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news.com details why Bill should be more assiduous in his daily meditation.

sno wrote in with this story over at news.com talking about the latest developments in the Domain Name adventure. Rumblings about NSI, InterNic, and the new TLDs that we keep hearing about. Maybe I should get '.dot'.

Digital, signaling their entry into a broader relationship with Microsoft will be putting both of their server arichectectures in the NT realm, a definite tilt for the NT side in the looming Unix v NT wars.

Dan Marks wrote in to let us know that SGI has a new CEO:Richard Belluzzo. Richard used to be a General manager of sorts over at HP. Read more here.

Joseph Carter writes " In this NEWS.COM article, the Department of Justice and Microsoft Corporation have reached a settlement in the contempt filing made in December. As part of the settlement, Microsoft will immediately provide a functional latest version of its Windows product without the Internet Exporer web browser components. The DOJ calls this a victory. "

Well it's a nice start anyway. Let's just hope that this is only the first step in a long path of breaking apart the monopoly. It's just refreshing to see Microsoft lose something.

NEC will be rolling out a new supercomputer, one of the few of the shrinking market, within the next few days. It's quite interesting to read some of the press releases about these supercomputers. NEC will be rolling out a new terraflops machine for use in climate and natural disaster modeling. Recently, the US Department of Energy announced that they will be buying more supercomputers as well-to model atomic bombs. Ironic, isn't it?

Wirehead sent us this news.com story where you can read about Sanford Wallace and Walt Rines's new web site, and the amazing ruckus that these spammers caused. I got spammed yesterday with a really annoying one asking me to buy spamming software for $295. If it just would have the word 'SPAM:' in the subject, I wouldn't care.

Lessig, the court appoi nted lawyer to the DOJ-MS case, who has come under serious fire from Microsoft for an alleged email to a Netscape employee saying that installing IE was akin to selling his soul, made a sworn statement saying that he had no personal bias or prejudice. No sure how believable that is, but the US Courts have already said that they will not be removing him from the case, much to Mr. Bill's dismay.

Matthew Weigel writes "Although his real role is unclear, Clinton has appointed a new adviser for encryption. Check here for the whole story, but it's supposed to be a re-affirmation of current policy (wanting key recovery here in the States), now that the old crypto adviser is working in the Commerce Dept. (an anti key-recovery player). It's not clear whether Steven Honigman, the new guy, will have any power, or simply be a mouthpiece."

This article from Steve Borho discusses how Digital is being forced to remain competitive with the new faster/cheaper wintel boxes by cutting prices by as much as 50% on it's Alpha hardware. I still can't afford one... anyone want to donate one to Slashdot?

Intel will be rolling out, the next level for the Pentium II at the end of this month, clocking in at 333 mhz. Some truly amazing speeds going on, and at not-entirely unreasonable price.

Dan Marks wrote in to say the following "Clinton's technology consultant Ira Magaziner says that recommendations for privatizing DNS should be out in a few weeks. article

On a similar note, a group that wants to test its new system of top-level domain names, possibly without permission from the existing DNS authorities. article"

Jon Webb wrote in to say this " The market continues to crumble for large disk drive manufacturers. At the end of last year Seagate Technologies announced a $300 million restructuring plan in response to falling sales and increased competition in the large fixed disk medium. This followed a slump in sales and an exit from the market by drive giant Micropolis (see this link for more on "Micropolis Goes Belly Up"). Seagate Technologies announced today that they would be laying off about 10,000 workers, closing several manufacturing plants, and cosolidating it's R&D Divisions, amounting to more than a 10% cut in the company (check it out here). "

Jon Webb wrote in to say this " The market continues to crumble for large disk drive manufacturers. At the end of last year Seagate Technologies announced a $300 million restructuring plan in response to falling sales and increased competition in the large fixed disk medium. This followed a slump in sales and an exit from the market by drive giant Micropolis (see this link for more on "Micropolis Goes Belly Up"). Seagate Technologies announced today that they would be laying off about 10,000 workers, closing several manufacturing plants, and cosolidating it's R&D Divisions, amounting to more than a 10% cut in the company (check it out here). "

News.Com is reporting that "A manager of a free lost-and-found Web site plans to charge Internet Explorer 4.0 users as a way to protest what he calls Microsoft's "monopolistic tendencies."

Personally I kind of like this idea. What do you think? Let's just shut them out completely. Mabey I should make my chat room send a page that says "Get a real browser" to anyone that wants to chat with IE. That would be kinda funny.

Intel will be shipping the Katmai processor in 1999, formerly known as the MMX 2. Continuing the trend of more multimedia friendly processors, Katmai is expected to run at about 500 mhz, and apparently will preced the Merced, Intel's 64 next-gen chip.

Dan Marks sent us this news.com story where you can read about Netscape's layoff. I guess a company that lost as much money as they did last quarter can't afford to keep its staff around. Is this the begining of the end? I think somebody at Netscape ought to read this weeks editorial before it's to late *grin*

Sharp today announced the development of a new technology called CGS, or continuous grain silicon, a process which allows glass panels to be made with integrated circuits inside. Sharp says they will begin to see profits from the derived products in this fiscal year.

Compaq said today that they will be exiting the PC-TV home theatre arena, due to high prices, and not much consumer response. So far, this area has been dominanted, if that word can be used, by GW2K's Destination Systems, but this has not proven to be the money maker that computer makers were looking for.

In a surprise to all of the news reports yesterday, TCI has said that the nearly five million cable top web browsers will not be running Java, as initialed promised, but will in fact run a Windows-based system. In many ways, this victory for Microsoft is one of the largest of recent months, giving them a big in into a part of the industry that looks to be huge.

Apparently TCI has chosen to go with Sun's Java for their OS instead of anything Microsoft. This is a major victory for (more) open standards. this article was sent to us by Garrick West.

David Fagan wrote in to tell us about this article where it is reported than recent statistics show that IE4 is out on top in the browser battle with 63% of the traffic at various high traffic sites. I don't put a lot of weight in these stats, but this is a pretty significant number.

Check out this story where you can read that Microsoft has actually apologized to the DOJ. Sort of. Thanks to Wesley Lemke for this nugget.

Who Vision Systems has reported that they will be implementing a fingerprint scanner that will actually be built into the computer monitor. Using a security system, this will allow for the requirement of finger print scanning, and then determine access to the machine. Maybe it's just me, but I think that if I really wanted access to a system built with this, I would just cut off the hand of the person who ran it, and put that up.

news.com reports that Microsoft is selling copies of Windows 98 Beta 3 for US$29.95, not including S&H. This is sold as an unsupported release.
I bet I'd be suprised how many people end up taking the bait...

The FCC will be hearing yet another plea from the telcos. The telephone companies are asking that ISPs be forced to pay for each connection to the switch center, by classifying calls to there as " telecommunications". The FCC struck this down last year, but is considering reopening the subject.

This week's perspective at News.com is an interesting retrospective on what 1997 meant to the encryption movement, but also about where it is going. All summary aside however, this is an issue that we need to fight as a community.

Dan Marks sent in This Story which discusses one of the things Microsoft is doing right these days- It is not participating in the normal practice of buying influence in Washington DC. This is a must read. But every coin has 2 faces, and this story sent to us by Alan is a very chilling account of how Microsoft Chewed up and spit out the 3D industry a few years back. I want all you MS Haters to read both articles. And try to argue intelligently- both of these articles are good examples of how the War with Microsoft will be won. The all to common MS bashing I hear so often won't get us anywhere, but this stuff... the truth will.

Following yesterday's Quake2.com hack, both bmw.com and Fox.com have been hacked. Fox was replaced with this X-Files Image sent to me by Scott Miga.

Troy Solo wrote in to tell us that BMW's hackers left a new page saying "Let's Have Fun with German Cars" and a flaming image linking to Ferrari's web site.