Triones asks: "I have found that Windows 2000 has a limit on the number of distinct windows that can be opened. W2K cannot open more than around 70 distinct windows (duplicate IE's on the same url don't count) even when it has 50Mb free phyiscal memory and much more in system cache. The max I can get is about 75 windows. Similar limits on machines with 256Mb or 512Mb ram. Some of my friends have reproduced this phenomenon on their systems. (By the way, no such problem with Linux (Redhat, XFree86, Gnome, Sawfish)). Is it related to the graphics 'resource' (GDI?) in Windows? Is there a parameter that can be tuned to increase the limit? If this is a 'flaw', is it fixed in XP?"

Spirit writes "Red Hat has anounced the release of Version 7.2 distribution with Gnome 1.4 and Nautilus, default ext3 fliesystem and according to ZDnet migration from LILO to GRUB"

Alex writes: "After a wait worthy of the Mozilla project, GNU Emacs 21 is finally released! Image support, colour syntax highlighting on terminals, nice scrollbars and tooltips, it's all there folks. Also, for the first time in it's long illustrious history (and a step forward for GNU Project development in general) it's now available via anonymous CVS on savannah. No more waiting a year for the latest features... Now all we need is a port to GTK/GNOME...." Other submitters point out that the changelog is available through CVS (this is a serious changelog!), and you might try the mirrors, or maybe some light reading while you download.

Welcome to Slashback for 20011018 -- read below for an update on Code Red (is Red Dead?), RAND patents in Web standards (some semi-good news on that front), the sad death of some MIDI software, and an upgrade for Thailand.

Nailer writes: "Subject says it all really. A (very brief) Linuxgram article claims GNOME 2.0 won't be ready for Solaris 9 and the OS will ship with CDE and Motif as defaults. I'm just waiting for the inevitable announcement the GTK port of OpenOffice has been cancelled."

We put up the original call for questions on September 5. Jamie's travel schedule (mentioned in one of his answers) is so hectic that it is amazing he found time to answer these questons at all. But answer he did, in detail. It's going to be interesting to see how Jamie's take on tech-oriented lobbying compares with that of "commercial" lobbyist Morgan Reed, whose interview responses we hope to see in the very near future.

Tetard asks: "Long live the pipe! Since the `|' was invented by Doug McIlroy in 1973, has there ever been a more effective way of reusing tools and connecting data ? The mouse is a device of the Beatles era; Rather than try and provoke nostalgia in the older ones among us, I'm asking myself, as are others: when we don't try to reinvent the wheel, or at least improve it, why must we try and copy it every time ? Xerox PARC exposed us to WIMPs and we haven't done better: some innovation, some plastic surgery -- but no "paradigm shift" -- where's the creative destruction that will take us further ? Graphical component programming is turning us into click-happy bonobos^H^H^Hchimpanzees, as we fail to find new ways to manage and connect richer data streams. My web designer friends are damaged for life because of mice, and yet we persist... Where do we go from here ? If we ever invent the graphical pipe, let if have keyboard shortcuts." Yes, you've probably seen a similar question to this run by Ask Slashdot before, but this time I'm wondering if maybe we need new input devices before the WIMP paradigm is replaced with something better. Might any of you have ideas on what form these input devices might take?

Dave H writes "The first pre-release of the GNOME 2 platform is now available! Find it at you can grab it from FTP.gnome.org It is of course a technology preview; note that it can't be installed alongside GNOME 1.x." There's some more information information posted on LinuxToday.

jdfox writes: "According to this press release from SuSE, they have just received another 15 million Euros (about 14 million $US) venture capital, with some big names listed in the consortium's membership. They have also announced that a quarter of their 500 staff will be let go, following on from similar recent cuts. This excellent distro deserves to succeed: I hope this move will see them through the current slowdown." The upcoming release (needs babelfishing from German) of SuSE's version 7.3 promised for October 13th is loaded with a ton of goodies, too -- Kernel 2.4.10, KDE 2.2.1 and GNOME 1.4.1 beta2, among other things.

Thanks to Dare Obasanjo for conducting this interview with [Miguel De Icaza], and sending it on to me. I've posted the interview below here - interesting answers, and very thorough. Well done, Dare.

Stephanie Black contributes this review of a book which might be nice to have around if someone suggests that Open Source is "not for business use." Managing Open Source Projects is one of a class of books that will probably expand hugely in the next few years.

Timothy has compiled a good list of links related to this morning's terrorist attacks around America. Many photos and video clips. There's a lot of good links there and I highly recommend that you read them. And thanks to the Slashteam for keeping the servers up through this. Its not easy dealing with 3x the traffic. I apologize to readers that have been inconvenienced.

McVeigh revels in this posting at Gnotices site which reads: "GDKFXT transparently adds anti-aliased font support to GTK+-1.2. Once you have installed it, you can run any (well, nearly any) existing GTK+ binary and see anti-aliased fonts in the GTK widgets. You don't need to recompile GTK+ or your application.'" He adds "I'm running it now -- it it looks great!!"

Cowculator writes: "Sun Microsystems will release the beta version of StarOffice 6.0 in October, with the development version already available. This ZDNet article has some more details, including a link to the development version..." Other submitters sent in notes about Gobe Productive and Hancom Office 2.0, not to mention KOffice and the Gnome office applications. As far as I know all of these are lacking the single most important thing, a robust and complete set of import filters for Word, Wordperfect, Excel, Powerpoint, etc.

Matt Beale writes "Ximian is slated to release Evolution (a mail client for Gnome/Linux) by October 1st. In preperation, they are offering awards for finding bugs in Evolution! A important open project to participate in, AND i can win a palm VII, sweet!" My bug was that it kept crashing ;) October release is ambitious but very cool.

Ur@eus writes: "Ever since Sun joined the GNOME Foundation people have been wondering exactly what they have been working on. To solve this we have done an interview with some of the people Sun have working on GNOME. The topics discussed include the background for Sun choosing GNOME, Accessibility, Useability and more. You find the interview at Linuxpower.org."

Leslie Proctor writes: "The GNOME Foundation announced today that they have hired Timothy Ney as Executive Director. Tim is well known in the Free software community for his work with the FSF. More details at www.gnome.org." The actual press release is online, as well as Gnome news. Having worked/talked with Tim before, this is great news for The Gnome Foundation -- Tim's an incredible guy.

Last week you asked Bradley Kuhn, VP of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) questions about working with RMS, his views on software freedom, and much more. He's answered at length below, on everything from becoming a saint to the "web app loophole," perl, and the next iteration of the GPL.

A few weeks ago, dot.kde.org featured a great why-should-this-be-amazing story about Linux being used as the day-to-day desktop operating system for city employees in Largo, Florida. Roblimo got a chance to see the system in action to find out how ordinary office workers are proving that the old "Linux is tough to use" shibboleth is nothing but FUD, and how a medium-sized city is saving buckets of money by minimizing the tax dollars spent on licenses and hardware. Oh, and they've also pre-empted the kind of costs (in hassle and money) that can face any organization that Microsoft suspects may have some licenses out of order. This is the kind of thing every elected official should have politely waved in his or her face by concerned taxpayers. The Largo system uses KDE on Red Hat, but since both KDE and Gnome are paying much attention to user interface, similar systems could easily be running on various combinations of hardware / distribution / desktop system.

Chromatic slipped this review under our door. You need a few laughs at this point in the summer (ok, Northern hemisphere residents at least) to distract you from the heat of summer and the cost of air conditioning, and Joy of Linux has some esoteric geek humor in store, even if it's intended mostly as a mostly serious field guide to Linux nerddom for amateur anthropologists, like parents, girlfriends and bosses.