Slashdotters talk about the possibilities of an ascii-character video for Linux from the fine folks at Dyne.org. Sounds like a winner/

A LinuxWorld column says Sun has fumbled its handling of Java, which sounds painful. “Sun’s inability to embrace the open source community is hurting Java as Linux penetrates the server
market.”

Linux Journal tracks down evidence that Microsoft.com has finally made the shift. Reports say Microsoft has outsourced its DNS to Akamai Technologies, “a well-known Linux shop,” and it appears that, yes, Microsoft.com is running, at least partly, on Linux.

TechWeb asks the question, claiming that Linus Torvalds might have too much power over Linux. ” … Some solution providers, vendors, and industry
observers are beginning to question how long one man can
steer the evolution of Linux, and whether Torvalds’ sole
oversight of the kernel, now at version 2.4, is slowing its
corporate adoption.” We didn’t even know Linux was ill.

Anonymous Reader writes “A research lab at Cornell University has
released a next
generation real-time video codec (CU30) and accompying Video conferencing program for Linux (qVIX).
The codec is a better than realtime/no latency, full frame rate (30 FPS), high quality, low
bandwidth algorithm designed for bandwidths of DSL and higher. While the algorithm is patented,
the University has granted a free (speech) patent-use to everybody so long as the implementations of the
patents are GPL’ed. qVIX/CU30 was demonstrated
several months ago in a live techTV interview which can be found
here,
here or
here. (120megs)”

MSNBC reports that N2H2 is selling aggregate data collected from its “Bess” Web-filtering software. The program filters Internet content at public and private institutions, for approximately 12 million students from kindergarten through the 12th grade. Despite the relatively low cost of the data package offered by N2H2, only two clients have so far purchased the information. One of those clients is the United States Department of Defense.

CNET News.com reports on Linuxcare’s recent history and Thursday’s high-profile deals with Hewlett-Packard, Network Appliance, Maxtor, Tricord and SGI.

LinuxDevices editor Rick Lehrbaum comments on the data collected in last year’s Embedded Linux Market Survey: “One particularly intriguing outcome is that despite the obvious cost-sensitivity of embedded devices, the “free speech” aspect of Linux (i.e. source code is available) edged out “free beer” (i.e. no royalties) as the primary reason why developers are looking at embedding Linux for their designs.” Full commentary at ZDNet.

ZDNet reports: “Swedish telecoms equipment group Ericsson said on Friday
it was pulling out of making its own mobile phones and shedding thousands
of jobs in the handset business after reporting a worse than expected
fourth-quarter operating loss of $155 million.” The company plans to outsource mobile phone production to Flextronics International, Inc., the world’s third largest electronics manufacturer.

Network World Fusion covers the latest OEM hard drives from Fujitsu: “The 3.5-inch drives incorporate a new
high-density disk with an area density of 18.6G
bits per square inch – around 2.5 times greater
than the capacity of Fujitsu’s current products. A
single platter drive with a capacity of 18.4G bytes
is available, as are versions with 36.7G bytes and
73.5G bytes of storage space. The drives have an
8M-byte transfer buffer, average read seek time of
4.5 milliseconds and an internal data transfer rate
of 84M bit/sec.”