emtboy9 asks: "As the semester winds to a close, exams fall upon us students once again. Today, outside of one of my programming classes, I overheard a conversation between a pair of middle aged women about programming degrees (which they are involved in), and this made me wonder. With the job market in IT being as pathetic as it is, what are the real-world chances of someone who is taking a programming course getting a job. In the places I have worked, all the coders were fairly young. So the question is, what are the chances for an older person, who is just now learning programming to get a job in that field?" Ask Slashdot last touched on this topic back in February of 2001. In the intervening two years, have things gotten worse or better for those who have been in the industry for a long time?

andyring writes "According to Cnet, RedHat and Fujitsu signed a partership agreement where the companies will jointly develop and market for Fujitsu's products. Fujitsu hs a strong presence in Asia, a place Microsoft has been trying to cultivate."

CowboyRobot writes "ACM Queue has an interview with Jim Ready about how embedded systems differ from desktops and servers, and how they will help shape the future of Linux. From the article: Your car, for instance, now has telematics -- mapping, navigation, and entertainment systems -- that clearly present a very sophisticated user interface... The neat part for me now is that embedded systems can consist of Linux applications with beautiful graphical interfaces."

Michael Williamson writes "A PC parallel port can provide 0 or 5v on 8 pins, individually controllable. This can be used to directly drive LED lights, or with the addition of an external power supply, some switching transistors, and some relays, control 8 higher-powered devices. I've written a handful of example programs that drive a homemade 8-LED display in amusing ways."

Philljd asks: "Computers 4 Kids is an organization run by the IT &amp ;CS department of Wollongong University in Australia that picks up computers from the local area, installs Linux on them and gives them to needy kids. We want to know what Slashdot readers think would be the best choice of distribution and window manager for an average system spec of a Pentium 100, given that the kids are around 10-13."

Call Me Black Cloud writes "NewsFactor Network has an overview of the $95.00 Gartner report titled, "Myths of Linux on the Desktop". It's a good look at several points from the perspective of a corporate user, not a home user."

MrPhiles writes "Just saw an article at Washington Technology talking about how the Navy is developing a Secure Auditing tool for Linux. I think it's cool that government agencies are taking steps to obtain credentials necessary for open source use in high-security environments."

Naturally, when answering your questions, he boosted his company. (Wouldn't you?) But I assure you, he wrote these answers himself instead of having them laundered by a PR team. Whether or not you agree with Michael and the way he runs Lindows (and used to run MP3.com) you've got to give him credit for speaking more openly than most other modern American CEOs.

An anonymous reader writes "With this review Linux and Main says it is kicking off a project to put together a Linux machine that operates entirely in the console, including applications, without the user ever having to enter anything at a command prompt. The review is of Twin, the very cool windowing environment for the console. Applications will be added over time, and readers are invited to nominate their favorite little-known console applications."

markcappel writes "RAM, bandwidth, and disk space are cheap while system administrator time is expensive. That's the basis for Nicholas Petreley's 3,250-word outline for making Linux software installation painless and cross-distro." The summary paragraph gives some hint as to why this isn't likely to happen anytime soon.

DarkOx writes "There is a new patch from Ingo Molnar which can prevent overflow attacks. The scoop from KernelTrap is as follows: Ingo Molnar has announced a new kernel-based security feature for Linux/x86 called 'Exec Shield'. He describes the patch, which is against the 2.4.20-rc1 kernel, as: 'The exec-shield feature provides protection against stack, buffer or function pointer overflows, and against other types of exploits that rely on overwriting data structures and/or putting code into those structures. The patch also makes it harder to pass in and execute the so-called 'shell-code' of exploits. The patch works transparently, ie. no application recompilation is necessary.'"

Morganic writes "After checking periodically for the past couple days, I noticed that YDL 3.0 has hit the mirrors, a day early (in fact, the page above still says it's not available, but the mirrors at the bottom are carrying it). Anyone got a BitTorrent?"

Jon Danzig writes "Hi, Libranet 2.8 has been released and I hope you will inform your readers. Libranet is our implementation of Debian to which we have added our installer, up-to-date software e.g. KDE, Gnome, kernel, etc., and generally packaged GNU/Linux into a super smart fast and stable system. The installer has sophisticated hardware detection and setup with flexable installation of software packages. We keep hearing that the Linux Desktop is on the horizon and while the horizon never gets any closer Libranet is steadily making its way in that direction."

An anonymous reader writes "This article by a researcher in Intel's Emerging Platforms Lab details some of Intel's current research into wireless, mobile robotics technology. A key goal of the effort, according to the article, is to efficiently combine the two technologies -- mobile robotics and wireless networks -- so that mobile robots can serve as gateways into wireless sensor networks. The Intel project is providing robotics researchers with a robotics development package that includes standardized silicon, a Linux-based open-source operating system, and open-source software drivers for robotics applications. Additionally, Intel has released a test version of a technical library for building Bayesian networks, which will help advance the ability of robots to navigate their environments, and pilot systems based on Intel's open-source packages are already being deployed in a variety of flexible environments in agricultural, security, and military applications."

HTMLSpinnr writes "Red Hat announced today it's release of GinGin64, a "Technology Preview" (read: not beta) of Red Hat's AMD64 technology. You can grab a copy here or at one of Red Hat's various mirrors. Though the version number listed in the release notes is 8.0.95, inside sources say it's based on Red Hat 9 plus some updates."

Jason W. asks: "I work for a medium sized company of about 75 employees. A while back I was asked by our CEO to look into a video conferencing solution. I didn't find much information about setting up a system in house except from Real Networks. The problem was, they wanted $10,000 just to start. We even had a sales visit from a consultant who laughed at us when we didn't want to spend $8-10,000. Like I said, we are a medium sized company, but did I mention we are privately owned? $10,000 is WAY to much for us to spend on what would be, new technology for us. I wanted to poll Slashdot readers, and see if they have any experience in this area. As for our needs, I know we would need to talk from Texas to Washington D.C, and to Virginia. Can we do it from our website? Do we have to have hardware 'stations' on each end? What are your thoughts?"

technoid_ writes "The Register has a glowing review of Suse 8.2. Wow, the Register can actually be nice?"

Jeremy Andrews writes "Andrew Morton posted a lengthy list of items that need to be done before the 2.5 development kernel tree should be turned into the 2.6 stable kernel tree. He prefaced his list by noting that 2.6.0 does not mean, "it's finished, ship it", alternatively offering, "I'd propose that 2.6.0 means that users can migrate from 2.4.x with a good expectation that everything which they were using in 2.4 will continue to work, and that the kernel doesn't crash, doesn't munch their data and doesn't run like a dog. Other definitions are welcome.""

An anonymous reader writes "DistroWatch reports about the 1.0 release of Beyond Linux From Scratch (BLFS), a subproject of Linux From Scratch: 'The BLFS Development team is proud to announce the release of BLFS 1.0. With this release, you can take your LFS 4.1 base beyond a development system. It can be a desktop, a firewall, a multimedia player/editor, an Apache web server or all of the above. You install only what you need. Your Distro. Your Rules. Enjoy.'" Choose the closest mirror...

Anonymous Coward writes "Michael Rash has written a howto for the Linux Journal on getting Linux to run on a Nokia IP 330. Now we can use a free firewall on a platform normally designed to run Check Point Firewall-1. In these troubling times where IT departments all across the landscape are trying to reduce costs, this will allow companies to say 'No' to expensive support contracts and upgrade costs and still maintain security without having to buy new hardware."