“Every network or sysadmin has a number of big obstacles to overcome. Aside from the stupidity and insecurity of people (namely users), there are physical issues and
— possibly the most difficult to deal with — middle management.

Recently, Linux has been touted as a way to get middle management and department heads to use Unix.

But in reality, BSD is more like what they’d want to see, and OpenBSD in particular makes working around them an easy task.” More at OSOpinion.com.

From FreeOS.com: “An inode contains the management information for a particular file. The information
contained includes owner id, size of file, access time, access rights, and the
allocation of data to blocks on the physical media. The inode already contains a
few block numbers to ensure efficient access to small files. Access to larger files is
provided via indirect blocks that contain block numbers.”

DebianPlanet: “Debianplanet II is now ready to be betatested, and it has bugs, lots and lots of them, please be careful.
Debianplanet II is based on PHP-Nuke 4.4 and most of the security bugs should be ironed out.
Even so, there are caveats. For now, everyone who wants to use Debianplanet II, will have to request
a password change, this can be done with the send password option at the bottom of the login page.
This will be fixed later on, but for now we will just have to deal with it.”

“ActiveState announces the appointment of many of the top minds in open source to its
Technical Advisory Board. Joining the team is: Larry Wall, Brendan Eich, Guido van Rossum, Rasmus Lerdorf, and Jon Udell.”

From ZDNET.co.uk: “A group of hardware developers is trying to bring concepts from the
open-source software world to the hardware business.

Engineers around the world, connected via the Internet, are seeking to
develop a vast library of freely available hardware designs, similar to
how Linux developers and other open-source programmers share
intellectual property.”

LinuxJournal: “As the largest computer-related trade show in the world, one might expect CeBIT to be a cosmopolitan affair, with English–the supposed world language of
technology–being used as the lingua franca. And while there was a good representation of technology firms from around the globe (companies from 62 countries) and a
fair amount of English spoken, there is no mistaking the dominance of German at this show. Of the 8,106 exhibitors covering 422,109 square meters of space, 5,046 are
German, and I heard not a single presentation given in English. I wish I had done more to expand my current two-word German vocabulary of hefeweizen and schnapps
before I came.”

oriellynet.com: “Noel Davis shows us a buffer overflow in ASPSeek; a denial of service attack against timed; a new version of OpenSSH with many improvements; an attack against the private keys used by GnuPG; a race condition in the UFS and EXT2FS file systems; and problems with MySQL, VIM, FCheck, Solaris perfmon, Interchange, and Compaq’s management software.”

LinuxJournal: “In a parliamentary hearing in the Netherlands two weeks ago, a majority of coalition and opposition party members of parliament instructed the Dutch secretary of state for
economic affairs to arrange thorough obviousness and novelty tests in the patent system before allowing any software patents, and to actively promote this view in the
European Union.”

SeattleTimes: “In a high-profile deal, the British
government said yesterday it hired
Microsoft to help move all of its
transactions online, starting with a
way for farmers to apply for
subsidies and citizens and
businesses to pay taxes via
Britain’s new Internet portal.”

“There is an over-proliferation of Linux providers,” he said. “There are over 150 Linux distribution
companies in the world and the world doesn’t need that many. We will see consolidation.” The Linux distributions worth backing include Suse, Turbo Linux, Red Hat and Caldera, according to IBM and this report at ComputerWeekly.