important news of the week

[Kragen Sitaker]

So the FDA can't regulate cigarettes, essentially because they're
designed to kill people.

Bochs and NEdit are now free software.

Subterfugue is being integrated into the mainline Linux kernel.  This
means mandatory access controls will be possible without downloading
extra kernel patches.

The free speech vs. intellectual property war is heating up, with the
Cyber Patrol lawsuit alleging that Matthew Skala and Eddy Janssen acted
illegally by violating the shrink-wrap license on Cyber Patrol to
reveal how shoddy the software is and how many mistakes are included in
its block list.  The DVD suits continue.  The Digital Millennium
Copyright Act's implementation date draws near; the comment deadline is
even nearer: http://www.eff.org/ip/DMCA/20000316_eff_dmca_alert.html.
Shockingly, UCITA has been passed in Virginia, over the vociferous
objections of every consumer-rights and computer-science group known to
humanity; discussion of its passage in some other states is happening
now.  Colleges continue to ban Napster, and Napster fans continue to
write clones and share music.

Something called the Chinese Linux Extension is out; it adds Chinese
language support to many Linux packages, such as GNOME and KDE.  On
another note, for a really imporessive list of supported languages,
check out AbiWord's list: Swedish, Indonesian, Danish, Finnish, French,
Italian, Norwegian, Spanish, Catalan, Czech, Portuguese, German, Dutch,
and, of course, English: http://www.abisource.com/dev_tarball.phtml

Netscape 6.0 should be out in the next month.  It's free software too.

Somebody's trying to write GNU Fortran 95: http://xena.eas.asu.edu/~andy/

Perl 5.6 is out.

VA Linux Systems' stock is down to $70 or so, a bit more than twice the
IPO price.  This means the company's market capitalization is about $3
billion; it is probably worth more than that if its chances of market
success are as good as they appear.

I might be biased, still owning some of the IPO stock.

Linux Weekly News says:

	The return of reality can only be a good thing. Linux will not
	take over the world tomorrow. No one company will ever dominate
	the Linux market. It makes no sense to value Linux stocks so
	highly, and it distorts a lot of things. It attracts companies
	like LinuxOne. Maybe now Linux company CEO's can dream a little
	less about becoming instant billionaires and get on with the
	business of making their companies actually work.

The 7.0beta2 version of PostgreSQL is out, as is a new version of
readline.  And someone has written an X server in Java called WeirdX.

-- 
<kragen@pobox.com>       Kragen Sitaker     <http://www.pobox.com/~kragen/>
The Internet stock bubble didn't burst on 1999-11-08.  Hurrah!
<URL:http://www.pobox.com/~kragen/bubble.html>
The power didn't go out on 2000-01-01 either.  :)