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Hot on the heels of their jump into the Windows NT world, SGI is planning on selling computers that run Linux. They might even create a distribution of their very own. LinuxWorld has the story.

I just found this incredibly banal Best of the Internet list at the Brill’s Content Web site. The media criticism in Brill’s Content is pretty good, I don’t know why they’d waste their time compiling the most obvious list of links possible. I hope they didn’t kill any trees to put this stuff in print.

DNS: A Short History and a Short Future, by Ted Byfield.

Mac OS X has a pretty GUI (not surprising since it comes from Apple).

In a controversial Internet case, USA today reports on a journalist who was sentenced to 18 months in prison after pleading guilty to child pornography charges. He was arrested for sending and receiving pornographic images over the Internet, and claims he didn’t know it was illegal. Apparently, the journalist was working on a story at the time, and committed the crimes during the course of his research. John Schwartz covers the neverending crypto debate for the Washington Post. ...

Microsoft, legendary for its marketing, has blown it in the media relations department lately. As most people in the technology side of the industry already know, Microsoft refuses to admit a mistake and exhibits a “my way, or the highway” mentality in everything they do. Increasingly, journalists seem to be catching on to that aspect of Microsoft’s corporate persona as well. Aaron M. Renn takes a look at the philosophical differences between the people supporting the term “Open Source software” and those who support the original term, “free software,” in his paper “Free”, “Open Source”, and Philosophies of Software Ownership. He’s right to argue that the difference is more than just semantics. ...

IBM has launched a redesign of its alphaWorks Web site, which is the home of a lot of the free software IBM releases. A K A Frank Sinatra -- the Washington Post pores over the FBI files on the chairman of the board. John Markoff covers a privacy problem in Microsoft’s software for the New York Times. Apparently, some of Microsoft’s applications are assigning a unique ID to your computer, and submitting it to the company when you register your products. This is just another good reason why you should avoid the registration wizards in your products at all costs. ...

Hot on the heels of their jump into the Windows NT world, SGI is planning on selling computers that run Linux. They might even create a distribution of their very own. LinuxWorld has the story. The Washington Post has an interesting feature on the effects of technological and organizational change on the U.S. Marine Corps. They’re putting more power in the hands of the grunts, and equipping soldiers in the field with wearable computers. ...

Senator Slade Gorton of Washington (where Microsoft is located) accuses the Department of Justice of pursuing the Microsoft anti-trust case in hopes of gaining votes in California for Al Gore in the 2000 Presidential election. I think that there are logical philosophical arguments to be made in favor of Microsoft, but this has to be one of the most cynical statements I’ve heard about in quite some time. Get a life, Slade. Wired News reports. ...

Unix programmers will love this: Creating a UNIX Application Using the Win32 API. Online Journalism Review interviews Scott Shuger, the writer behind Today’s Papers at Slate. TP is wonderful, especially if you’re too lazy to actually read the newspapers that Shuger covers. Shuger reads and reviews five major papers every morning before you wake up, and offers probing analysis of what they’re covering and, in many times, what colors their coverage. My employer is in the news! ...