This ZDNet News story quite possibly offers the understatement of the year when describing the sad situation of memory chip designer Rambus: “Things are likely to get worse.” While the company was expected to report a small profit today, analysts not that the company faces a dicey future, thanks in no small part to its continuing train wreck of a legal campaign, in which it is suing several large memory makers for patent infringement. Rambus’ legal prospects aren’t very bright: In the U.S., the company’s claims against one rival were dismissed (with the judge upholding the defandant’s counterclaim of fraud), and an Italian court has found in favor of another defendant.

Computer Associates kicked off its annual users’ conference on Tuesday with a first look its new software products, to be rolled out during the coming year. A software package by the name of BrightStor Enterprise Backup will provide backup and recovery software for a variety of platforms, including Solaris and HP-UX. Other platforms, including Linux distributions, will be supported through a suite of client agents. Full story at Network World Fusion.

One of the most surprising no-shows for this year’s MacWorld Expo in New York will be Adobe Systems. Adobe denies any rift between it and Apple, insisting that the decision to be absent from this year’s show was purely financial in nature. Even though the company will not have a booth on the showroom floor, the company will send individual employees to take part in the show. Full story at CNET News.com.

From an AP item posted at CNET News.com: “The technology bubble may have burst on the world’s trading floors, but the
industry’s stock is still rising in the “Concise Oxford Dictionary.”

The latest revision of the dictionary, launched Thursday by Oxford University Press, has such
high-tech words as “MP3” for the music file, “e-book,” for a paperless book and “i-Mode” for
Japan’s wireless Internet service.”

The Register: “One of the largest IRC (Internet Relay Chat) networks, EFNet, has come under a
denial of service attack, according to reports posted on the organisation’s Web site.

According to postings to EFNet.org the attacks started late on Tuesday and have
resulted in a number of organisations, such as Cable & Wireless INS and
University’s disconnecting from the community service. Register readers report
trying to connect to the service for hours only to find nearly all its servers were
down.”

ZDNet News: “A German union is encouraging Hewlett-Packard employees not to go along with a voluntary
cost-cutting plan that asks them to take a pay cut or forfeit vacation days.”

From DebianPlanet: “T.Hirasawa has written to us informing that he has started the debian-i586 project at
SourceForge which aims “to create/produce a tuned/optimised Debian GNU/Linux distribution
for i586 (Pentium class) processors or higher, just like Linux-Mandrake does.” The project is
currently at http://debian-i586.sf.net/.”

“Welcome to the first issue of the EnGarde Secure NewsBrief. This monthly newsletter contains details on EnGarde development, usage tips, news
& reviews pertaining to EnGarde, and information on the latest software released by Guardian Digital for EnGarde.” Read all about it at LinuxSecurity.com

“The xinetd port, versions prior to xinetd-2.3.0, contains a
potentially exploitable buffer overflow in the logging routines.
If xinetd is configured to log the userid of remote clients obtained
via the RFC1413 ident service, a remote user may be able to cause
xinetd to crash by returning a specially-crafted ident response. This
may also potentially execute arbitrary code as the user running
xinetd, normally root.” Full details at LinuxSecurity.com.

Craig Maloney reviews Perl CD Bookshelf 2.0for Slashdot. The series includes five O’Reilly titles, including Perl in a Nutshell by Ellen Siever, Stephen Spainhour, and Nathan Patwardhan, Advanced Perl Programming by Sriram Srinivasan, and Perl for System Administration by David N. Blank-Edelman. Maloney: “This is the most portable way to get five Perl books from here to there. While there are problems with the keyword
search, the master index should be good enough to get you the information you need. If you’ve been considering
getting these books this is the most cost effective way to bring them into your library.”