CNET News.com reports on the opening day of Rambus’ patent infringement lawsuit against rival Infineon. If Rambus prevails in court, the company stands to recoup as much as $1 billion in royalties. Lawyers for Rambus told the jury that Infineon infinged upon its patents; Infineon countered by telling jurors that Rambus used “manipulation and trickery” to gets its design accepted as an industry standard.

The latest Mozilla tree management diagram shows plans for several, additional, pre-1.0, Mozilla browser-suite releases. That pushes the Mozilla 1.0 expected shipping date to the end of Q3 2001 at the earliest.The Mozilla browser-suite is the basic, prototype, Mozilla-based application upon which other browsers, such as Netscape 6 and the upcoming new NeoPlanet browser, are built.

This new tree management diagram indicates at least three 0.9.x Milestone releases before Mozilla 1.0 ships. We added our estimated timelines for the 0.9.1, 0.9.2, 0.9.3, and 1.0 releases to project Milestone and final Mozilla event and release dates. These estimates are based upon a 5-week release cycle, which is the current release-scheduling plan.

That makes 6 September 2001 the earliest, Mozilla 1.0, final release date if all goes well. If not, look for a Mozilla 0.9.4 release at that time rather than Mozilla 1.0.

Abi the Ant, along with the entire AbiWord team, is very proud to
announce the newest version of AbiWord, 0.7.14. It is available both
in source code and binary form for the platform of your choice, and
can be downloaded from www.abisource.com.

This release saw so many improvements, new features and bug fixes that
we couldn’t possible list them all here. Instead, we would like to
point you to our release notes, which detail all the hard work we’ve
put in through the last few months. They are available at
http://www.abisource.com/release-notes/0.7.14-2.html

Abi the Ant

“The samba ports, versions prior to samba-2.0.8 and samba-devel-2.2.0,
contain /tmp races that may allow local users to cause arbitrary
files and devices to be overwritten. Due to easily predictable
printer queue cache file names, local users may create symbolic links
to any file or device causing it to be corrupted when a remote user
accesses a printer. In addition, the file will be left with world-
writable permission allowing any user to enter their own data.” Full details at LinuxSecurity.com.

ZDNet: “More than two years after the steady din began, Bluetooth continues to dawdle, hampered by disagreements over protocols, high component prices, interference problems and a dearth of real products to promote further testing and development. The technology-often touted to support anything from on-the-fly wireless networks of PCs to communication between cell phones and toasters-is now suffering a growing lack of support from industry leaders that could jeopardize Bluetooth’s future before it gets started.”

LinuxPlanet’s Brian Proffitt talks with Peter Liljenberg, one of the primary developers of PLWM, the Pointless Window Manager.

– By Linda Harrison –

– The Register –

The average price of flat-panel monitors has halved over the past year, according to IDC. And thanks to supply finally starting to catch up with demand, combined with the slump in PC sales growth, LCD monitors prices look set to continue to fall.

“Flat-panel monitors are going to become all the rage,” said Roger Kay, IDC research manager for PC hardware.

The steepest price erosion for LCDs is in the 15-inch monitor market, where prices dropped around 30 per cent in 2000, according to IDC. During the year they also grabbed around 30 per cent market share.

For example, last week Dell started selling 15-inch flat-panel monitors for $499. The 1503FP monitor is part of a package – it must be bought with a Dell OptiPlex desktop or Precision workstation – otherwise it costs $549 if you buy it alone. This same monitor cost $999 in September 2000, and $699 in February this year.

In the same week, California-based Viewsonic dropped the price of its 15-inch VE150 Viewpanel to $499, and NEC-Mitsubishi chopped its 15-inch monitor from $749 to $549.

Fourteen-inch monitors also saw a substantial price drop in 2000 – falling 28 per cent during the year, and accounting for 33 per cent of the market.

In total, sales for TFT screens reached $15 billion last year, up 33 per cent on 1999.

A year ago, it seemed LCD manufacturers couldn’t churn the products out fast enough – and most of the supply was gobbled up for laptops, meaning desktop LCD monitors stayed expensive. Now, not only are more countries, such as Taiwan, making them in volume, but overall demand for computers has also fallen.

The result is a more competitive market, with flat panel monitors not much more expensive than CRTs. Consumers can look forward to prices continuing to drop over the next couple of years, according to Kay.

All Content copyright 2001 The Register

NewsForge editors read and respond to comments posted on our discussion page.

Asia BizTech reports that software vendor Borland will start selling two new Linux development packages in Japan. “Miracle Linux Oracle 8i/Kylix,” and the creatively named “Do Meister” will ship next month.

ZDNET.co.uk: “A music site that has captured many estranged Napster users and
now claims to be more popular than its high-profile predecessor,
caused a stir among music swappers on Sunday by halting its service
and forcing them to download a new advertising-based client.”

NetworkWorldFusion: “The specification, according to the companies, will enable
client-side, Web-based BI (business intelligence)
applications to query OLAP (online analytical processing)
servers from Microsoft, Hyperion, and any other vendors
supporting the specification, without having to use several
APIs.”