joabj writes “ZD Net has a story on how Microsoft’s developer base for Visual Basic may be eroding. A March survey found that the use of VB slipped in the last year by almost 20 percent for programmers using multiple languages–from 62 to 46 percent. A quote from one programmer summed up why this may so: “They have changed Visual Basic to make it more like C++, which begs the question: Why don’t we just use C++ or Delphi? Or Java?””

Chicago Tribune: “For independent DSL providers, the reality has fallen far short of the
promise. Wall Street lost confidence. Plans to create nationwide
networks were scaled back. Many independents are going broke.

Emerging dominant in the DSL market are the century-old phone
companies against whom complaints had piled up for shoddy service
and long installation waits.”

Help Net Security: “It is possible to insert a pointer into a linked list that will allow
overwriting of any value in memory that is followed by 4 null characters
(a null pointer). one such memory location is the last entry on the GOT
(global offset table). When another item is added to the linked list, the
address of the data (a filename) is inserted over the last value,
effectively redefining the function to the code represented by the
filename.”

Slashdot: “AnandTech has posted a story about AMD’s new Athlon 4
processor and also included some information about Silicon on Insulator
transistors in their article. SOI technology has been used by IBM in recent
history and AMD will begin using it in 2002.”

Shocking, but true: A patent organization doesn’t believe that Amazon ever had a lock on “one click” online shopping. Japan’s patent office notified the Seattle-based Internet retailer last November that it had reason to reject its patent. The office found evidence that others had the idea and concept of “one click” long before Amazon did. The company has a few days left to respond before that patent is rejected. Full story at IDG.net.

PC World reports on a new monitor that could give users a more in-depth computing experience. The new displays give the illusion of depth, but without the cumbersome and headache-inducing set of goggles currently required for three-dimensional computer imaging.

ZDNet covers yet another setback for 3G mobile phones. This time around, British Telecom delayed the launch of its 3G services due to glitches with NEC’s handsets.

From Help Net Security: “PHProjekt is an open source groupware suite written in PHP4… by adding the famous “..” string to the url one can have access to other
directories than the one which is specified in the config.”

From a Businesswire press release: “Caldera International Inc. (Nasdaq: CALD), Monday announced the acquisition of
the assets of the WhatifLinux technology from Acrylis Inc.
WhatifLinux technology provides Open Source users and system administrators with Internet-delivered tools and services for faster,
more reliable software management. As a result of the acquisition, Caldera will extend its Linux management solution, Caldera Volution
(Volution), to include online software management. The solution will be named Volution Online.”

From KDE News: “Various people have been asking how to configure fonts with the new Xft
extension, which enables AA fonts, among other things. This is a short tutorial on
how to configure the new Xft extension.”