From BusinessWire via Wide Open News: Altera Corporation (Nasdaq:ALTR) today
announced plans to port the Quartus II design software to Linux-based environments by offering support
for the Red Hat v.6.2 operating system. This initiative bolsters Altera’s leadership position in design software
for system-on-a-programmable-chip (SOPC) development.

ConsultingTimes.com has a story talking about Linux in business. “Linux found a niche — and a
large one. A poll of 2,092 IT professionals by Survey.com found that 68 percent of companies have or intend to
deploy at least one Linux system. And according to IDC Linux was second in server operating environment
shipments last year with 24 percent of the market.”

The Chicago Tribune reports on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. “It didn’t take long before the companies that backed the DMCA made its
opponents look like prophets.

Last year, the Motion Picture Association of America used the law to stop an
online magazine from posting a program that could be used to decrypt DVD
movies. Although the purpose of the DeCSS program was to play DVD movies on
computers running Linux operating systems, the industry complained it also could
allow users to make unauthorized copies of those movies.”

From Ntk.net: “According Marlin Eller’s account in ‘Barbarians
Led By Bill Gates’, one of Mundie’s first acts at Microsoft was
killing the company’s 1993 low-bandwidth Net project in favour
of the *real* future – broadband interactive TV. That said,
once Gates caught on to this Interweb thing, Mundie was first
to catch on. ‘We’ll tune it for all the platforms, then get
hardware companies to build accelerators for it’, he
predicted, of the Net’s most guaranteed success – VRML.”

LinuxPower.org has a story on the GUADEC annual GNOME Users and Developers European Congress in early April. Well, actually, this a diary of last year’s GUADEC.

From Net-security.org: A recent (fall 2000) security fix to cron introduced an error in giving
up privileges before invoking the editor. A malicious user could
easily gain root access.

This has been fixed in version 3.0pl1-57.3 (or 3.0pl1-67 for unstable).
No exploits are known to exist, but we recommend that you upgrade your
cron packages immediately.

Inter@ctive Week reviews the current DeCSS case pending in a New York court. Not a lot new here, although the story again notes the motion picture industry vs. 2600.com case is an important test of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

From ZDNet’s AnchorDesk: “I am tired of software that doesn’t work very well. Specifically, I am tired of Windows
crashes and the version of ActiveSync that requires me to restart my iPaq if I want to
sync it to my desktop.”

CNET: “Intel is a key partner in Compaq Computer’s plan to build servers that cram hundreds of
CPUs into just a few square feet of floor space, the companies plan to announce
Monday.”

NandoTimes: “Like previous versions of Windows from Microsoft, Windows Me compels submission from most of us. Do it the system-default way or face a complex modification procedure that often yields unintended results.”