Shlomi Fish has written up a piee on why Oracle and Java can't work together, but why Perl and Oracle will. It might be a language war type piece, but I don't really think it is. Both of these languages are really hot right now, and Shlomi does a great job explaining some of the reasons why.

Brian Gregor wrote in with a suggestion for a forum. He says "I am recently been suffering from pain and stiffness in my wrists and forearms after using standard computer keyboards and mice, including my Logitech Mouseman. Aside from a trip to a doctor, I am looking into ergonomic keyboards and mice. Some feedback and suggestions from the slashdot community would be great, especially since I imagine that this is not a rare problem. " I'm very interested in this. My wrists often are quite sore at the end of a long day. Brian sent a few relevant links also: Kinesis makes ergo keyboards, the Anir mouse, The Twiddler which has linux drivers.

Lyno Sullivan has begun researching the GNU/Linux Desktop alternative for more mainstream usage in government. Click the link below and read what he has to say. It's a work in progress, but it's definately worth a read. Throw in your 2 bits and hopefully he can convince more than just Minnesota.

The Freedows OS team has split into 2 camps: Freedows and the Alliance. This feature article presents the view of the Alliance, and has been written by Alliance Ambassador Davis Ray Sickmon, Jr. We hope to have a response to it from Freedows Project Lead Reece K. Sellin tomorrow.

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.