ZDNet reports that Intel may be the only company to believe that the high-tech industry’s market will soon pick up, after a several month long slump.

Anonymous Reader writes “One major obstacle to a widespread usage of computers in developing countries has been the high cost of hardware and software leading to high levels of software piracy. Although Linux and other open source “free” software has meant that such countries can now afford to use legal software, hardware costs still remain a multiple of the common man’s monthly salary. Against this background, we now have the “Simputer” a low cost computing device from India that promises to usher in a new era of computing for the masses who otherwise would never be able to afford access to computers.
http://freeos.com/articles/4343”

Kelly McNeill writes “When it comes to ‘Code Red,’ Microsoft is winning the media spin battle. Microsoft seems to be riding out the Code Red debacle pretty well so far. By jointly issuing warnings with the government, Microsoft is identifying itself with the solution –perhaps more so than with the problem. Almost without exception, the mainstream media is minimizing Microsoft’s complicity in Code Red through its shoddy security. Instead, everyone is focusing on the need to apply Microsoft’s patch. I’m sure the automakers in Detroit would love to get off so easily the next time there’s a defect in one of their car models.”

Slashdot discusses the true purchasing costs of Linux versus Windows, started by the comment that many Linux users buy the latest distributions at full retail costs as they come out, whereas copies of Windows are generally bought with a computer.

O’Reilly.net reports that “Eric Raymond treated a roomful of attentive geeks to an overview of his latest writing at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention in San Diego, along with a peppering of observations on the Linux kernel, Sendmail, libertarianism, and economics.”

Alan Cox has released Linux kernel 2.4.7-ac4. Changelog and links below.

ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/alan/2.4/

                 Intermediate diffs are available from
                        http://www.bzimage.org

*
*       Treat this one with a bit of care. The ext3 code I trust, the -ac
*       code I trust but the merge of the two could always include suprises
*

2.4.7ac4
o       Fix inode cache shrinkage problems in 2.4.7     (Al Viro)
        | This should cure the problem where it gets 
        | really slow over time. Its not the final fix
o       Make aironet compile again                      (Arjan van de Ven)
o       Fix an incredibly stupid i2o_scsi bug causing   (me)
        crashes with the adaptec 2100 and other stuff
o       Fix memory corruption if using gcc 3 and serial (Thomas Hood)
        probing fails
o       Fix out of memory handling with raid            (Neil Brown)
o       Fix a raid mishandling bug on errors            (Neil Brown)
o       Add promise 20268 software raid card idents     (me)
o       Fix leaktek winview601 problems                 (Leandro Lucarella)
o       Merge ntfs 1.1.16                               (Anton Altaparmakov)
o       Avoid panic when reiserfs attempts to mount     (Nikita Danilov)
        invalid superblock
o       Error rather than panic on journal replay I/O   (Chris Mason)
        error in reiserfs
o       Update atp870u driver                           (Wittman Lee)
o       First batch of superblock handling cleanup      (Al Viro)
o       Restore module oops dumping                     (Kai Germaschewski)
o       NFSD update                                     (Neil Brown)
o       Fix ieee1394 sleep with spinlock held           (Andi Kleen)
o       Add AMD 760-MP to the Agp table                 (me)
o       Rip out zillions of duplicated -ESPIPE          (Christoph Hellwig)
        llseek methods for a common one
o       Fix qlogic direction flag handling in 2.4       (Jeff Andre)
o       Clear inode->i-blocks on deletion in reisefs    (Nikita Danilov)
o       Merge rest of S/390 tty driver fixes            (Ulrich Weigand)
o       Finish adapting S/390 to new softirq code       (Ulrich Weigand)
o       Remove accidental duplicate block in Makefile   (Ulrich Weigand)
o       Update DASD drivers                             (Ulrich Weigand)
o       Further pnpbios fixes                           (Andrey Panin)
o       Switch pnp to use slab not malloc.h     (Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo)
o       Switch parport_cs to slab not malloc.h  (Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo)
o       Further config cleanups                         (Steven Cole)
o       Fix make spec with no .version                  (Keith Owens)
o       Further ipchains fixes                          (Rusty Russell)
o       Add procfs info option for reiserfs stats       (Nikita Danilov)
o       Remove dead code from the reiserfs tree         (Jeff Mahoney)
o       Quota updates                                   (Jan Kara)
o       FreeVxFS leak fixes, allow block sizes != 1024  (Christoph Hellwig)
o       Improve serial_cs reporting                     (Jonathan Corbet)
o       Add v7 fs sanity checks to the sys5 fs code     (Linus Torvalds,
                                Christoph Hellwig, Al Viro, Andries Brouwer)

ZDNet reports that Samsung is planning to make products that use Sony’s ‘Memory Stick’ flash memory format, which the company has up until now not done in spite of having a license to do so.

Kelly McNeill writes “I was cleaning out an old desk the other day and I happened to find some intriguing technology articles from the mid-1990s. Aside from a few laughs at the ridiculous claims of the talking parrots who obediently repeated the Microsoft party line, there were several cases of anti-OS/2 articles full of FUD-raking that were quite amazing.”

Segfault: “”God holds a monopoly on the Universe,” says one of the developers working on FreeVerse, “and He’s
withholding information about His system which could be used by its users to learn more about it.” ‘God’ here does
not mean Linus. It does not mean RMS. It means God. The Supreme Being. Creator Of All Things.

One group of people angry with God’s non-disclosure policy on His source code are physicists. They argue that it
would be much easier to write a Grand Unified Theory if they could only get a peek at the source code. FreeVerse
means to change that. “We’re using no proprietary code,” says another FreeVerse developer, “it’s all done from
scratch.”” Ha.

Ximian is proud to announce the availability of the Beta 2 release of
Ximian Evolution, the integrated personal information management
solution for GNU/Linux and Unix desktops. This is the second of four
milestones on the road to the 1.0 release this fall.

 Now is the time for Evolution to be stress-tested and bug reports to
be submitted.  Remember that prizes will be awarded to those reporting
the nastiest, the thorniest, and the most total bugs.  To report a
bug, visit bugzilla.ximian.com or use the GNOME Bug Report tool,
bug-buddy.

  Every Thursday, between 9am. and 9pm Eastern Standard Time (US),
developers and users of Evolution gather online to find, isolate, and
destroy bugs.  To participate, open your IRC client and visit the
#evobugs channel of irc.gnome.org.

* Availability

  If you use Ximian GNOME, you can install this version by subscribing
to the Ximian Preview channel in Red Carpet (System -> Get Software).

  You can also get the Evolution source code and all the related
tarballs (GtkHTML, GAL, bonobo-conf) here:

    ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/unstable/sources/evolution

  The official web page for Evolution is:

    http://www.ximian.com/apps/evolution.php3

* Changes since Beta 1 (0.11)

Shell:

  - Change the name of the local storage node from "local" to "Local
    Folders".  (Jason)

  - Fixed a problem with invalid URIs crashing the shell.  (Jason)

  - Hide internal folder types (like "vtrash") from user.  (Ettore)

  - Fixed some crashes that could happen when creating folders.
    (Ettore)

  - Fixed the URIs for the installed manuals in the help menu.
    (Ettore)

  - Added a status bar to show components' tasks instead of using
    pop-up progress dialogs.  (Ettore)

  - Other miscellaneous bug and leak fixes.  (Jason, Ettore)

  - Initialize GConf properly when GtkHTML is built with GConf
    support.  (Frederic Crozat)

  - Make the shortcut bar not change the current group when renaming
    it.  (Jason)

Mail:

  - Use new shell ActivityClient interface for progress reporting so
    the ongoing activities appear at the bottom of the window instead 
of
    using a pop-up.  (Michael)

  - "Remember this password" check box added.  (Peter, Jeff)

  - UI for timespan editor cleaned up.  (Peter)

  - UTF8 issues with PGP and mail display addressed.  (Jeff)

  - Translate some more strings.  (Jeff, Zbigniew Chyla)

  - Fix camel_session_*_timeout functions.  (Michael)

  - Fix application/pgp handling.  (Jeff)

  - Fix DnD with no messages selected.  (Jeff)

  - Respect the GTK+ theme when generating the header in the mail
    display.  (Jeff)

  - Make the default date column smaller.  (Peter)

  - Don't display "0 hidden" messages.  (Peter)

  - 'q' now toggles the message (pre)view.  (Peter)

  - Rename the "Date" column to "Sent".  (Peter)

  - Fix saving of passwords (some passwords were being saved and
    loaded under different URI's).  (Jeff)

  - Enter now always open the message in a new window.  (Peter)

  - Gray out unsupported authentication mechanisms.  (Jeff)

  - Fix saving/loading of several preferences.  (Peter, Jason)

  - Overwrite attachment files correctly.  (Jeff)

  - Don't lose the selection when deleting the last message.  (Jason)

  - Improve guessing of which address to use when replying.  (Jeff,
    Jason)

  - If SSL isn't supported, indicate so.  (Peter)

  - Improve handling of NoSelect IMAP folders.  (Peter)

  - Add a browse button for local mailboxes.  (Jason)

  - VTrash handling improvements.  (Jeff, Peter)

  - Display "unsent" in outbox summary.  (Peter)

  - Only have main view folder browsers save view settings.  (Peter)

  - Fixes to POP3 cache.  (Jeff)

  - Handle variants of charset names.  (Jeff)

  - Progress reporting and optimizations for IMAP.  (Dan)

  - Progress reporting for SMTP.  (Michel)

  - Handle unencoded eight-bit headers.  (Jeff)

  - Miscellaneous improvements to Camel backend.  (Michael, Jeff)

  - Several crashes fixed.  (everyone)

Addressbook:

  - Fixed some warnings.  (Chris T.)

  - I18n fixes.  (Zbigniew Chyla)

  - Address quoting in composer bug fixed.  (Jon)

  - Made it so that Other Contacts doesn't show up if you don't have
    LDAP compiled in.  (Jason)

  - Made it so that Other Contacts doesn't show up if you don't have
    any LDAP servers configured.  (Jos Dehaes)

  - General bug fixes.  (Chris T., Jon, Frederic Crozat, Jason,
    JP, Ettore, Chris L.)

  - Some LDAP cleanup.  (Chris T.)

  - Crash fixes.  (Jon, Dan)

  - Work on contact lists.  (Chris T., Jon)

  - Made Contact Editor Save & Close button not active if nothing is
    changed.  (Chris T.)

  - Added accelerators to a few dialogs.  (Taylor Hayward)

  - Made evolution-vcard-importer.c load the file into the correct
    directory.  (Iain)

Calendar & Tasks:

  - Show icons for categories.  (Rodrigo)

  - Multiple selections for cut/copy/paste in task list.  (Rodrigo)

  - Added missing underlined shortcuts for dialogs.  (Taylor)

  - Many timezone-related fixes.  (Damon, Federico)

  - Alarm notification dialogs.  (Federico)

  - iTIP and iMIP ongoing work.  (JP)

  - Consistency & cosmetic fixes for dialogs and menus.  (Damon,
    Federico)

  - You can now create new calendar/tasks folders in the shell.
    (Ettore)

  - Printing fixes.  (Damon)

  - Added a search bar for tasks folders.  (Federico)

  - The task pad in the day view is now filtered as well.  (Federico)

  - Timezone support for conduits.  (JP)

  - General bug fixes.  (Federico, JP, Damon, Rodrigo)

My Evolution:

  - Removed the wipe trackers option.  (Iain)

  - Fix broken links in the Calendar.  (Iain)

  - Added some more German cities.   (Iain)

  - Fixed the New Feed button.  (Iain)

  - Fixed the KDE and Newsforge urls.  (Iain and Jason)