Iraq and UN agree return of inspectors. UN and Iraqi officials agree practical arrangements for the return to Iraq of inspectors – but Washington says the deal is not enough. [BBC News | WORLD]

PC Makers Hit Speed Bumps; Being Faster May Not Matter. The computer industry continues to release faster computers, but PC users are hesitating to buy new models. By John Markoff. [New York Times: Technology]

InfoWorld: Sun challenges Microsoft on the desktop. [Hack the Planet]
Good read about what Sun is up to via Linux. “Linux is a tactic. Java is the strategy. The developer platform that we’re encouraging is for line of business applications, content-based applications, distributed applications.”

eWEEK: ePeriodicals: Microsoft’s Killer App for Tablet PC? Microsoft Corp. thinks it’s found a killer app for its Tablet PC: as a home for a new breed of electronic magazines. The software giant is prepping an end-to-end electronic publishing solution, known as ePeriodicals, which it will introduce at its Tablet PC launch in New York City on Nov. 7, according to sources. [Tomalak’s Realm]

A summary of what we learned in the last few days about XML and namespaces. It’s not a pretty picture! [Scripting News]
Dave has discovered in his rss 2.0 work that many xml/rss parsers choke on have any namespace declarations. Now he has to break compatability, or wait for people to break thier parsers.

Danger’s HipTop Renamed and Released [Slashdot]
Congadulations to the HipTop folks.

I’m playing with the DIY Web Services Tutorial right now.
Here’s the trick to go soap instead of xmlrpc:
<% params = {“name”:”Dave”}; soap.rpc.client(“/radio”, “helloWorld”, @Params, “localhost”, 80) %>

France resists US pressure on Iraq. French President Chirac says he remains opposed to a proposed UN resolution on Iraq that threatens automatic military action. [BBC News | WORLD]

Milosevic says Srebrenica ‘made up’. Yugoslavia’s ex-leader claims the Srebrenica massacre was staged to make the Serbs look bad¸ as he opens his defence over Bosnia. [BBC News | WORLD]

Viruses are dead. Long live viruses!. What’s the next big thing? [The Register]