An anonymous reader writes " This CRN article states that Microsoft is about to buy Connectix and enter the server consolidation market. Connectix makes virtual machines products that compete with those of VMware. Quote: 'The technology will be integrated into the Windows code, sources said.' Will Microsoft be able to pull this one off? Will their virtual machines run operating systems other than Microsoft's?"

Slashback tonight brings updates and amplifications on file-swapper hunting in Australia, Blender's progress since going open source, the badly subtitled LotR rips mentioned a few weeks ago, and more. Read on for the details.

geoffsmith writes "Just stumbled upon a gesture system for the linux desktop called 'wayV'. It works similarly to Mozilla gestures, except at windowing system level. For example, hold down the middle mouse button and draw an 'N' and netscape pops up, or draw a slash through a window and it kills the window's process. There are .debs available and the author is currently porting it to win32."

bluephone writes "I've been lucky enough to receive some interesting information from within the Netscape/AOLTW firewall, although in light of AOL's recent massive losses, poor outlook, and high profile execs resigning their positions, I'm not sure if these battle plans are still intact. As it stands, Netscape 7.x has one major release left for the forseeable future, but Gecko will soon overshadow everything, becoming the core platform for all of AOL's Internet content distribution. For all the details and much more, read it here."

An anonymous reader submits: "I use Microsoft's .NET Framework at my place of employment to create website applications for the general public. I have noticed a number of issues that can make web applications developed in .NET incompatible with Netscape and Mozilla." Read on below for his specific complaints; have you encountered the same incompatibilities, and can you suggest any workarounds?

jdclucidly asks: "I am a network administrator for a small non-profit (about 50 employees). I would like to roll Mozilla 1.2.1 out to all of our desktops. We don't have a single ghost image because the computers on site are too varied. Yes, I did my Googling. The source for the installer is just huge and mind boggling. Is there something like a Mozilla Administration Kit that will generate custom Mozilla installers? If not, would people on Slashdot be interested in starting a new project to make such a kit?" If you were going to deploy a "branded" version of Mozilla, company-wide, how would you do it, especially if you had to worry about a mixed OS environment?

BladeMelbourne asks: "As a web developer with a healthy love of Linux, I was wondering which fonts look great in Linux web browsers (particularly Mozilla/Netscape). Using 'Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif' just doesn't look nice. Do different distro's have different fonts? Which fonts resemble Arial/Helvetica? Which fonts are anti-aliased? Speaking of anti-aliased, does anyone know concisely how to get AA fonts with Mozilla on RedHat 8.0? I have my TTFs working, but don't seem to display correcly and look rather ugly on my display."

Fr05t asks: "Gone are the days of being able to use the W3C specs for DHTML and Javascript as a solid reference for every browser. To make things worse I've been finding more and more I'm required to build richer web content that runs on all browsers. I've found many books that have a chapter on Browser Compatibility, but is there such a thing as a complete guide to the incompatibilities between IE, Netscape, and Opera? I'd even settle for a site dedicated to the documentation of the browser SNAFU."

An anonymous reader writes "MozillaZine is currently featuring an article looking back at the last 12 months of the Mozilla project. It's amazing to see how far things have come in 2002. A year ago, there was no Mozilla 1.0, no Netscape 7, no Phoenix, no Chimera and no shipping AOL clients using Gecko (Mozilla's rendering engine). An interesting read."

mkeke writes "In a post over at OpenBSD Journal, Theo states that he has written a spam blocker that works with pf and Spews. It looks darn cool :)"

Slashback tonight (is this number 200 already?) brings a few updates and amplifications on grid computing and AMD's plans vis a vis Intel. Also, it seems that some of the best features of Mozilla have finally infiltrated the world of Netscape. Read on the for the details.

Ermintrude the Flying Cow writes "Ever wonder what "Ode to Joy" would sound like if stretched to 24 hours? Now you can find out. 9 Beet Stretch is the result of running Beethoven's 9th Symphony in a digital stretching program, turning the one hour piece into a 24 hour attention span acid test. Thankfully, for those of us who know our limits, it's been cut into 19 parts."

Velcro_SP writes "When was the last time a company had the nerve to attempt a worldwide introduction of an all-new desktop computer with dedicated OS? Genesi has been demonstrating prototypes all around Europe, most recently in Poland, in the USA, and is even making noise about Moscow. Throwing all caution to the wind they are moving past beta stage, announcing the consumer release scheduled to occur at an Aachen, Germany convention on December 7th and 8th. The Pegasos is a PPC processor-based computer designed and manufactured in Europe. It runs MorphOS, a PPC OS based on the Quark microkernel."

Liam writes "Tomcat is a subproject of the Apache Software Foundation's Jakarta project, its purpose being to serve Java Servlets and JavaServer Pages. It's a complex piece of software and though the documentation is very comprehensive, it helps to have a good reference work to hand. There aren't many books on the subject to choose from, so a publisher could make a fast buck putting out an incomplete work lacking in depth. Fortunately Wrox Press has done a great job with its new publication Professional Apache Tomcat." Read on for the rest of Liam's review.

Some excellent questions got asked. And these answers, from Larry Rosen, an attorney who works heavily on open source licensing matters, ought to give you a bit of insight into what the Microsoft "final judgement" means in the context of open source development and the software marketplace in general.

nileshch asks: "A very important development in recent times with regards to website users' privacy has happened with the W3C introducing the Platform for Privacy Preferences(P3P). P3P allows websites to create and maintain XML-based privacy policies for the entire website or sub sections of the site. These machine readable policies document what information is collected from users and how it is going to be used. Today, a few browsers like Mozilla/Netscape & Internet Explorer are committed to giving support for P3P (Mozilla here, IE here) . Although that support seems only skin-deep. I also find very few big sites adopting P3P seriously. Isn't it like the classic chicken-and-egg situation? Websites wait for full P3P support on browsers, browsers go slow on development because there isn't much feature demand happening on this front. Do you have P3P policies for your website? If not, what stops you from creating one? We all create hoopla over tiny privacy issues, user profiling and doubleclick.net . Then why isn't there much enthusiasm for P3P support in browsers?"

PizzaFace writes "After pushing free instant messaging to more than 100,000,000 users, AOL is now selling AIM-monitoring software to businesses that want to monitor and control the messaging of their employees. AIM Enterprise Gateway will reportedly sell for about $35/employee/year."

bhhenry writes "Linux Format reports on a new Microsoft PDF-killer technology to be included in Office 11, called XDocs. From the article: "Adobe's stock took an immediate hit, and some analysts went so far as to compare Adobe to erstwhile MS competitor Netscape.""

Once again, Dan Gillmor shows us why he is one of the world's most influential IT journalists, this time directly on Slashdot by way of his answers to your questions. Note that Dan reads Slashdot regularly, just like you. He'll surely read any comments you post to this article, although with his killer schedule he may not have time to post any replies.

musicmaster asks: "If you search the net for free drawings you will find a lot of them, but usually they are free for private use only. I tried to look for drawings that are really free - that is public domain, but I didn't find very much. Wikipedia has some images - scanned from books with expired copyrights - but not much Could you help me further?"