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.

Jon "maddog" Hall is the head honcho at Linux International. Monday we asked him questions about the future of Linux, his beer preferences, and other burning issues. Today, as our premier interview guest in the last year of the 20th century, maddog answers with his usual wit and candor.

Keith Russell writes "Caught this news blurb on ZDNet. Apparently, attrition has taken its toll at on Interbase's top levels, and Inprise is seriously considering open source as an alternative to pulling the plug. A likely possibility, given their recent enthusiasm for Linux. This could be a Good Thing. I'd rather see "end of life" software opened than hoarded. "

Shawn wrote in asking for suggestions on high-end Linux Workstation configurations for the US Army. Aparently, they are looking at replacing some SGIs with cheaper PCs, and this being Slashdot, I'm sure some of you might be able to make some improvements to their suggested configuration. I can't tell you how glad I am to see the US Army giving Linux a chance. The US Navy could probably learn a thing or two from this. Click below for the full text.

notsosilentbob writes "This story about a 50 year old unsolved Quantum Physics problem at Eurekalert.org is interesting, if just for the discussion about the computing power required (SGI/Cray machines). Unlike the blowhard from BlacklightPower, this sounds like an important breakthrough. " The problem solved is that of the scattering effects of three charged particles. This is important, as this event occurs in everything from fluorescent lights to the ion etching of silicon chips.

Okay, here they are: Brian Paul's answers to your questions. Even if you've never heard of Brian or Mesa, his comments give insight into how an "essential but unsung" Open Source project runs, and why Brian has devoted endless time to Mesa. (More below.)

CloneRanger writes "SGI announced that it has released version 1.1 of SGI Linux (derived from RH6.0). Major new enhancements include: raw I/O to disk for SQL database systems, Parallel I/O to keep disks busy, POSIX-compliant Asynchronous I/O Interfaces, and development tools. Read more in the press release."

bendawg writes "I was reading the 2.2.13ac2 patch summary on Freshmeat, and I was intrigued by the mention of ext3. I tried to find more specific information on this to no avail. Does anyone know what new features this filesystem is supposed to have? Also, anyone know the status of SGI's XFS journaling filesystem? " Yes, I know 2.2.13ac2 is old, but I have yet to hear ext3 mentioned in the geek conversations I participate in. What new features does this next iteration give us over good ol' ext2?

Shortly after their IPO, Red Hat's Bob Young had a book published, written by he and Wendy Goldman Rohm (who, I should add, I had a drink with at @ ALS, and is a very nice woman) about Red Hat, and what Linux is trying to do. Click below to get the full story - and thanks to Malcolm Tredinnick for his indepth review.

Thanks to Allan over at SGI for letting me know that SGI has just released IRIS Performer for Linux. It's version 2.3 and it's free for download. If you want the program or more information, they've IRIS page for Linux up and running.

Marco Bertini asks: "I'd like to know which graphics card with video input (S-Video or coaxial) are supported by Linux, and if there's any library to handle video input. My problem is to acquire two video inputs from cameras at the same time. At present I'm doing it on SGI O2, using the Digital Media libraries for video input, and OpenGL extensions for edge detection using it's h/w boost. Is it possible to switch to Linux to do it ? It seems that for example ELSA GLoria Synergy offers OpenGL h/w accelaration supported by Microlink Extreme 3D, but I'd like to hear about live experiences, and other options. "

Lars Bergstrom writes "Well, SGI's finally given up on their Visual Workstation product line -- check here for the details. " As many people have noted, the technology was pretty sweet, but people won't pay the huge premiums for that. At least the flat panels are great.

Mintslice writes "Dave McAllister, SGI's Directory of Technical Strategy has been touring Australia recently. The Age is running this story about comments he made at at local LUG (LUV). It runs over SGI's intentions for Linux, what they're doing to help development, what this means for marketing at SGI, and a treasure trove of bits and pieces including Chilli Recipes. Something for everyone. "

Aviast writes "SGI is in talks with the Gores Technology Group to sell the Cray Research unit of SGI. Read the [Yahoo News] story here. SGI bought Cray three-and-a-half years ago for $700 million. According to this story Gores originally offered $100 million for Cray, but has since lowered its offer." Rumors about this have been floating around for weeks. Looks like they *may* become reality, but the deal is apparently still a long way from done.

jfinke sent in a link - as did many others - to a brief Yahoo News story about SGI's plans to move into the parallel processing supercomputer marketplace with Linux as their base OS. "We're really pumped up about it," said Beau Vrolyk, senior vice president of SGI's product group. "It represents the beginning of a whole new generation of supercomputer."

Anonymous Coward writes "sendmail.net has a piece on the new Top500 list of supercomputers. 'So who came out on top? Well, three US Department of Energy machines have taken spots one, two, and three to lead the list: ASCI Red (manufactured by Intel) at Sandia National Labs in Albuquerque, ASCI Blue-Pacific (IBM) at Lawrence Livermore Labs in Berkeley, and ASCI Blue Mountain (SGI) at Los Alamos. These are the only three systems to exceed 1 TF/s on the Linpack benchmark, and represent 7.4 percent of the total Flop/s on the list.' The story notes that the average growth rates for the list exceed the number set by Moore's Law. "

Alphix writes "SGI has announced their Linux Kernel Crash Dumps project - and it's gone to release. It's intended to simplify the examination of system crashes thru saving the kernel memory image when the system dies due to a software failure, recovering the kernel memory image when the system is rebooted and then examining the memory image to determine what happened when the failure occurred."

xinit was one of the people who pointed us to the CNET story running about the possibility that a current bid by SGI for a supercomputer could be run on Linux. The supercomputer could be the fastest in the world at time of its production. SGI has confirmed the bid, saying it's being targeted for 2001, if the bid is accepted. The placement would be Los Alamos National Laboratory.

hoppy wrote to us in regards to the recent EE Times article about a tuberculosis detecting biochip. The United States and Russia are teaming up to make the chip, as variant drug-resistant strains are infecting thousands in Russian jails, and making a big comeback in poorer areas in the US. The chip will be used to identify the strain of TB, so that appropriate treatment can be used, rather then the shotgun approach In other news, James Clark, co-founder of SGI and Netscape has given 150 million US to his former school, Stanford. The donation is to be used just for biotech.

A few days past, we solicited questions from you folks to ask QuakeLaird John Carmack ^[?] . We sent the questions over to him, and he answered. A lot. It's definitely one of the best interviews we've had yet - click below to read more.