Amigori writes "Gamepro has this article about the upcoming Indrema console. Its a basic article, but it does a decent job of explaining the system in an easy to read way." Talks about how they are expecting hackers to take apart the box (unlike the ZapStation: I asked about this at ALS and was told that they are doing stupid things like encrypting their file system, despite the fact that it is super cool and runs Linux and screams "Hack me Hack me!" and hackers would just love to rip that thing apart and make it better. The next generation of Linux devices is going to be interesting: the ones you can hack (Tivo and Indrema) and the ones you can't (may they see the light)

David Hansen asks: "I want to see what problems other Slashdot users have had with @Home restricting their service. We all know that they block the SMB ports, and probably for good reason. But did you know that they won't let you access certain other machines on the @Home network? And why don't they mention any of this in their acceptable use policy? My mother and father are both @Home subscribers in the same city (different subnets). I have Linux boxes acting as firewalls in both places which cannot ping or otherwise contact each other. I can ping them both from an outside location. I discovered this and the SMB thing the hard way. What else doesn't @Home want us to do? Do other ISPs do this also? BTW, I can reach @Home users who are in other cities." I've noticed that ISPs have been filtering lots of ports in the event that users will put up servers. Do you feel that ISPs should make a list of ports that they filter available to their customers?

Kyle writes: "According to this story on Wired, most of the new TLDs selected by ICANN will be restricted. For example, .biz will sport a $2000 price tag with an annual $150 fee, and will be limited to verifiable, legitimate businesses with specific commercial intent. The .pro TLD will be used exclusively by certified "professionals," including doctors, lawyers, etc. If the point is to introduce competition for .com, ICANN might have missed the target. Might this exclusivity limit the popularity of new domains? If almost no one is allowed to use them, the general consumer will likely be unaware that they exist, and continue in their .com'ocentric mindset." Problem is, who says what's bona fide? Would officious rules like this allow eccentric, personal Web-museums (like the online LED Museum) into.museum?

Effugas writes: "Thank Memepool for pointing everyone towards The LED Museum, an absolute geek haven if there ever was one. The Museum archives, tests, and describes the multitude of LED types out there, from Ultraviolet to Turquoise to Infrared--and, most amazingly, true full color LEDs! Apparently, I wasn't the only tech drooling over the possibilities that these devices could be put to use towards: Color Kinetics threw 75 of 'em into a spotlight can and added a surprisingly versatile digital controller with external interfaces. The result: A 16.7 Million Color Programmable Spotlight, for $500US." This is an incredible site; I look forward to when the full color LEDs (and that spotlight - Yow!) are a lot cheaper. And unaccountably, Effugas has linked that "A" to something awful.

cprael writes "AT&T has decided that anyone using their broadband network is their customer, and any online merchant that sells them something owes AT&T a cut of the pie. They are apparently planning to charge for both delivery of the customer, and for the value of any goods/services bought by those customers. Article on Yahoo News." See also a CNN story on the same subject. Hey, it's just like the phone company takes a cut every time you phone in an order from a catalog... oh wait, they don't.

The NYT tells us about Gore's latest campaign commercial, which tells us that Gore will "fight violence and pornography on the Internet, helping parents block out what children shouldn't see." zhensel comments: "I was aware of Lieberman's previous efforts at censoring, but this seems a little bit ridiculous. Should we expect a government provided net filter for families? A government requirement that sites rate their content? I don't see how a president could accomplish this." There are many ways; the problem is that most parents don't need censorware, and they especially don't need the government pushing it on them. The NYT today has an above-the-fold, front-page story in which parents say censorship of films, music, and the internet is Their Job, Not Politicians'.

joseph writes: "This article on C|Net announces Publius, a system similar to Freenet, meant to battle censorship on the Internet. What makes this approach interesting is its backing from AT&T Labs. Of particular interest in the article are the safeguards against the common opposition to such projects, like their use for piracy. Publius features no search utility and a maximum file size of 100k."

Tei'ehm Teuw writes "From an article on CNN - The Federal Communications Commission Monday approved AT&T Corp.'s proposed $54 billion bid to buy cable television company MediaOne Group Inc. This will pave the road for servises like Roadrunner to be tenatively available in 30 percent of the US market. The FCC denied AT&T's position that the 30 percent ownership rule did not apply to its proposed merger with MediaOne and is forcing them to reduce the overall cable assets across the new empire. This is both good and bad, good because broadband access is more widespread, but bat because the monopoly of old seems to be making a comeback. " It seems that the FCC is requiring AT&T to give up MediaOne's stake in Time Warner, and/or 11.2 million other cable subscribers, so that they control under 30% of the cable market. However, I've seen a lot of these Stop AT&T billboards where I live.

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."