"The loser in the browser wars has filed a private antitrust suit against Microsoft. But the company doesn't deserve to win. It isn't fair. Netscape gave us a revolutionary product that has touched the lives of everyone in America, and in exchange we took away its market and made the company a minor subsidiary of AOL Time Warner. But we can't fix things by exchanging the rule of law for a popularity contest. I know that if it were me I'd be mad as hell -- but nevertheless this is one fight that Netscape deserves to lose." First of a two-part series editorial on the legal battle between Netscape and Microsoft. Update: Second part is online: "Microsoft should be punished".

From the press release: "Apple today announced Apple Remote Desktop for MacOSX software, which enables users, teachers and administrators to remotely manage other Mac desktops anywhere on a local network, AirPort wireless network or across the Internet. With Apple Remote Desktop, teachers can view students computer screens, perform group demonstrations and help individuals with real-time screen-sharing, text chat and the request attention command. System administrators can provide remote assistance, get comprehensive system profiles, reconfigure system settings and quickly and easily distribute software applications across hundreds of computers all from one central location over both Ethernet and AirPort wireless networks."

This paper at IBM.com is a summary of problems encountered by the LAN Distributed Platform (LANDP) for Linux team whilst porting LANDP from OS/2 to Linux. This paper should be useful to other teams that are porting OS/2 applications to Linux.

It is not just me. Other analysts and journalists claim that what Sun is trying to achieve with their lawsuit against Microsoft is too much, and in places does not make sense at all. In this editorial, I discuss Sun's lawsuit point by point, and evaluate how sensible (or not) it is.

From DaemonNews: "A new area of the FreeBSD web site has been created dedicated to release engineering. This new section contains information about future releases of FreeBSD, a specific schedule for the upcoming releases of FreeBSD 4.6 and 5.0, and more." According to the web site, FreeBSD 4.6 is scheduled for June 1st, while there will be two Developer Previews for FreeBSD 5, one at April 1st and a second one on 25th of June. The final version of FreeBSD 5.0 is expected at 20th of November.

"The shareholders and directors of NaN Holding BV, owners of Blender, have decided to terminate all activities of NaN Technologies BV and apply for its bankruptcy at the Amsterdam court. It means that effective today, all technology development and website activities around Blender will be frozen." Exactly one year ago NaN had exactly the same problem, but they managed to find venture capitals who believed in the company. A year later, NaN is on the same situation again, and this time it seems they are going down for good.

"To achieve the long-elusive goal of easily finding information hidden in computer files, Microsoft is returning to a decade-old idea. The company is building new file organization software that will begin to form the underpinnings of the next major version of its Windows operating system. The complex data software is meant to address a conundrum as old as the computer industry itself: how to quickly find and work with a piece of information, no matter what its format, from any location." We have already reported on this here and here, but News.com has more information on the subject today.

Today, SuSE announced SuSE Linux 8.0, the company's latest Linux operating system and applications package highlighting increased security, KDE 3 desktop, seamless installation and expanded multimedia capabilities for professional and private desktop users. SuSE also announces 64-Bit-Version of the SuSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 7 for IBM eServer zSeries.

From the press release: "Red Hat, Inc., the world's premier open source and Linux provider, today announced a strategic agreement with Motorola, Inc. to develop a GNUPro Linux toolchain and cross compiler for Motorola's Altivec-enabled host processors based on the PowerPC instruction set architecture. As the leader in GNUPro tool development, Red Hat will provide a complete toolchain for the PowerPC instruction set architecture with full support for Motorola's AltiVec technology."

Earlier this month some Australian Amiga User groups represented Amiga at Comdex, the biggest Australian IT show. They demonstrated AmigaDE software running binary identical at full speed across various devices, as well as introducing people to the new AmigaOS XL package. Many developers and users were amazed of what the AmigaDE can do, read the full show report here. Tomorrow Amiga Inc's CEO Bill McEwen will demonstrate Amiga products on TechTV's 'Screen Savers'. Also there will be many interesting demonstrations and seminars at the upcoming AmigaExpo, to be held later this month.

David Pogue is a well known author of a whole series of computer and other technical books. His latest book "Mac OS X: The Missing Manual" was published about 2 months ago in assosiation with O'Reilly.

Mozilla 1.0 is only one month away according to the latest roadmap. Today, the Mozilla folks released version 0.9.9 which brings MathML, TTF support under Unix, ZLib security fixes, SOAP scripts support and many additional bug fixes.

"What’s New in HP-UX 11i?" The new HP-UX 11i sports an 'Internet-centric' focus for end-to-end e-services. Irene Maltzan covers the major new features of the HP-UX 11i operating environment -including better scalability and availability- in this article. "Example File Systems" This chapter excerpt from 'Modern Operating Systems' book discusses several example file systems, ranging from quite simple to highly sophisticated. "Clustering Microsoft Exchange Server 2000" Ensuring reliability and scalability within your email system can be a trying experience. Let author and columnist Joseph M. Lamb guide you through the construction of a clustered Exchange Server utilizing Windows 2000 Advanced Server and Exchange Server 2000. "What is a Microsoft Cluster?" Let author and columnist Joseph M. Lamb guide you through the various cluster types, and how you can implement clusters that best serve the needs of your application using Microsoft's Windows 2000 Advanced Server. "Optimizing Disk Performance in Windows XP Professional" In this second article on getting better performance from Windows XP Professional, Louis Columbus provides step-by-step directions for increasing disk drive performance on your Windows XP system. Read all these articles at InformIT.

"The software bug--known as a buffer overflow--caused key memory-management functions in the zlib compression library to fail, a condition that could allow a smart attacker to compromise Linux computers over the Internet, said Dave Wreski, director for open-source security company Guardian Digital". Read the rest of the report at News.com.