I'm the first to admit that I'm the last person who should write a book review. In fact, this is the first one I've posted on Slashdot. Frankly I don't read books any more- just web pages. I just don't have time- plus that whole paper thing doesn't appeal to me any more. But when "Open Sources:Voices from the Open Source Revolution" got here, I had no option but to read it. Immediately. Edited by Chris DiBona, Sam Ockman and Mark Stone, it's a collection of essays from Open Source glitterati with an impressive roster of names including ESR, RMS, Linus, Larry Wall, Bob Young, Tim O'Reilly, Bruce Perens and more. It's a wonderful read, hit the link below to read the rest.

Master Switch writes "Microsoft won a six month repreive from Caldera's case against them. They initially asked for 3 months, but due to scheduling conflicts, the judge gave them six. Estimated potential damages are 1.6million if Caldera should win the case " Update: 02/19 03:19 by S : That should say 1.6 billion.

A member of the ubiquitous Clan Anonymous Coward asks: "Hi, I'm having some trouble playing MP3s smoothly on my PII333/96MB Linux box, running Slakware 3.6 w/ kernel 2.0.35. X11amp and mpg123 both skip when I scroll in Netscape. I have messed around with it a bit to no avail. Can anyone give me some pointers on giving the MP3 player a higher priority than other apps (in the hopes that this will keep it from skipping)."

Maybe its because I consider myself an artist, a coder, and a designer. Maybe its because I worked as a commercial programmer in an ad agency surrounded by talented designers. And maybe its because I served out my studio art minor surrounded by talented artists. Maybe its because I wrote free code in my spare time, but this feature Oskar Pearson struck a chord in me. It talks about Art vs. Design, and Commercial Code vs. Free Code. Something to think about.

Landley writes "Here's an introductory article from developer.com about Gecko and NGLayout. Mentions Linux and Apache in passing, tries to comprehend "Open Source" but calls it "public domain" at least once, bit of speculation about the Netscape/AOL merger and future use of the technology... Not a lot new here, but worth a quick look anyway. " Gecko still seems to be crashing on my box. Ah well, Officially I want to make Slashdot work right with it- but really I just want gtk themes *grin*.

takshaka writes "Playboy Enterprises has joined the mass of trademark litigants, alleging that Excite and Netscape are violating its trademark by serving banner ads for other adult sites whenever visitors search for the magazine's home page. This seems to be yet another case of actively defending a trademark to avoid name dilution. But, really, how many people who type "playboy" as a search term are actually looking for playboy.com? " I just search for the articles.

Sorry its been so long, but I've been busy keeping the guys over at themes.org busy with various things. This weeks Guest is Seth Spitzer of Netscape. He has some interesting things to say during this weeks interview. Don't forget to check out last weeks Guest Tiler which was about the whole new "Yellow Dog Linux" distro. hoping the /. effect doesn't kill t.o :) We get almost as much traffic as Rob does... its just spread out over the whole site. I wonder if slashdot could hold up to the slashdot effect..... hmmmm.

RandySC writes " Demoronizer is a Perl program which corrects numerous errors and incompatibilities in HTML generated by, or edited with, Microsoft applications. The demoroniser keeps you from looking dumber than a bag of dirt when your Web page is viewed by a user on a non-Microsoft platform. A little detective work revealed that, as is usually the case when you encounter something shoddy in the vicinity of a computer, Microsoft incompetence and gratuitous incompatibility were to blame. Western language HTML documents are written in the ISO 8859-1 Latin-1 character set, with a specified set of escapes for special characters. Blithely ignoring this prescription, as usual, Microsoft use their own "extension" to Latin-1, in which a variety of characters which do not appear in Latin-1 are inserted in the range 0x82 through 0x95--this having the merit of being incompatible with both Latin-1 and Unicode, which reserve this region for additional control characters. " So now we know what happened to Jon.

SCF writes "This article illustrates yet another browser security bug. This time, it's in Netscape 4.5. Data from submitted forms stays in the Windows temp directory for the world to see, exposing any personal data you've filled out on a site. "

A name that all the book reviewers know SEGV has sent in a review of Scott Meyers' CD work Effective C++ CD. This is a stray from our normal book reviews, but figured people would appreciate seeing Scott Meyers' newest effort.

Isaac-Lew wrote in that Sierra has recalled all 50000 copies of their NFL Football Pro '99 game, and the company's presided apologized: "I want to apologize to all our loyal customers for releasing a product before it was ready," They will be offering a full refund and a free game to anyone who bought this game. Is this the end of the proprietary software industry as we know it?

VinceV sent us a link to a new site he's started up called Control-Escape.com which aims to be a help site for novice linux users making the migration from those less known alternative OSs from Redmond. jedgar wrote in to announce the Feb. Edition of DaemonNews and FreeBSD 'zine, and Squeezer wrote in to say that the feb. issue of Ext2 is out. (Mention one, ya gotta mention 9 more. Sheesh *grin*) Several other folks wrote in to note that The GNOME Project has released 0.99.5. Justin Clarke wrote in to show us Rioport.com which is Diamond's new site to connect Rio owners with legal MP3s. danmil noted another Slashdot reference in the mainstream- this one is in a NY times story. Now we have a few funny bits not for the Moral and Pure: the_gimp sent us a link to what is probably the most amusing patent in recent memory. Glad that's patented. Don't want that technology uncontrolled. Somewhat related, behhl sent us a site that was bound to happen- AdultLinux. You can guess what it's for. And lastly, for the strangest bit of the day, Hans sent us a link to Furniture Porn. Fear. And hide your children.

Chris Halsall writes " Mac OS Rumors is reporting that Qualcomm is likely to sell off or simply shutdown their Eudora e-mail client division because of poor financial performance out of the group. How to do you compete with free e-mail systems included with every web browser? You don't, which is why a buyer is unlikely. My question is would Qualcomm consider "doing a Netscape" and release the code under OpenSource? This would allow the client to continue to evolve without their expending resources, and they could continue to use the upgraded client in their own applications. Win-win." The article is down the page. Since the submission, Mac OS Rumors has reported that pressure from Microsoft is also involved.

HoserHead writes "Netscape has released a new JVM-JIT compiler called ElectricalFire. It originally started as an in-house commercial compiler project but is now purely Open Source: there are now no plans to turn it into a commercial product. ElectricalFire also contains none of Sun's code. Check it out at its homepage on mozilla.org." It's NPL'd and they are calling for developers.

coats writes "ESR has written a new article, "Open Source: Programming as if Quality Mattered" on the Internet politics-and-policy site Intellectual Capital. This article starts off with the Netscape OpenSource release, describes how it fits in with the way the Internet was built, mentions Linux, and then goes on to wonder whether staking the corporation on some one else's closed-source software is not the height of irresponsibility-- Let's say you are a chief technical officer (CTO) at a Fortune 500 company and you have just spent millions of dollars on a strategic business system with software you cannot see inside and cannot modify, software that depends on a single vendor to service. Now are those systems going to change to serve your business plan or your vendor's business plan? " While it does not say anything new, it's phrased more towards a business audience. The comment below it also gives an interesting perspective. In a related story, Recoil wrote in with this interview of ESR.

This Anonymous Coward asks: "I'm wondering if anyone out there knows of a site where one can get copies of Netscape Navigator 3.01 (or is that 3.0.1)? I need this for a firewall that is configured over the web, and for some reason only works with 3.01 and not the later versions from Netscape and Microsoft."

Emissary from LinuxPower wrote in to tell us about an interview with JWZ that you might be interested. Talks about lots of stuff relating to Mozilla, Open Source, Netscape, AOL and more. Good bit.

Jeremy Lee has contributed another feature to Slashdot. This one attempts to address some of the issues surrounding the new commercialization of Linux and Open Source. This is a really good piece that raises a lot of good issues worth thinking about. A must read.

Isaac-Lew wrote in to tell us about the Tiger Woods playstation CD, which apparently has southpark's "spirit of christmas" mpeg on it in PC format if ya happened to stick it in your computer instead of your playstation. It got recalled. Guess Santa & Jesus doing battle is just to much for the kiddies to handle.

The Netscape/AOL/Sun deal will not come to fruition until late March because Microsoft's trial has resulted in a lengthier federal regulator review process. Moreover, the net result of the deal in 3 years time may be that Sun walks away with Netscape's software while AOL takes its portal.