An alert, but anonymous reader tipped us off to this ZDNET story about the Linux 2.5 kernel summit.

CNET: “Online auction powerhouse eBay is telling customers their personal data would be
shared if eBay is bought out or merges with another company.

The new privacy policy takes effect May 15, but eBay already has placed notices about it on
its site, which counted 22 million registered customers at the beginning of the year.”

CNET: “Mark Windholtz spent the first 12 years of his programming career writing code alone in
a cubicle.

But now when Windholtz creates code, he does so with a comrade at his side–one of the
tenets of the software development methodology called Extreme Programming.

“Sometimes if you’re coding alone, you end up going off on the wrong thing for a while,”
Windholtz said. “If you’re ‘pair programming,’ that doesn’t happen, or it doesn’t happen for
very long…As soon as one person runs out of ideas, the other person just picks up on them.”

PRNewswire: “Next week, at the XML DevCon 2001
Conference in New York, April 8-11, Internet developers will get an inside
look at the new XML (Extensible Markup Language) features in Oracle9i.
Attendees can meet the Oracle XML experts who sit on the W3C (Worldwide Web
Consortium) standards committees and the development of XML capabilities
across all Oracle9i(TM) products.”

Eet.com: “AVX Corp. has developed a supercapacitor that can deliver short pulses of power and
can therefore extend the effective talk time of battery-powered mobile phones and data modems by
more than 25 percent, the company said. AVX also announced that it will cease production of
passive-component arrays in the United States in favor of its facility in Coleraine, Ireland, thanks to
rapid production ramps there.”

PCWorld.com: “Every so often, a product like Pioneer’s DVR-A03 DVD-R/CD-RW burner comes
along and makes a host of high-cost computing tasks suddenly affordable. DVD-R
writers and their capacious 4.7GB DVD-R media used to be extremely
expensive–$5000 or more for a writer and $40 for each disc.”

DallasNews.com: “Texas Instruments Inc. is expected to announce a digital signal processor technology for Internet appliances Tuesday.”

CNET: “IBM on Monday consolidated its desktop and notebook units in what analysts
characterize as a forward-looking move.

The change created a new Personal Computing Devices group that combines not only the
NetVista desktop and ThinkPad portable product lines, but also their design, development and
logistic operations.”

“The Register: “Following weekend reports that Be is about to run out of cash, the company
yesterday announced it was trimming its already small headcount by cutting
approximately 27 jobs – around one quarter of its worldwide workforce.”

ZDNET.co.uk: “The antivirus industry lambasted email firewall startup GateKeeper
on Monday, after the company announced a reward for any virus
writer who can infect a specific computer protected by its product.

“It is probably one of the most irresponsible things that someone could
do,” said Vincent Gullotto, director of the Antivirus Emergency
Response Team for security services company Network Associates.”