"The Defense Department's inspector general is paying nearly $1 billion to 20 auditing and IT firms to assist the department in improving its bleak financial systems picture."

"The Justice Department, which challenged Microsoft Corp. in courtrooms for nearly a decade over antitrust violations, will pay more than $2 million each year to buy business software from Corel Corp., a leading Microsoft rival."

"VA Linux Systems Japan K.K. (VA Linux), a provider of Linux solutions for the telecommunications and enterprise systems markets, announced a strategic alliance with Sun Wah Linux Limited (SWL) to jointly develop a universal Debian GNU/Linux

"Maybe SCO Group should be called "the gang that couldn't sue straight.""

"SCO Group of Lindon, Utah, became high-tech's most hated company after suing IBM over the free Linux operating system. Now Linux lovers everywhere can celebrate: SCO is having problems."

Well, what can I say that I haven't already said? Not the best way to start an article hoping to get read, but this has been the most uneventful week using kde yet, and I've been using kde quite a long time.

"Actor Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson revealed more information on the upcoming Doom film, based on id Software's hit franchise. Johnson, who was on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart promoting the film Be Cool, was prodded by Stewart about another upcoming project."

"The Texas Gaming festival is a successful LAN event that has been taking place in Dallas, Texas for the past few years. Over the years, it has become one of the top most visited and sponsored LAN events in the nation with attendance easily surpassing the 500-attendee attendance. This year was no different. In fact, this was perhaps the most successful attempt at a LAN event especially when ATI decided to launch its X850 XT PE 512MB graphics card officially."

"A JAPANESE WEB reports that Intel will be found to have violated antimonopoly laws after it gave favourable prices to customers as long as they didn't use AMD processors."

Dan Bricklin, who helped kick-start the personal computer revolution in the 1980s as co-inventor of VisiCalc, recently named by [Boston] Governor Romney to a state information technology advisory panel, [states] open source is key to creating "Software That Lasts 200 Years."

"Linux is a free operating system for computers that has been developed largely by volunteer programmers.

Linux is thriving, not just on the college campuses where it emerged, but in companies and institutions. Surveys show that Linux is used by 24 percent of computer servers. It is creeping up on Windows, which has 55 percent of that class of operating system software."

"A full-scale quantum computer could produce reliable results even if its components performed no better than today's best first-generation prototypes, according to a paper in the March 3 issue in the journal Nature* by a scientist at the Commerce Department's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)."

"While Sun Microsystems Inc. moves to open-source its Solaris operating system and releases key patents in a nod to the open-source community, the company still takes a rap for hampering open source in other ways."

"Unbelievable as it's gonna sound... My friend's Windows XP CD... crashed while being inside his CD-ROM. This photo was taken immediately after the CD was ejected from the drive. Seriously, if this is not irony, then I don't know what is."

Link to photo.

THE FREE MAGAZINE ON FREE SOFTWARE

"Welcome to the "Free Software Magazine" project. Free Software Magazine is the free magazine for the free software world, available on paper and in electronic format. If you wonder what free software is, you should read this article written by the Free Software Foundation."

Link.

"Washington state bill would hold game companies responsible for "inspiring" real-life violence; Arkansas proposal literally keeps M-rated games out of kids' reach. Lawmakers across the country continue to propose legislation that would safeguard youths from the supposedly harmful effects of games that depict violence or that are rated "M" (for Mature content) by the Entertainment Software Ratings Board."

"Early attention to security issues might have given us a better internet today - or the project might never have taken off at all, says Robert Kahn."

"To quell the privacy-invasion fears that are stunting the growth of e-commerce, Web marketers need to give consumers more control of the personal information collected about them, according to research by Naresh Malhotra, Regents' professor of marketing at Georgia Tech College of Management."

"With the petroleum industry pumping just barely enough fuel to keep the world's economic engine humming, a buying frenzy on oil markets is setting the stage for sharply higher gasoline prices as early as next week.

"This week, in Dublin, the Digital Video Broadcasting Project held its annual meeting to discuss progress on its latest set of specifications for digital television. Much of its work has to do with technical details such as codecs and data formats, but a key section called Content Protection/Copy Management (CPCM) is about controlling how high-definition digital broadcasts may be recorded, copied, or redistributed.

"The 2005 Toyota Sienna (I'm not sure about earlier models) has an Event Data Recorder (EDR) which is a black box of sorts (sans the audio recording). In the event of a crash, near crash, or airbag deployment, it records various data such as vehicle speed, engine speed, driver seat position, gear selector position, etc."