“Satellite communications company Iridium Satellite said it has signed agreements with 13 service providers to offer voice and data services via its satellites when it launches its commercial service next month.” Airtime will sell around $1.50 per minute, as opposed to Motorola’s previous price point of $7 per minute. Full story at ZDNet UK.

Jon Panker writes “IBM’s Susan Whitney, vice president of its eServer marketing and sales, said Linux is ideal for business use. Whitney said IBM customers that are proving that include an oil company, which clustered up to 1,000 Intel X-series servers with Linux, and a retail chain, which is installing 15,000 Linux servers in its stores. The operating system is ready for file print, Web serving, distributed computing, commercial clustering and server consolidation, she said. Read the full story at searchEnterpriseLinux.com.“

The Chicago Tribune reports that electronics giant Motorola plans to slash an additional 7,000 employees from its workforce, this time in its cellular phone division. This brings Motorola’s total job cuts to 16,000 for this fiscal year, a ten percent reduction in its global staff since December 2000.

Info World reports that Microsoft plans to debut software next week that will enable Web services created with .NET to be used on platforms other than Windows. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer confirmed that those “other platforms” include Linux.

Version 2.2-beta of the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS) is now available for review through March 31. FHS is a set of requirements and guidelines for file and directory placement under UNIX-like systems. View the FHS project page for the CVS guide, file download, and public comment submission guidelines.

The Wall Street Journal (via MSNBC) reports that Hitachi will announce later today that it plans to sell Unix servers from IBM. The announcement could position IBM as the lead Unix server supplier, unseating market leader and current Hitachi supplier Sun Microsystems. Analysts say the move is a “very big design win” for IBM.

The European Commission “is seeking a mandate from national governments to draft a pro software patent directive without first concluding the consultation process,” and Eurolinux are not happy about it. Read their open letter at LWN.net.

“There are several buffer overflows in imap, ipop2d and ipop3d. These overflows usually only make it possible for local users to gain access to a process running under their own UID.
However, due to a misconfiguration, it is possible for remote attackers to gain access to the ‘nobody’ account and run programs or further exploits on the attacked machine.” Full details at Help Net Security.

From LinuxPlanet: “If the criteria for Linux to be a “player” is to have a stunning interface, then I think critics are being shortsighted. Not looking beyond the GUI is a big mistake. But if this the way it has to be, then I would warn those same critics to watch out. Because if it’s a stunning interface you have to have, then with the releases of KDE 2.1 and (soon) GNOME 1.4 and all the other cool window managers, you’re about to get it.”

“Open Docs, LLC has announced today “Python Programming: Taming the Snake”. The book, their fifth title is a comprehensive programmer’s guide to the Python Programming Language. With this release, Open Docs has managed to keep pace with the open source’s cutting edge development. The title is ensured to be one of the most comprehensive resource books available today.” Read the press release at LinuxPR.