ZDNet reports that there may be a pending price war in the laptop market as a variety of companies try and sell cheap laptops that are not sub-par technologically, aiming to get the price below US$1000.

MSNBC reports on the progress of Video on Demand, the concept of seeing what movies a user wants to see when they want to see it (without dropping by the video store).

Anonymous Reader writes, “userlocal.com is reporting the sad news and has brief comments from 2 of the developers.”

MSNBC reports that the US Government may be tracking users who read a variety of Government web sites, in spite of instructions explicitly forbidding the practice.

Interactive Week reports on Hewlett-Packard’s recent decision to endorse the Enhydra application server, which “holds the promise of saving corporate users big money.”

This is a direct quote from a ComputerWorld story, really. “Microsoft Corp. is taking steps to make Windows a more secure operating environment.” You mean it wasn’t secure?

ZD’s LinuxDevices has a story about iomojo a startup “founded on the conviction that there is about to be an explosion of interest in media-centric sever appliances, in home, business, and embedded environments.” You’ll have to read the story to find out what that means, but the company founders are Linux fans.

Posted at LWN.net: “Python 2.1 is almost ready. We’ve built a release candidate — a
version that should become the final version, barring any last-minute
showstopper bugs (which will of course be fixed before releasing the
final version). Thanks to all who helped!

Please download the release candidate and use it on your favorite
platform. For more info: http://www.python.org/2.1/.”

CNet’s take on the Red Hat 7.1 release: “Red Hat introduced a new version of its take on the Linux operating system aimed at
improving multiprocessor performance and keeping out bugs.”

From a reader who shall remain nameless: “Well, there is a new project to create a open source linux based console. The TuxBox (they have a site tuxbox.50megs.com and a irc channel @ irc.openprojects.net #tuxboxproject) seems to be more community-oriented, and it seems that most of the console will be developed by the community.”