From a guest column at ZDNet: “In my opinion, the RIAA wanted to create a service that reflects the digital-music download model, but a ‘dumb outsider’ beat them to it. But … Napster will not prevail with their current arguments.”

From an InfoWorld article: “In the wake of comments made Tuesday by Transmeta CEO Dave Ditzel that the ambitious microprocessor start-up is at least five years ahead of well-established competitors Intel and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), a spokesman for Santa Clara, Calif.-based Transmeta clarified that the company’s lead is in its software emulation technology, a method of computing unique to the company’s Crusoe processor.”

Upside.com has an article that rips into Open Source stock prices before talking about a debate between Open Source advocates and closed-sourcers at the Embedded Systems Conference West trade show in San Jose,Calif. “The biggest news event was the Great Open Source Debate, during which
two teams squared off to debate the merits of proprietary vs. open source
development in the embedded systems realm.”

Eric S. Raymond’s Tuxedo.org has a new chapter of his book, “The Art of Unix Programming.”

Slashdot readers talk about a PR Newswire story that 3dfx
has been admitted to the OpenGL Architectural Review Board.

From a ZDNet story about Frontpath’s new ProGear Net appliance: “The tablet will cost about $1,500 with premium options such as a 1,024×768 10.4-inch display, 128MB of RAM, 6.4GB hard disk drive and a lithium-ion battery. The ProGear will run the Linux OS, use a 400MHz Transmeta TM3200 processor and browse the Web with Netscape Navigator version 4.74 for Linux.”

Slashdot readers discuss a Linux Magagine interview with IBM’s chief Linux strategist, Irving
Wladawksy-Berger, about IBM and Linux. From Slashdot: “IBM sees Linux as
a disrupting technology of the same class as the Internet: an OS that can run on many
platforms and that nobody owns: something that can fundamentally change the
landscape of computing.”

Researchers at Sony’s Computer Science Laboratory in France have succeeded in creating a version of the company’s robot dog AIBO capable of speaking, reports ZDNet UK News.

MacWeek proclaims, Mac OS X, through its Unix-derived 4.4BSD foundation, brings Mac users a feature that some might regard as heretical: the ability to control the system by means of a command line interface (CLI).

Eslit.com has launched a collection of 101 multimedia web special effect Java applets to provide 101 ways to jazz up anybody’s web site, from Internet Wire.