Yodel_Spoogenshortz write:s "Here is an update on the Dune Miniseries being produced by New Amsterdam Entertainment to be shown in December of this year on the Sci-Fi Channel. The site has more photos and press releases. Earlier Slashdot articles on the upcoming series can be found here and here. For information on the Dune book series look at the Official Dune Web Site." Dune is an absolute classic, and probably my favorite book of all time. I'm hoping they don't screw it up.

scenic asks: "I was wondering what people thought about the available ODBC implementations that are available for Unix. I've been looking at ways to simplify database access in my applications on Linux and Solaris without having to use API's which are specific to a particular DB (or platform, ideally). Does anyone have suggestions or comments on the ODBC software that is available for Linux or any Unix flavor? What about advantages and disadvantages of specific ODBC packages?"

Henk Langeveld writes, "This announcement can be found at kornshell.com: March 1, 2000: I am happy to annouce the the 'i' point release of ksh93 is now available for download. For the first time, source is available as well as binaries for several architectures. If you build binaries for new architectures, and send them to us, we can add them to the download site. The download page has been completely revised in a manner that hopefully will be easier to use. ksh93 is part of the ast-open package. tksh (ksh with tk support) is also part of this package. -- David Korn
As a long-term fan I'm glad to see the korn shell now being released under a new license. The license is quite non-standard, and does include some restrictions (changes can only be distributed as patches), but as far as I can see it does allow anyone to bundle binaries with their products. The distribution format is quite non-standard. The research group at AT&T has their own packaging system, built around nmake. "

Monday we had over 550 assorted questions and comments for and about Bjarne Stroustrup. Excellent moderation (Thanks, Monday Moderators!) helped cull this mass down to 10 extremely high-quality questions Bjarne has kindly answered in amazing depth, for which he deserves a loud round of applause. Update: 02/28 02:12 by R : Bjarne later took the time to dig through all the comments and reply to some of them. The additional material is appended to the end of the original Q&A session.

Neil Sloane writes, "Run across a number sequence you want to identify? For instance, what comes next after 1, 2, 4, 9, 20, 48, 115, 286, 719, ...? The On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences is a database with over 50,000 such sequences. Serves as a "fingerprint file," so you can see if your problem has been studied before. Widely used by researchers in number theory, combinatorics, computer science, physics, chemistry, etc., as well as people trying to solve puzzles. " That's nuts. Mind you it would in no way have assisted me in getting a decent grade in calculus, but still, it's fun.

You can learn more about Bjarne Stroutrup here. Even though Bjarne isn't on your nightly news a lot (like never) he deserves (and gets) heavy respect from fellow programmers. If you have a question for Bjarne that he hasn't already answered on his FAQ page, please post it below. If you're a moderator, please moderate others' questions up or down, as deserved, which is just as important as actually asking questions. Tuesday afternoon (U.S. EST) we'll forward 10 selected questions to Bjarne. His answers are scheduled to appear Friday.

Stacy Uden asks: "What is your favorite online trading company? Which one is the best? I am a newbie to online trading, and I am looking to jump into the game. I have heard good things about E*Trade, Charles Schwab, and Vanguard, but I would like to hear the opinion of the Slashdot community! "

I personally consider Steve Wozniak the biggest "star" we've ever interviewed on Slashdot. I was s-o-o happy when he agreed to do this interview that you wouldn't believe it. Many excellent questions for him were submitted Monday. Click below to read answers to the 11 questions we felt best represented the hundreds y'all sent in.

CDS writes "Fade to Black comedy magazine has a hilarious story on the Y2K problem. Michael Page, the main man @ F2B, e-mails several companies asking if their products (such as Haagen-Dazs, Oil of Olay, and Elmer's Glue) are Y2K compliant. Funny Stuff. " I laughed. I cried. It was better then "Cats". Warning: Some of the material is offensive. To someone. I think.

LocalLinuxLobbyist wrote in to point us to this clever patent that apparently says GraphOn owns what VNC has done forever: the displaying and using of Windows apps over X. Oh, don't forget that this is the same GraphOn that is making Linux the Official OS of China.

Steven Young writes "As an intellectual property attorney, and a regular Slashdot reader, I would like to share a few of my thoughts regarding patent issues, especially as they relate to programmers. Although patents (for better or worse) are playing an ever-expanding role in the software field, many programmers do not know much about them." (Full story below.)

Chris asks: "For the past while I have had a LAN connecting my parents Win95 machine to my Win98 macine. The 95 machine has a connection to the phone line, and I have been using a Proxy server to connect to that machine and use the net at the same time. Recently, I've installed Red Hat 6.0 on my machine. My problem is that I want to connect to the internet using Linux through my parent's machine like I have always done, but I can't find any info on how to do it. My ISP dynamically allocates our IP address, so that complicates the matter. I realize that IP-Masquirading exists, but that only works with the Linux machine as the server, and I want it as the client. I also know about proxy servers, like squid, but they are too large for a 2 computer network, and again, use Linux as the server. I know my Ethernet card has support, according to LinkSys it uses a Tulip driver and that was detected on installation. Any help would be greatly appreciated."

An anonymous reader noted an amusing story where we learn that Jar Jar will make space fun for children with attention spans destoryed by MTV, and senses of humor rendered disfunctional by years of Sitcoms. It might be better if it was hosted by Darth Darth Binks (thanks SissyLaLa) Point_Blank Sent us a really interesting site that has a history of GUIs. Its just interesting to watch the evolution of those clicky interfaces that we've been using for so long. John Hebert noted that there are New Dune Novels coming out. Tim Macinta sent us a super hilarious Microsoft Advocacy HOWTO. Worth the read. $Bob was the first to tell us that the new obfuscated Perl challange is up (no I'm not entering Slash ;) Bowie J. Poag has concocted an epic poem known asTuxowolf: ..A retelling of the classic Beowulf legend in more familliar prose. Gorak sent us a great 3D image gallery at Mastering 3D Graphics that is laden with bit streams that fulfil Rob's Art Axiom (Art is better when it is a desktop image) And finally, the most disturbing bit was sent by an anonymous reader. Ever want to augment your cats the hi tech way. Check it out. Update: 07/29 12:05 by CT : Shaheen reminded me that I'm going to be on The Wednesday Night Wireside net radio thingee tonight at 9:30 EDT.

bw writes "The NYTimes magazine explains why there is no such thing as a secure network. Along the way, it compares the attacks of script kiddies to a million monkeys firing catapults at random -- some attacks are bound to succeed. Also, Eugene Spafford thinks that after Y2K suits dwindle away, hungry lawyers will start looking at how the promiscuous connectivity of modern office apps can have dangerous side effects (think Melissa with a payload). " A truly excellent article! It's quite long, but worth the reading time, and if you don't have a (free) NYT login yet, this is the time to get it.

Shaheen writes "USA Today has an interesting report about how homes that have an Internet connection watch an average of %13 (about an hour) less television than other homes each day. You can read about it here. " What about those of us who forget to turn the TV off while we read our email? The scariest thing to me is that 13% is an hour. Who is watching 10 hours of TV a day?

Shaheen writes "Gary Kasparov (world's greatest chess player) is once again doing something to mix technology with Chess. This time it's him against anyone and everyone. Basically, Kasparov makes a move, then the world - along with "expert" advice - votes which move to make. You can sign up here. " Interesting, but could chess be where some of Brooks's theories apply? Could throwing more people at the problem hurt instead of being beneficial?

zaks writes "I found this ZDNet article on Yahoo, saying that Apple may soon be sold. They attribute the story to "third-party sources close to Apple and its Interim CEO, Steve Jobs". The potential buyers discussed in the article are Disney, TimeWarner, and Viacom. "

scenic writes "A Washington "Think Tank" has a report complaining about the new "Assessing Microsoft" conference. In particular, they have an issue with the OSS remedy that many, including Nader and Love, have proposed (i.e. opening up the Windows source code). There is quite a bit of stuff concerning Linux (about a quarter of the long article) and why OSS and Linux are temporary phenomenons created by "media interest in identifying a viable competitor to Microsoft." "

This story is a week old, but I had not seen it before. Apparently, AT&T is making some source code for its DjVu image compressor available under yet another license, in a bid to improve its acceptance. They're open to discussion about it, so make your views known to them. Link from Openresources.

Gveloper wrote in to say that x11amp is in CVS. An anonymous reader sent us a link to a Linux based synthesiser. I probably wouldn't have posted it, but I was playing with it quite a bit and its just a lot of fun. Make little drum beats and throw power chords over top of it. Whee. AbsurdSnore wrote in to tell us about a Slashdot mentioned in New Scientist's Netropolitan column for February 6th regarding the fight for ajax.org and the creation of the Domain Defense Advocate site. Anyone who thinks that the world is coming to an end is probably right as evidenced by the following three inventions: A nonymous Coward sent us the first. Pray that it is a hoax. fcw sent us number 2: the world's first (and I hope only) Ass Kicking Machine. And last of all, for the completely random, David Price sent us a link to gas powered couch Don't care about the advancement of technology? How about some bits about a a more primal topic? Knish wrote in to say that the Swimsuit Edition of Sports Illulstrated is online. Somewhat related I guess, Greedo sent us another Pseudo O'Reilly Book that you won't see in bookstores.