A Reuters item at CNET reports on a newent Gartner study that says the memory chip market segment is in deep trouble. According to the study, revenue of DRAM chips will drop by 55.5 percent to $14 billion for 2001. Last year, global revenue from DRAM chip sales were $31.5 billion. There is light at the end of the tunnel, however, as Gartner is calling for 2002 to be a “transistion year” with increasing sales, and 2003 should give the market segment its strongest growth since the early 1990s.

From BBC News: “A computer science professor has been declared the Sexiest Geek
Alive.

Ellen Spertus, who teaches at Mills College in California, beat off
competition from thousands of entrants and eight other finalists to
the title.

The competition, which emphasises “brains not beauty”, aims to find
the geek who combines a deep knowledge of computers with
non-geeky traits such as social skills and even good looks.”

The Register comments on the continuing debate over the recent Microsoft-funded Gartner study that reported Linux server sales at 8.6 percent of the total market: “…what made us
particularly dubious about the Gartner stats was that they pegged Linux usage in
supercomputer sites at zero right now.

So Lawrence Livermore Labs, Ames, CERN and many other research institutes are
clearly phantom installations.”

The Register: “Bill Gates’ trenchant warning about the Pacman-like qualities of the GPL this week
has come too late. GPL-toting commies are already inside the organisation and
busily subverting Microsoft in order to overthrow the US economy.

Or at least, the Internal Revenue Service – but doesn’t that amount to the same
thing?”

Transmeta took its 40 lashes from Wall Street today, a day after the company had revised its earning forecast for the second quarter of 2001. CNET News.com reports that the chipmaker’s stock dropped by 55 percent in early trading on Thursday, down $7 to $5.60.

An anonymous reader writes: “Traditionally, a lot of avant-garde believers are also highly supportive of the arts and culture. They appreciate, support and fund artists, both from the literary segments and performing arts. Arts and culture, they say, are the expression of our lives. Following this, practitioners of the arts are given free room to explore their creative processes. They get paid to play.

“… there is a forgotten and unrecognized breed of artist which most of society does
not see. He too uses his creative processes every day, generating art which is both
beautiful and functional. His works are used and admired by millions and his style is followed
by others of his ilk. Those not within his inner circle marvel at his art and yet they do not pay
homage to him. He is unsung, unknown and usually disregarded.

He is the network programmer.” Read more at www.alphaque.com“

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

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

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

2.4.5-ac17
o        Sanity check the BIOS tables for bootflag       (me)
o        Update multicast support by devices doc                 (Ralf Baechle)
o        Fix iohi=0 option in parport                    (Tim Waugh)
o        First set of ipt_unclean fixes                  (Rusty Russell)
o        Add YUV420P to the pwc driver                   ('Nemosoft')
         | This is the compromise - its simply an unpacking order option
         | not RGB/YUV

o        Swapfile bugfix                                         (Rik van Riel)
o        Allow readahead to be tuned for big arrays      (Craig Hagan)
o        Add PIRQ router support for the AMD756          (Jhon Caicedo)
o        Fix bootflag bitmasks                           (Dave Jones)
o        Fix lseek limit handling                        (Martin Frey)
o        The joystick/gameport symbol game continued     (Keith Owens)
o        Update i810 tco driver to know about 815,820 ..         (Andrey Panin)
o        Fix missing allocation failure checks in
         drm, mtd, aironet, skfp, scsi, irda             (Chip Turner)
o        Further lvm updates                             (Joe Thornber)
         | Fixes VG_CREATE_OLD problem

Openp2p.com: “HailStorm can best be thought of as an attempt to re-visit the original MS-DOS
strategy: Microsoft writes and owns the basic framework, and third-party
developers write applications to run on top of that framework.”

– by Tina Gasperson –
When I heard about the “Sexiest Geek Alive” contest I was afraid to go look. I’m always intimidated by beauty contests, or anything that might require holding my head just so, or smiling nicely, or having my picture taken. Especially that. Please do not take my picture, I am not photogenic, have a nice day, buh-bye.And the way the site was plugged didn’t help: “Sweet Jesus, yes, there are good-looking geek women…” OK, I thought. Just what I need, a bunch of Christina Aguilera or Britney Spears look-a-likes who are smart too. Maybe I’m not Miss America material, but I’ve always had brains, and everyone knows that extremely beautiful people are also vapid. Right? Except Geena Davis, she’s in Mensa. But there’s always an exception or two to every rule. Anyway, it’s always been nice to claim superiority over Baywatch babes in the brains department.

So I went to the website and saw the obligatory ‘nice-looking woman in a come-hither pose’ and I supposed she could be a geek; I scrolled down and saw a stunning platinum blonde (a la Baywatch) and I thought, wow, is that a geek??? No, she’s Jennifer Glover, Miss California-USA, and she’s just there to crown the winner of the SexiestGeekAlive contest.

I still hadn’t decided to turn tail and run, so the next step was to take a look at the finalists. It was on that page that all my fears were assuaged; lo and behold, these ‘sexiest geeks’ were decidedly uninitimidating in the good-looks department. Not saying they’re ugly… just not rivals for Jennifer Glover’s crown. Not only that, but there were mostly men in the line-up. Trust me, I like men a lot, my husband is one–but, even as a female, if your eye is expecting to see pretty women and all of a sudden a dude is staring at you, it’s a bit of a shock.

Gazing at the list of contenders, I felt much more confident with my own limited supply of external beauty, and decided to take a shot at entering the next contest. There’s an online timed test with questions in mathematics, computers, science, and geek culture, and several essay questions to complete. The questions aren’t too difficult, but they’re certainly geared to more cerebral types, for example:: “Adenine (A), Guanine (G), Cytosine (C) and Thymine (T) collectively make the nucleotide bases of: a)ADD, b) chromosomes, c) Pepsi, d) DNA.

In the computers section one of the questions was: “Which is correct: a) OpenBSD, b) FreeBSD, c) Berkeley BSD, and I can’t remember the fourth potential answer, because I got stuck wondering if this was an ideological query or a technical one. Anyway, one of the essay questions was something about how open source software could contribute to the good of society as opposed to closed, “fee-based” software. There was another essay question asking me to explain the differences between fantasy rings or something. Hey, I think this geek exam may be a bit stereotyped. Don’t they know that not all geeks are into Lord of the Rings?

The prizes: a “state of the art Gateway system;” (wow, can I get that without the OEM copy of Windows?), a “geek cruise” for two, and “a ton of media exposure” (ah yeah, just what all us introverted, eccentric geeks want, lots of attention from strangers).

Big problem with this site: it runs on active server pages, which with some regularity have a crashy-effect on my Netscape browser. Hmm, wonder why? A geek site that runs on such MS-centric code is a bit suspicious to me. Oh, maybe now I’m the one who is operating on stereotypical preconceptions. Could it be that there is such a thing as an MSoftie Geek? But back to the site problem – you can’t go back and start where you left off with the test. If your browser refreshes at all, it takes you to the beginning of the next section and you forfeit all the answers in between. (The site actually has noted this problem in its FAQ, and in the absense of IE, they recommend Opera.)

So unless I go back and re-register with different information, I’ll never know if I was good enough to contend for the Sexiest Geek Alive crown. Maybe you can do it.

Johannes Loxen writes: “The dispute over the name SAMBA has been finally settled. On behalf of the SAMBA team, the company Service Network GmbH (SerNet) paid
a token price of DM 1.00 to the consulting company CMG in
exchange for the trademark rights to the name of the Open Source software
SAMBA.

Moreover, CMG, which owns the trademark “SAMBA” in the category “data
processing” (for a banking software named Standard Anmeldung Meldewesen
Banken), also conferred on SerNet the right to grant sublicenses to other
distributors of the Open Source software SAMBA for the use of this name.

Thanks to the efforts of SerNet’s lawyer, CMG has gone far beyond its
original plan which merely envisioned a waiver of the issue of further
warnings to SAMBA users. The license agreement negotiated by SerNet and CMG
lawyers is only useful for business support providers who want to benefit
from trademark protection. Mere users of the Open Source software are not
affected by the license agreement. The sublicense, that can be ordered from
http://Samba.Sernet.DE/lizenz/,
consists of a short
license confirmation by SerNet and a copy of the license agreement.

Having covered all previous expenses incurred by this issue, SerNet intends
to charge a EUR 10.00 fee for handling expenses. The sublicense itself is
free of charge.

“Open Source software has been part of the existing software landscape for
a long time now and is usually considered as an enrichment rather than a
competitor,” remarks Johannes Loxen (Ph.D.), Managing Director of SerNet.
“From our point of view, it is very important to solve occasional problems
regarding e.g- trademark and copyright issues as simply and legally
unambiguously as possible. The solution found by CMG and SerNet in the
SAMBA case can be considered as a precedent.”

About SerNet:

SerNet (Service Network GmbH) was founded in late 1996 as a service
provider in the field of network security. Open Source software is employed
whereever possible. SerNet promotes the diffusion and utilization of Open
Source in all industrial sectors as well as in public administrations. It
produces and distributes the official CD-ROM of the SAMBA team (an
international group of developers for the Open Source software SAMBA) and
offers support and consulting services for this server software. SerNet is
a member of the Linux association LIVE e.V.”