rjnagle writes "I got my cubicle colleague interested in OpenOffice.org when I said, "Here's something that can convert your Word files to PDF ... for free!" By now people hip to the open source concept use OpenOffice.org for everyday applications, yet MS Office is still the predominant application in the home and workplace. Many educated people have still not heard of it. Why?" Read on for Nagle's four-part answer to that question, and his (lengthy) review of Michael Koch's Special Edition Using Star Office 6.0 -- the content applies to StarOffice's free cousin OpenOffice.org as well.

David Schaffter writes "I bought Hacking Linux Exposed when it first came out. What struck me about it at the time was that it was unlike the other hacking books that were out there. Most seemed to play on the hacker craze, and were essentially lists of cracks. Hacking Exposed, presumably the model for HLE, was very much like this. Topical, overblown, and in the end it was outdated by the time you got it." Read on to see what David finds has changed (or not) in the second edition.

genehack writes "Long-time weblogger Rebecca Blood's The Weblog Handbook: Practical Advice on Creating and Maintaining Your Blog is an excellent introduction to the currently white-hot world of weblogs. Blood covers all the bases, from a history of the weblog form, through starting a blog of your own, and finally onto finding (and retaining) readers for your site. The book doesn't offer as much for the veteran blogger, but even the bloggeratti won't go away completely empty-handed -- Blood's weblog history provides a valuable common vocabulary for debating what is and isn't a weblog, and her discussion of weblog ethics should be required reading for anybody who claims to be serious about their weblogging." Genehack's review continues below.

dooling writes "Continuing the tradition of well written O'Reilly 'Programming' books by those who know the language best, Programming PHP, co-written by the creator of PHP, Rasmus Lerdorf, provides a detailed overview of the popular PHP web-page scripting language. This book provides good programmers who have never used PHP enough information to do serious web development using PHP and serves as an excellent reference for web-page designers who dabble in PHP." Read on for the rest of his review.

Last Saturday a comment was posted here by an anonymous reader that contained text that was copyrighted by the Church of Scientology. They have since followed the DMCA and demanded that we remove the comment. While Slashdot is an open forum and we encourage free discussion and sharing of ideas, our lawyers have advised us that, considering all the details of this case, the comment should come down. Read on to understand what this means.

HumpBackB wrote us about the lawsuit that ISP Media3 has filed against MAPS and its Realtime Blackhole List. The RBL, despite blocking only 2% of spam, is widely seen as an effective tool against mail abuse. I'm going to risk life and limb, and say that it has become, instead, just another censorware tool. Here's why.

Young women between the ages of 13 and 30 are pouring online. They're at the heart of the rapidly growing movement of women onto the Net. Political correctness aside, men and women are not alike, at least not online. They may have equal skills, but they choose to do very different things. Along with open source, younger women may trigger another political, media and social transformation in cyberspace.