The fastest route to the American portable computer market may be by way of Japan. Transmeta is concentrating on getting its low-powered chips into the notebook computers made by Japanese companies, and gaining a “backdoor” into the U.S. computer market. The latest Japanese design win for the California firm will place its Crusoe processor in Toshiba’s Libretto “sub-notebook” computer. Toshiba joins Hitachi, NEC, Fujitsu, Casio, Sony, and Sharp in the list of Japanese companies supporting Transmeta’s design. Full story at IDG.

Linux Weekly News posts a message from Bruce Perens: HP has announced that Debian is their “design center”. In other words,
Debian is the selected development platform for Linux work at HP. The
target of HP’s development is all LSB-compliant distributions, including
Debian, Red Hat, Turbo, etc. But because of its status as the development
platform, Debian works out to be “first among equals.””

SecurityPortal: “I’m not here to bash OpenBSD specifically. Security is an extremely
complex subject with a variety of definitions. This article is an attempt to
educate people about the need to specifically evaluate their security needs when choosing and configuring an
operating system.”

LinuxDevices.com has the latest edition of the Embedded Linux Newsletter. In this issue: a recap of last week’s Microsoft “Open Source is evil” speech (and the response it generated), DevelopOnline’s new Java stack, word of new IPv6 routers from Edge, and an update on the Real-time and Embedded Systems Forum. Also: new conferences, seminars, and courses for embedded Linux.

When Mozilla reaches 1.0 status, Red Hat plans to drop Netscape from the bundle of programs included with its Linux distribution. The company says that Mozilla’s Open Source is better suited to its Linux offering. Also in this report from ZDNet: new service and support products for Red Hat enterprise customers.

Slashdot : “The O’Reilly Network is featuring An Introduction to Extreme Programming, by
Chromatic (of Slashdot and PerlMonks fame). ‘The central tenet is, “Find the essential
elements of creating good software, do them all of the time, and discard everything else.”
Programmers should program and make schedule estimates. Managers should make business decisions.
Customers should choose the features they want and rank them by importance.'”

Find out who said what in the recent MPAA vs. 2600 appeal hearing. Cryptome has the full transcript.

ZDNET.co.uk: “Brand wars! In a challenge to rival Intel’s yet-to-arrive mobile
Pentium 4, Advanced Micro Devices is calling its new chip —
due next week — the Athlon 4. In case you hadn’t noticed,
there’s no Athlon 2 or 3.”

Wired: “A new tracking technology called Songbird claims it allows copyright holders to catch file traders on the Napster and Gnutella systems. But early results haven’t been good — and some even question the viability of the service.”

ZDNET: “We’ve seen programming
languages develop
increasingly greater
distance from the
hardware they’re meant to
control. C provided a level
of abstraction above
assembly language, and
C++ bolted numerous
extensions onto C,
creating what many
consider an unwieldy
monster. Having been
witness to quite a few
mind-curdling discussions
during the past few years
about what a given
snippet of C++ really
means, C++ evokes in me
parallels to esoteric
numerological
interpretation. Clearly, this
is not Programming for the
Rest of Us.”