"The Matrix" and "Phantom Menace" are a great study in contrasts when it comes to looking at movies, technology and geek culture. "Matrix" might be the easiest and cheapest test of geekdom yet. Geeks will almost surely love it. Others might scratch their heads in wonder. This is the closest popular culture has ever come to capturing the strange world of virtual reality.

Just weeks after Littleton, there's been another school shooting -- this time in Conyers, Georgia, where a sophomore student shot and injured (none-fatally) six students. The suspect profile is familiar. Classmates describe him as a "normal" kid with plenty of friends, and no associations with any particular "groups". These shootings will almost surely re-spark, at least in part, the post-Littleton hysteria, including the media notion that computer gamers and people who wear dark clothing are mass murderers. Here's some perspective. This week, the FBI announced that crime is dropping like a rock, to its lowest levels in half a century. Says a leading criminologist: "For most of our kids, school is the safest place to be."

Paul wrote in to point us to the GNU Jobs Page. ^BR wrote in to say that the may issue of Daemon News is out for your BSDies out there, and CaVi wrote in to say that the Linux Gazette is out (sorry that these took so long to announce... moving was a bitch). Bitscape sent us a Salon story about Coding in Vampire Mode. Mikesch noted that www.palmcolors.com is selling colored Palm Pilots rsn. Looking for new backgrounds? President John F. Kennedy wrote in to tell us that the Volume 7 of Propoganda is up. And for those who are curious, he actually did send me beer! robert@budzynski.ddns.org sent us this art gallery with fodder and dayeight sent us a photomosaic picture for you Lara Craft Perverts out there. HighJack noted that the latest version of JWZs X Screensaver distribution contains a new one that looks like those funky falling charachters from The Matrix. And finally for some crazy fun stuff, dave sent us hilarious proof that Star Trek is Satanic, and chrisd sent us one of the best ebay auction items in recent memory. Psst-this is Hemos. It was Rob's birthday on May 10-he thinks he escaped. E-mail him and tell him how much you love him.

In the days after the Littleton, Colorado massacre, the country went on a panicked hunt the oddballs in High School, a profoundly ignorant and unthinking response to a tragedy that left geeks, nerds, non-conformists and the alienated in an even worse situation than before. Stories all over the country embarked on witchunts that amounted to little more than Geek Profiling. All weekend, after Friday's column here, these voiceless kids -- invisible in media and on TV talk shows and powerless in their own schools -- have been e-mailing me with stories of what has happened to them in the past few days. Here are some of those stories in their own words, with gratitude and admiration for their courage in sending them. The big story out of Littleton isn't about violence on the Internet, or whether or not video games are turning out kids into killers. It's about the fact that for some of the best, brightest and most interesting kids, high school is a nightmare of exclusion, cruelty, warped values and anger.

chris sent in a link to this story which reports on FreeBSD being used on 32 dual-processor machines to render special effects for The Matrix. With 32 dual-processor machines, I doubt there's much that they couldn't render.

Druppy writes "I just got an email about this article in our local paper here in Santa Cruz. It's basically about illegal copies of movies like The Matrix being moved over campus lines. Needless to say since my school was mentioned 4-5 times in the article the administration is starting to crack down. " So are people sneaking cam corders in to movie theaters now? I get nervous just trying to sneak in a candy bar.

John Dillinger wasn't nailed with much more fanfare than the alleged creator of the now-famed Melissa virus, whose apprehension in New Jersey a few days ago drew a governor and a platoon of state, local and federal cyber-cops. This syndrome is becoming almost ritualistic. The virus and the arrest tell us a lot about Crime and Hype; Technological Hostility, and Closing the Distance that makes so much online hostility so easy.

Dyslexic writes "ABCNews is reporting that strands of DNA can act like semiconductors. After seeing "The Matrix" this makes me only fear the future." The research is coming from two researchers in Basel, Switzerland. Essentially, this research is saying that while DNA makes a good semiconductor, it does not conduct as well as, say, copper. It's real usefulness comes from the fact that "...he knows of no metallic wires that can be made as small or as regular as DNA strands. A strand is 2 billionths of a meter thick, or one-forty-four-thousandths of the diameter of a medium-size human hair ". Uber-thin. I like it.

"The Matrix" is the latest product from the sci-fi hollywood world. A techno-thriller that is raising a lot of eyebrows and posing the question "What is The Matrix". We'll try not to answer that question, but skip Katz's column if you're concerned: he gives abit away. If you're anal about getting movies spoiled, just don't read any reviews. Mine is fairly spoiler free, but if you like sci fi, see this movie. Its golden. Hopefully it'll tide me over until May.

Richard Thieme has long been writing a weekly column called Islands in the Clickstream. Richard wants to run them weekly on Slashdot - he would be joining Katz then providing new content on these pages. I'm excited about this, and I think many of you will too. The following feature is this weeks island. Read it, vote on the poll, and hopefully Richard will be back next week.

Gextyr submitted a question regarding something I've always wondered about as well. He asks: "I work at a local computer shop, and was just given permission to put together a Linux box for display and demo purposes. My boss gave me a touch screen for this (the touch matrix is serial controlled) purpose as well. I want to know if there is any touch screen support for Linux, and if so, where can I get mode information about it?"

needles writes "Afraid to leave home 'cause you'll be without your Linux box? Check out the CAJUN Car Audio Jukebox page where it describes how to use a linux box and a Matrix Orbital LCD display and keypad to add a mp3 Linux-based jukebox to your car audio system and fear no longer. The only problem I see in building this is the temperature and shock conditions for the components of the Linux box. Does anyone know what the most reliable components (especially the hard drive) for these conditions would be? " Something like this would work in your living room too. Somebody needs to sell these things. Anyone? Please?

Peter Williams writes "The second and third prequels for the Star Wars saga are to be filmed in Sydney Australia, in the renovated former showground studios. Filming is set to begin in 2000. The studios have really only been used for the forthcoming Keanu Reeves vehicle, The Matrix and the Babe sequel. Pig in the City. "

Klas Elmby writes "I have completed the building of a MP3CD player for my home-stereo. I hope this could inspire/help others to do the same thing. It is based on a Matrix Orbital LCD-display with keypad interface and ... yes, linux. " Now that is what I want for Christmas! The RIAA needs to back off so we can all buy these things. With 9 gigs hard drives. Imagine not having to rummage through mountains of CDs to find that perfect track. Update the other link died fairly quickly. Klas has since moved the pages here.

Gavin Peters wrote to tell us about a free CPU to be released soon. It runs at 9MHz and is programmed into a $10 FPGA. Gavin reminds us that "A FPGA is a "Field Programmable Gate Array" - a matrix of gates that you can configure _through software_ - to do essentially anything. You can make an ASIC, a custom microprocessor, and/or memory. All reprogrammable many times a second.".

Mike Johnson writes "Going back to all the talk about the nifty little LCDproc displays, I found something that might be of interest. Check out this site for information about a small display." Its a bit thin on details, but it costs only $99. Takes RGB input. SVGA would be cooler, but hey, its cheap. Add sine QuickCams for cheap videoconferencing, Or hook it up in a space where you don't have room for a big screen. I dunno. It just looks cool.

Michael Eilers has written a sort of introduction to Beowulf, what it does, what it doesn't do, and why we should care. It really is a sort of quickie distributed computing FAQ that many of you might enjoy. So hit the link below and find out.

Sixl6 wrote in to tell us about another encryption cracking project happening. Virtual Matrix Encryption claims to be the strongest in the world, but if you can crack it, you can make some money- web page says over a million bucks if you can rip open VME98.