Wired.com: “ZDNet U.K. and Australia shuts down its free e-mail service without notice, and that’s only the half of it. Users find themselves unable to retrieve messages or information they’d previously saved to their folders.” ZDNet UK users were dumped, apparently because of a payment dispute between ZD and its email service provider.

A CBSNews.com interview: “Dean Kamen is used to coming
up with brainstorms that change the
world – like his latest invention: a
wheelchair that goes up and down
stairs. He is also on a mission to teach
America’s children that scientists and
engineers are the superstars of the
future.”

ZDNN: “The new chip, dubbed Radeon Mobility, pairs ATI’s desktop Radeon 3D graphics technology with variable voltage and
clock speed. The built-in variability allows notebook PC makers to design machines that lessen the power
requirements of the graphics chip when running on batteries in order to increase battery life.”

From CNET: “Cisco, Intel, Microsoft and Dell were the only high-tech companies named to the most
admired list. But these companies were also the list’s biggest losers in terms of stock value,
with the exception of Home Depot, which declined in value by 33.3 percent in 2000.”

From eeTimes.com: “A unique appliance that can stop denial-of-service attacks in enterprises or
Internet points of presence took its first bow at the recent ComNet show.

VHB Technologies, an angel-funded startup in Richardson, Texas, had been searching since its launch
last fall for a security-oriented network processor to perform deep packet classification of the type
needed to prevent denial-of-service, but ended up designing its own: the Vipre parallel-processing
ASIC.”

CNET reports: “Preview Systems, one of the original companies offering anti-piracy protections for
online digital products, on Tuesday said it would cut 25 percent of its staff and explore
new “strategic” options that could include selling part or all of the company.

Citing growing competition from large companies, Chief Executive Vincent Pluvinage said in a
conference call that circumstances have forced Preview Systems to look for a bigger home for
its products. The company is in negotiations toward that end, he added.”

From EE Times: “Momentum is slowly building for freely available open-source processors, the
semiconductor equivalent of open-source software movements like Linux.

A handful of commercial efforts are experimenting with open-source CPU cores.
Contract-manufacturing giant Flextronics, for example, is laying plans to tap into open-source
hardware for its ASICs. And both Metaflow Technologies Inc. (La Jolla, Calif.) and IROC
Technologies SA (Grenoble, France) are building products using the Leon-1, a Sparc-like
open-source processor developed at the European Space Agency’s Technology Center.”

Kir Kolyshkin writes “SWSoft has just released third stable version of ASPSeek search engine software – 1.0.2. This release is fixing some bugs found and adding some new small features (more charsets support, ability to run query on other search engines, and stopwords file for Turkish). Full changelog is here.
ASPSeek is open-sourced search engine software, it is avaliable under GNU GPL. It can be used to build a search engine capable of indexing and searching as much as a few millions URLs, and search speed will be blazingly fast. It also has some nifty features, like query words highlighting, grouping results by site etc. ASPSeek is oriented toward multisite search, but can be used to made a search for one site as well.”

The change list and a fresh beta download for QuakeWorld is available at QuakeForge.net.

LinuxToday has posted the latest kernel update message from Alan Cox.