Kelly McNeill writes “In its latest bid to prevent competitors from gaining exclusive placement on the upcoming Windows XP desktop, Microsoft is tripling the number of icons some computer makers must include. Some see the move as a clear test of the Bush administration’s regulatory will. Original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) that decide to add icons for rival America Online must also prominently place Microsoft’s Windows Media Player, the MSN online service and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer on the new desktop, the Redmond, Washington software giant decreed on Wednesday.”

Bloomberg News reports that “Microsoft and government antitrust enforcers were urged by 122 U.S. House members Thursday to end their antitrust battle as soon as possible on terms that promote competition and innovation in the software industry.”

– by Tina Gasperson –
Sometimes you can consume an entire Web site in just a few minutes. Then there are sites like Softpanorama.org. You could camp there for days and still not get the whole picture. Ever heard of the skeptical approach to programming?The authors of Softpanorama create their own jargon and aren’t afraid to shove it in the face of readers time and time again. And when pieced together jargon doesn’t quite work, cliches fill the bill nicely. You’ll see them make reference to the KISS principle many times as you peruse the page hierarchy.

No Open Source software icon is safe from the swipes of the opinionated content: RMS, ESR, Linus; and Softpanorama has no mercy for professional journalists, who are referred to as “a special kind of prostitute.”

So where’s the useful stuff? Presumably, it’s located in the sections with boring titles like “security,” “Perl,” “stackless Python,” and “open source software development problems.” But I ran out of time before I could get to those sections. I was too busy reading stuff like the “Bad Linux Advocacy FAQ.” There, you’ll learn that some of the frequently asked questions include:

“Is ‘Vulgar Marxism’ a legitimate scientific term?”
“Why can competition with Microsoft be unhealthy for the OSS movement?”
“Why is the success of Linux mainly a manifestation of Unix Renaissance that could happen with or without Linux?”

Sorry, but these sound like questions you’d hear from the press corp at a George W. Bush state of the union address, not interested potential members of the Open Source software community. But it’s a good read, especially if you’re short on chuckles for the week.

Before you leave Softpanorama, click on the link to the Linux Advocacy Guidelines page (which is an offsite link to a page in the Linux Gazette). It’s 27 steps to spreading the good news about Linux, with contributions from none other than Jon ‘maddog’ Hall himself. I like the one that urges us to pretend we are members of a corporation whose CEO is Linus Torvalds. Accordingly, we are expected to refer to “other products” by their proper names, and respect the use of other operating systems.

Oh, and, “Always remember that if you insult or are disrespectful to someone, their negative experience may be shared with many others. If you do offend someone, please try to make amends.” I think some people forgot to read that one.

Kelly McNeill writes “I’m so bored with the pundits that suggest that Linux is failing because it is not moron-friendly. I’m equally tired of hearing how Microsoft is a glowing example of the free market economy at its best. Millions of morons insist on lining up on both sides of the trough to eat slop. So what? The fact of the matter is that there are working alternatives to what you’re currently using. Who cares? Why are so many people so preoccupied with computing acceptance? It’s a pointless endeavor.”

NewsBytes reports that Microsoft’s Hotmail free email service has had a number of member servers infected with the Code Red MS/IIS worm.

Anonymous Reader writes “The IBM alphaWorks team treated LinuxDevices.com to a sneak preview today of a technology demonstration that will be unveiled publicly next week at IBM’s Solutions Developer Conference in San Francisco, and the following week at LinuxWorld (also in San Francisco). Here’s the scoop, complete with picture of the car and its browser-based web-interface. No, they won’t let you start the car and drive it around from across the world — its URL is a closely guarded secret (at the moment).”

O’Reilly Onlamp continues its series on Linux compatibility on BSD for the PowerPC platform, “In part five of his series on porting the Linux compatibility layer to NetBSD’s PPC platform, Emmanuel Dreyfus looks at Linux emulation fixes needed to have a fully functional Linux gdb.”

Reuters: “A Texas Internet provider on Thursday charged AOL Time Warner with
locking out independent providers from its high-speed network, an act that could violate an
agreement with the U.S. government.

In a complaint filed with the Federal Communications Commission, Austin-based Internet service
provider Texas.net said AOL Time Warner had refused to negotiate terms of access to its
high-speed cable-modem network, while at the same time forging agreements
with large, national providers.”

From an AP story posted at News.com: “The Nasdaq Stock Market is changing the high and low prices for June 29 for dozens of its
stocks, an adjustment needed due to a trading outage that day.

The Nasdaq is correcting that day’s high prices for 111 stocks and low prices for 81 stocks.
These changes are important to investors because they could alter a stock’s 52-week high or low
price.”

News.com reports that the National Science Foundation has awarded contracts worth $53 million to build a grid connecting supercomputer clusters across the United States into a single resource called the Distributed Terascale Facility. Among the contractors is IBM, who will build four Linux supercomputing clusters for the project.