LinuxSecurity.com interviews people from Cylant Technology, Inc. about the contest on cracking a Red Hat box, and “the experiences gained from holding it.”

Bill Kendrick writes, “I had the opportunity to meet Bradley LaRonde, CEO and main developer at Agenda Computing this week. He did a talk at NBLUG in Sebastopol, CA on May 8th. It seems they’re making the rounds, with an appearance and sponsorship of SDLUG’s (San Diego) May 16th meeting, a talk at NTLUG (Dallas) on June 16th, and keynotes at both the OSDN Handheld Conference in Austin on June 18th and the Embeded Linux Expo in San Jose on June 26th or 27th.”

The Register: “IBM will launch its upcoming Itanium-based workstation, the IntelliStation
Z-Pro 6894, when Intel tells it that it can and not a moment sooner.

“It’s ready to ship as soon as Intel allows us to do so,” said Steve
Horobin, IBM Personal Systems Group’s EMEA workstation marketing
chief with special responsibility for the finance sector (but not job titles,
clearly).

And Horobin confirmed that Intel will officially roll-out Itanium on 29 May –
at 6am Pacific Time, to be precise – as we revealed a couple of days
back.”

ZDNet: “Startup Memora Corp. is attempting to create a
new product category–the “personal server.” A
name reminiscent of “personal computer,” the term
“personal server” is meant to convey the idea of
an appliance-like device that performs a range of
useful services and can be easily installed and
operated by nontechnical users in their homes.
Accordingly, the company is billing its initial
product offering, the Servio Personal Server, as
“the first ‘personal server’ for the home.””

MSNBC: “Mix a rabid love of freedom
with an intense dislike of corporate or state-sponsored
censorship, fold in the wacky collective brilliance of a
group of rogue coders, and what do you get? Tyranny’s
worst nightmare: an untraceable, globally distributed
digital information network called Peekabooty.”

Network World Fusion reports that OmniSky will charge users of Compaq’s iPaq device $20 more per month for its wireless services. OmniSky says the extra cost is justified, because the iPaq consumes more airtime than other portable devices. Analysts say the extra cost could influence corporate IT purchasing decisions.

InfoWorld reports that Microsoft today raised the curtain on its new licensing program. The new agreement allows customers with 250 or more computers to license enterprise software as a subscription service. The license, named the Enterprise Agreement 6.0 Subscription Program, lowered its minimum number of computers requirement — the previous minimum was 500. A Microsoft spokesperson says “80 percent of our customers will see no change to their licensing costs or the costs will decrease.”

– By Tina Gasperson –
We did some checking on Linux Island a couple of months ago when the Linuxgruven deal was going down. The SAIR rep we talked to was completely positive about LinuxIsland’s good standing as an Accredited Center of Education (ACE). Anyone who visits the Linux Island Web site might come away with a different impression.Remember the Web back in the mid ’90’s? No one expected much then, and all you had to know was a few HTML tags to get by. Animated GIFs were state-of-the-art technology. This site looks like a throwback to those days. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, except 1) this is a business, 2) this is a tech business, 3) this is a tech business with a huge prejudice to overcome.

In case you’re not familiar with the whole she-bang, Linux Island arose from the ashes of training company Linuxgruven’s crash and burn; the company is headed up by a former Linuxgruven instructor. For many who had their wings scorched by the shenanigans of Hibbits and Lebb (the duo who ran Linuxgruven and by most accounts didn’t deliver on promises made), the business strategy is way too close to Linuxgruven’s: Place ads looking for inexperienced IT workers who want to make $45,000 a year; get them to take (and pay for) the training and certification; and send those workers out on a contract basis to companies who want to set up their intranets on Linux servers.

Starting out with that strike against it, and having had to field many, many questions and accusations already, common sense would seem to cry out for a professional-looking Web site (among other things). And by professional we don’t mean crazy flash-splash pages or misty-edged jpegs of satisfied business people. No, all we ask for is clean, simple layout and clear navigation.

What we found frightened us:

A bright royal blue background with a big, cheesy setting sun and a silhouetted penguin floating in the center of it, with its wings spread as though it were trying to fly up and snag a coconut off the equally cheesy silhouetted palm tree that does double-duty as the “L” in Linux Island. This logo looks amateurish at best — like something pieced together from Microsoft Office clip art. An animated “under construction” GIF would be perfect on this page.

Linux Island could redeem itself by providing well-crafted and useful content — but sadly it doesn’t. A look at the “What Is Linux?” page turned up text rife with grammatical and punctuation errors; while mistakes can and do happen to the best of us, a company that concerns itself with education should take time to make sure that its content is correct. The “Our Education Island” page didn’t make us any happier. There’s a big, silly graphic right in the middle of the page, and no usable content. Same for “Our Service Island,” and “Our Support Island.” If we were looking for Linux IT management, support, OR education, we’d turn tail and run in the opposite direction after looking at this.

And that’s sad, not only for Linux Island, but for Linux as a whole. We need to be able to show a good face to a world that is used to the slickness of Microsoft. We don’t want to give Redmond any ideas, but they could use the Linux Island site as an advertisement for their cause.

ZDNet’s Stephan Somogyi: “Reading Unreal developer Tim Sweeney’s exegesis on programming languages
about a year ago brought back many memories. Having recently re-read it, it started
me thinking about what the next step in programming language evolution is going to
be.”Reading Unreal developer Tim Sweeney’s exegesis on programming languages
about a year ago brought back many memories. Having recently re-read it, it started
me thinking about what the next step in programming language evolution is going to
be.”

Linux Weekly News posts an announcement: The Ximian Setup Tools (aka “Perris Valley”) 0.4.0 are now available. “The Ximian Setup Tools are a set of cross-platform configuration utilities
for Linux and other Unices. Internally they are divided in a frontend and
backend, the frontends knows nothing about the underlying system and provides
the same user interface across the different types of systems. The backend
knows how to read and write configuration information. The Ximian Setup Tools
do not impose a new database on the system, they work with the default
configuration files so that configuration can still be done by hand or by
other tools.”