The Midland (Texas) Daily News has a column that Microsoft gets off easier than the oil industry. “So once again, although nothing has yet been proven, the oil and gas industry is being treated as criminal, while the real robber baron — Bill Gates — is given pretty much a free ride.”

Not exactly a surprise, but IDG News Service reports that Usenet is “becoming a breeding ground for some of the Net’s most vicious viruses, says one security firm.”

Kelly McNeill writes, “The U.S. and Japan have reportedly asked Sony to halt plans that would have resulted in the PlayStation 2 (PS2) game console being made in China. The request is due to fears that the game console could be converted to military use, according to published reports. The two governments are pointing to the PlayStation 2’s DVD ability as being possibly helpful to China’s military. Ironically, on the PlayStation Web site, Sony refers to the PlayStation 2 as ‘the ultimate weapon in the universe.'” The column is at osOpinion.

David Irvine writes, Ayrtek are pleased to announce that the Ayrtek shop is now open for business at shop.ayrtek.com.

On sale is the revolutionary new eBoxit suite from Ayrtek in conjunction with MandrakeSoft and IBM. The product offerings include IBM hardware and MandrakeSoft Pro Suite.

This solution will allow the small buiness community to not only purchase a fully functional robust and secure server that will provide all the generic business tools required in today’s economy (email, schedule, document mamangement etc.), but also to install the workstations as well with one of the most powerfull and expandable desktop operating systems avaliable.

No more per user licensing worries or machine crashes; it’s now time to get the work done and for small companies to concentrate on their core business without any IT headaches.

The new eBoxit suite has been awarded IBM ServerProven status and may be purchased and configured ready for plugging in direct from Ayrtek with immediate avaliability and total support.

– by Tina Gasperson –
As first reported on The Dot, KDE sources are now indexed through the LXR (Linux Cross Reference) system. This is different from webcvs, explained Kurt Granroth, one of KDE’s project leaders, because with LXR, every object in each file is cross-referenced to every other object in the database.Webcvs allows users to see how a file has changed historically, but isn’t capable enough to allow users to see where that file is located elsewhere in the KDE platform of applications.

With LXR, all the objects and the methods in the file are hyperlinks, says Granroth. Simply by clicking on one of those links, you’ll get a list of where that file is defined, where it is declared, and where it is referenced, he added.

The LXR project is sloppily written in Perl, according to the project maintainers in a statement at the LXR Web site. The main goal of the project is to “create a versatile cross-referencing tool for relatively large code repositories.” In addition to KDE, FreeBSD and Mozilla also have cross-referenced their sources using LXR’s technology.

Code Catalog is another cross-referencing tool for source code which allows queries of specific API functions, searches for file names, and searches on any word that may appear in any of the indexed source code. The actual CVS project is indexed using the Code Catalog tools, along with about 140 other Open Source projects, including KOffice, MySQL, and xchat.

The new cross-referenced sources are available at lxr.kde.org. The webcvs is located at webcvs.kde.org.

Linux Devices reports on a Linux device capable of running off of human power, that’s to say, an environmentally friendly computer.

Kelly McNeill writes “Back in early ’97, it was with great dismay that I heard rumors suggesting Microsoft’s intentions to split the Web into two tiers — one for rich corporations and another for “the rest.” However, one of the wonderful things about the Web is that, by its nature, it has to function so that everyone has a nearly equal opportunity of exposure, without regard to how much each person has in the bank. Fortunately, Microsoft’s plans came to naught — the resilience of the Web infrastructure proved itself. How fortunate are we that the basic architecture of the Web was wrought without any assistance from a software behemoth. “

Kelly McNeill writes “The inclusion of AMD’s supercomputer, the PRESTO III, is significant for the company, which is engaged in an ongoing speed war with chip market leader Intel. Advanced Micro Devices has sneaked onto the world’s top 500 supercomputer rankings for the first time, though IBM continues to dominate the list with six of the 10 most powerful systems in the world, including the top two. The most powerful supercomputer in the world continues to be IBM’s ASCI White at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where it is engaged in energy research.”

The Standard reports that the file-swapping service, Aimster, is being sued in two courts by AOL and the RIAA.

CNet has a story saying the popularity of Mac OS X its foundation in the Unix operating system have started to “draw the scrutiny of hackers and security
experts. The result: Electronic mailing lists dedicated to security are seeing the first reports of Mac
OS X vulnerabilities.”