Microsoft may have dodged the breakup bullet in the United States (for now), but a European Commission investigation of the company could produce a less desireable outcome. European governments have less of a burden than their U.S. counterparts when proving economic or competitive harm, and one of the two EC investigations has resulted in a “Statement of Objections” which, as this Interactive Week story says, often leads to an adverse opinion against a company.

Anonymous Reader writes “LinuxEmu has done an interview with the gnuboy coder Laguna. He is talking about the past, novadays and present state of his masterpiece. Laguna is also talking about the open source,
lamers requesting roms and of course our beloved OS Linux. The interview is available here:
http://linuxemu.retrofaction.com/gnuboy-interview. html.

Intel’s latest Pentium 4 chips are now availaible in 1.6 and 1.8GHz flavors; Intel now offers its P4 family of chips in 100MHz increments from 1.3 to 1.8GHz. The company says users can expect a 3 to 7 percent gain in performance from each increasingly faster chip, however, benchmarks show that even the new 1.7GHz P4 still trails behind AMD’s 1.33 GHz AMD Athlon chips in some areas. Story from PC World.

The Gramm-Leach-Billey Act goes into effect this Sunday July 8, and a few thousand U.S.-based Web sites could be in hot water for non-compliance with the act’s new disclosure terms. A financial reform measure, Gramm-Leach-Billey includes terms that address how companies collect and share non-public personal information with third parties, and requires companies to offer consumers an “opt-out” of passing personal information along to third parties. Full story at ZDNet News.

Looking for truly innovative devices at this years’ TechXNY show was akin to searching for a needle in a haystack. As this San Jose Mercury story at the Chicago Tribune says, such shows are “packed with gee-whiz products we can really do without.” Among the few items that impressed the correspondents the most were software that transforms Motorola pagers into e-mail devices, Compaq’s ultralight, ultrathin Evo N200 laptop, and color laser printers priced for the consumer market.

LinuxPR: “Kmud is a free graphical MUD client for Linux and other Unix platforms running
KDE. It is an useful and easy to use program for all people who want a nice
graphical interface instead of a simple telnet for playing MUDs. Kmud is published
under the GNU General Public License.”

LinuxPR press release: “LogOn Technology Transfer recently concluded a successful pan European
Linux@work series that stopped in 9 cities and attracted more than 2,500
participants.

The Linux@work events were designed for IT professionals as well as for the
Linux community members and focused on real solutions for putting Linux to work
in business. Each event was featuring a one-day-conference and an exhibiton
area. Exhibitors demonstrated the latest in products and services for Linux.”

LinuxPlanet’s Brian Proffitt writes: “AbiWord, for good or ill, has clearly positioned itself in terms of functionality against the Microsoft Word product. Not that there’s
anything wrong with that. After six years of putzing around with different word processors, I have generally found that these
applications fall into one of three groups: Word-derivatives, WordPerfect-derivatives, and Everything Else. AbiWord falls into
this first group. It is, in this stage of its life, the Dr. Fresh to Word’s Dr. Pepper.

This may not be something we want to hear, since All Things Microsoft are Evil, blah, blah, blah. But, I figure if AbiWord wants to
be in this position, then its only fair to hold it up to the product its trying to emulate.”

Interactive Week highlights the latest anti-Open Source silliness from Microsoft — a company, as one observer is quoted as saying, “seems to be going ahead as if antitrust doesn’t exist and won’t affect them.” Read all about the licensing changes to Microsoft’s Mobile Internet Toolkit that forbid the use of “viral” software and operating systems, and the new look-but-don’t-touch program of “shared source” that is supposed to prove that Windows isn’t closed source. Or something like that.

– By Jeff Field –

Many of the Linux users I know, myself included, are fans of classic gaming such as Nintendo, Super Nintendo, and classic arcade games. For the console fans among us, there are a
plethora of emulators out there, for every system imaginable, including Snes9x and RockNES. The chief complaint seems to be
that, even though the games themselves may function perfectly, it just doesn’t feel right to use a keyboard, or even a
gamepad designed for a PC. Now, there appears to be a solution to this input problem, and it even works on Linux!
Console input devices have followed a steady evolution, with the most popular systems playing off a similar theme. The SNES controller was an NES controller with four additional buttons. The original
Playstation controller was just an SNES controller with grips and a better feel about it, and the newest PlayStation 2
controller is the same thing with a small joystick (or “analog stick”). The PlayStation
controller has everything you need — enough buttons, a comfortable size, a familiar design, and ready availability (and cheaply, if
you find a used one somewhere, such as a local Funcoland). The only
problem is, how to hook it up to a PC?

Confronted with this problem, I went on a search. I knew someone must be marketing the converter necessary to
use the PlayStation controller on a PC. I found just such aPSX->USB converter at
Easybuy2000.com, a vendor I had not heard of. But for $12.50, I figured I’d take a chance, and see what
happened.

A few days later, the unit arrived, with a plain
(unlabeled) floppy disk loaded with Windows drivers. The unit itself is simply a tiny box
with circuitry to talk to USB, a PlayStation connector on one end, and a USB connector on the
other. Physical installation is as simple as plugging the device in, and plugging the controller into it. It accepts all
PlayStation-compatible controllers from the original gamepad to the latest PlayStation 2 Dual Analog Shock 2
controller.

Once I had it installed, it was a matter of getting the proper drivers — in this case, I had to get joystick/USB input
installed and working. I compiled the input and joydev modules under input core support, and made sure USB human interface devices were supported. I compiled the modules (make modules; make modules_install) and then loaded them with insmod.
Once you do this, your joysticks are assigned names like /dev/input/js0 through js31. The easiest way to tell if everything
is working at this point is to type cat /dev/input/js0, then press buttons on the controller. This should cause all
sorts of text to scroll down the screen. If you get results from this, the converter is set up, and you need only set up whatever game
you want to use with the device to see it at /dev/input/js0.

Conclusion
I have never been satisfied with the design of gaming controllers for the PC — they never seemed to fit quite right,
and their directional pads never worked right. The Legend of Zelda is tough to play when Link wants to go up and to the
left instead of just up.

The PlayStation controller is the best controller you can get — Sony has put a lot of time into
making them, as did Nintendo in the designs that inspired Sony. With the analog controls for things like flight
simulators or other flying games, and a D-pad for those old, but great, NES and SNES games, this is the ideal choice for gamers
today. At only $12.50, it is a steal, especially when you can get a used PlayStation controller for as low as $5. I recommend getting the newer analog models, which are still cheaper than some higher-end PC controllers that might not function as well. If you are in the market for a controller to use with emulators, or
any game for that matter, check out the PSX adapter, available at EasyBuy2000.com.