From a Boston Globe story: Riding on the penguin’s coattails is a tricky thing. Just ask Corel Corp. Last year, Corel placed a large bet by selling Linux versions of its software, including its marquee WordPerfect Office programs. It hasn’t paid off, at least not yet. The Ottowa software company’s finances are dismal.

This Boston Globe story updates the denial by Microsoft that it was porting some applications to Linux.

Unix Review
asks: “Do we really need another editor?” My skepticism subsided as I began using Visual SlickEdit 5.0. I found it to be a high-quality product, specifically tailored for programming. It allows you to work more efficiently and productively, and is worth installing.

Byron Sonne wants both Gnome and KDE to shut up. His opinion is on OSopinion. Check out another column at LinuxPlanet.

From a CNet story: VA Linux Systems surpassed analyst expectations today, reporting revenue of $50.7 million and a loss of 10 cents a share, a nickel better than analysts predicted. Analysts generally expected revenue between $42.7 million and $44.5 million, and those surveyed by First Call/Thomson Financial expected a loss of 15 cents a share. In the same quarter a year ago, VA had a net loss of 34 cents a share on revenue of $7.8 million. More at BusinessWire and from Reuters. The company’s CEO appeared on RadioWallStreet Wednesday. (Full disclosure: VA Linux owns NewsForge.)

The Energy Department has awarded Compaq Computer Corp. a $200 million contract to build the largest supercomputer in the world — a system with enough disk space to store 20 times the number of books at the Library of Congress, according to a story at Federal Computer Week.

The White House announced Wednesday that President Clinton will allow Japan’s Nippon Telegraph & Telephone to purchase the U.S. Web hosting company Verio, which had undergone an unusual high-level review due to espionage concerns, according to a story by the Industry Standard. The proposed $5.5 billion deal came under the scrutiny of a federal government national security panel due to concerns about potential spying because NTT, which is majority owned by the Japanese government, could have access to U.S. wiretapping activities.

U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno said Wednesday that details for a planned review of the FBI computer program designed to capture e-mail messages for criminal investigations will be released Thursday, according to a Reuters story. The Justice Department will post a statement on its Web site at 5 p.m. EDT on Thursday detailing the work and its expectations for the wiretap review, Reno said.

The old-time users of Novell are fed up with all this talk of Linux, TCP/IP, CISCO routers and switches, etc., and they have decided to stick up for themselves, according to this story at the parody site segfault.

Porn sites are generally supporting file-sharing services such as Freenet, according to an IDG story. “It could be a major benefit for us,” says David Schlesinger, VP for Internet marketing at Vivid Video, a leading maker of pornographic videos. “If surfers find a snippet from a movie, it might entice them into buying the whole tape. We can actually turn these shared files into mini-infomercials.”