“Faced with uncertainty over the future use of memory chips featuring its proprietary high-speed interface in PCs, Rambus looks to carve a niche in networking hardware and expand its reach into the consumer electronics market,” says PC World.

Ah, it’s a brave new world… all of a sudden (just as the MPAA long feared), DVD rewritable drives are all over the place. No mention in the eet.com piece on the current crop about whether any of things work with Linux or *BSD, but you know it’s only a matter of time until some clever hackers make it so.

Fortune.com profiles a new Internet retailer, Libida.com, “the spot for
female sexuality.” The story says, “Online retailing might be out of favor, but in Silicon Valley, there’s no killing the hope that you can make a lot of money off what your neighbors do behind closed doors.”

“Malicious vote-bots could make hanging chads look tame,” says SecurityFocus columnist Kevin Poulsen in a story at The Register.

“An Italian company has proposed a new message routing system which could transform the way people communicate over the Internet if the application for a new TLD (top level domain) is accepted by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).” Full story @ PC World.

Very cool story from LiuxWorld’s Joe Barr about how Bob Young and Mark Ewing met and ended up incorporating Red Hat. (Another installment is promised for next month.)

It’s cute, it hooks instantly to AOL when you turn it on, it uses a Tramseta processor, it runs on Linux, and its browser is based on the (Mozilla) Gecko engine. What’s not to like (assuming you want to use AOL)? Well… a ZDNet review finds a few deficiencies, but is positive overall.

“You might call Neoware a company on a mission. One of
many companies struggling to carve out a profitable
niche for itself in the market of selling Linux-based
products, Neoware has tuned its efforts to what CEO
Mike Kantrowitz dubs ‘Appliance Computing.'” That’s a little of what it says in a ZDNet story about NeoWare. It’s a PR-like blurb, but contains enough info about NeoWare’s plans for the “post-PC” age to be worth reading. Warning: toward the end of the piece, CEO Kantrowitz is quoted as having said, “I think that a
balance is appropriate. For example, not everything that
we do is open source. We keep certain really unique and
proprietary technologies as non-open-source
technologies. But things that are based apon open
source we are obligated to provide back. And we also
contribute things that we don’t have an obligation to
provide back, because we think that open source is an
important phenomenon…”

…is the title of a great-sounding book (with a tres-cool cover) that gets a glowing review at maximumlinux.com. According to the reviewer, “The author, Nicholas D. Wells, takes a unique approach
with this book. It’s not something you would read front to
back. Rather you scan the index, find out what you want to
do, and flip to the section that warrants your interest.”

Hi.. Tuxtiles.com has a neat idea for the winter: Linux blankets. For 30$ USD, you get a nice big blanket that’s warm. The press release is located here. 🙂 –Inoshiro