IDG.net reports that Rambus Inc.’s patent infringement cases against Micron and Hyundai have been delayed by a German court. The court has requested that this week’s hearings focus on procedural issues, instead of the juicier who-did-what allegations that are at the center of the suit. Rambus is suing to recoup royalities it claims the companies owe for using its patents in computer memory technologies.

ZDNet reports that makers of digital music devices are changing their promotional strategies in the wake of Monday’s court decision against Napster. MP3 player manufacturers are shifting focus away from their devices’ ability to transport digital music, opting for promoting image capture and personal information management capabilities.

Slashdotters are talking about this story at LWN daily. Is there hope for winmodem owners after all?

Sensei writes “I’ve seen this question pop up a whole lot lately… most recently, twice in 5 minutes by two different people on the message board.

The question is “What’s the Debian equivalent of rc.local” or “Where can I put startup commands in Debian?”

Here’s a quick step-by-step guide to one way to do this:

1. Execute this command to find your default runlevel:

cat /etc/inittab | grep initdefault

You should see a line like this:

id:2:initdefault:

That means [b]2[/b] is your default runleve. This may also be [b]3[/b], or
rarely 4 or 5.”

Check it out here“

LinuxToday has a story about the latest KDE/Gnome skirmish.

Wired.com: “Microsoft has built security into its operating system to prevent music from being played on unknown hardware. Its plan to prevent piracy could mean a scuffle with electronics makers.”

FairfaxIT: “Jakob Nielsen says what we all think: computers are too difficult to use. His eloquent explanations of the shortcomings of
over-engineered machines, bloated software and hyper-designed Web pages define the cries of exasperated office workers all over
the world.

As principle of the Nielsen Norman Group, his task is to make technology fit humans.”

Wired.com: “There are dozens of peer-to-peer alternatives to Napster for finding, downloading or trading music, but no clear “winner.” They all
seem to suffer from one shortcoming or another.”

WinMag: “It’s a huge, hard to read
page full of legal mumbo jumbo that protects the software
company in the event that they have to haul you into court
someday. When we don’t read the agreement, but choose ‘I
agree’ we’re lying.”

Yahoo has a story about the Anna Kournikova thing. Who didn’t get at least five emails with this virus attached yesterday? Here’s another story about it at SeattleTimes.