The BBC discusses alternatives to bowing into peer pressure and updating your system to the newest version of Windows, suggesting everything from switching to an Open Source operating system to buying a Mac.

The Globe and Mail reports on the pre-launch buying of the .name top level domain (TLD). and the efforts going in to making sure only peope with legitimate claims to a domain can get them.

ZDNet reports that the magazine The Industry Standard will be shut down as its finances dwindle. The next issue will not be published.

Red Herring reports on the progress of the network chip, the programmable processor which is designed to handle network traffic, and the dangers facing it with the industry’s slowdown.

O’Reilly.net discusses “how to reduce the number of servers that your company has to support and how to bring more services together on the servers that remain.”

The sell-off of Metricom’s assets, including its Ricochet high-speed wireless Internet network, was completed in less than three hours. Metricom declared bankruptcy this month, and shut down the Ricochet network last week. Who bought what won’t be known until sometime next week, but word has it that telco giant Verizon showed up. So did a few other interested parties, who were turned away at the door because they couldn’t post a $50,000 deposit for the auction. Full story at News.com.

Microsoft fired back at Sun Microsystems, a week after Sun took out full-page ads asking consumers to “demand that Microsoft include the Java platform in their XP operating system”. Microsoft took issue with the content of that ad, saying that an agreement reached with Sun prohibits Microsoft from using any Java virtual machine developed after 1997. News.com has the story.

Suppose that a single corporation were able to monopolize the computer antivirus market. According to this story at the San Francisco Chronicle, McAfee might soon become that monopoly. The company was recently approvied for US Patent#6,266,774, which describes “a “method and system for securing, managing or optimizing a personal computer,” and that nicludes hardware/software diagnostics, virus scanning, automatic software updates, and just about any other computer-related maintenance tasks. The McAfee case is used as an opener for the story, and later an example of why the U.S. patent system is in dire need of an overhaul.

ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/alan/2.4/ — Intermedia diffs available from http://www.bzimage.org.

*       Small reiserfs changes but otherwise this ought to be a bit more
*       solid. Again still a little experimental. I'll probably do another
*       couple of 2.4.8 based release to get it rock solid before merging 
*       the 2.4.9 stuff that isnt already in -ac.

2.4.8-ac6
o       Pull Linus buffer.c/mem fixes into 2.4.8-ac     (Rik van Riel)
o       Make writeout smoother on zone specific         (Marcelo Tosatti)
        shortages
o       Fix an md oops                                  (Neil Brown)
o       AD1848 isapnp handling                          (Miguel Freitas)
o       sr_ioctl capacity reporting fix                 (Jens Axboe)
o       Starfire update                                 (Ion Badulescu)
o       cmpci update                                    (Carlos Gorges)
o       UDF update, fix delete BUG() trap               (Ben Fennema)
o       Move nmi defines so asm/irq.h isnt required     (Russell King)
o       Add experimental requirement to intermezzo   (Andrzej Krzysztofowicz)
o       Fix missing include                             (Tom Rini)
o       Small eepro100 test updates                     (Arjan van de Ven)
o       Reiserfs transaction tracking update            (Chris Mason)
        | Speeds up O_SYNC and fsync
o       Update vfs_permission, handle root exec         (Christoph Hellwig)
        weirdness
o       First piece of the CyberPro 5050 audio merge    (Peter Wächtler)
o       Tidy i810_audio cornercases of OSS compliance   (Laurent Pinchart)
o       IDE cdrom blacklist updates for DMA             (Matt Domsch)
o       Merge some i810 updates                         (Doug Ledford)
o       Fix bug in i810 device removal                  (me)
        | fortunately nobody yet has multiple ICH audio in one box 8)
o       Natsemi gige driver                             (Ben LaHaise)
o       Allow more I/O addresses on msnd_pinnacle       (Steve Sycamore)
o       Correct sys_tz definition                       (Andi Kleen)
o       Remove unused prototypes from md                (Andi Kleen)
o       Fix flags wrong types in usb                    (Andi Kleen)
o       Fix assorted wrong flags, add x86_64 defines    (Andi Kleen)
o       Fix flags types in i2o                          (Jes Sorensen)
o       Add another vaio byteswap case                  (Stelian Pop)
o       Add devfs support to usb scanner                (Yves Duret)
o       Fix an ess solo warning                         (Christoph Hellwig)
o       Fix flags types in 3ware driver                 (Jes Sorensen)
o       Fix generic serial warnings                     (Christoph Hellwig)
o       Fix flag types in firewire drivers              (Jes Sorensen)
o       Fix flag types in dz serial                     (Jes Sorensen)
o       Extend short name handling in fat based fs's    (OGAWA Hirofumi)
o       Fix flag types in n_r3964                       (Jes Sorensen)
o       x86_64 ifdef hooks for raid and fbcon           (Andi Kleen)

2.4.8-ac5
o       Next batch of IDE driver updates                (Andre Hedrick)
        | qd6580 driver becomes a qd65xx driver
        | 80pin cable detect for serverworks on Dell
        | Mode5 on SIS chipsets
o       Handle ARM mmap were FIRST_USER_PGD_NR is not   (Russell King)
        zero
o       Make the sl82c105.c code common between ARM     (Paul Mackerras)
        and PPC
o       Update cisco hdlc handling in the isdn layer    (Bjoern Zeeb)
o       Add called party number to isdn tty emulation   (Jan Oberlaender,
                                                         Kai Germaschewski)
o       Eicon warning fix                               (Kai Germaschewski)
o       Tiny agp cleanup in severworks code             (Mike Harris)
o       Switch to 2.4.8 nr_free_buffer_pages            (Rik van Riel)
o       Change bootmem bitmap setup                     (Rik van Riel)
o       Unlazy the queue movement when we touch
        inactive cache pages (VM balance assumed this)  (Rik van Riel)
o       Update the orinoco drivers                      (David Gibson)
o       Update natsemi driver (experimentally anyway)   (Tim Hockin)
o       Update hpt366 blacklists                        (Kevin Fleming)
o       Reclaim buffer cache into inactive list when    (Rik van Riel)
        it is too large
o       Documentation tidy ups                          (Steven Cole)
o       Switch map_user_kiobuf to use down_read         (Ben LaHaise)

2.4.8-ac4
o       ADFS date/time computation fix                  (Russell King)
o       Add ALS120 ident to ns558 joystick              (Filip Van Raemdonck)
o       Make Reiserfs endian and alignment safe         (Jeff Mahoney)
        | Fixes IA64 indirect alignment, S390 alignment
        | Big endian
        | Update inode generator
o       Enable input drivers on ARM                     (Russell King)
o       Add intermezzo file system kernel side          (Peter Braam and co)
o       First blocks of ppc64 merge     (Paul Mackerras, Anton Blanchard,
                                         Tom Gall and the IBM PPC 64 team)
o       Fix return value bug in mac nvram driver        
o       Make oom killer kill all threads of a set       (Eric Lammerts)


2.4.8-ac3
o       Update ISDN cvs idents                          (Kai Germaschewski)
o       Update isdn experimental idents                 (Kai Germaschewski)
o       Add Compaq Phoenix 4.06 to irqsafe APM          (Arjan van de Ven)
o       Remove rockridge printk generating too much     (Mikael Pettersson)
        debug output
o       Add a needed include of delay.h                 (Arjan van de Ven)
o       Revert access DAC change                        (me)
        | Breaks in some cases
o       ARM documentation, credits, maintainer updates  (Russell King)
o       Atyfb build fixups                              (Stelian Pop)
o       Configure.help merges                           (Steven Cole)
o       Initial merge of dpt_i2o.c              (Deanna Bonds, Bob Pasteur, 
                                                 Karen White, Mark Salyzyn)
o       Teach i2o_core to skip dpt cards                (me)
o       Sony Pi driver update                           (Stelian Pop)

2.4.8-ac2
o       Fix suspend/resume bugs in eepro100             (Arjan van de Ven)
o       Fix missing spec required delays in PCI PM      (me)
o       Disable PM on eepro100, it breaks even with     (me)
        those fixed
o       Resynchronize Configure.help                    (Steven Cole)
o       Further superblock handling updates             (Al Viro)
o       Fix various GPL misreferences           (Andrzej Krzysztofowicz)
o       Updated A20 gate switching code to handle       (Peter Anvin)
        odd (Olivetti etc) and no legacy boxes
o       Fix expand_stack race                           (Manfred Spraul)
o       Fix a malloc failure path in ipc                (Manfred Spraul)
o       Revert 2.4.8 scsi_lib change (hangs ide-scsi    (Arjan van de Ven)
        on some drives)
o       Fix binfmt elf strlen->strnlen_user             (me)
o       Add additional checking to binfmt_elf           (me)
        | Last two based on Solar Designers 2.2 work
o       Make pnp_bios dock thread exit when it finds    (me)
        docking isnt supported
o       Ext3 file system updates                        (Andrew Morton,
                                                         Stephen Tweedie)
o       Merge common components of uhci drivers         (Brad Hards)
o       Remove crud from media Makefile                 (Keith Owens)
o       Fix build on Alpha                              (David Gilbert)
o       DRM warning/oops fix                            (Arjan van de Ven)
o       Fix i810 audio return funny                     (Laurent Pinchart)
o       Fix ldm partition checking                      (Richard Russon)
o       Agpgart typo fix                                (Mike Harris)
o       Revert emu10k changes in 2.4.8, wait until the  (me)
        maintainers actually have debugged code and
        want an update
o       Fix a compile fail case for the 53c700 driver (Andrzej Krzysztofowicz)
o       ARM core and video updates                      (Russell King)

2.4.8-ac1
o       Merge Linus 2.4.8
        - Skip VM changes for now
o       Fix sblive build problems                       (Rui Sousa)
o       Add Fernando Fuganti to credits                 (Fernando Fuganti)
O       Revert printk return change                     (Andrew Morton)
o       Add drm-4.0 to mod_subdirs                      (Brian Dushaw)
o       Bluez bluetooth updates                         (Maksim Krasnyanskiy)
o       Fix serverworks AGP memory leak                 (Hugh Dickins)
o       Update DRM 4.1 for Alpha AGPGart support        (Jay Estabrook,
                                                         Jeff Hartmann)
o       Fix depca crash on unload                       (Peter Denison)

Version 0.9.2 of this Open Source word processor is now available and ready for download from AbiSource or . Changelog:

These changes are those made since 0.9.1


                 Jared Davies: Interface review.

                 Hubert Figuiere: autoconf patch.

                 Bug fixes (1408, 1823, 1842)

                 Francis Franklin: Fix building of wv and libiconv.

                 Marco Innocenti: Italian localisation update.

                 William Lachance: More work on WordPerfect importer.

                 Dom Lachowicz: Changes resulting from interface review.

                 Paul Rohr: Fix building of wv and libiconv.

                 Martin Sevior: Yet more section break fixes.

                 Alec Wolman: autoconf patch.