin Kissell, Carsten Langgaard,
                                         Jan-Benedict Glaw)
o       MIPS scsi updates                               (Ralf Baechle)
o       Notifier signal oops fix                (Benjamin Herrenschmidt)

2.4.9-ac1
o       Merge the fat and iso changes from 2.4.9
o       Merge the sunrpc changes from 2.4.9
o       Merge (hopefully correctly) the nfs changes
o       Switch to the 2.4.9 emu10k1 driver
o       Merge vfs directory type changes
o       Merge other oddments
        - This leaves min/max and the vm/buffer changes
          both of which are pretty dubious anyway
o       lock_kiovec page unwind fix                     (Velizar B)
o       do_swap_page recheck pte before failing         (Linus, Jeremy Linton)
o       do_swap_page doesn't mkwrite when deleting      (Linus)
        | From 2.4.9 with extra comments etc            (Hugh Dickins)