Jean-loup is the kind of person I love to see us interview here. He's important in the sense that work he's done (positively) affects almost every Linux or Unix user, but the chance of Jean-loup ever getting any "mainstream" media attention is zero. Or possibly less. Without people like Jean-loup there would be no Open Source movement, and I consider the chance to present him as a Slashdot interview guest a *huge* honor. The readers who asked the excellent questions, and the moderators who helped select them, also deserve major kudos. So thanks to all of you for an excellent Q&A session!

lvillalt writes: "Three Axis Interactive is porting Nanosaur (a 3D Mac game) to Linux, using the Quesa 3D graphics library." Nanosaur seems like one of the best reasons to buy a Macintosh -- smooth action, good controls, nice textures, and action suitable even for small kids. But if you can put Nanosaur and a close-enough-to-Aqua theme on a Linux box, the premium for The Real Thing suddenly looks a little steeper. However, no release date yet.

absolute writes, "Who would have thought Ebay the online auction site would ever had a chance to buy the venerable 250-year old auction house Sotheby's? Apparently, Ebay is trying to capitalize on the price fixing scandal at Sotheby's to buy it. The story is here." Hmm. I hope they get Sotheby's sniped from them at the last minute by some guy with a perl script. Update: 02/29 12:04 by R : eBay denies any interest in Sotheby's.

SlashNET is hosting a forum with Jamie Zawinski of Netscape, Mozilla, and XEmacs fame. It will take place at 5:00 PM EST (22:00 GMT) on Feb. 26, which is this Saturday, in #forum. If you'd like to submit a question for jwz ^[?] early, you can do so at the questions page. With all the projects that he has touched, this looks to be an interesting and informative time.

Quite a number of people have ants in their pants over the latest release of Netscape Communicator. This latest release, 4.72 to be exact, can also be grabbed through their Web site. Here's to hoping it's more stable than my current release. 'Course, Mozilla's getting really really close now...

Matthew Mastracci has sent in the first in a series of features comparing the various productivity type apps under Linux. This week is an application I haven't used since college: Word Processors. Specifically he looks KOffice's KWord and Applixware's ApplixWords. Other word processors (including StarOffice Writer, Corel's WordPerfect 8, AbiWord and KLyX will follow).

Last week, I gave a presentation on SurfWatch, and blocking software in general, in downtown Holland, Mich. Preparing for it was an interesting experience, mostly in annoyance, hard work, and dealing with getting seriously sick two days before. Read on for the story of recovering, preparing, talking, giving away $100, a bolt of lightning, and why nothing anyone does is going to stop fundamentalists from bringing issues like this to America's ballots.

Guylhem Aznar, one of the folks over at the Linux Documentation Project has sent us an updated list of features/responses/additions that they've put into the project. Much of this work comes as a result of Slashdot suggestions; you can read more below and perhaps want to sign up to help out.

Stephen Cass dropped this into my submissions box last week, and he figured all of you might be interested in this editorial regarding research institutes, corporate interests and how this relationship may develop in the future. He writes, "Freely available software, developed by researchers, is good for science and keeps commercial companies on their toes. In an era of quasi-monopolies, research institutions should encourage it." Intrigued? Read the article below and think about ways in which we can answer this question: What can we do to we keep researchers in the Open Source community and not lose them (and their science) to the Corporate World where their breakthroughs will become another piece of "Intellectual Property"?

Jayakrishnan, who recently reviewed Java Look and Feel Design Guidelines, has returned with a review of Li Gong's Inside Java 2 Platform Security, Architecture, API Design and Implementation. With the increasing use of Java in many different situations, books like this will only increase in importance - so learn more about now, versus later.

sysadmn writes "From CMP Media's Winmag Win Letter, A company called Kerbango has built what it bills as the world's first standalone Internet radio, which can play any of the claimed 4,000 audio streams floating around the Net as well as more conventional AM or FM broadcasts. Tuning is accomplished through the Kerbango Tuning Service, which displays the user interface on a half-VGA grayscale LCD monitor. The radio has a built-in computer, with an 80MHz PowerPC chip running Linux with 8MB of DRAM, 8MB of flash memory, and a whole bunch of codecs. It'll be available in the Spring. They're not saying how much. "

menthos writes "In this story on Cnet, the talk is about the latest speech from an AOL executive. Some of the most interesting things include that they are preparing to launch the Netscape-branded version of Mozilla "this spring", and it will be labeled Netscape Communicator 6.0. "

genehckr writes "Salon has an article about how JWZ has been spending his time since leaving Netscape/AOL/Mozilla -- he's working on buying a nightclub in San Francisco. The article also delves into JWZ's personality, and some of the history behind the JWZ/RMS Lucid Emacs/emacs split -- an interesting read. " Ok, I put it under the Mozilla icon because I don't have a 'San Francisco Nightclub Icon'. Interesting article covering stuff that we don't usually see around here.

New reviewer Jayakrishnan Nair has brought with him a review of Addison-Welsey/Sun's Java Look and Feel Design Guidelines. There's a lot of work being done in Java right now - make sure that it looks correct. The book covers everything from basic controls, keyboard navigation, tables, toolbars, treeviews to the JFC and effective ways to use the JFC components.

The January 2000 Netcraft survey is out, with Apache showing a 1% gain in share. What is interesting is that, with the exception of Netscape, all other servers suffered a decrease (or no change at all), according to the survey.

raphinou asks: "I am really worried because Microsoft is making serious progress on streaming media fields. Realplayer is available to Linux users. Windows Media isn't. How do you want Linux to succeed on the desktop if there aren't any streaming players for it? If Microsoft can convince broacasters to use Windows Media, they'll again control the desktop. It really makes me think about the Netscape thing. And I'm afraid we'll have the same end: RealNetworks dead. This is really the same thing: Microsoft is giving away for free what RealNetworks has to sell." What do you think? Have the BrowserWars become the StreamingMedia wars?

Anonymous Coward writes "CNET's News.Com has a story about universities beginning to ban access for Napster users. The schools cited excessive use of bandwidth (with 5% of total bandwidth going to Napster) and the RIAA's lawsuit as reason for it. Take a look at the story here."

pnevares writes "CNet has the news that the UDP on @Home has been lifted, apparently before the close of business Tuesday. They still have a 30-day probation, but the UDP [Usenet Death Penalty] will not go into effect."

Big_Joe wrote to us with the continuing story of Michael Chaney. Michael is the guy who paid the re-registration fee for the Hotmail domain name, after Microsoft had failed to over the Christmas holiday. He's auctioning the 500$ "thank you" check off on E*Bay and has pledged to donate the winning bid to charity, as well as matching up to $2,000 of that out of his own pocket.

ChrisRijk wrote to us about the release of PKI information to Mozilla. The "Sun-Netscape Alliance" has that announced that it will give mozilla.org a bunch of PKI (Public Key Infrastructure) library source code and utilities. This was made possible due to looser regulation of encryption source code by the US Department of Commerce." A FAQ available at the Mozilla web site.