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Nrik noted a wired story about too much gaming and how sometimes a few too many hours of gaming can cause your mind to blur some lines. For me it was Tony Hawk- I played so much that I started sizing up curbs for grinding while driving home from work. Katamari Damacy has been a problem too. I'm fairly certain my car is large enough to pick up the railings on the overpass near my house. I'm even more certain that these thoughts are bad.

Anonymous Coward writes "The sky will fall next.... Betanews is carrying a story about Phoenix ditching the trusty old BIOS and moving to 'Trusted Computing'... ya right... Time to stock up on those old motherboards boys!" A follow-up/analysis on this story.

DaaZ asks: "I'm a webmaster (and more) for a small Internet company and discovered a neat feature in Symantec's Norton Antivirus 2004 that might shake some fragile nerves looking at diminished revenues outlook. This feature is an ad blocking tool that very successfully blocks banners on websites, based on a simple keyword identification. It seems to place itself between the download and render engines of Explorer (I haven't tried with other browsers yet, lack of time) and removes code based on a keyword query. We have a rotating banner code on our Web site and with ad blocking enabled, it's completely gone from the source, and so are all our images that link to an external site. It even strips images that are not advertising banners, but simply images that link to an external site! We all hate advertisements, but as with public TV, it's the reason we can get it for free (provided you buy the nice TV and the cables and the storage unit and the TiVo, and the..." Does NAV2004 have some kind of feature where certain sites can be exempt from ad blocking (in the case you do wish to support a site with ads)? I believe the choice to block banner ads belongs to the consumer, not Symantec, and it should be more than a "yes-or-no" choice. If banner ads fail, more and more sites will be forced into a pay model, and the days of the "Free Internet" will be almost over. Do you think banner ads are still an effective way to offset the cost of a website, or has their time passed? If so, what do we replace them with?

"Now of course this is a sensitive case as, like most sites around, we get most of our revenues from the banners we sell to advertisers. In fact, we get over 50% of our revenues from these banners and many other big sites, like Google, have an even bigger share of their revenues from the banners. Google's AdWords are not spared and, in fact, with ad blocking enabled, I can't even access our AdWords account as the link to access it is 'Advertise with us' on the main page, probably blocked because of the word 'advertise'.

Now, of course nobody likes banners, but for many sites it is a large part of or the only means of revenue and so there is a fragile balance that is at stake. I hate banners, but without them my company has much less revenues, both from less cashflow from advertisers as well as clients, as we depend a lot on Google's AdWords capacity to bring us clients who are specifically searching for what we sell.

Norton Antivirus 2004 now comes bundled with a lot of new PCs, and I saw the problem on many of our clients with new PCs as well as some of our sales representatives, who have a hard time selling a product our potential clients do not see advertised anywhere.

So I'm asking to all you webmasters around what's at stake here and the potential repercussions. I know that for us it will be disastrous if NAV 2004 gains too much popularity and its ad blocking software is used by millions of people. It would mean our corporate clients would not see our banners or ads, our consumer clients would not find us and would not see the banners of our corporate clients, who would then not pay us because they'd be paying for something too many people can't see. We already have some of our clients threatening us to cancel their contracts with us if we don't fix this.

This also brings, in my opinion, the subject of spam and general Internet advertising. While banners are not spam, they're almost as hated, especially those that pop right in our screens and move around with flashy graphics. But where does the limit stand between what we can do with the net and the user experience that we'd all like to have? Of course the Internet still has a lot of grounds to make, still being a mere teen, especially in the capacity of consumers spending money to buy something on a product they already spent a lot of money. Banners are the downside of having a lot of content for free as we pay for it by being annoyed by people who want to sell us stuff instead.

But what could be done instead if users are sufficiently annoyed by banners to request such a tool, as was probably the case considering that ad blocking is automatically enabled in NAV 2004? Web sites need revenues and the consumers are not ready to pay for it, largely because of the natural impoverishment imposed by increasing technologies. Buying a computer now means paying for the hardware, the software, the Internet connection, the gizmos, the subscriptions to sites and of course the upgrades, all of which were not expenses 20 years ago."

Mazzaroth queries: "Over the last few years, system architects saw many middleware and language eras. RPC, CORBA, .Net, EJB/J2EE (with WebLogic, WebSphere, and the zillion of other apps servers), XML/SOAP, Java, C++, C#, to name a few. More recently, an effort has been initiated to isolate application's architecture from the middleware particularities: Model-Driven Architecture (MDA). The idea is pretty good. This will eventually allow me to model the application, deploy it on .NET, then change my mind and go for WebLogic instead for instance. Even if the number of software engineering tools supporting MDA is quite limited for now, I would like to get feedback from people using an MDA approach to develop their application. What are the drawbacks, difficulties and limitations of MDA? What would be required in UML to better support MDA? What percentage of code can actually be generated? Can you share your experience?"

As you might know, Slashdot runs on Greenwich Mean Time. That means that you're reading the last story posted in 2001, in which we've gathered some more year-end submissions. Happy New Year to all, no matter what time zone you're in! Zargo writes: "Infosync.no has a great collection of articles named Rewind 2001 looking back at the best stories of 2001. Lots of cool gadgets in there. Samsung 3G prototypes, a car designed by Bella and Nokia, soft hardware by IDEO, Siemens wristphone, Compaq's project Mercury, the Agende VR3 Linux based PDA, the Pogo, Psion's über gadgets, Handspring's Treo, Fathammer's X-Forge, Samsungs YOPY (Linux PDA), Sharp's Zaurus SL-5500 including screenshots. Lots and lots of cool stuff to read."

Speaking of Stuff, Dave Gould writes: "I have published my picks for the 2001 Stuff of the Year. Here's hoping for lots of neat new stuff in 2002!" I bet high that stuff continues to arrive. Maybe even more IT.

Weedstock writes: "EE Times has a list of 15 interesting articles about technologies to watch in 2002. One of those articles, Software model needs overhaul, explains the current problems with computer processing and describes new technologies (Such as the Reconfigurable Architecture Workstation processor from MIT) that will affect this domain in the next year."

uninet writes: "'Looking back over the past year, I think most people would have to agree it has been a ground breaking time for open source. While it is true that open source companies suffered just like the rest of the tech sector from poor economic conditions, those same conditions have also made open source appear even more attractive.'" Here's the rest of Open For Business' analysis of the year past and coming.

There are plenty more year-end wrap-ups filled with bulleted lists and instant nostalgia, but few can top Llewyn, who writes: "The couple who met on Slashdot two years ago are celebrating their first wedding anniversary! you can email them at scott@asofyet.org and elysse@asofyet.org or visit their reminiscing website." Congratulations!

For those into New Year's festivities of the more athletic (and semi-athletic) variety, burntfungus writes with words on "Security and open 802.11b WLAN Access Points along the Rose Parade route, Pasadena's yearly event that allow anyone to be a street person for two nights a year! If you get cold there are many places to get a hot cup of coffee or hot chocolate. Watch floats (on webcam, blimps and low flying stealth bombers! Find a public WLAN access point or two."

At least partly wrapping up one of this year's oddest stories, several readers have submitted a link to a CNN story which says that Dmitry Sklyarov has returned home to Russia, and has already raised a toast with his wife and children. I hope Dmitry's treated a little differently on his next visit to the U.S. suwain_2 adds a link to this Newsforge story as well.

Weedstock writes: "BBC Tech News has an article about the latest development in wireless networking security. It seems that RSA Security has improved the encryption system used by the protocol. Will this new update finally make wireless networking secure? You can also find a list of papers about wireless security issues here." RSA has a press release about their changes to WEP being accepted by the 802.11 committee.

Weedstock writes: "In an article on LinuxWorld, Joe Barr is once again making 10 predictions about the success of Linux for the new year." The first of many sets of predictions for 2002, no doubt. And some guy named "Robin" or "Roblimo" or something like that wrote about Linux in 2003 for Newsforge.

Weedstock writes "According to this article on New Scientist, it would be caused by a magnetic field that affect the gas flow in the star. This magnetic field being created in the first place by the gas flow, it results in a loop which cause the star to act unpredictably."

Alex asks: "How would one go about calculating immediate costs and tangible benefits of migrating an NT/Novell IntranetWare LAN to Linux. I am not talking only about long-term benefits as in more uptime, fewer crashes, robustness, etc., but if I could use fewer and cheaper boxes for file, internet and print servers. What could I say to a company about the immediate benefits?" What about the costs associated with retraining? What pitfalls do NT admins have to worry about when moving to Linux?

K.G. writes "A Russian computer related news agency Computerra said today that Linus Torvalds will move to Moscow, quitting his job in Transmeta to develop a Linux compatible OS intended to run on the E2K processor from Elbrus International. In a russian-language article named "Closer to Dad" Computerra said that the factors that convinced Linus to move to Russia were "more interesting and promising job", closeness to his father who works as a Moscow correspondent for Finnish radio & TV, and a more familiar climate, similar to Linus's homeland Finland (they don't get a lot of snow in LA, do they... ). They also quoted the future boss of Linus, professor Boris Babayan: "The great professional qualities of Torvalds will help create a dependable OS for the E2K processor, fully compatible with Linux, in a tight deadline". "

alexandre writes "ZDNet has an article saying that HP, Sun, Dunix, Sco and Unixware are going to work on a common interface for drivers on the intel platform. Maybe this could be emulated in Linux for those evil vendors who arent giving their specs! "

Alexandre writes "You can read here or here That the Unreal port would be too hard to make because the game was designed for Windows and license in mind instead of portability (blah!) So i guess we'll have to work on the new Heretic source code :) " To bad... I would've bought Unreal too.

Alexandre wrote in to tell us that Jaques Gelina will be speaking at the Linux-Quebec UG tonight at 7pm to talk about LinuxConf- which will be included in RH5.1. You can read more at the LQUG Homepage (which seems to be down at the moment).

Alexandre G wrote in with this link to an article at 32 Bits Online where you can read about Office Suites for Linux. Its a series of article that will be covering Applix and StarOffice as well as something called AndrewUser Interface System that I've never heard of. Looks like it'll be interesting- check it out as the week continues."

kIRC, the best looking of the new breed of X IRC clients has reached a halting point in development. Click the link to read Aaron Granick's announcement that he just doesn't have time to maintain kIRC anymore. His feelings are all to familiar to yours truly- ePlus development has all but halted as I am busy making mugs, slashdot articles etc. Anyway, read Aaron's message and maybe some of you guys are up to the task of picking up where Aaron is leaving off. (How about a Gnome port?) Jean-Philippe Couture sent in this bit,along with a note that if you are interested in helping the project, email parallax@ucsd.edu.

Well Bootnet has posted an article about MSIE5... the funny thing is that their "Proof" is an httpd log entry frome tide11.microsoft.com formatted like IE5 most likely will. See Those strings are really easy to change (as proven by the zany stuff that you guys put into my agent logs each week). Will someone mail me a perl script or something that sets HTTP_USER_AGENT = "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.66; Windows NT 6.66)" and does a GET off bootnet? If we each ran it once, we won't hurt their server at all and they'll notice the new browsers in the log files and maybe report wide scale beta testing has begun on IE6.66 and NT 6.66. Shhh... don't tell them *grin*. All kidding aside, BootNet is a Neato-Site(tm) and definately worth a regular gander. Thanks to Xces for letting me know.

Update:A few notes, Slashdot has recieved dozens of hits from tide*.microsoft.com in the last few weeks. Read whatever you want into that. Second, this script was sent to us by Vivek that will fake an agent. run it with an address, port and an agent string (like the one above) as parameters. Lynx users can set it already.