“According to the hive mind of Microsoft, open source should be made illegal. There’s no way around it, this is the bottom line. Want to write your own code and release it
into the community? Congratulations, come with us Sir/Madam, we have this nice little grey room for you. Don’t worry about the bars on the windows, they are there for our
protection in case you somehow manage to write a graphics viewer or a Perl script to terrorize the world.” More rant mode at LinuxJournal.

“Ok, the patch looks huge (it’s a meg and a half compressed, 6+ megs
uncompressed), but most of the patch by far is S/390 updates and the
new Cris architecture.”

Subject: Linux-2.4.2
                  Date: Wed, 21 Feb 2001 18:19:43 -0800 (PST)
                  From: Linus Torvalds 
                  To: Kernel Mailing List 


                  Ok, the patch looks huge (it's a meg and a half compressed, 6+ megs
                  uncompressed), but most of the patch by far is S/390 updates and the
                   new Cris architecture.

                  The biggest real changes that impact normal users are the two bugs
                   that could corrupt your harddisk. The IDE driver bug that Russell
                   found has, to my knowledge, never been shown to happen on anything
                   but his ARM machine, but for all we know it could be quite bad even
                   on x86. Similarly, the elevator bug could cause corruption, but
                   probably has not actually bit people in practice. But both are
                   definitely deadly at least in theory even on bog-standard common PC
                   hardware.

                  The reiserfs fix should hopefully make the "null bytes in log-files"
                  problem a non-issue, and along with the smbfs/HIGHMEM thing it is
                  certainly important for those that it can affect.

                                  Linus

                  ----

                  final:
                   - sync up more with Alan
                   - Urban Widmark: smbfs and HIGHMEM fix
                   - Chris Mason: reiserfs tail unpacking fix ("null bytes in reiserfs
                   files") - Adan Richter: new cpia usb ID
                   - Hugh Dickins: misc small sysv ipc fixes
                   - Andries Brouwer: remove overly restrictive sector size check for
                     SCSI cd-roms

                  -pre4:
                   - big S/390x 64-bit merge
                   - typos and license name fixes. doc updates.
                   - more include file cleanups (phase out "malloc.h")
                   - even more elevator corner cases.. When not merging, find the best
                   insertion point. - pmac ide update
                   - network fixes (netif_wake_queue on tx timeout)
                   - USB printer select() fix
                   - NFS client missed initialization, deamon fixed client address
                   check

                  -pre3:
                   - Jens: better ordering of requests when unable to merge
                   - Neil Brown: make md work as a module again (we cannot autodetect
                     in modules, not enough background information)
                   - Neil Brown: raid5 SMP locking cleanups
                   - Neil Brown: nfsd: handle Irix NFS clients named pipe behavior and
                     dentry leak fix
                   - maestro3 shutdown fix
                   - fix dcache hash calculation that could cause bad hashes under
                   certain circumstances (Dean Gaudet)
                   - David Miller: networking and sparc updates
                   - Jeff Garzik: include file cleanups
                   - Andy Grover: ACPI update
                   - Coda-fs error return fixes
                   - rth: alpha Jensen update

                  -pre2:
                   - driver sync up with Alan
                   - Andrew Morton: wakeup cleanup and race fix
                   - Paul Mackerras: macintosh driver updates.
                   - don't trust "page_count()" on reserved pages!
                   - Russell King: fix serious IDE multimode write bug!
                   - me, Jens, others: fix elevator problem
                   - ARM, MIPS and cris architecture updates
                   - alpha updates: better page clear/copy, avoid kernel lock in execve
                   - USB and firewire updates
                   - ISDN updates
                   - Irda updates

                  -pre1:
                   - XMM: don't allow illegal mxcsr values
                   - ACPI: handle non-existent battery strings gracefully
                   - Compaq Smart Array driver update
                   - Kanoj Sarcar: serial console hardware flow control support
                   - ide-cs: revert toc-valid cache checking in 2.4.1
                   - Vojtech Pavlik: update via82cxxx driver to handle the vt82c686
                   - raid5 graceful failure handling fix
                   - ne2k-pci: enable device before asking the irq number
                   - sis900 driver update
                   - riva FB driver update
                   - fix silly inode hashing pessimization
                   - add SO_ACCEPTCONN for SuS
                   - remove modinfo hack workaround, all newer modutils do it correctly
                   - datagram socket shutdown fix
                   - mark process as running when it takes a page-fault

From NewsFactor: “You don’t just go to a store (or online) and buy a box labeled “Linux.” There are
numerous versions of the operating system, called “distributions,” the most
popular of which in the U.S. is the one put out by Red Hat Software. In
addition, you can choose from SUSE, Mandrake, Debian or any number of
others.”

“Try this experiment some time on an unsuspecting geek friend:

Ask your unwitting subject about the performance of his or her newest computer, and I bet you’ll be treated to a litany of specs: how many
megahertz or gigahertz the processor and graphics chip are, how much memory is on the motherboard and the graphics board, what kind and size
of cache the CPU uses, etc. But nowhere in this recital will your friend tell you anything specific about the hard drives in the system–no data
transfer rates, no platter RPM values, no drive cache sizes, etc. For many computer users, even the hardest of the hard core, disk drives are “just
there,” and any detail beyond the drive being EIDE or SCSI, or (possibly) UDMA 66 or UDMA 100 or some particular sub-flavor of SCSI, is a
mystery.” More from Lou Grinzo at LinuxPlanet.com.

Nandotimes: “The trendy technology magazines that cashed in on the booming dot-com days are now
reeling as last year’s advertising bonanza disintegrates into a miserable comedown.
The Industry Standard, the self-proclaimed weekly “newsmagazine of the Internet economy,” provided another sign of the sobering times
Wednesday by laying off 69 employees, or 16 percent of its work force. The cuts included 18 workers from the magazine’s 130-employee
newsroom.”

From ZDNET.co.uk: “Sending a threatening email or text message could land you with
six months in jail – if you’re in the UK. The government will table an amendment to the Criminal Justice and
Police Bill on Thursday that will, if successful, ban hate emails and
hate text messages.”

url “Confirming the suspicions of Mac handicappers, Apple chief
executive Steve Jobs used his keynote speech at Macworld
Expo/Tokyo yesterday to introduce faster new versions of the iMac,
most of them equipped with CD-RW drives.” More at ZDNET.co.uk.

Wired.com: “Rural Sicily, in the shadow of Mt. Etna, is where Italian technology and Web firms are looking to settle. In fact, the government is pinning its hopes for the region’s economic recovery on the Etna Valley.” We’d like to request a transfer, please.

CNET.com: “Online recruiting is changing the way employers think about
finding good employees and the way employees think about their
jobs and their employers. Indeed, the Internet may completely
change the way companies manage human resources, says
Peter Cappelli, a professor of management at the Wharton School.”

Jorrit Tyberghein writes “Here is another release of Crystal Space. This is 0.18r001.
This release is a stability release but of course we didn’t forget the
new features 🙂 Lots of problems were reported
with 0.17r002 (especially on Windows). This release has been tested much
better on GNU/Linux and Windows and I’m fairly confident about the stability.
There are also various new features. Some highlights:”

• 3D sprites, 2D sprites, and particle systems have been removed from
  the engine and are now available as plugins. This greatly improves
  modularity of the engine and it also allows external applications to
  define their own plugins. With the following release of CS this trend
  will continue as more and more of the engine will be placed in plugins
  (more on this later).
• CS supports hierarchical transformations using the plugin objects
  above.
• Support for ‘regions’ in the engine. Using this new concept it will
  be easier to dynamically load and unload big worlds in memory.
• There is a new csfx library which contains standard procedural textures
  for fire, plasma, water, and a procedurally generated sky box. In
  addition it contains an animated 2D texture.
• In contrast with 0.17 release the Python plugin is now actually working.
• Some work on fonts. There is a small font editor included and a utility
  to convert TrueType fonts to CS format.
• Sound has largely been rewritten and works fine now.
• CSWS (the CS Window System) has many new features like color schemes,
  themes, transparent windows, layout manager, …
• New plugin for playing AVI/MPEG videos on textures.

CS has been tested and is known to work correctly on the following
platforms:

• Linux (but beware of compiler bugs in compiler shipped with RedHat 7).
• Windows (both with Visual C++ and MingW free compiler).
• Solaris
• BeOS
• OpenStep
• NextStep

CS will *probably* work on the following platforms but it hasn’t been
tested there recently:

• MacOS/X
• DOS
• OS/2

Check out the Crystal Space site for more information.”