An anonymous reader writes "As 'Black Friday' approaches and consumers line up for the Playstation 3 it looks like Zune has become an afterthought. Despite months of hype, opening Zune sales are only so-so. While Zune did reach the top 10 on Amazon's Top 25 list for electronic product sales on its first day, it quickly fell below the top 15 and continues to drop. Six separate iPod models now outsell it as well as SanDisk's e250 player. In-store sales are not much better."

Reverse Gear writes "SecurityFocus has an interesting article about a paper published on the possibility of hiding a rootkit in different PCI cards and having the rootkit survive a reboot or cleansing of the hard disk. It seems though that the author of the article doesn't think this would be abused frequently. From the article and paper: '(Because) enough people do not regularly apply security patches to Windows and do not run anti-virus software, there is little immediate need for malware authors to turn to these techniques as a means of deeper compromise.'"

RobertinXinyang writes "MSN's MoneyCentral has an article on the possibility that the $100 laptop project fails to meet its goals, and the potential of the project to harm people in developing nations. The article goes on to liken the project to 'good-natured showboating', and cites the unreality of a family using the glow from the laptop's screen as the only source of light in their hut. Perhaps there are better things to do with our time and money in developing nations?" From the article: "The entire idea may be misguided and counterproductive. At least that's what Stanford journalism lecturer an Africa watcher G. Pascal Zachary thinks. The basic argument is that with $100 you could almost feed a village for a year, so why waste that sum on a laptop? What are they thinking? The fact that these people need electricity more than they need a laptop is only part of the problem. The real problem is lost mind share. The people are harmed because these sorts of schemes are sopping up mind-share time of the people who might be doing something actually useful."

Stony Stevenson writes "In comments confirming the open-source community's suspicions, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer Thursday declared his belief that the Linux operating system infringes on Microsoft's intellectual property." From the ComputerWorld article: "In a question-and-answer session after his keynote speech at the Professional Association for SQL Server (PASS) conference in Seattle, Ballmer said Microsoft was motivated to sign a deal with SUSE Linux distributor Novell earlier this month because Linux 'uses our intellectual property' and Microsoft wanted to 'get the appropriate economic return for our shareholders from our innovation.'" His exact wording is available at the Seattle Intelligencer, which has a transcript of the interview. Groklaw had an article up Wednesday giving some perspective on the Novell/Microsoft deal. Guess we'll have something to talk about in 2007, huh?

Luminescent writes "Nullsoft, in their new company, "Gnullsoft", just released an open source Napster clone. It does mp3s, movies, and any other format you could want. " More details: Gnutella is currently at version .48. Presently, they are finishing the version on-hand and will be doing a release at 1, along with the source, which is *not* currently availible. In addition to releasing the source at version 1, they will be releasing the client for other OSes. Presently, it's a Windows-only thing. Despite all of these drawbacks, this is an interesting move from WinAmp->Netscape->AOL->Time-Warner. Or whatever they are today.