Slashdotters discuss an announcement at debian.org that Ben Collins is the new Debian project leader.

ZDNet has a review of Mac’s OS X, saying “the reports of kernel panics, unexpectedly low performance, and other manifestations of .0 malaise
are many.” An Associated Press writer likes OS X, but says it lacks some essential support.

“The new operating system (that X is a Roman numeral) is my old Macintosh on steroids. Its
underlying guts, which afford rock-solid stability, are a version of BSD Unix that Apple calls
Darwin.”

ZDNET.co.uk: “Microsoft wants bad drivers off the Windows highway.

With the next version of its consumer Windows operating system,
Microsoft is trying to make computers less daunting and prone to
crashes. To reach that goal, Microsoft not only needs to clean up its
own code, but also all the third-party drivers, little bits of software that
help the system communicate with peripherals and other add-ons.”

ZDNET.co.uk: “Many IT workers are now asking
themselves this question with increasing frequency and for good
reason. In the past month ZDNet has reported on the loss of several
thousand technology jobs in the UK — and this trend looks set to
continue as the tech recession bites deeper into the hardcore tech
industry, having already devoured the fluffier dot-com sector for its
first course.”

The Register: “The Unix business has never been known for the simplicity of its business
alliances, and in that tradition one of the most complicated deals of all was
concluded this week. Finally.”

The Register: “Pierret, who made the comments in an interview with magazine 01 Informatique,
seems to have made a convincing bid for Open Source pin-up status whle he was
about it. “I support Linux and free software,” he said, “because they allow faster
and more robust development to put public administration systems online.
Commercial software raises security issues, because one doesn’t know what’s
inside it. This is why I am against software patents in Europe.”

ZDNET.co.uk: “A newly discovered bug in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer Web
browser could let malicious hackers read the e-mail and computer
files of some unsuspecting people.

Bug tracker Georgi Guninski said the exploit is activated when a
surfer using Internet Explorer 5 loads a malicious Web page. The
surfer’s network also must be running Microsoft’s Exchange 2000
server for the bug to show up.”

“More than three in four Linux developers use Red Hat’s distribution when selecting a Web server or Web application server, a
survey revealed today.” Read more at FairfaxIT.

“Maybe it was the weather, which has been unrelentingly miserable here in the Northeast. I was going to sit down and write about the tremendous
improvements David Faure has made to KWord by backporting much of the upcoming QT-3.0’s rich text engine to the KWord CVS. And at the
same time I thought I’d talk about the exciting new KPrinter that will be part of KDE-2.2, and which promises finally to get a grip on printing in
Linux. But I just couldn’t work up any enthusiasm.” We’re not sure what all this has to do with Linux and Open Source, but it *is* on LinuxPlanet, after all.

MSNBC tells us: “A Photoshop 6 install may trigger the following Windows 98 or
Me system errors when exiting PageMaker 6.5x, says Adobe:
‘This program has performed an Illegal Operation and will be
shut down’; ‘PM65 has caused an invalid page fault in module ‘;
‘PM65 has caused an invalid page fault in module kernel32.dll’,
and; ‘Pm65 has caused an error in KERNEL32.DLL. Pm65 will
now close’.”