Linux PR has a press release from IOGEAR. From the release: “IOGEAR is working with the Linux USB project to deliver the necessary 2.0 driver that will offer users higher performance peripherals and reduction in bandwidth bottlenecks. The Linux USB team is focused on building open-source USB support for the Linux 2.2 and 2.4 systems.”

International Data Group (via PC World) reports that Microsoft has backed down on its plan to reward computer dealers for reporting people who bought Windows-less PCs, calling it “stupid”.

LinuxGram has a brief about Taiwanese Linux house Coventive Technologies getting ready to release a high-availability high-density rack-mount design called the Blade Server.

The new issue of ApacheWeek is out. Among the items: his week saw the public release of Apache 1.3.20, and the release for testing of Apache 2.0.18. It seems likely that the Apache
2.0.18 tarball will be released as “alpha”-level code, due to problems on some Linux platforms, and a mod_dav configuration
issue.

LinuxGram has a brief saying the Embedded Linux Consortium is setting up ELC-Europe, its first international chapter.

EE Times has a story about a manufacturing trade group pushing for special
Windows certification for manufacturing software products.

“The Open Modular Architecture Controls (OMAC) User’s Group … told
Microsoft executives that it wants to ‘lower the bar’ for Windows 2000
certification, thus allowing more factory controls vendors to meet a
common set of requirements. OMAC user certification might also give Windows a leg up on its upstart competitor, Linux.” One Boeing exec is quoted as saying, “If you’re
going to an Intel hardware base, you have a choice between Microsoft and Linux. Windows already has an advantage because some users are concerned about Linux’s security
issues. This [certification] would just make Windows an easier choice.”

From ZDNet: “Some cell phones are so hard to use that most people are abandoning the fancy features
such as e-mail, according to two studies that put the blame on WAP.

More than 90 percent of the handsets on the market contain WAP (wireless application protocol)
programming, a set of standards for cell phones.”

LinuxGram has a short item saying Caldera has decided to outsource sales and marketing of its maintenance and support contracts for
both Linux and Unix.

Caldera has hired Rainmaker Systems Inc, a specialist in web-enabled sales and marketing.

From Gnome.org: “It is that time of year again, flowers bloom, love is in the air, and there is
another GDM release. This one, once again is dedicated to a certain part of
the population. This time it’s dedicated to the users, those poor souls
afflicted with the terrible burden of having to actually use GDM. So this
release improves usability and friendliness in many ways.”

LinuxGram has a brief saying Parabon Computation has added Linux support to its Pioneer compute engine. “The Pioneer engine harnesses idle computing power to process tasks retrieved from Parabon’s Frontier
distributed computing platform, which processes large computational problems by breaking them into
smaller tasks and distributes them to individual computers over the Internet or within an enterprise.”