The BBC reports on the CeBIT technology show in Europe. “This year there will be plenty of companies making products based
on Linux …
Linux has gone from a geek cult to a mainstream product and
companies like Red Hat, Caldera Systems and SuSE will be showing
off their newest versions of the software.”

Slashdot readers dicuss a story from Salon.com about Foresight Institute, a
nonprofit nanotechnology think tank, and IP.com, a Rochester, N.Y.,
start-u, teaming up to “give
open-source programmers and projects the chance to work
within the patent system even as they strive to overturn it.

Specifically, the joint venture will give open-source and
free-software developers the chance to ‘defensively publish.’ “

Anonymous Reader tells us about this: “As Net music companies search for more ways to generate income, services that were once free will now incur a charge. One of those free services, MP3.com’s unique Payback for Playback service will soon go that route.” It’s at

mp3newswire.net.

“Today, a decade into Linux, there are millions of Linux users who, by their very use of Linux, are able to look down upon the owners of machines
running the commercial operating system. Lusers, we call them, and with considerable justification. Appliance owners. We have sympathy for those
who embraced the previous noble attempts, the Amiga owners, the OS/2 users. It wasn’t their fault, so our hearts are open, but to us they’re
lusers, too.

We’re unstoppable. We can thumb our noses at everyone. We can taunt them a second time.

And if we believe that. we’re fooling ourselves. Yes, Linux has grown in wonderful and unexpected ways, and has become the tremendously
competent operating system that no one expected. But step back and take a look.” Read on at LinuxPlanet.

From The Register: “Intel shipped its 900MHz Pentium III Xeon server CPU, the last to be based on the
0.18 micron PIII core before the Xeon family switches over to the Pentium 4 core, at
least in the high-end server biz.

The 900MHz part, like its 700MHz predecessor, ships with 2MB of on-die L2
cache, and is aimed at four- and eight-way multiprocessor servers. Unlike the
previous chip, there’s no 1MB on-die L2 option. Both parts support a 100MHz
frontside bus.”

“The unexpected downturn of the economy has everyone pointing fingers. M$ has the view that competitive
under pricing is both un American and destructive. They don’t like the “services as software” crowd where
competitors, who collaboratively build openly shared freeware, then use it as the basis for delivering fee based
services. M$ prefers the “software as a service” approach, where the platform provider can extract a vig from
all participants. Salon Magazine politicizes the downturn, blaming old economy campaign contributions to Bush
for the collapse of the new “highly productive” economy. And The Economist finds the downturn explanation as
a high tech ponzi scheme having run out of suckers.” More at LinuxToday.

SeattleTimes: “One day after
Microsoft disclosed significant
details about its much ballyhooed
.NET strategy, Chief Executive
Steve Ballmer unveiled one more
piece: how mobile and wireless
devices will fit in.

“We see mobility as fundamentally
important to the vision of .NET.
This is the next revolution in the
Internet,” Ballmer said at yesterday’s opening of the Cellular
Telecommunications and Internet Association’s annual conference.
“This is a Job 1 area of investment for Microsoft.”

Infoworld: “Describing it as a key piece of its overall portal strategy, IBM on Wednesday
launched Websphere Portal Server, which it hopes will serve as a single horizontal
platform that hosts several different types of portals.

Complementing the product is the introduction of a portal partner program with the
help of four business partners who will offer Websphere Portal Server users access
to about 30,000 content sources including world news, stocks information, and
sports.”

At Slashdot they’re taking a look at K12Linux, a terminal server distribution based on Red Hat. The group of educators doing this is also donating some 1000 Intel processors to schools.

“As with the Linux kernel, compiling the FreeBSD kernel is something of an essential
skill. The newly compiled kernel will give you access to your new hardware. It will be
your custom configuration. And finally, it will elevate you a couple of points up the
Guru scale. Read on for more on how you can achieve all of the above.” More at FreeOS.com.