Anonymous Reader writes “http://penguinppc.org/articles/aploss

penguinppc.org weighs in on Apple’s record with Linux and OSS.”

Kelly McNeill writes, “What upsets me is when I see Linux software developers actually striving to attain the very same goal that drove them away from Microsoft in the first place. Take a look at KDE and GNOME. While both have a pile of applications available, KDE applications won’t work perfectly with GNOME, and vice versa. In effect, what we are heading towards is two ‘bundled’ application suites.
Why would anyone want to switch from Windows to either of these two desktop environments? If I was like most users, I sure wouldn’t. KDE and Gnome incompatibilities give usersmany of the problems that drive us away from Windows.” The column is at osOpinion.

TheStandard: “Former White House press secretary Joe
Lockhart ended his brief high-tech career last
week, departing from his role as Oracle’s
public-relations director after only six months on
the job.

Lockhart tired of commuting to Silicon Valley
each week from the Washington, D.C., area,
where his wife and daughter still live, an Oracle
spokeswoman said.”

From a Bloomberg item at CNET News.com: “Microsoft’s Xbox games console is doomed, Ken Kutaragi, president of Sony Computer
Entertainment, told the Financial Times. “Microsoft was finished before it even got started,”
Kutaragi said. “They have no games” and “retailers in the U.S. are already disappointed.””

Think you get a lot of junk e-mail? The FTC, who currently receives over 17,000 pieces of spam per day, expects to receive almost half a billion pieces of spam if current anti-spam legislation becomes law. Full story at CNET News.com.

CNET News.com: “The company that manages databases for the Internet’s most popular names
has shut down an e-mail discussion list that had turned into a forum for its critics.

VeriSign made the announcement on the “Domain Policy” mailing list Thursday. The decision was
effective immediately.

VeriSign spokesman Brian O’Shaughnessy said the closure had nothing to do with the criticisms.
If that had been the case, he said, VeriSign would have shut down the list long ago.”

“In terms of going through the code audit almost all the sound drivers still
need fixing to lock against format changes during a read/write. Poll
creating
and starting a buffer as write does and also mmap during write, write
during
an mmap.” Read on for the changelog:

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

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


This one just fixes the first chunk of stuff the Stanford checker found and
a couple of other small bits.

2.4.4-ac17
o       Fix double free in new cciss                    (me)
o       Fix i2o_pci double free on error                (me)
o       Fix use after free in iphase (two of)           (me)
o       Fix use after free in cs4281                    (me)
o       Fix use after free in lapbether                 (me)
o       Fix use after free in bpqether                  (me)
o       Fix use after free in edgeport                  (me)
o       Fix memory leak in cciss                        (me)
o       Fix memory leak in failed vxfs mounts           (me)
o       Fix memory leak in failed cmsfs mounts          (me)
o       Fix memory leak on error in ixj                 (me)
o       Fix memory leak in lmc                          (me)
o       Fix memory leak in isdnppp                      (me)
o       Fix memory leak in wanrouter                    (me)
o       Fix memory leak on error in jffs                (me)
o       Fix reference to invalid memory in rio          (me)
o       Fix leaks in xircom driver (and update)         (Arjan van de Ven)
        | All of the above found by the stanford checking team
        | who [or whose tools] effectively did the work for us
o       Fix maestro bug from merge                      (Marcus Meissner)

From Slashdot: “The old adage ‘The only safe computer is locked in a room and
unplugged from the Internet’ proves false. According to a recent security report about
Logitech wireless mice and keyboards, an attacker can sit a hundred feet or more from your
computer and ‘sniff’ the data from your keyboard and mouse. Scary.”

Software Development Online: “Apache, Cocoon and Linux aren’t just useful programs, they’re best-of-breed. Some of the
more intemperate free software boosters, intoxicated by this success, claim that proprietary
software is obsolete and that it’s immoral to keep your source code secret. Well, maybe.”

Bisoños Usuarios de Linux de Mallorca y Alrededores has posted the results of their benchmark tests for Ext2, ReiserFS, and XFS, nothing that there’s no clear winner between the three.