Ramon van Handel has written a summary of the Freedows project for everyone to read. He talks about what it is, where it is going, and tries to address some of the major concerns that folks have expressed about it.

Jeremy Arnold has written an essay on what he calls LUTE- the Linux Usability Testing and Evaluation project. It could help make programs more usable by organizing volunteers to test software and clean things up. Far to often great programmers aren't the best at creating the ideal user interface. Perhaps this project could put people who understand the human factors in touch with the guys who write the killer code. Hit the link below to read it and throw in your 2 bits.

Its been awhile since I hopped up on the soapbox, but I guess nows the time. First, a status report: We got about a million hits last week. The new server and connection to UPN held up fine. We saturated the T1 a bit, but the T3 will be in soon. The DNS moved on monday and it seems to be cool. I also wanted to plug Linux-HW who sent us the new 9gig hard drive. Muchos thanks. I also added some links in the 'older stuff' box so you can link directly to previous days stories in the normal homepage format. Much more convenient. Click below to read about Slashdot user accounts and other nifty features that will be coming.

Next up is Kyle Eli who was the first person to submit an essay on the whole linux standards hoopla. He wrote in with a piece called "A User's Realistic View of the LSA"

Michael Bacarella wrote in with the first essay on Linux Standards. I've got several more of these left to post today, and I'll continue to post them as I have time.

Usman Latif has written a feature for us on Be, and why he believes that it makes sense for them to take their OS and release it as open source.

Garrett Goebel has written in with a short review of the WP8 demo. He starts off: Well, I have downloaded (bz2 or gz) Corel WordPerfect 8.0 for Linux and have been playing around with it for a couple days now... and I have to say that I'm pretty happy. It is a full featured, intuitive, WYSIWYG. -Oh, and I haven't had a crash or needed to reboot my Linux box yet ;-) I was wondering what experience other people are having?

Joseph Pranevich has written in to talk a bit about one of those features that might be slipping into Linux 2.2, the Frame Buffer Console. It's a nice summary of what it is, and why we might (or might not) want this feature.

Kevin Forge has written in with an interesting piece called Lawyers use WordPerfect. It talks about his view on free software vs. commercial software, and especially commercial software on free Operating Systems. Check it out.

Morten has written in with an excellent summary of the Wine project, and an updated status report. This is definately a critical project and deserves attention. Click below to read what he has to say about it.

Jauder Ho wrote in with a seed for a discussion. He says " In the light of all the various standards now, there seems to be quite a few people trying to integrate commercial, freeware or a combination of both of IMAP, LDAP and mail. It's a rather thorny problem which I think I have solved the IMAP+mail portion, what remains is doing the LDAP portion. There are indications that there is going to be a get together to discuss this at the Perl conference in a couple of weeks and I tentatively have a BOF scheduled at LISA in December. Please mail ilm@carumba.com if you are interested in such a thing and maybe we can get some collaboration out of this."

Omega from the Cult of the Dead Cow has written up a series of answers to questions posed in the article we ran Wed. on Back Orifice, the remote administration program that will be released on the first week of august at Defcon 6. They talk about buffer underruns and other security holes that will allow B.O. to roam free, as well as answering tons of other questions about what this is and what it will and won't do. I'm not going to taint this with opinions, because frankly I still don't know what I think about this. So read it and decide for yourself.

Rob Lanphier is an employee of RealNetworks who has written a short open letter containing a few of his opinions on some issues that have be discussed on slashdot lately. He comments on the recent MediaPlayer mess, as well as the Real MP3 Problem. Read it if you're interested in that sort of thing.

Cyrrin has written in with a killer update from Siggraph 98. He's got notes about everything from Alpha to Antz, as well as a ton of juicy nuggets from the Linux 3D SIG. Click immediately below and read this if you're at all into graphics!

Dean Olson has written up his opinions on Linux and Corporations. It's an interesting read in which he discusses what needs to happen for linux to be practically accepted in many corporate worlds. Check it out.

Bruce Perens has sent us another writeup, and this one hopefully won't cause a flamewar that brings the server to its knees! This one is on Security Through Obscurity, and why it just doesn't work. Specifically, Bruce talks about cryptography and why open source is necessary to produce truly secure internet applications.

Allright I know I said no more Gnome/KDE stuff, but Bruce Perens asked me to post this, and its worth reading. Now I'm going to be frank here guys, keep the comments under control. I know this is a hot issue, but think before you post. This issue is a major schism, and we need to solve it, not bicker amongst ourselves about it. Now hit the link below and read Bruce Perens rebuttal to Linus' opinions on the KDE/Gnome debate. Update I had to close the comments. Not because they were bad, but because we had 95% of the httpd processes on this machine serving up that story. 200+ comments in 6 hours was just too much. Anyone wanna swap a boatload a RAM for advertising? If we can get more RAM, this hopefully won't happen again.

Shawn T. Amundson has sent us a feature on Solaris and the Desktop. Most of his arguments are cut and paste translatable to Unix as a whole, but in Sun's case, he's quite right. If they want to grow, they need a new desktop. Anyway, hit the link below to see what he has to say about making that happen.

Chris Blain recently went on an adventure that many of us will experience: Getting a cel phone. He has written up his experiences for those of you on the fence on the issue. It's an excellent piece if you've thought about it, but just didn't have the answers. He also compares various services in his area, which is probably at least a decent example of what it will be like near you.

Joshy has written an excellent piece after going to visit the Xerox PARC. Joshy also talks about what we could learn from the Star, and gives some ideas on how Linux could benefit as well.