Rumors are afoot that AOL reject a buyout offer by Ol Ma Bell, aka AT&T. These rumors said that AOL turned down the offer, but also said that the reported offer may have been a tenative move by AT&T, trying to get AOL shareholders to cozy up to the idea, but that may backfire by drawing other rival bidders into the fracas.

Ari haviv wrote in to send us this story where you can read that Corel and Lotus are both integration Voice Recognition into their office suites. This is one VR that might actually be feasible in the next few years. I can type at about the same rate as I can talk, but this would definately save everyone a lot of repetitive stress if it becomes standard. And reliable (that's a big If though)

Scott Francis sent us a link to an article this Seattle Times Article where you can read about a company called Pixel, who apparently has some clever patent pending (grr) software that allows them to shrink the desktop, and put icon bars and stuff around the edges. I'm curious to see if it really works. Currently it is a win95 only technology, but if this really works, it could certainly be put to good use somewhere. arielb also sent us a similiar article from wired. And the MySpace Homepage claims that Mac and Unix versions are coming.

This is the first of a series of articles investigating the interplay between Open Source Software and commercial vendors. The common thread will be to find out how authors have earned a living from writing and servicing GPL/Open Source Software.

The series kicks off with Michael Tiemann, one of the founders of Cygnus Solutions, and author of the C++ component of GCC. Cygnus is one of the pioneers in commercial support for open-source software. It sells support and customization services for the gnu programming tools (gcc, gdb, ld, etc). Initially, the Free Software Foundation applauded this, but more recently, RMS feels that by also selling proprietary software Cygnus has betrayed the principle of free software.

In this interview, Michael discusses what it takes to set up a business based on open source software, what Cygnus hopes to add to GCC, and why they took the decision to sell closed source software.

AT&T and MCI, amongst a host of other companies have agreed to work together to construct an underseas cable connecting the US and Southern Europe. The cable will cost about 236$ million, and will be operational by September of 1999. Once in place, this will effectively increase the bandwidth between these places by twenty-fold.