Kelly McNeill writes “I firmly expect to see and hear Microsoft calling out for taxpayer subsidies in a few years time. All big companies tell the government to get lost when things are going well, but go cap-in-hand to scrounge off the taxpayer when things aren’t so good. Microsoft has already set the scene with its claim that the U.S. economy is dependent on its latest “upgrade” being delivered on time. Ditto the world economy… At least we have Wine, Twin, Twine, Reactos, OWP, et al, to help us break the Microsoft dependencies.”

Network World Fusion reports on the continuing rapid growth of the world’s supply of email boxes – nearly 900 million around the globe.

ZDNet reports that Intel has developped a method of etching more transistors into less space on silicon wafers, allowing for significantly faster processors.

Computer World reports that a cybercrime treaty being worked on by the Council of Europe has been attacked as being too biased toward law enforcement at a U.S. conference.

Tim O’Reilly posts to ONLamp.com: “I got a lot of email in response to my weblog, Shuttle Diplomacy Between Jim Allchin and Richard Stallman, in which I chronicled my efforts to mediate between Microsoft and the Free Software Foundation. I answered a lot of the email, but I have also asked some of the most vocal of the early respondents for their permission to reprint their email to me.”

From LinuxToday: “The third pre-patch of the 2.4.3 linux kernel is available to download from www.kernel.org or from your favorite mirror site.”

Alan Cox posts the latest changes to the Linux kernel, including: “Uniprocessor APIC fixes for misdetect” … “Switch to the updated irda fixes” … “Mark ips scsi experimental until IBM ship a proper 2.4 driver.”

What’s the least valuable asset of a dead dot-com? That might be the domain name associated with the deceased business. A report at the Los Angeles Times says that there’s not much market interest in such hard-luck domain names that often performed double duty as the company name bandied about in negative media accounts. There is hope for some “generic” names — garden.com, for example, now redirects to the Burpee Seed Company.

CNET reviews two “slimmed-down” Linux distributions: Vector Linux 1.8 and Peanut Linux 8.3, concluding that both “are good if you want to get your feet wet in the Linux waters but aren’t able (or willing) to devote a great deal of computing resources to the process.”

Sylvania’s newest digital television product will ship with a penguin. The 27-inch PC2700iHD Internet/TV will provide access to the global network via an embedded “Internet appliance computer” running “sophisticated Linux-based operating system and user interface software, with an easy-to-use graphical interface that unifies TV watching and Internet viewing.” In addition to standard 56K dialup, the device can take advantage of faster connections via its built-in Ethernet port. Full story at ZDNet.