As soon as Judge Jackson's decision was available for download (from this mirror site, among others), I was on the phone with Washington DC attorney Don Weightman, who often serves as the informal "Slashdot legal interpreter" on federal law, especially for antitrust and regulatory matters. Click below for a transcript of the phone conversation Don and I had as we read the decision together. Don makes some great points!

Quite a number of people have been writing to us about Dave Whitinger's column that ran on LinuxToday and was sent over here as well. Dave's contention is the browser compatibility is a crucial battle for the success of Linux - and things don't look so good. Click below to read the column, and contribute your thoughts.

This week's ApacheWeek has the news that Amazon.com has switched from using Netscape's server to C2Net's Stronghold, an Apache-based commercial server (Stronghold is mostly known for it's SSL capability). Check out the Netcraft poke to see the setup Amazon is running.

Boy, is this book overdue. If you're reeling from media hype about gazillion-dollar start-ups, Net billionaires, worker benefits and stock options, here's the story -- truly nailed down -- of what life is really like for many workers in the new, hi-tech workplace.

Isaac-Lew wrote to us pointing out that Opendesk.com has gone into public beta. From the looks of it, they are trying to implement an Office-like suite of features on the Web. Word Processor and such are still forthcoming, but they have got calendering tools, web mail and other "applications" in place. One of the most interesting aspects is that they claim to be open sourcing the project. I can't quite tell if it's a Sun-style commuity source licensem, or a GPL ^[?] style license.

Michael Lewis' "The New, New Thing" focuses on mythic Silicon Valley entrepreneur (and Netscape founder) Jim Clark to explain how Silicon Valley really works. It's a great read, but the author perhaps admires his ego-maniacal subject a bit too much.

hoppy wrote to us in regards to the recent EE Times article about a tuberculosis detecting biochip. The United States and Russia are teaming up to make the chip, as variant drug-resistant strains are infecting thousands in Russian jails, and making a big comeback in poorer areas in the US. The chip will be used to identify the strain of TB, so that appropriate treatment can be used, rather then the shotgun approach In other news, James Clark, co-founder of SGI and Netscape has given 150 million US to his former school, Stanford. The donation is to be used just for biotech.

Because you're reading Slashdot, you probably know that client-side cookies are perfectly safe. They don't contain any code that gets executed by your computer, and there are limits to keep them from filling up your hard drive. Just as importantly, no server can read another server's data, each site reads only its own cookies, and you don't have to worry about privacy. If you don't want a site to know anything about you, you don't tell that site anything. Simple. Or is it?

There's an interesting (but somewhat old) article by Network Computing which supposedly helps webmaster's pick their "best bet" for web development systems. They compare Netscape's Enterprise Server, Microsoft's IIS and the ASF's Apache. Despite Apache and PHP being their "clear favorite" they somehow give the Editor's Choice to Netscape. Confusing, but still a pretty good read.

NoWhere Man writes "Intel plans to release Coppermine, its 700Mhz+ series of Pentium III chips, on Monday. The new chip will, not only be available for desktop machines, but notebooks aswell; thanks to a new design which makes them cooler. This release will allow Intel to say, once again, that it offers the fastest chip on the market. "

Herschel Krustofsky writes "A researcher at the University of New Mexico has modified the Doom source to visualize processes and kill them! Finally you can really enjoy killing that Netscape process that just won't die!" Allright, I'm impressed.

KuRL writes "Entertainment Weekly is reporting (yeah, that's the right link, it's at the bottom of the page) that the one and only Who will reunite to play Vegas on October 29th. What? Not 'news for nerds' you complain? Well, the concert, entitled 'iBash '99' will be kick off the launch of Pixelon, and will be 'webcast' live." Caveats: most of Pixelon's content requires a Windows-only Netscape plug-in to view. I bummed my wife's (Windows) PC to try it - and it crashed repeatedly. And downloading a 30 second "preview" clip took over three minutes on my cable modem. It would take forever via dialup. I don't think the CmdrTaco/Pete Townshend online singalong we've all been looking forward to is going to happen quite yet. Oh, well.

It's nice that "the media" and the outside world in general have finally noticed Open Source. Trouble is, unless you mention Linux, their eyes glaze over like yesterday's halibut. Open Source has a lot of successes, especially Apache . So how come you never see that rainbow feather on the news? Read on.

k_wayne writes "The Gnome team have finished an amazing bug hunt and we are left with a pretty cool stable release of the Gnome system. See the announcement made by Elliot Lee. The gnome developers are now moving their attention toward the next generation gnome release. This new Gnome stuff is not only very stable, it's got some very cool stuff in it. " One really nice new feature is dingus-clicking: you can click on a URL in the terminal and have Netscape come up. XChat, glade, more translations, and easier bug reporting some of the most significant features.

NoWhere Man writes "Just surfed into Wired and read an article about a theif using email to get AOL passwords. Using OperaMail and a program similar to those used to hack ICQ, the sender can get the password to anyone's account on AOL; all the user has to do is open the email. " You've Got A Password! (Done in sing-song voice).

OUSpirit writes "I saw this over at Netscape's Technews site. Evidently, Intel (and some other companies) just invested some major bucks in TurboLinux to put them on more equal footing with RedHat. They plan to use the money to expand management and development staff. "

johns713 sent us the word that Milestone 10 of Mozilla has been released. For more information on what M10 has read the release notes. Now I gotta see if it will stay up on my machine this time - or at least beat Netscape for uptime.

pangloss writes "On the heels of the "Whither Netscape 5.0?" story comes M10. Proxies are working. Check out the release notes or the brief blurb at MozillaZine, which cites the new beta release date (12/15/99). Cheers to the Mozilla Team!"

An anonymous reader wrote in to point us to a Time Digital article (By Nathaniel Wice: Hey man!) about AOL Shelving plans for Netscape 5's release yet this year. So is the browser war really over? Does Mozilla have a chance?

Long ago and far away, I started writing a series called "Road To Linux," in which I set out to learn Linux in a few weeks. Talk about clueless. Nearly one year, two wasted computers, a ticked-off spouse, (and a Yellow Lab who ate a motherboard) 30-plus books and manuals and much assorted debris later, I've more or less made it.