BSDToday: “The BSDCon 2002 Program Committee invites you to contribute your ideas, proposals and papers for the invited talks program, refereed papers track, and Work-in-Progress Reports related to BSD-derived systems and the Open Source world.”

“Linux is an important part of the computing landscape. Important because open standards matter. Important
because it creates competition and a looming threat to
Microsoft. Important because it gives a large number of
geeks and wonks a religion to belong to–complete with
a patriarch.

Religion is a good thing, I believe, right up to the moment it
makes a fool out of you. And a good many Linux?what’s
the term? Proponents? Advocates? No, zealots!–yes, a
good many Linux zealots make fools of themselves.” More at ZDNET.

ZDNET: “While some familiar
with the breach said
hackers came close to
gaining access to key
parts of the system and
could have interrupted
the movement of
electricity around the
power-hungry state,
officials at Cal-ISO
said the grid was not
threatened and that
they had remedied the
situation.”

– By Jeff Field –
Crucial Technology, a division of Micron Semiconductor Products, is a seller of RAM upgrades for PCs. Recently, the company made a hefty 17-gigabyte memory donation to Linux.org in order to help the site upgrade capacity on its servers. We contacted Sean Spence, Crucial’s public relations manager, to find out more.
1.Why did Crucial decide to donate the memory to Linux.org?

“Linux.org is a very successful site, and their servers did not have nearly
enough memory to handle all the work they were doing. So someone from the
site requested memory in return for advertising. Linux users are pretty
savvy, and can be vocal if they want something, so we suggested that Crucial
could provide the memory if their members asked us to.

“Linux.org e-mailed about 75,000 members, asking that they send us messages
supporting the contribution. In about five days we were hit with nearly
6,000 responses from all over the world — exceeding our expectations by
about 200%. These folks obviously understood how badly the memory was needed
and they wanted us to provide it. This was a great opportunity for Crucial
to make thousands of computer users happy and do some good at the same time.”

2. What is Crucial’s view of Linux and Linux users, both on their own and as
a market for your products?

“Linux users are great customers for us because they are typically very
tech-savvy, which makes them more likely to understand the value of a memory
upgrade. Plus, Linux users tend to believe strongly in sharing what they
know. That’s the whole point of Linux, right? So when Linux users understand
that a memory upgrade is the cheapest and easiest way to boost the
performance of their computers, they share that information with all kinds
of people.”

3.Does Crucial use Linux in house for any purposes?

“We don’t, but a lot of our customers do, so we’re pretty excited to be a
small part of that community.”

4.You say that Linux.org asked its users to e-mail you — did you set this
up ahead of time with Linux.org, or were you not expecting to get these
e-mails?

“We suggested the program to Linux.org and helped them put it together. We
helped them write the message they sent to users, as well as the message
that appeared on the Linux.org Web site. We had no idea the response would
be so great, though. We were hoping to receive 2,000 responses, and were
ecstatic to hear from nearly 6,000 Linux users.”

5.Has Crucial donated memory to projects before? If so, to what
organizations?

“We have donated memory to a wide variety of organizations, from
organizations like Linux.org, to schools, to charities.”

6.RAM has dropped greatly in price as of late, due to this do you find
users purchasing more of it?

“Sales have skyrocketed. In fact, the last week in May we sold more memory than

than any other week
in Crucial’s history.”

7. Crucial/Micron RAM has been the “crème de la crème” as far as RAM is
concerned — perhaps not for having the cheapest RAM, though prices now
are
more than reasonable, but for having very reliable RAM, What does
Crucial
do/plan to do to keep up this reputation?

“Crucial’s philosophy is to provide what the market demands — and to provide
the highest quality and one of the most competitive prices on the market.
That will not change. Right now, it looks like DDR may be the next big thing
in memory …”

ZDNet reports that the University of Los Andes in Colombia, which manages the ‘.co’ top-level domain, is taking bids from companies to take the domain to market, to help fund the university.

The BBC reports that civil liberty groups are warning of the privacy implications of the 26th draft of the European cyber-crime treaty set to be voted on next week.

ZDNet reports that business leaders are warning of the consequences of alternative top-level domains, such as .web, being circulated by New.net as an alternative to ICANN’s slow bureaucracy for new TLDs.

MSNBC reports on fighting spam with SpamCop, a utility to help identify the source of spam, and report it to the administrator of the system used to send out the spam.

Dallas News reports that a flood in Southeastern Texas knocked out Pulse, a large non-profit funds transaction company, which disabled 175,000 ATMs across 22 US states.

IDG reports that Computer Associates International and Aladdin Knowledge Systems have stopped distributing their antivirus software for free.