Hack
Jon Johansen the hacker who made DeCSS for DVD has released a hack to bypass Apples iTunes DRM (Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) format)

Debian Linux site was also hacked... but nothing hit the papers .. even the statment the CEO made stinks !!

DirectX
Links to DX and MDX
http://www.dotnetforums.net/t75901.html

DirectX tutorials
http://staff.develop.com/candera/weblog2/articleview.aspx/DirectX

http://www.kuhnstall.de/tutorials.html

MyMSEvents.com
Good site for PDC and Technet related stuff

PDC 2003
Collection of all the PDC 2003 documents
Awesome collection of ppts and discussions

Some interesting facts of COBOL
* 75% of all business data is processed in COBOL. - Gartner Group
* There are between 180 billion and 200 billion lines of COBOL code in use worldwide. - Gartner Group
* 15% of all new applications (5 billion lines) through 2005 will be in COBOL. - Gartner Group
* CICS transaction volume (such as COBOL-based ATM transactions) grew from 20 billion per day in 1998 to 30 billion per day in 2002. - The Cobol Report
* There are over 90,000 COBOL programmers in North America in 2002. Over the next four years there will be a 13% decrease in their number due to retirement and death. - Gartner Group
* The most highly paid programmers in the next ten years are going to be COBOL programmers who know the Internet. - GIGA Group

MS
Here Comes Virtual PC 2004; There Goes Linux Support
Next week, Microsoft will finalize the code for Microsoft Virtual
PC 2004, the most recent version of the virtual machine (VM)
technology the company purchased from Connectix earlier this year.
I've been a Virtual PC customer for years, and although I was happy to
see Microsoft select what I feel is the superior VM technology, I'm
now distressed to see how the company is changing the program.
Previously, Virtual PC was an excellent platform for testing
alternative OSs such as Linux. But Microsoft has killed support for
Linux and other non-Microsoft systems, although the company curiously
still supports OS/2. The reason? Microsoft is positioning Virtual PC
as a way to run legacy Windows NT and Windows 9x applications in VM
environments on modern Windows versions

Linux vs MS
Germany Installs 11,000 New PCs. Windows PCs. Running Office 2003.
We've been hearing a lot about Germany installing Linux PCs this
year--even though most of them will run Windows applications inside a
VMWare VM environment--but this week, Microsoft revealed that it
continues to grab the lion's share of software installations in a
country that the mainstream press would have you believe is "going
Linux." Microsoft will install Office 2003 on 110,000 PCs in North
Rhine-Westphalia (NRW), the largest and most populated state in
Germany. NRW said that it chose Office 2003 largely for its XML
capabilities.

According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Carnegie
Mellon University, all the complaints about Microsoft having security
problems are bunk. In fact, a report from the two organizations
specifically calls for all the finger-pointing to stop because all
technology is inherently vulnerable, and simply blaming Microsoft for
everything obscures a bigger problem: Microsoft doesn't own or control
the Internet infrastructure, which is extremely vulnerable to attack.
Furthermore, the report says, more than 90 percent of all
Microsoft-related attacks--including the two most infamous recent
attacks, MSBlaster and SoBig.F--involved vulnerabilities that the
company had already fixed.

Red Hat CEO: Use Windows--It's Better
You just can't make up this stuff. Matthew Szulik, CEO of Linux
maker Red Hat Linux, said this week that Windows is a better choice on
the desktop than--yes--Linux. "I would say that for the consumer
marketplace, Windows probably continues to be the right product line,"
Szulik said