California-based Alteon WebSystems Inc. agreed Monday to acquire Swedish software manufacturer Bluetail AB for $152 million in stock. Stockholm-based Bluetail’s engineers are credited with the invention of Erlang, a programming language used to develop a variety of different applications that run on the UNIX operating system, The Associated Press reported.

Shares of InfoNow and Red Hat were up in late afternoon trading Monday after news of a partnership was announced. The alliance will provide InfoNow’s technology to Red Hat solution providers with closed-loop lead management in an effort to increase the conversion rate of sales leads, CRN reported.

Microsoft Corp.’s delay in providing interactive-television software may slow AT&T Corp.’s technical trials of the technology and could limit the number of set-top boxes the telephone company lets Microsoft outfit, sources said Monday, according to a Reutersreport.

Several more “friend-of-the-court” briefs supporting Napster were filed in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals on Monday. Pressure is mounting for the court to reverse Judge Marilyn Patel’s injunction, reports Wired.com.

A ZDNet story talks about the end of the x86 processor era. “The Common Language Runtime not only can jump processors running Windows, but also jump processors and operating systems in general. What this means is someone creates a CLR for MacOS (or for Xfree86/Linux, BEOS or any other GUI-based operating system), and the programs written under the CLR in Windows will run in those environments as well. And of course, it can probably expand from even the computer market. Anyone want to run Outlook Express on your toaster?”

Sales of personal digital assistants in the United States during the first six months of 2000 equaled sales for all of last year, suggesting that overall sales of the devices in the United States this year will be double those of 1999. U.S. sales of PDAs in 1999 reached 1.3 million units, with a value of $436.5 million, reports InfoWorld.

Against the backdrop of the 10th annual International Storage System Symposium in San Diego, IBM on Tuesday will unveil its Modular Storage Server, which is heavily rooted in Compaq’s MA 8000 modular storage array, according to Mike Harrison, the director of storage alliances for Armonk, N.Y.-based IBM. With the introduction of this system, IBM gains ground in Compaq’s successful lower-end Intel and Unix-based storage markets, reports InfoWorld.

Intel Corp. has asked computer makers to halt shipments of models powered by a 1.13 gigahertz version of its Pentium III chip because of problems in running some software. Under certain conditions, the chip doesn’t work properly with computers running programs based on the Linux operating system and Sysmark 2000, a performance-benchmarking program, according to a Dow Jones story.

From an announcement at LWN.net: Since the last regularly scheduled CERT summary, issued in May, we have published information on a vulnerability in
rpc.statd on Linux systems, several ActiveX controls, vulnerabilities
in Outlook and Outlook Express, security considerations for using chat
software, hidden file extensions, and vulnerabilities in many FTP
daemons.

The First Annual Linux Users’ Training Conference And Awards Presentation will be Oct. 30 at the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center in Washington D.C. The full
press release is at LWN.net.