Well, it was only a matter of time anyway--Hasbro has introduced a new animatronic Teddy Bear. The bear is equipped with IR sensors, and comes with a lexicon of 160 English words, and as well as "Furbish". This new toy, known as Furby came out today, and is supposed to respond to the environment, forming phrases and sentences from there. The marketing types are saying that multiple Furbys will communicate with each other, and that the animals can be taught tricks. I dunno-I still like Legos, but if they did it with Transformers--well, that's a different story.

Several folks asked for it, so I figured I'd quick whip up a review of the first full length CGI film from PDI. Hit the link below to read my take on it.

the secret asian man sent us an image that could only have been inspired by the iMac. GRR wrote in to tell us that Symantec is retireing it's Norton Utilities in favor of it's new Bigman Utilities. I found that one extremely amusing. Lastly Jaro wrote in to announce yet another Unix GUI project. This one is called the Unix Desktop Project.

Dave writes "This article at yahoo! has to do with a new GPS toy. It lets you send e-mail from anywhere in the world (it'll also tell ya where you are too). The really nifty feature, is that you can lock in certain spots (like where you parked your car) and then wander away (or go to Fry's) and when you come back out, you tell it you want to get back to your car, and it tells you how to get there from where you are! Wonderful lil toy! "

India's built itself a new supercomputer, the Param 10 000, for $12.5 million. It'll be the main node of a fast network allowing research labs, academic institutions and companies to use it. There's no clear data as to the computational power it will first reach, but it could reach 1000 gigaflops... How large a Beowolf cluster would be needed to reach that?

Allright I know I said no more Gnome/KDE stuff, but Bruce Perens asked me to post this, and its worth reading. Now I'm going to be frank here guys, keep the comments under control. I know this is a hot issue, but think before you post. This issue is a major schism, and we need to solve it, not bicker amongst ourselves about it. Now hit the link below and read Bruce Perens rebuttal to Linus' opinions on the KDE/Gnome debate. Update I had to close the comments. Not because they were bad, but because we had 95% of the httpd processes on this machine serving up that story. 200+ comments in 6 hours was just too much. Anyone wanna swap a boatload a RAM for advertising? If we can get more RAM, this hopefully won't happen again.

Jim Race writes " An essay was released 6/19 written by Michael Toy, one of the cool cabal folks behind mozilla.org and an old-timer at Netscape. Definitely worth a read. " Agreed.

The battle for the X desktop has never been fiercer. And the major contenders for the easy-to-use integrated desktop of the future is being waged between KDE and Gnome. Kevin Forge has written in with his "Twisted View" on the situtation.

Couple of real gems for ya: Aint it Cool (The best film site on the net) is running a couple of pictures from 2 of the films I can't wait to see. First, a spiffy Toy Story 2 pic. Not surprisingly, it looks a hecuva lot like any pic from TS1 *grin*. Much cooler is the pic from Bugs Life. I am just itching for next thanksgiving. Pixar would just be the coolest place to work. Seeing pics like that makes me want to try to do another animation and submit a demo reel to animation houses. Probably should stick to perl though *grin*

Bruce Perens sent us a bunch of info about the status of the Linux Standard Base System. I'm running it as a feature to get some feedback on it. The LSB is definately one of the most important issues facing Linux these days; especially if we want it to continue to grow. Bruce also says "We would like to discuss the following proposal in BOF sessions at both Linux Expo and Linux Kongress. Nothing about the proposal is cast in concrete until after those meetings."

Evan Vetere has written an interesting bit on a couple of people who he considers 'Driven'. He selected James Cameron (uber cool director of T2 and Titanic) as well as Steve Jobs (the ego behind Apple of old, and today). You might not agree with everything Evan says, but it is still worth reading. hit the link below to read the feature.

Federico Mena let us know that you can get a New Gnome if you're interested. Number 0.13 has expanded pretty significantly to encompass a wide array of utilities, and many more are on the wings. Check out The Official Site for more details, or just download the new version and enjoy the cool new toys. Gnome has crossed over the line from toy to tool guys, It's pretty exciting. I hope anyone developing under motif is paying attention.

Once again, Ain-it-cool-news and Harry Knowles score with the cool scoops that we all want to hear. First Bug's Life has an cool picture of one of the charachters, and the cast list. Amazing names here guys, it's gonna be really cool. And the other juicy nugget is Toy Story 2 which Harry reports will not be going direct to video as we all have been expecting for the last few months. Instead, it will be the Holiday film for Disney in 1999.

Brace yourself:Hong Kong has followed up the Success of its tomagotchi toy with the virtual lover. You take them on dates and write them letters. Judging by the huge flurry the recent Asia Cararre story we posted raised, a lot of our readers may actual want one. I know I do. But go read more if you're into this sort of thing.