Taroon

Red Hat released Taroon, a public beta of Enterprise Linux 3.0; it supports i386, IA-64, x86-64, and PowerPC. It includes Eclipse, but you'll have to download your own JVM.

The new browser era

It's already some days since AOL cut the remaining Netscape staff, after AOL sold its soul to Microsoft. Some people call the firing of the Netscape crew the death of Netscape. It seems true, now that Internet Explorer has absolute control in website statistics. However, there are signs that something is terribly wrong with IE : IE6 is stone old, but IE7 will not be released within the next year. If you realise that most corporate desktops still offer IE5.5, you can count on it that IE7 will not reach your computer at work before 2005.

Ongoing writes the following : Today, the human experience of the Net stands at a crossroads, paths diverging into the future, and nobody knows which one we'll be on in a year. A lot of people who will read this have the chance to make a difference in the decision. Let's look at the options...
I'm quite certain that the FireBird and ThunderBird siblings of Mozilla will open a new browser competition : Mozilla as it is now, is simply too big to be used as a lean browser, certainly if you want to compare it against small browsers like Galeon, Opera, Camino and Safari. Debian is again light years ahead : AFAIK, it is the only distribution which has separate packages for the Mozilla components.

In the mean time, some people are watching Microsoft like a hawk.

Global Instability Index

After the new Cisco security flaw announced by Cisco, the Internet stability was quite disturbed while major backbone operators were busy to upgraded their routers. Someone developed a new model called Global Instability Index based on some BGP stats. Very nice to observe the impact of such events on a graph...

Perl state of the onion

We the unwilling,
led by the unknowing,
are doing the impossible
for the ungrateful.


One of the highlights of every OSCON is Larry Wall's annual State of the Onion address, covering Perl, philosophy, linguistics, music, theology, science, and usually funny other things thrown in for good measure. These are the thoughts of the man behind perl. (This explains a *lot* about perl. ;)