Abhikhurana writes "I work for a company which designs a variety of video surveillance devices (such as MPEG4 video servers). Traditionally, these products have been based on proprietary OSs such as Nucleus and VxWorks. Now, we are redesigning a few of our products and I am trying to convince my company to go down the Linux route. Understandably, our management is quite skeptical about that and so I was asked by our CTO to recommend a few RTOSs which have mature networking stacks and which work well on ARM platform. I know that there are many embedded Linux based distributions out there. There are commercial ones such as Montavista, LynuxWorks, free ones such as uclinux, muLinux and some Linux like distros such as Ecos. What is the most stable and best community supported embedded Linux distribution out there?"

An anonymous reader asks: "I am an IT professional, and due to budget constraints, I have been told to install multiple copies of MS Office, despite offering to install OpenOffice, and other OpenSource Office products. Even though most of the uses are for people using Excel like a database, or formatting of text in cells, other programs are not tolerated. I have been over ruled by our controller, to my disagreement. I would never turn them in, but I am in tough place by knowing doing something illegal. I want to keep my job, but disagree with some of the decision making on this issue. Other than drafting a letter to the owners of the company on how I disagree with the policy, what else can I do?"

bricko noted a story of our modern journalism world gone so wrong it makes me sad. "Editor-in-Chief Harry McCracken quit abruptly today because the company's new CEO, Colin Crawford, tried to kill a story about Apple and Steve Jobs." The link discusses that the CEO was the former head of MacWorld and would get calls from Jobs. Apparently he also told the staff that product reviews had to be nicer to vendors who advertise in the magazine. The sad thing is that given the economics of publishing in this day and age, I doubt anything even comes of this even tho it essentially confirms that PC World reviews should be thought of as no more than press releases. I know that's how I will consider links from them in the future. But congratulations to anyone willing to stick to their guns on such matters.

yamamushi asks: "Within the past few weeks, students across Boerne ISD were being called into offices to discuss the use of proxies to circumvent the schools websense system. The problem is that some of these students are being suspended from school for up to 3 months at a time. Shouldn't the school district be liable for their own insecurity? Why are they punishing so many students for something that should be handled from the district's end? I know at the time I was going to school there, I was punished for using a Linux LiveCD to login to their computers without using a password, even after I told the admins how to disable booting from CD-ROMs. They refused to update any of the computers and as such I was using the same tactic till the day I graduated." While security breaches by students are something to take seriously, should school administrations continue with their knee-jerk mentality to something like this, especially at the times when its obvious that no malicious intent was involved?

An anonymous reader writes "The Consumerist recently published a story about an Apple customer who went through support hell with a broken Macbook. After escalating the issue up the support chain, and a month wait for his Macbook, the guy gave up and simply wrote Steve Jobs a blistering flame-mail. So, was he surprised when Jobs' executive assistant responded back the next day! He got both a brand new Macbook, as well as his old one to copy the hard drive. The guy also responded in a comment, and he turns out to be a slashdotter! He even wrote a journal entry here about the story."

jlcopeland writes "For two decades I've hated the command prompt in DOS and Windows. Inconsistencies abound and everything is a special case. The fallback on a Microsoft box has been running a Unix shell under Cygwin or installing Microsoft's own Services for Unix (or its predecessor, Softway's Interix), or by scripting in Perl, but those only get you so far. Having co-written nine years worth of trade rag columns using mostly Perl as the implementation language for the samples, and thinking of every problem that comes across my desk as an excuse to write a little bit of scripting code, I've got some well-formed views about scripting languages and what works and what doesn't. That means I've been eagerly watching the development of PowerShell since it was called Monad. It's got the advantage of being a unified command-line interface and scripting language for Windows, even if it does have a dorky name." Read the rest of Jeffrey's review.

Mighty Mouse writes "Hardware review sites across the web have published reviews on NVIDIA's GeForce 8800 Ultra. The response appears to be fairly lukewarm at the moment, mainly thanks to its incredibly high asking price. Bit-tech tested the 8800 Ultra in eight different games at three resolutions, finding it to be on average about 10% faster. TechReport's Scott Wasson reviewed the card using another good selection of games, while HotHardware had the chance to check out SLI performance."