“As ADSL continues to attract bad press for slow rollout, high prices and limited range, broadband wireless has been heralded as a quick, cheap alternative to getting the UK wired to broadband. E-minister Patricia Hewitt looked forward to a “competitive” auction and anticipated its roll out would benefit both businesses and the “whole economy”. The reality has been somewhat different.” Full story at ZDNet UK News.

Sensei wrote in to tell us about Danny DiPaolo’s article on Linuxnewbie.org: Customizing vim. Designed for “anyone who really loves their vim and wants to make it even better,” the piece includes plenty of hints and tips to get the most out of this venerable text editor.

The Register reports “Compaq has been slapped with a patent infringement lawsuit demanding at least $60 million in damages. The patents cover the compression of video data, and the plaintiff is a consortium of seven companies, including consumer electronics operations JVC and Matsushita.”

osOpinion Webmaster Kelly McNeill stopped by to tell us about a review of Linux-Mandrake 7.2 on that site. “Mike” writes: “I’ve always maintained that Linux could be a useable desktop OS if some of the development community worked toward that end. The Gnome and KDE people obviously feel the same way. It now takes fewer mouse clicks to install Linux than any version of MS Windows and, hey, it works right outta the box.”

Looking for a friendlier way to tell your users the document they’re looking for isn’t available? Zez.org’s Paul Kenneth Egell-Johnsen offers a few tips for making a more informative 404 error page with Apache. Thanks to NewsForge reader pkej for the pointer.

A post at LWN.net details two recently discovered issues with the Common UNIX Printing System’s access control and network behavior.

ZDNet’s Jason Brooks comments on the future of Windows and its alternatives: “The wicked Windows 9x witch is nearly dead. Sometime next year, a tornado of marketing hype will emerge from Redmond to drop a house on Microsoft’s marquee product. And, as its feet shrivel, I’ll not shed a tear.”

“Next year, Palm will begin offering a back-end platform to support enterprise applications with integrated application services tailored for individual business users. Through the platform, corporations will be able to allow employees access to networked applications through their Palm personal digital assistants.” Full report at ZDNet eWEEK.

ZDNet News reports that Time Warner, in an effort to appease regulators and win approval for its merger with AOL, will allow Earthlink to offer high-speed Internet services via its cable networks.

New Netscape packages are available that fix a buffer overflow in parsing HTML. Full details at Help Net Security.