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starwindsurfer writes "US space agency Nasa is to get a massive supercomputing boost to help get its shuttle missions back in action after the 2003 shuttle disaster. Project Columbia, a collaboration with two technology giants, will mean Nasa's computing power will be ramped up by 10 times to do complex simulations."

Sure, it's not the dream system with computer-controlled vents on the furnace and a genetic algorithm to optimize heat-flow, but it is pretty damn cool. This system makes use of Dallas Semiconductor Digital Thermometers to monitor temperature throughout the house. Hopefully the fellow running the project will put up the source to the Linux driver he has running the sensors. This project ties in nicely with the question posed by a recent Ask Slashdot as well.

Sure, it's not the dream system with computer-controlled vents on the furnace and a genetic algorithm to optimize heat-flow, but it is pretty damn cool. This system makes use of Dallas Semiconductor Digital Thermometers to monitor temperature throughout the house. Hopefully the fellow running the project will put up the source to the Linux driver he has running the sensors. This project ties in nicely with the question posed by a recent Ask Slashdot as well.

Esqueleto sent us an interesting story from Security Focus on convincted hackers and employment in the security field. When you get past the zillions of obnoxious frames, you'll read an article about a wierd problem: the guys who have a criminal record are tougher to hire... in this case they're talking about Mark Abene (Phiber Optik) being snubbed by @Stake, the guys who merged with L0pht. Of course this makes total sense from a corporate perspective, but considering many of the folks in the industry will admit freely to doing the same things, the conviction on your record makes all the difference.

A whole load of people submitted questions related to this Inter@ctive weekly article but HarryHood got thru first "...and it got me thinking about the prevalence of offices completely free of Microsoft Office. Of all the communities on the Internet, I would think the /. community would have the largest comglomeration of users that work in such environments. So can we get an informal vote and some comments on the ideal Microsoft Office-less setup?" There are several issues which Free Software still has to address, the largest of which is compatibility. Read on for a choice helping of some related questions that have recently fallen into the bin.

One Clan Anonymous Coward member asks this question regarding viable alternatives to the entire suite: "The company for which I work is presently deciding on software and hardware standards for employee desktops. A couple of days ago a radical thought occurred to me: could the company use Sun's StarOffice suite in place of Microsoft Office? If so, it might save the company a lot of money! So I cadged some free copies from the local Sun sales office and spread 'em around. For an integrated office suite, it doesn't look half bad. And it may allow some of us to keep our 'nix desktops :-). The question is: can StarOffice really be used in place of Microsoft Office? The big concern is, of course, exchanging MS-Word and MS-Excel files with customers and vendors. Does anybody out there have any experience with deploying StarOffice in place of MS-Office on a company-wide scale?"

TigerPlish asks: "[I wish to] find or develop a cost-effective e-mail solution that'll support Microsoft Outlook. All the functions MS-Exchange provides must be supported, in particular, the ability to migrate an ACT2000 database into an Outlook contact list..complete with searches, etc. So far, the other geeks at work are pushing for MS Exchange, and Lotus Notes, both running on NT. My suggestion is HP's OpenMail, which I'm now starting to play and get familiar with - and it's turning to be quite a bear to configre. At least it sends and gets mail from the internet - tho the x.400 to internet name mappings are truly hideous. Other than HP's OpenMail..are there any other Outlook-compatible server solutions for linux? They can be either payware or open-source..."

Compatibility with Office's contact management features has been a big issue with many of the submissions I get regarding Office replacements, unfortunately I didn't get much information in this regard from the last time this question was raised. It would be interesting to see how much has changed in this area over the past 18+ months.

Lumpy asks: "Is there a program that I can use from Perl (or as a daemon/ etc..) that will converse with an Exchange server for sending and receiving email? Our corporate servers are only Exchange based, and will not open up a POP3/SMTP server for use by non-MS systems."

Which is, as most of us know, another way Microsoft locks offices into their infrastructure. Has there been any progress made on solutions to this problem? I ask this primarily for cases where where administrators are unwilling to go through the trouble of enabling POP3 and SMTP services for their all-Microsoft networks.

Here's a similar question from OldGrover: "Does anyone know any information on the format Outlook uses to talk to Exchange? Where can I find this info? I'd love to have a perl module that talks to an Exchange server and I see no such beast on CPAN, so I'm perfectly willing to write one, but obviously I need the data. If the data isn't available, what are my potential liabilities if I just figure this out myself? (Watching packets, or whatever). Where are the Evolution guys getting their info? If I could, I'd use something else, but there are an awful lot of companies out there using Exchange. My biggest beef with it is its lack of scriptability and transparency and a Perl module with all the power of Outlook (mailing list updates, querying, mailbox manipulation) would go a long way towards helping me resolve that. I'm willing to put in the time on this, but I have to know the lay of the land first. Comments?"

Decyphering the Outlook<->Exchange dialect would go a long way into opening up the office to other systems. A Perl module implementing such a thing could almost directly plug into CSCMail, for example. However, reverse engineering the protocol might prove problematic, even if it was done in countries where reverse engineering is legal, since Microsoft can still put heavy pressure on anyone choosing to use that information. What legalities would be involved here? Could such a feat be performed legally?

What about Calendar sharing? I know Outlook has functionality for scheduling meetings and appointments via e-mail. Are there any Open Sourced applications that perform something like this? Would such a thing be difficult to implement?

So there are still a few issues that need to be addressed before a Microsoft Office-free environment is practical, but it's currently possible with varying degrees of success. Now that the itch is being felt, even among the average user, getting it scratched is a matter of "when", not "if".

Ex Machina writes "Apple's PublicSource has posted some news on the Darwin OS and other Opensource projects. The first four Darwin Developers are: Scott Anguish, Joe Gervais, Luke Howard, and Andrew Stone. The multiplatform networking architecture OpenPlay has Linux support now. Apple also has released the NetSprockets gaming code for OpenPlay. Finally, the new HeaderDoc source to HTML documentation system has been released. "

Ex Machina writes "According to the legal jargon on Pez.com: "You may not embed Metatags (hidden text used by web search engines to find websites) into your website using any of the registered or unregistered trademarks of Pez Candy, Inc. or its affiliates, in particular the PEZ® mark. Any such use of Metatags will be considered trademark infringement and will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. " Is there a precident for this case? I do believe this would fall under fair use--- for example, product reviews could be blocked if this was legitimized by a court. I fear lawyers. "

PowrSurge writes "CNN as a nice article on Linux's Desktop experience not being the Windows experience. It's worth reading. " It's Nick Petreley writing, which explains the fact that they actually have a clue as to what theya re talking about. But it's always a good thing to explain in a mainstream audience why networked computing is good, and why X is good.

Anonymous Bastard writes "There's an article in today's Chicago Tribune suggesting that the effort being put into the Linux operating system would be better spent improving Microsoft's software. The author says that Linux is trying to reinvent the wheel. Linux isn't a waste of time, is it? " Oh my.

Gary Franczyk writes "Apparently Linus Torvalds was named one of the top visionaries in Upside's Elite 100 list of most influential people in the computer industry." He's the only "Visionary" that didn't get his picture on that page. So sad.

Knightphall wrote in to let us know about an upcoming MP3 conference next August. The conference "De Janeiro" will be in Chicago. Check the page for more information-still under development, but should be an interesting time. H: I've gotten an e-mail from Knightphall-due to popular acclaim, the conference name has been changed to "Layer 3".