Radical Net programmers are committed to building a wholly anonymous, virtually untraceable way of communicating and trading files online. Chief among these is Freenet, an open-source project viewed by many as the ultimate inheritor to Napster's original promise of free online file swapping. For the first time, the largely volunteer effort has hired a paid staffer, Swedish student Oskar Sandberg, who will get $2500 for two months of work, using funds from an online donation pool.

According to the Meta Group analysts organizations should focus on mainstream environments and treat Linux as a tactical solution for embedded systems and special uses, unless they are operating in countries with a large and available skilled IT labor pool that does not demand high wages. They say that Linux is unlikely to displace Windows or the proprietary versions of Unix now used on virtually all desktops and servers in commercial environments.

"Last week I was flamed by dozens of Linux users for simply reporting on the results of a recent survey of Australian IT managers that indicated that usage of Windows 2000 is growing strongly, and that Unix is declining a little. Linux users often get religious about their operating system, and they don't like facts that are contrary to their prejudices. Since time immemorial religion has provided people with a rationale for their existence and meaning to lives that would otherwise comprise little more than the proverbial sham, misery and broken dreams.

With this validation, SuSE Linux has broadened its enterprise directives to reach a wide audience of IT customers committed to deploying the extensive e-business infrastructure provided through Oracle9i Database. In addition, at Oracle OpenWorld in Berlin, Oracle9i Real Application Clusters running on SuSE Linux is being shown in Network Appliance's booth as well as in Intel's booth.

Compaq has affirmed its affinities with Linux by announcing a handful of new programs including a "Tru64 Affinity Program" that aims to provide application and management compatibility between machines running in a mixed Tru64/Linux environment, and by making its "single system image" technology (SSI) available to Linux under a "GPL-like" license.

There's more to Microsoft's recent attacks on the open-source movement than mere rhetoric: Linux's popularity could hinder the software giant in its quest to gain control of a server market that's crucial to its long-term goals.

GNOME 2.0 Release Manager Martin Baulig's resignation from his position was part of a broader, more extended conflict within the GNOME developer community. Havoc Pennington has written a document, currently under discussion, that addresses the dynamics that caused the conflict to become so protracted and proposes ways to mend them. Entitled `GNOME Enhancement Procedure,' the document is centered around "recommendations for how to review changes within modules. It covers changes to libraries and APIs, and also major UI changes and the like," writes Pennington in the document's introduction.

The first release of Visual Perl, Visual Python and Visual XSLT for Beta 2 of Microsoft Visual Studio.NET are solutions that allow developers to edit, debug and run programs written in Perl, Python and XSLT in the Visual Studio.NET IDE.

Customizable error response

Customizable error response, the Apache style, comes in three flavors:

1) Plain text

ErrorDocument 500 "The server made a boo boo.

Note: The (") marks it as text, it does not get output.

2) Local redirects

ErrorDocument 404 /missing.html to redirect to local URL /missing.html

ErrorDocument 404 /cgi-bin/missing_handler.pl

Note: You can redirect to a script or a document using server-side-includes.

Librenix has a piece on Microsoft's oposed "Smart Tags," (the author is against them and proposes a way in which they'd be more palatable) and a more interesting bit of related information, which is the license under which all the site's content is provided: changes to presentation details allowed by the W3C HTML specification are permitted, but "reproduction in a web browser" in such a way that URL's are added or links otherwise provided are not.