CNN: “In the research behind an article titled “Executive
Control of Cognitive Processes in Task Switching”
— being published Monday in the American
Psychological Society’s Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance —
Rubenstein and his associates David Meyer, Ph.D., and Jeffrey Evans, Ph.D., determined that for all types of
tasks, subjects lost time when they had to switch from one task to another.”

SecurityFocus: “A new rapidly-spreading Internet worm that exploits the same vulnerability as last month’s Code Red virus emerged over the weekend, and
security experts are warning that it may be more malicious than the original.”

LinuxJournal: “There’s a lot of controversy surrounding LinuxToday.com and the so-called astroturfing. These words should clear a few things up. Be warned, however,
some of the questions I pose at the end are not likely to have easy answers.”

Craig Nelson writes: “Here are links to two stories from the IT section of the UK Observer. The first is a general discussion of the over-reliance on Microsoft in the light of Code Red: http://www.observer.co.uk/business/story/0,6903,53 2756,00.html, and the second is a short article referring to the increasing attraction of Linux: http://www.observer.co.uk/business/story/0,6903,53 2757,00.html“

LogError writes: “Tripwire is easily described as a file integrity tool, meaning it is designed to maintain a database of software packages installed on your system, allowing you to quickly examine and trace changes on your system. Tripwire can prove to be very effective measure against malicious code, sniffers, trojans or any other software post installed to your system. Please notice that Tripwire, effective as it is, cannot help you if your system has been compromised prior to the installation of Tripwire. So, in order to use it properly, I advise you to install it just after you install and set up your system. But, to go one step at the time…” More at Net-security.org.

“This is to inform you that the final tagging for KDE 2.2 has taken
place. Changes that, at this moment, do not have the KDE_2_2_RELEASE tag will not be part of KDE 2.2.”

From: Waldo Bastian 
To: kde-devel@kde.org, kde-core-devel@kde.org, kde-i18n-doc@kde.org
Subject: KDE 2.2 tagged
Date: Sun, 5 Aug 2001 18:26:11 -0700

Hiya,

This is to inform you that the final tagging for KDE 2.2 has taken 
place. Changes that, at this moment, do not have the KDE_2_2_RELEASE tag will not be part of KDE 2.2.


KDE_2_2_BRANCH
==============
For KDE 2.2.1 a KDE_2_2_BRANCH branch has been opened. To update to 
this branch use: cvs update -r KDE_2_2_BRANCH

The KDE 2.2 branch remains frozen, that means that all fixes for KDE
2.2.1 should be posted for review first. The message freeze remains
in effect for this branch as well. The KDE 2.2. branch will be released as KDE 2.2.1 in about a month from now.


HEAD
=====
The HEAD branch will become KDE 3.0 and is open for all your hacking 
pleasure. The HEAD branch is the cvs branch that you get by default.

If you want your application to be part of KDE 3.0, _THIS_ is a good 
time to move it out of kdenonbeta.

As mentioned before, Dirk Mueller will coordinate the KDE 3.0 release. 


THANKS
======
I hereby would like to thank everyone for his or her patience and 
commitment, thanks to you KDE 2.2 seems to have become the stable release that we all wanted it to be.

Thank you very much.

Cheers,
Waldo
-- 
Andrei Sakharov, Exiled 1980-1986, USSR, 
http://www.aip.org/history/sakharov/
Dmitry Sklyarov, Detained 2001-????, USA, http://freesklyarov.org/

– By Grant Gross –

In between all those warnings about the Code Red worm hitting Microsoft servers, some Open Source-related news actually broke out during these slow days of early August. Unfortunately, some of it was bad news, as computer maker Dell’s U.S. operations announced it would no longer ship Linux on desktops and laptops.

Dell, saying the market demand didn’t support pre-installed Red Hat Linux, made the decision about nine months after the company first announced it would ship Linux on desktops, and that’s not the only way the PC giant was acting two-faced about its commitment to Linux. Just a couple of weeks earlier, Dell announced factory-installed Red Hat 7.1 on some servers and workstations, and just days after the decision by Dell’s United States divisions, Dell Australia said it would continue to offer Linux on desktops.

Tux Racer for Windows: Say it ain’t so

More semi-bad news from the camp of Tux Racer, the beloved Linux game. NewsForge news editor Tina Gasperson reported that Tux Racer developer Sunspire Studies will
release a proprietary version of the game for Windows. Sunspire CTO Jasmin Patry says he plans to eventually release a Linux version and eventually GPL the game, but Windows players will get the first shot at the commercial product.

New on the scene

MandrakeSoft raised $3.76 million USD in its initial stock offering this week. Now, Mandrake fans can buy stock in the Marche Libre exchange in Europe. Meanwhile, NewsForge editor in chief Robin Miller suggested that Mandrake and SuSE should team up and dominate the Linux market, at least outside of the United States.

The Mozilla browser project continued crawling to a 1.0 version with its 0.9.3 release this week. However, one report called the new version “branched and buggy.”

In the case of the missing beta, Red Hat denied that a rumored Roswell beta exists. Red Hat people say others are probably mistaking it for the already-existing Rawhide.

Hewlett-Packard announced it is GPLing parts of its Cooltown interconnected computing software project, earning the company kudos for its commitment to Linux.

New in NewsForge

Stories unique to NewsForge this week:

Hardware reviewer Jeff Field runs the AMD Athlon 1.4GHz processor through the paces and finds it a relatively inexpensive way to get top-of-the-line performance.

There’s been lots of news this week about IBM’s new Grid Computing project, but did you know that an Open Source project is behind these powerful computing grids?

The Gnome activity for the 22nd of July through the 28th of July has been published, and is being hosted on sites like lwn for all interested in following the development proccess.

Juraj Bednar writes “I conducted two interviews, one with
Richard Stallman and the second one with Bero from RedHat. They both
talk about Free Software and Open Source development methodology.”

Advogato:
“The last three weeks has seen an incredible outpouring of anger and resistance against the unjust arrest of Dmitry Sklyarov. August and September will see even more activity as the movement to Free Dmitry continues to build up force. Dmitry Sklyarov is a Russian Ph.D. student researching security and copy protection in electronic book formats like Adobe’s eBook and encrypted PDF. He was arrested by the FBI on July 16th in Las Vegas at the behest of Adobe for alleged violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 (DMCA).”