honestpuck (Tony Williams) writes "I have to admit that I can bristle at books that try to preach, so Perl Best Practices was on a hiding to nothing when I came to review it. I also have to admit to being torn about the author -- after all, he is one of those poor fools who insist on living in cold, unenlightened Melbourne, while I live in vastly superior Sydney. On the other hand, how can I dislike a man who manages to place a quote that involves my favourite character, Lady Bracknell. from my favourite comic play, 'The Importance of Being Earnest,' in the first few pages of his book?" Read on for Williams' review.

You may recall that sometime last November we put up a request for questions to be passed on to author, voice actor, comedian, and card shark Wil Wheaton. Seven months and many adventures later, Wil has responded in depth to the excellent queries Slashdot users put to him. If you're curious about what's kept him, what it's like to be a Teen Titan, or how to use the LCARS User Interface, read on for his responses.

ARSDeveloperGuy writes "Fourth generation languages are cool, but there seems to be little to no effort being spent to standardize them. The current state is commercialized pseudo-languages are created to allow vertical apps to be expanded. (ARS Remedy, Siebel, Oracle JDeveloper) The concepts of a form, field, and workflow can be standardized, and when you look at many of these languages they aren't terribly different. Why don't we create a standard and start writing "workflow converters" for these powerful languages? That would allow conversions to happen more readily, maybe even to an open source offering like OpenSourceCRM."

Noryungi writes "Cousteau's grandson has built a robotic replica of a great white shark to better observe these animals in their natural environment. The robot-slash-submarine is able to mingle with the great white, and not draw their attention, thanks to a closed-circuit pneumatic propulsion system and cleverly disguised cameras. Do not miss the nice pictures next to the Wired article. Let the Dr Evil joke begin!"

blueZhift writes "This Reuters report on CNet states that Tecmo has filed a federal lawsuit in Chicago under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act accusing the site owners and perhaps some users of game hacking site www.ninjahacker.net (now offline) of knowingly infringing on their game software. This should be another interesting test of the DMCA and just how far it can be pushed to restrict what end users can do with/to their software purchases. This might ultimately affect the legality of cheat devices like the Game Shark and even the mere sharing of cheats or exploits."

An anonymous reader notes that "IBM has launched its new product line of storage devices: the DS6000 and the DS8000. The results are quite impressive, with the DS6000 being rack mountable, 3U, and ONLY 125 pound storage device that will hold up to 67.2 TB! The DS8000 is equally impressive, with 6x performance of ESS 800 (Shark), making it the most powerful storage system to date. "

Thanks to Yahoo for reprinting a Majesco press release announcing a videogame version of Universal Pictures' and Steven Spielberg's Jaws, apparently "scheduled for release in 2005 for the PlayStation 2... Xbox [and PC]." The title, in which "players assume the role of a... shark driven to a predacious frenzy by the sonic emanations of underwater oil drilling equipment", is being "developed by Appaloosa", the developers of the Ecco The Dolphin series for Genesis and, latterly, for Dreamcast/PS2. Elsewhere, QT3 messageboard readers point out Sole Predator, likely the pre-Jaws licensed version of the game, in which "players assume the role of the most feared predator on earth, the Great White Shark."

Gudlyf writes "Anne Quéméré, a French woman who had previously rowed across the Atlantic Ocean from Spain to the West Indian island of Guadeloupe, is currently on her way to doing it again, only this time in the opposite direction. This season's challenge will take Anne 2700 nautical miles, from Chatham, Cape Cod (USA) to Brittany (France), her native land. She hopes to make it in less than 90 days. Is it just me, or does the giant fish on her boat scream 'shark bait' to you?"

Polo writes "While reading dpreview, I noticed that among several new products, Canon has announced a Digital Image Verification Kit to prove that an image taken by a particular camera has not been modified. It's disturbing to think about the conditions that would allow digital images to be accepted in a courtroom. I guess one defense would be to figure out how to 'verify' a photo of shark attack..."

Dan writes "The anticipated GCC3.3.1 switch on NetBSD has happened for some of the popular platforms. NetBSD's Matthew Green announced that he has switched the alpha, i386, sparc and sparc64 ports to use GCC 3.3.1 as the default system compiler. At the same time, NetBSD's Matt Thomas announced that the arm ports(acorn26, acorn32, cats, and shark) have been switched over as well."

laupsavid writes "Here's an interesting interview with government and industry reps on the Black_Box_Voting site. I think it's funny (yet terrifying), almost like an extended Shark-Tank Unclear on the Concept item. They interview Paul Miller, Registration and Systems Manager of the Office of the Secretary of State. Black Box Voting is dedicated to informing people of reasons to reject electronic voting systems. I believe Bev Harris runs the site, and she claims to be an expert on accounting fraud. Also, see this area of the a site called Ecotalk for a list of instances of purported fraud by electronic voting."

Leeji writes "Here is an interesting read about one geek's project to build and launch a weather balloon. The flight recorder is a small $200 Soekris Engineering computer running Bering Linux. It also uses a Garmin GPS, HAM packet radio, an automated Aiptek Pencam Trio digital camera, army surplus batteries, and lots of geek duct tape."

Makarand writes "Unlike mammals that use ion channels in their cell walls to produce electrical currents and fire nerves in response to changing temperatures, sharks have been found to be using a totally different approach, one that does not rely on the ion channel mechanism at all. According to this article in Nature a temperature sensitive gel in the pores of the snout allows the shark to sense temperature differences as little as 0.001 C. Increasing temperatures improve electrical conductance of this gel which is noticed by electrically sensitive nerve cells. This may also explain how sharks are able to locate where water masses of different temperatures meet in the oceans to find prey. A synthetic version of the shark gel may be of interest to the microelectronics industry."

jd writes "According to the BBC, shark populations in the Atlantic declined on average 75% (the hammerhead faring worst at 86% loss) in the past 15 years. This ain't trivial. Many sharks produce one pup a year, if that, and less than half of those survive to adulthood. Sharks are essential to the health of the oceans, so this is not a trivial concern. They're mostly in decline because some idiots like to cut off the dorsal fin, to make soup. (You kill a lot of sharks, and get gristle stew as a reward.) Others die because of paranoia, and yet more because of psychotic trophy hunters. If sharks do die out, they will be the longest-lived species that humanity has exterminated. (Who needs Daleks? We're doing just fine on our own... :()"

Solaris was one of several movies to hit the theaters this Thanksgiving weekend, and it won't be the most successful. The 1961 sci-fi novel has also been the source material for a 1972 film. There are numerous reviews - far more for Solaris than Die Another Day, suggesting that the critics were hopeful (Salon, NY Times), or maybe just tired of Bond, James Bond. I saw DAD as well this weekend, and my capsule review is simple: it sucked, the Bond franchise has definitely jumped the shark (two words: invisible car). But Solaris is worth a few more words.

As much as I avoid discussing Slashdot on Slashdot, I figured I'd just take a moment to say that Slashdot is 5 years old now. I've written a Journal Entry with a few more comments on the subject. And yes we know we jumped the shark about a week after we registered the domain name, but we just don't care! Here's hoping we're here 5 years from now doing exactly the same thing with the same folks. (As a side note, due to a data importing bug, we really don't know exactly when we made our debut, but I spent september 97 putting the site together... and when we went live, we didn't even have comments for the first week or so!)

randomErr writes "Voice of America reported that 'Officials at Detroit's Belle Isle Aquarium say a shark there recently produced three babies in an event they are calling virgin births. The mother, a white spotted bamboo shark has lived at the aquarium without any male counterparts for the past six years.'"

Peter Wayner writes: "In all of the scary stories Hollywood circulates about copyright piracy, nothing could be scarier that the gang of file swapping, copyright circumventing hackers in the new movie 'Enigma'. They laugh and love a bit, but mainly they spend their time building a big whirring and clicking machine to smash a copyright protection mechanism. When the machine delivers, they put the results into a Gnutella-like file sharing system called Ultra so their friends can track down the original artists and kill them." (Read on for the rest of Peter's review.)

Ahab writes "Now if only Robert Shaw had had one of these... Reuters is running this thinly-veiled press release about a personal anti-shark unit. The unit creates an electric field around the swimmer that only affects sharks. The smallest unit repels sharks at a distance of about 6 to 9 feet, and will retail for $240."

An Anonymous Coward writes: "According to Eric S. Raymond in this article, 'hackers don't have to be helpless chum in the dating-game shark pool. We have some advantages; with a little understanding of human ethology we can learn how to use them effectively.'" Anyone who says brains aren't sexy doesn't get turned on by a liter of gray tissue.