CNET News.com report that Apple and Sears have decided to “mutually part ways,” citing slow sales and a shift in retail strategey that sees the Cupertino computer maker opening its own line of stores across North America later this year. This will be the second time in less than five years that Apple has severed its relationship with Sears — and both times citing disappointing revenues as the cause.

“The effort to standardize the way Linux works has moved several steps closer to reality in the last two weeks. The effort, through Linux Standard Base (LSB) and several other projects, is Linux’s answer to avoiding some of the fragmentation that split Unix–the operating system upon which Linux is modeled–into several incompatible versions. That fragmentation is one of the reasons Microsoft was able to make such progress with its more unified Windows products.” More at CNET News.com.

From Salon.com: “DivX Networks aims to do for video what MP3s have done for music. Can it please both hackers and the movie biz?”

ZDNet reports that NCR, which apparently just noticed this week that handheld organizers are everywhere, has filed patent violation lawsuits against Palm and Handspring. The company claims that these devices violate its 1987 patents for “handheld devices that perform financial transactions such as shopping via a communications network.”

“Thousands of confidential messages between the CEO of an Internet company and top executives have been posted on the Web, stirring up a hornet’s nest of corporate intrigue and providing a rare glimpse into a dot-com as it struggled to cope with a brutal shakeout.” Full story at CNET News.com.

If you thought that the TCP flaw announced earlier this week was old news, well, you’re correct — almost. The original announcement, made in 1985, did prompt software vendors to implement random incremental Initial Sequence Numbers to prevent remote attacks. However, what the latest announcement was actually saying was that crackers could still figure out the ISN by sniffing other TCP sessions. Full story at ZDNet News.

ZDNet’s Stephan Somogyi asks: “Can someone please explain to me why those responsible for the well-being of servers don’t apply security updates and patches?”

Relying on the charitable donations and the help of a dedicated group of volunteers, the American Friends Service Committee have created a computer lab in an inner city Washington, D.C. neighborhood, “eschewing prohibitively expensive big-name software.” The twelve networked computers in the lab take advantage of Linux and other freely available Open Source programs. Program officers claim that Microsoft and its high-cost wares are actually expanding the “digital divide.” Full story at MARStar.

From the weekly summary of topics discussed on the python-dev mailing list: “Bug fix releases” … “Revive the types-sig?” … “Moshe Zadka posted three new PEP-drafts.” At LWN.net.

From LinuxPR: “REDSonic, Inc. and K Computing are hosting a hands-on Real-Time Embedded Linux Training class in San Jose from April 16-18, 2001. This hands-on tutorial walks the participants through the steps involved in customizing a Linux environment to support an embedded application.”