doodzed writes "A massive earthquake has just hit Taiwan. Many buildings have been toppled and over a hundred people are confirmed dead. It is hard to predict what the ramifications to the computer industry will be. Most of the world's motherboards and a lot of chips come from there. Those machines can't be reset overnight if they survived. I guess memory prices are going to go up again, but this pales in comparison to the human toll. Please pray for the victims." The story's at CNN.com - and everywhere else. Things don't look good in Taipei right now. Update:Spock_NPA writes "According to this article, the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company indicated at 6:00 PM PDT that the company's building has successfully withstood the effect of the earthquake." But according to this Reuter article, analysts in Seoul still expect to see higher chip prices.

Matthew Priestley has taken a break from slaving for the man to write us a piece where he takes on the convential wisdom that Security through Obscurity isn't secure at all, and tries to argue that sometimes it is. Click the link below to read it. Lots of interesting stuff and some good examples. Its worth a read.

The Ottawa Linux Symposium has come and gone. It was a superb, very technical, conference that was also a great social event. Dana has put up her pictures, and the lovely Alix has put up hers. Last but not least, Alan Cox has put up his large collection. Finally, I've included my report below.

We got a bunch of questions for Illiad (of User Friendly fame) Monday, let the Moderators (you know who you are) decide which of them were worthy, and sent the chosen ones off to the wilds of British Columbia. Here are Illiad's answers...

A Nameless Slashdotter submitted this question: "IP Masquerading (NAT under FreeBSD) is straight from the Gods. Yet it has a few very large drawbacks, such as inability to do DCC or ICQ file transfers, or play games over the internet on one of the Masq'ed machines, even with the "irc" and "quake" masquerading modules loaded. Someone give me options to solve this problem, be it another operating system, a firewall setting, a program or setup!"

Last week, Lycos closed its purchase of Wired Digital, publisher of Wired News and Hotwired, officially ending the Wired Era. This is good or bad news, depending on your point of view, but worth marking either way.

Reporting live from New York's Javits, Ars Technica has gone the latest round of coverage, with info about Quake III and BeOS, amongst others , including Simcity 3000 on Be, along with the sorry state of the Linux "pavilion". That's one of those down sides - the Linux shows themselves are usually pretty rocking, but outside of that turf, the showcasing is pretty lacking - preaching to the choir situation.

Keeper wrote in with the report on Everquest Stratics web site, that Brian Hook, who lately left Id, has officially relocated to Verant Interactive. Click below to read the full release.

Like many of us, Justin Beech struggled with the age old quest for high bandwidth. He's submitted a quite interesting feature which discusses issues surrounding many of the options (Sat, Cable, DSL, Modems) and where he ended up. It is a little different than typical Slashdot fare, but I think you'll like it if you've thought about DSL, but wanted more data to get started. You'll just wish it had a happy ending.

whiteprints writes "The New York Times has a great article about John Romero and John Carmack. Talks about the school shooting connection " It's getting on my nerves that so many people want to connect Doom and Quake to the shootings, and aren't willing to connect that simple fact that for millions of years, humans were hunters. And this is the NYT so you need to login to read the article.

schmack writes "Surfing the Id plans, John Carmack mentions he's working on SMP support for Quake 3. Although initially developed for NT, he says "it should definately make its way to the linux port...". Look for a speed up of 20% [worst case] to 80% in frame rate over a single CPU. This will mean "it will also be possible to build a reletively cheap SMP system (say, dual 400's) that outperforms the best single processor system." "

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."

As promised, we've taken a look under the hood and banged the tires on Lokisoft's port of Civilization:CTP to Linux. I've given my thoughts below, and included a review from James Brief-click below for the details. If you know you want it now, buy it at Handeye.com.

lightPhoenix writes "Get this, John Carmack, god of id & quake 3 arena, is offering a bounty for exposure of game server exploits. Check it out. " It's down the page a bit-but it's there. That's a cool idea.

Mr. Slurpee writes "The San Jose Mercury News has a good article on LAN parties (bunch of gamers get together with their computers, and frag away on LAN games - Quake, Starcraft, etc.). Puts gamers in a positive light, disputes that gaming causes violence, and talks about the growing international gaming leages. Well written, clear, and unbiased. "

Wednesday's column on Virtual Property brought a massive and fascinating outpouring of e-mail from gaming programmers and execs, Web architects, Cyber Movers and others transfixed by the idea of virtual property, an idea being dramatically advanced this week on eBay, where middle-class Americans are starting to shell out big bucks for virtual characters, potions and symbols. Quotes from a fraction of the enormous response to this idea, and some questions some of you might be able to answer (hopefully):

On eBay, people are shelling out thousands of dollars for gaming characters, symbols, armor, magical potions of trinkets. The media has missed the real story as usual: it isn't online violence, it's digital property. eBay may be even more significant than Mp3's. As the middle-class plunges into gaming, the Net is facing real world problems like housing costs and congestion. The result is another landmark in Net evolution: the owning of virtual property, something that may change the nature of Net economics and knock the gaming world for a loop.

Since Littleton, the cost of being different has gone up. Thousands of powerful e-mail messages have chronicled an educational system that glorifies the traditional and the normal, and brutalizes and alienates people who are or who are perceived as different under various names -- geeks, freaks, nerds, Goths and oddballs. One of the powerful messages coming out of Colorado is that so many of these "different" kids say they find school boring, oppressive, and utterly hostile, feelings echoed by educational survivors, many of whom are now parents. The hysteria over Littleton has only made things worse. It's time geeks defined and lobbied for some new rights. From their own messages, here are some places to start.

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.

Nightmarish high school massacres like the one in Littleton are now an almost ritualistic part of American life. And increasingly when they occur, journalists and educators blame new media like the Internet, computer games like Doom or violent movies. Why kids kill this way is an urgent and complicated question. But teenaged crime isn't rising, it's falling. And there's no evidence that the Net or other new media are the reason for massacres.