This is from Rumor Central, a column at ZDNET: “What could Microsoft executives have been up to
last week as they lurked in the hallways of the
Javits Center in New York during the LinuxWorld
Conference & Expo, pondered the Katt. “Just a
few short years ago, they wouldn’t have been
caught dead at a gathering of engineering geeks
who were discussing a fringe operating system
that supposedly had no chance of ever becoming mainstream or
enterprise-class,” mused the Mouser.”

Reuters at Yahoo is carrying this bit about IBM’s crush on Open Source: “IBM, the most traditional of technology companies, is betting that the decidedly non-traditional Linux software system can give it an edge in the
market for computers that carry out the most mainstream and strenuous business workloads.

“Linux is ready for real business.” International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE:IBM – news) President and Chief Operating Officer Sam Palmisano said during a speech
at LinuxWorld Expo here.”

Slashdot groupies are gnashing their teeth over a couple of dual processor goodies spotted on the web.

From ZDNET: “Jennifer Granick is a well-known figure within the hacker community. She helped Kevin Poulsen navigate his
return to using computers after the convicted hacker came out of jail. Granick is now defending Jerome
Heckenkamp, the 21-year-old Los Alamos National Laboratory employee accused of breaking into eBay’s
computer systems.”

Slashdotter are yakking about success in installing Linux on an Intel 80200 XScale.

Here’s a rather rambling opination from Linux Planet: ” KDE, meanwhile, was off in a tiny booth in the middle of the .org section of the show, staffed not by KDE employees (of which there are none) but
by volunteers who were happy to talk about KDE. KDE2 was being handed out not at the KDE booth but by SuSE, which was (a little puzzlingly)
giving away a CD with the KDE2 upgrade for SuSE but not SuSE itself. The upgrade was wrapped in a small book that is the best KDE2
documentation I’ve seen. The difference between the displays of Gnomish stuff — Eazel and Ximian –and the KDE display could not have been
more striking. But we may here have an example of the difference between freefall and parachute: KDE’s goal is to produce a good desktop that
users can have for free, while the others have popped their chutes and now hope to make money.”

SuSE’s position in the Linux market is one of contrasts, reports LinuxPlanet. “In the European, Middle East, and African markets, SuSE Linux not only dominates the
Linux categories, but also the general software categories as well. But in the U.S., it ranks behind other Linux distributions, which all in turn rank
behind Microsoft Windows.

But SuSE is making fast inroads into the U.S. customer base, having adapted its usual sales methods to what its executives consistently label as the
“marketing-driven American consumers.”

ComputerWeekly reports: “A flurry of announcements has accompanied this week’s Linuxworld conference and exhibition in New
York, as the open-source operating system gains credibility as a business software resource.
ComputerWeekly.com summarises the ten most important announcements.”

This is from GlobeTechnology: “Most hackers don’t see themselves as fitting the usual movie and TV stereotypes about their kind
— many of which apply more to criminal hackers, a subgroup that regular hackers refer to as
“crackers.” And far from being antisocial, author Pekka Himanen says hackers have quite a
well-established social network, one that he believes has a valuable perspective on work, money and
life in general.”

Amit Gupta writes “Precompiled binaries for the motorola sm56 modem are available at http://mylug.virtualave.net/sm56.html.” (Warning! Annoying pop up ad; tread lightly.)