HoserHead writes: "For those who are really worried about the Unisys patent on LZW compression in GIF files, the answer may soon be at hand: MNG is on the way. PNG has a brother in MNG, which is the free alternative to animated GIFs. Tim Rowley has recently sent Mozilla hackers a checkin of preliminary MNG support, as can be read here (Necko/Imglib section). Now, all that's needed is MNG export support for the GIMP!"

Thanks to all of the fine folks who contributed these updates, you are in for another illuminating, invigorating, inspiring round of fruity nuggets picked from the tree of wisdom, irradiated, waxed, polished, chilled, packaged and shipped (metaphorically) to your browser. Swallow two of these a week, call if symptoms recur.

Justin Mason writes "Raph Levien, Advogato builder, GNOME and Gimp hacker, and general graphics guru, has made 19 patents available for free use by GPLed programs." Raph adds: "I hope to see the dithering code used in free inkjet drivers soon." It's great to see that kind of commitment; if a few hundred more people did that, think where we'd be. On behalf of my BSD-lovin' friends, I asked Raph why the GPL specifically and how he felt about about other licenses; for his reply, "read more"...

Some useful stuff: An anonymous reader noted that AltaVista has opened Raging.Com which is a super fast minimal search engine without all that bloated portal crap. gi_wrighty noted that the winneers of the 5k HTML Contest have Been announced. Impressive minimalism. Soeren Staun-Pedersen noted that a new The Gimp User Group has come along. j1mmy pointed us to pictures of the new Lara Croft Model from E3. Yaruar sent us a story about Lego Filmsets that come with cameras for you do-it-yourselfers. If you don't want to make your own films, how about your own Mars Polar Lander Site? (Thanks Biff Studly). antiwesley sent us interesting insight into a typical geek cube. Speaking of things found in geek Cubes, BenTheDewpendent sent us a page that tracks tons of info on Mountain Dew and bob_jordan found pictures of upcoming Futurama Bender Action Figures (Not as cool as Nate's Picolo tho) Baloo Ursidae sent us a story about electricity generating shoes. Gorphrim sent us some Duron Parodies Finally some Slashdot references: DrFun (one of the original net comics) mentioned us in a recent strip, Someone noted that Geek Culture is selling First Post T-Shirts. QuasEye noted that someone registered hotgrits.org and ironically enough, is running Slashcode. And the WashPost ran an article on us which is mostly accurate. And to wrap things up, maxxon showed us the way to Crank Dot Net, which has stuff on all sorts of conspiracy theories and urban myths and other crazy stuffs on the net. Stuff like UFOs, the face on mars, Creationism, Scientology, antigravity, and perpetual motion and more.

Our original interview with two SCO Presidents somehow turned into responses from just one, returned long after they were promised. Anyway, here are answers to your questions about SCO from David McCrabb, President of their Server Division.

Linux is always a little bigger than you think. Every day, people are working on porting Linux to new platforms to achieve more with what they have. In the case of LinuxPPC and Terra Soft Solutions, they're working with community spirit and the PowerPC architecture to create insanely great solutions with a touch of Tux.

Spencer Kimball, best known for co-creating that little app known as The Gimp, wrote in to let us know what he's doing these days. He, along with four other XCF members have created OnlinePhotoLab.com. Using the Gimp as a backend, it provides 50 megs of storage, and the ability to perform many normal gimp functions on images. Also provides an easy facility for sharing your images. Most interesting is the hardware. Spencer says "We have ten Linux boxes, each a dual processor running four GIMP engines, for a total of 40 engines. We estimate we can process about a million image requests per day. The cost of hardware was less than $25k." Here's hoping it can withstand the Slashdot Effect: it worked great last night ;)

Bauwolf writes "According to MacCentral, Corel has bought some of MetaCreations' graphics products. Does this mean I'll have Painter running on my Linux box and Kai's Power Tools plugins for the Gimp soon?" Don't forget Bryce.

Forkenhoppen asks: "What is graphic tablet support like under Linux? I'm interested in getting a tablet for my computer for drawing/touching up art, and for using with the Gimp. What have people's past experiences been with different types of graphics tablets? What is the best one? Is there a low-cost tablet that works well under Linux? Are USB tablets supported? And most importantly, how many people actually use graphics tablets under Linux?"

Jeremy is a leading Samba maintainer, and therefore one of the world's leading experts on Samba, which is often held up (along with Apache and the Gimp) as a sterling example of efficient and useful Open Source development. In the interest of full disclosure, we must mention that Jeremy is now employed by VA Linux, but that his primary responsibility is still Samba, just as it was when he worked for SGI. Look for Jeremy's answers to your questions within the next week.

Carey Bunks wrote to tell us that last week, "a new GIMP site, Gimp-Savvy.com, has come online and is making available the complete text of the recently released book Grokking the GIMP . This new GIMP resource, written by me and published by New Riders, has been released under an Open Publication License. The goals of Gimp-Savvy.com are to provide high-level educational and practical resources for the GIMP, and to promote its skillful and knowledgeable use."

Scott Draeker writes, "Here are my responses to the questions you sent, and a few others that had been posted." All we can say in return is, "Thanks, Scott. We really appreciate the time you took to do this."

A not-so-Anonymous Coward asks: "I hope to start a dot.org (dot.com is so '90s, yuck) when I finish University (UK), and it will involve stuff to do with graphics. The question is: What's going on with Digital Watermarks, and how could I start using them in free software? Are they patented? Do they involve scary math? My ideal answer would be a C library or Perl module that can work with the standard graphics libs/mods that could do long batches of them, or even a script-fu for The Gimp."

Well, last Thursday evening we announced the Beanie award winners at the Slashdot/Andover/VA shindig at The China Club. For those of you not able to attend, I've written a synopsis below, otherwise you can watch the whole deal at TheSync. You can grab the awards in both streaming and downloadable format. And, if you'd like to see some pictures from the show, check out Brian Hawkins' online-pix as well as Kurt Gray's pix from the Andover booth.

The GUI has revolutionized the desktop. It made computers accessible to the masses, and even today it keeps getting cooler. Our nominees areeach carving out new territory in the realm of the graphical user interface. You can Vote for the best interface between The GIMP, Mozilla, XMMS and Enlightenment.

MartyJG asks: "I've been watching my Freshmeat slashbox for a while now, and I've seen many wierd and wonderful project names pop-up on there. There's obviously the cool names like Gimp, Gnome, Enlightenment, CodeWarrior, etc which everyone knows, but recently I've seen names like Orgasm, SleezeBall, Oregano, and SANE. My question is this: Who the hell can take open source software seriously with names like these? Can you imagine a developer saying to his supervisor "I'm not using Microsoft Visual Whatever anymore, I only use Orgasm now"? I can't. There's a flip side: names like Parsecfg, NAMG, Mmucl and Wmmp3 which are probably all great projects, but don't exactly trip off the tongue. Should we care more about what we call our projects? I'm not suggesting making Linux uber-commercial and all suit-like overnight - just give it some respect." Interesting thought, should we take more care in what we name our Open Sourced projects? Or should we stick with picking names that we think represent our projects properly?

The first edition of this fine book, written by Neil Matthew and Richard Stones, remains one of the top-selling books that we've ever reviewed on Slashdot. At the beginning of this fall, the 2nd edition was introduced, to much fanfare, and a review by Kurt Gray. Click below to find out what's improved, or what's declined.

Last week, Microsoft and antritrust. This week, thoughts on KDE's future from some of the people who work directly on it, specifically Kurt Granroth and Richard Moore. Instead of posting their e-mail addresses here and swamping them with messages, please see http://developer.kde.org, which will tell you not only how you can contact these gentlemen, but much more about KDE development.

Quite a number of people have been writing to us about Dave Whitinger's column that ran on LinuxToday and was sent over here as well. Dave's contention is the browser compatibility is a crucial battle for the success of Linux - and things don't look so good. Click below to read the column, and contribute your thoughts.

Frank Brockway writes "Photogenics, on of the best paint/image manipulation programs for the Amiga, will be available soon for Linux. Not much details as to which disto/cpu it works under, but this is definently a commericial program. The programmer, Paul Nolan, originally wrote this program in 1993 as a young teenager, and at the time, it was one of the best pixel pushers on any platform. Looks like The Gimp has some serious competition now. "