To sidestep a European tax on gaming machines, Sony has added YA-Basic, an open source distribution of the classic programming language, to its new gaming system. This bundle will be exclusive to Playstation 2 consoles distributed in Europe. From a report at The Register.

A Reuters story posted on News.com reports that the Republican National Committee’s Web site was cracked just hours before polls opened on Tuesday.

Stock of Santa Clara, California-based Transmeta (TMTA) rose 100 percent to $42 in first-day trading. Shares priced Monday night at $21 each, substantially above a recently raised expected price range of $16 to $18. From Wired News.

InfoWorld.com is reporting that Compaq has confirmed it will not use Transmeta’s low-power Crusoe chip for its next generation of Armada laptops.

Christopher Robato Yao of 32BitsOnline comments on the Rambus legal stragety: “Half of the memory market is the consumer; the other half consists of the devices that interface to the memory. In short, you can’t sell RDRAM if you don’t have devices that use them: processors, motherboard and graphics chipsets. So why isn’t RAMBUS suing the likes of AMD, VIA and nVidia? Perhaps it’s the limitations of financial resources.”

After further review, says ZDNET, security experts last week
said enterprises can glean some new lessons from
the Microsoft Corp. hacking saga. First and
foremost, if you get hacked, don’t do what
Microsoft did.

CNN.com reports that Microsoft Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates will open the show
Sunday evening with his traditional state-of-the-industry speech. As well as
highlighting initiatives in the smart phone and handheld-computing arenas, the
Microsoft chief is expected to offer one of the first public glimpses of Whistler, the
codename for Microsoft’s next operating system for consumer PCs due next year.

The Scotts Valley, Calif.-based
company said it won a contract to provide hard
drives from June 2001 through midyear 2003
for the Xbox, which is scheduled for release in
fall 2001. From Reuters and ZDNET.

Networkworldfusion.com reports:
“It’s an issue where if we move too quickly to ban the
tools used by hackers, we also may ban the tools used by
investigators,” said John Patrick, vice president for
Internet technology at IBM, and chairman of GIP.

Intel subsidiary Dialogic has unveiled the Intel Communications
Platform (ICP), a set of software components to let corporate
customers build their IP communications infrastructure on
established standards including the ECTF S.100 API and
Microsoft’s Telephone API (Tapi). From ZDCOUK.