carl67lp writes "With all the hype surrounding Dan Brown's The DaVinci Code, I decided to travel to the bookstore to purchase the novel. However, while looking at the "New in Paperback" section, I happened across Brown's Digital Fortress and read the back cover quickly. It was exactly what I was looking for: a thriller with science (mathematics and cryptography), technology (a 3-million processor supercomputer), and intrigue. I devoured the nearly-400-page book in less than two days. But I left feeling a bit disappointed when looking back on the overall picture." Read on for Anderson's reasoning.

Decaffeinated Jedi writes "GameSpy has posted a timeline charting the history Sony's PlayStation 2, the third part in a series previously covered on Slashdot that includes similar retrospectives for the Xbox and for GameCube. The timeline traces the PlayStation 2's history from its initial boom, through its period as 'a repository for bad sports games, giant robot games, and other disappointing releases,' and up to the console's revitalization by such games as Gran Turismo 3, Metal Gear Solid 2, Devil May Cry, and Grand Theft Auto III." How has the PlayStation 2 measured up to your expectations?

Thanks to Game Science for their second article, following yesterday's first part, discussing Japanese game developer expectations for 2004, as relayed via a survey in Famitsu magazine. Of 100 developers surveyed, 25 thought things would improve in 2004, suggesting "new hardware will spur the market on, [and] big hits like FFXII and GT4 will be released", but 32 expected no change, saying "makers and shops will struggle to get by, [and] it will be a tough year for small companies." Hints of the Japanese games slump in 2003 came from survey results in which a clear majority considered it a 'bad year', pointing out "companies like Digicube went bankrupt... [and] the market got smaller." Finally, of those Japanese developers surveyed, 52 were planning to concentrate on PlayStation 2 in 2004, compared with 24 on PC, 15 on PSP, 11 on GameCube, and just 7 on Xbox.

He says, "Sorry about how long this took to do. Blame it on a European Tour that took much more of my time than I have ever imagined..." No problem, Neil. We love you, and your answers to our questions were certainly worth the wait.

carambola5 writes "No, this isn't a dupe from a year ago. The University of Wisconsin-Madison team has taken the FutureTruck title for the second year in a row. The overall goals of the competition are to modify an existing Ford Explorer (make and model dependant on year) to improve fuel economy and greenhouse gas emissions while maintaining or exceeding customer expectations. The University of California-Davis team took 2nd, with Michigan Tech, Georgia Tech, and Penn State following close behind. Speaking as a member of the winning team, I am quite sure that all of the students and advisors from the participating teams are well-deserving of appreciation after those many, many hours of preparation." Too bad Ford isn't actually using any of this hard work. One thing to note: The FutureTruck website still has to be updated with the winning info.

g00mba_b0y writes with this review of O'Reilly's Java Enterprise In A Nutshell. "As the name implies, this massive tome (971 pages stem to stern) covers a mind numbing range of technologies associated with 'Enterprise' Java software development. There are 17 sections in all, as well as your standard API reference pages. As you would expect, all of the usual suspects are there - Servlets, JSP's, EJB's, JNDI, RMI, CORBA, etc. In addition there were other enterprise technologies that I found useful as well - Messaging, SQL, Java Mail and so on." Note his disclaimer ("I am an avowed O'Reilly technical series fan, and proud of it. Whenever I want to understand a new technology I head to the O'Reilly shelf in my local Borders before I look anywhere else. So adjust your expectations accordingly.") and read on for the rest.

cpfeifer writes "Performance has been the albatross around Java's neck for a long time. It's a popular subject when developers get together "Don't use Vector, use ArrayList, it's more efficient." "Don't concatenate Strings, use a StringBuffer, it's more efficient." It's a chance for the experienced developers to sit around the design campfire and tell ghost stories of previous projects where they implemented their own basic data structures {String, Linked List...} that was anywhere from 10-50% faster than the JDK implementation (and in the grand oral tradition of tall tales, it gets a little more efficient every time they tell it)." Want to kill the albatross? Read on for the rest of cpfeifer's review of O'Reilly's Java Performance Tuning, now in its 2nd edition.

gse writes "I first heard about Po Bronson's What Should I Do With My Life? here on Slashdot a few weeks ago, then read more about it on NPR. I found these articles and excerpts compelling and inspiring, so I picked up the book. Before I get into the review, some quick background on me so it's clear where I'm coming from: I'm a geek. I've been programming since I was a little kid, I have a computer science degree, I contribute to open source projects, I've been coding professionally for ten years. I am "successful" in my career. But I've found my day job unfulfilling for years, and as a musician I often wonder if I should follow my heart elsewhere. I imagine I'm not the only Slashdot reader who fits this description." Read on for Scott's take on this book.

I'm not embarassed to admit that I'm 26 years old and a fan of Harry Potter. This weekend saw the release of the 2nd film based on Rowling's books about the wizard boy and his education at Hogwarts. The first film was a smash blockbuster, will this one live up to the huge expectations? My review follows. There will probably be spoilers, but if you haven't read the book, why do you care about the movie?

Once again, Dan Gillmor shows us why he is one of the world's most influential IT journalists, this time directly on Slashdot by way of his answers to your questions. Note that Dan reads Slashdot regularly, just like you. He'll surely read any comments you post to this article, although with his killer schedule he may not have time to post any replies.

This is part 2 of the interview with Dr. Richard Wallace. You might want to start with part 1.

We saw a cultural and generational coup d'etat this month, at least in cinematic terms -- if we were watching. Star Wars was challenged by millions of rebellious kids, who decided to choose a new kind of myth. The next generation unseated its elders -- as is the right of every generation - and is making its own culture, moving away from ours. In doing so, these kids balked at mega-hype, rediscovered earnestness, simplicity, the love story, some patriotism, punctured a billion-dollar balloon, and maybe even sparked a (relative) movement away from whorish sellouts, back to simpler story-telling. I, for one, sure hope so.

greg pryzby writes: "A friend has been pushing me to read a number of technical books lately. After reading Building Secure Software: How to Avoid Security Problems the Right Way (BSS:HtASPtRW), I decided I needed to spread the word." Read on below for Greg's word on this one.

You may remember Peter Wayner as the author of the Slashdot-reviewed books Free for All and Disappearing Cryptography (Version 2 due this spring); he's also the author of seven other books. Wayner recently inteviewed Stanford's Internet and legal luminary Lawrence Lessig; their conversation is below. Lessig touches on some ground familiar from his recent Slashdot interview, but also explores a few issues you may not have heard him delve into before.

Slashdot author Chris DiBona took the afternoon off to watch the lightly promoted new Sci-Fi movie "Impostor," which was based on the Philip K. Dick story of the same name. In short, it's a nice bon-bon of a film with solid effects so long as you don't expect too much from it.

Now that Linux kernel 2.5 is under development by Linus and others, the all-important job of maintaining and updating the "old" kernel series (the one that people rely on in day-to-day use) has fallen to 2.4 maintainer Marcelo. You asked Marcelo about everything from the influence of politics (age and otherwise) to his working enviroment and approach to maintainership; his answers are below.

Minutes into Jurassic Park III, the movie I'd planned to review, I lost it. It was obvious we'd all seen this movie before, only in better-written, more vivid and original form. The bottom line is that dinosaurs keep getting smarter, while screenwriters are getting dumber. Anybody dumb enough to get on that island again deserves what he gets. The raptors are getting as familiar and menacing as Mickey Mouse. So I bolited, skipped illegally across the hallways of the megaplex to write a weekly wrap-up instead. I saw Legally Blonde, Score, and the big romantic comedy of the summer, America's Sweethearts. The latter, despite the great cast, is a near-total disaster. What can you say about a week in which the most entertaining movie was Legally Blonde? Hang on for Planet of the Apes next Friday.

People who love sausage and respect the law should never watch either one being made. Law professor and copyright expert Jessica Litman takes a hard look at the process which makes copyright law, and most readers will likely finish her new book, Digital Copyright, with their respect for the law substantially lessened. This is the book for everyone who has ever gotten fed up with IANAL posts and wanted answers that were a bit more informed, everyone who's gotten tired of soundbite analysis of Napster and overheated mailing list discussions. If you're looking for one book to help you understand the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the past and future of copyright law, this is it.

In some ways, the Net Revolution, like most others, is a sad and strange story to be told: one of almost unbelievable and rapid change, excitement, opportunity and disappointment. It's also a story of a great backlash, growing doubts, and broken promises. Technologically, the network has proved to be one of the fastest growing phenomena in the history of invention. But politically and socially, few of the early hopes for it have materialized, and the counterattack is underway. Is the Net Revolution out of touch with human beings? Second of a series. (Read more).

The latest media-transmitted meme about technology and the Net is that the tech world is in the midst of a slump. This is true only if you define technology's overall status by dotcom stock prices. If the dotcom era is really over, good riddance. Maybe we can forget about dog and cosmetic sites, venture capitalists, copyright and lawsuits for a bit. Some of the tech world's most interesting innovations -- from the Net and Web to mom and pop online retailing to countless individual web pages to file-sharing to Freenet to P2P programs, AI to gene mapping -- have been developed far from venture capital cash. (Read more).