“One of the two men behind Usenet, Jim Ellis, has died aged 45. He died at his
home in Pennsylvania yesterday morning after losing his battle with non-Hodgkins
lymphoma.” Full story at The Register.

IDG: “A vulnerability exists in the HTTP (Hypertext Transfer
Protocol) server component of the IOS software. By
requesting a particular URL (Universal Resource
Locator) from the server, a malicious user can bypass
the authentication controls and execute commands on
the device at the highest privilege level, level 15, Cisco
said.”

Interactive Week: “While education sites have been tardy in adopting Mac
OS X, Apple Computer Inc. is predicting its new OS will move toward
the head of the class over the next year.

At the National Educational Computing Conference here this week,
Apple Vice President of Education Cheryl Vedoe told MacCentral that
the company is focusing on the task of sowing Mac OS X in K-12.”

Help Net Security: “A vulnerability in the Oracle implementation of the TNS (Transparent Network
Substrate) over Net8 (SQLNet) protocol allows a remote user to mount a denial of
service attack against any Oracle service that relies upon the protocol, including the
TNS Listener, Oracle Name Service and Oracle Connections Manager.”

– by Tina Gasperson –
Erstwhile Ars Digita CEO Philip Greenspun says he is interested in discussing what computer programs can do for human beings, and I guess that’s the truth, because he’s laid out quite a spread explaining what Bill Gates’ software has done for him and how we can emulate the richest man in the world.
Greenspun’s eloquent missive is all about the path to riches, a la the post-modern Napolean and world dominator whom everyone loves to hate, Bill Gates. Phil used a goodly share of bytes instructing the little people in this most useful of lessons entitled, “How To Become as Rich as Bill Gates.” The strange thing is, seems that Mr. Greenspun harbors a mite of resentment against Gates for having the audacity to become so filthily rich, almost as though it were a sin to have so much money. Last time we checked (and trust us, we checked), having copious amounts of money isn’t an automatic bar to entrance through the pearly “gates,” if you will. Oh, we know what you’ll say. You’ll say that it’s not the amount of money he’s managed to rake in, it’s the way that he’s done it that makes him so awful.

That’s precisely what Greenspun is not so subtly hinting at. He makes mention of Gates’ purported tendency to insinuate lesser intelligence on the part of the issuing party when he hears an idea he doesn’t agree with. Hell, that personality quirk describes 90% of the programmers we know — that’s one thing Billy G. definitely doesn’t have a monopoly on. Many geeks are brusque, impolite and lack social skills. Big deal. He also implicitly criticizes Gates for having sprung from wealthy lineage, which is so silly it’s ridiculous. Greenspun also leaves us little doubt about his views on Microsoft’s business practices:

"Conventional (loser) economic wisdom holds that monopolies should spend heavily on research because they are in a
position to capture the fruits of the research. But if you want to become as rich as Bill Gates, you have to remember that it
is cheaper to wait for a small company to come up with something good and then buy them. In the old days, antitrust laws
kept monopolies from buying potential competitors."

Greenspun’s rant is not vitriolic; rather one can imagine him presiding over the paragraphs with an impish grin that says, “hey, look at this — kinda funny, ain’t it?” One eerily prophetic statement reminds us all, “Let the venture capitalists schmooze Wall Street … but don’t let them run your company.” A sage bit of advice that causes one to wonder how and or why Greenspun allowed them have free reign to ruin his company (or couldn’t stop them from having it).

As is the case on most of Greenspun’s pages, this one is illustrated with some of his photographs, which are not only a nice display of a more than adequate talent in composition, but also add an underlying tacit wit to the proceedings.

Greenspun adds reader comments to “How To Become as Rich as Bill Gates.” Responses span the expected spectrum but add a little bit of entertainment value to the read. The “Bill Gates Personal Wealth Clock” is an interesting side note, also put together by Greenspun.

From a column at ZDNet: “I have to wonder whether all the leaps that Linux has made in recent history will wind up being
compared against the slow, steady progress of the BSDs. The BSD-based OSes all look to be doing
better and better at the moment, even without Linux’s marketing fury behind them.”

Announced by Eric S. Raymond: “The Jargon File version 4.3.1 is available at the usual location http://www.tuxedo.org/jargon/.

This is a point release; lots of minor cleanups and corrections,
relatively
few new entries.”

Better late than never, ZDNet reports that Caldera International is “bucking a trend” by charging for each copy of Linux customers use.

PRNewsWire: “Liquid Audio, Inc. (Nasdaq: LQID) today announced that the U.S. Patent Office
has awarded the company a patent (#6,219,634) for its efficient watermark
technique used for distributing secure digital music files. This newly
patented invention covers a technique for embedding and detecting watermark
data within an audio signal in a computationally efficient way. The optimum
level for the watermark signal is determined using mathematical algorithms
that require significantly less processing power than other techniques. This
greatly increases the watermark decoder’s ability to detect the watermark
inside recorded music.”

Wired: “Everything, everywhere, all the time. That’s the promise of many of the 11 digital music subscription services this year. The only problem: You’ll need a second job to afford music online.”