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RebRachman asks: "Has the inevitable finally happened? After years of dismissing as alarmist all the commentary about how spam and security concerns will eventually render email useless, is it actually happening to us? I don't know about you, but for the past three days, all of our staff (we are a virtual company of 20 telecommuters) and clients have been unable to get email to one another reliably. Attachments disappear or become garbled, mail disappears into the great beyond, or arrives hours after it has been sent, even within the same ISP. We've resorted to sending one another an IM every time we send an email to confirm that the messages are arriving alright. In extreme cases we have even reverted to using a telephone handset to ensure that clients have received everything that was sent. Is it only a matter of time before we all resort to file transfer by P2P? (And if so, what are we going to do with these firewall boxes?)"

Hetz Ben Amo sent us this link talking about how not only has Oracle decided to go work with Linux, but has setup parternships with Red Hat Software and VA Research, SuSE, and Japanese firm Pacific HiTech. Very cool-anyone know anything more about this?

The submittor par excellence Hetz Ben Amo found a very thought provoking article over at Zdnet. Interesting stuff, and makes me right and properly paranoid. So, whaddya think? A bit paranoid probably but the idea itself is an interesting one.

Hetz Ben Amo sent this link my way and daywalker also wrote "It appears that Dan Shaffer of "Project Heresy" fame will be covering be covering Linux news once a week in their CNET Radio webcast... Check out the good stuff "We'll be covering Linux news & views every Thursday in CNET Radio's 1:00 p.m. PT webcast, starting September 3. You can also catch each episode on-demand from this page." "

The prolific Hetz Ben Hamo sent in the attached press release, and plea for writings to Insignia. As we have heard some bigger companies have begun a flirtation with the wonderful world of Linux. But Insignia as a company, and as others have shown, they need to know that there is a paying market there. So, if you are interested in SoftWindows for Linux, read below to find out how to help.

Folks, this is a transcript of a message from an internal IBM Linux forum. Yes, there are some folks at IBM playing with Linux (like me for example).

A fellow IBMer phoned Insignia customer service and spoke with "Kyle". He inquired about a possible Linux port. He was told that they are talking to Red Hat and have two different port methodologies - an easy one/poor performance and a hard one/good performance.

They are currently "TRACKING REQUESTS" to customer service to determine market size. Everyone who has a real business case for or is otherwise seriously interested in a native Linux port is encouraged to email unixcs@insignia.com and
a) request a port be made,
b) (important!) identify sound business reasons why you want it and why it would be a good strategic move, and
c) TELL THEM THAT YOU WOULD PAY $$$ FOR IT (as they are concerned that nobody wants to pay for products on a freeware system).

Try citing examples like Wabi purchases and explain that we are running out of 16bit code, and Corel WordPerfect Linux/7 from Corel/Software Development Corporation. Encourage this to be sent out to the public at large so all people who are really interested in a native port can write Insignia. This port would be the single most effective method of increasing Linux market share. We can have native apps later - right now we need to run everybody else's W95 apps. This could be what we have been waiting for!!!!!!

Hetz Ben Hamo got the exclusive scoop from SciTech, makers of the Display Doctor, with more information about what the soon-to-be-released beta will have, as well as future plans. This is good stuff-more games, more display-related materials (obviously). Click below to get the full message. Hi,

Thanks for your interested in the SciTech Display Doctor for Linux beta. The beta release is not ready at this time as we are building the list of interested parties ready for the beta release. We hope to have the beta release ready in the next 1-2 weeks, and we will send you more information at that time.

Since many of you are most likely wondering exactly what SDD for Linux is (see we were deliberately vague in our announcement), this is what is in store for you:

• Support for every display mode imaginable (320x240/400x300/512x384 low res game modes up to 2048x1536 regular and 2048x1152 HDTV 16:9 aspect ratio modes).
• Complete, generic refresh rate control and display mode centering.
• Full 2D hardware acceleration support for just about every chip on the planet.
• Direct fullscreen console graphics libraries available using the SciTech MGL or SuperVGA Kit graphics libraries.
• XFree86 driver running on top of our drivers, fully accelerated.

Planned features that may make it into the first Linux release:

• SVGALib wrapper to run SVGALib games like Quake using our display modes and device support.
• fbcon console driver support using our display drivers.
• Full multi-head support using any old PCI graphics card (up to 8 in one system!).
• Full support for both hardware and software stereo LC shutter glasses, with complete refresh rate control support (> 120Hz!).

Planned features for future versions:

• GGI/KGI driver so that GGI can utilise SDD device support technology.
• Full 3D hardware accelertion via our native SciTech Nucleus API and via OpenGL (based on Mesa).

Best Regards,

SciTech Software - Building Truly Plug'n'Play Software!
Kendall Bennett | Email: KendallB@scitechsoft.com
Director of Engineering | Phone: (530) 894 8400
SciTech Software, Inc. | Fax : (530) 894 9069
505 Wall Street | ftp : ftp.scitechsoft.com
Chico, CA 95928, USA | www : http://www.scitechsoft.com

Hano makes the observation, and I agree, that the future development of gaming stuff, video-this makes things much better. This is commercial software, but the rumors are that the price will be pretty darn reasonable, and may be shareware.

Hetz Ben Hamo sent in this story about a Dutch company that is taking machines based on the Commodore 64, and make boxs for simple web browsing. The machines will cost under 400$US, and are expected to be revealed during CEbit at Hanover. Simple, scary, and well, cool.

Hetz Ben Hamo (Unique) wrote in to tell us that the W3C Consortium has proposed a new HTTP protocol called HTTP-NG (for Next Generation). If this draft is accepted, I'm sure it will be practical sometime around when we start using IPV6 *grin*.

Hetz Ben Hamo wrote in to say "Well, many of the emulators fans seems to know the System 16 emulator. This emulator (which is different from M.A.M.E concentrates on emulating Arcade machines from 8 bit (it was called system 8), and now mostly on 16 bits arcade. It emulates 68000 arcades and some double processor arcades (like OutRun, etc).

Why am I telling you this? Cause now someone has ported system 16 to Linux and it's runs pretty well on it :) So for heaven sakes, check his page and grab the emulator, and grab the ROM's (although it's Illegal cause it's copyrighted by various manufacturers like Sega etc) from davesclassics.com. The emulator itself is here"

Something I personally find interesting about Linux is despite the lack of games, through the emulators ranging from Mame, SNES9x, Dosemu and S16, we can still play a lot of cool stuff.