efp asks: "I'm a graduate student and have a programming assignment coming up. We're encouraged to work in pairs and I've agreed to work with a friend. However, while I'm far from l33t, I've several years more experience than my partner. Are there effective techniques for pair programming with a wide gap in talent? I want us both to get a lot out of the assignment, and I do not want to do all the work (which has been specifically identified and disallowed by the instructor anyway). Navigator/driver scenarios? Index-card design techniques?"

Art Grimm writes "Movie studios want to punish legitimate customers for legally purchasing content, while the real pirates go right on stealing. ZDNet's George Ou writes: "There seems to be a persistent myth floating around the board rooms of the movie companies and Congress that analog content is the boogie man of music and video piracy. In fact, they're so paranoid about it that they're considering a mechanism called ICT (Image Constraint Token) that punishes law-abiding customers for content that they legally purchased. But ironically, the real content pirates who make millions of bootleg movies have no intention of ever taking advantage of the so called "analog hole" because that is the slowest and lowest quality method of stealing content.""

Slashback tonight brings some corrections, clarifications, and updates to previous Slashdot stories including Microsoft denies Vista rewrite, Tuttle Oklahoma city manager still doesn't get it, MS Virtual Server slips and VMWare fills the gap, Samsung execs plead guilty to price fixing charges, Tux in retail part 2, a renewed bid to register the Linux trademark in Australia, OpenSPARC.net shades of the past, and a follow up on Mac botnets -- Read on for details.

A worried comrade asks: "A friend of mine has had what many of us (his peers) are starting to consider a serious problem that we are becoming very worried about. He is addicted to World of Warcraft, and not in the same way the rest of us are. While most of us are able to disconnect from the game to take care of our own affairs, he plays to the exclusion of his friends, his job (he calls in sick a lot, it is starting to get noticed) and his life. How do you help someone who is actively throwing their whole life away to play a game?"

aardwolf64 writes "In an apparent response to the hearing loss lawsuit against Apple, the company has released an update to the iPod nano and 5th generation iPod that allows the user to set the maximum volume level. Parents can even set a lock code that prevents the volume from going above a certain amount." Apple also has instructions at their site on how to implement the changes

Jane Walker writes to tell us TechTarget has an interesting article on HP's new TestDrive program. For many small business owners this new site could allow for the benefits of testing many different platforms without having to make the investment up front. From the article: "The program, called TestDrive, is accessed online via the TestDrive Web site. It allows free-of-charge access to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and Novell SuSE Linux and other open source operating systems like Debian, FreeBSD and OpenVMS. After registering with the site, each user is allowed 1 GB of space in which to work and is granted access to HP hardware housed at the HP Linux Expertise Center in Marlboro, Mass. Access to the system includes the use of 64-bit processors like Integrity, Alpha, and PA-RISC; and SMP x86 and Opteron ProLiant servers."

cowbutt writes "The two houses of the UK government, the elected House of Commons and the House of Lords have agreed a compromise on Labour's ID cards bill, after Conservative peers accepted a Labour amendment. Under the new amendment, anyone renewing a designated document (e.g. passport) will be able to opt-out of getting a card until 2010, but will still have their details put on the National ID Register immediately."

radicalskeptic writes "In the latest installment of Gamespot's series modestly titled 'The Greatest Games of All Time', the editors review Bioware's RPG classic from 2000: Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn. The article is a broad overview of the game and touches on the game's innovations, comments on its historical significance, and includes a section devoted to BGII's romantic subplot. Gamespot concludes that 'all in all, Baldur's Gate II is a towering achievement in the history of role-playing games, giving you a huge world to explore, plenty of well-drawn NPCs to argue with or get romantic with, and an engaging story that's simultaneously epic and personal.'"

benthemeek asks: "A friend of mine works for a company that has more than 6k users connecting to a Outlook exchange server instance through VPN from various homes all across the country. The executives at his company would like to move to Active Directory and a web based solution for these users. When Outlook Web Access was priced out, it was judged very expensive and they opened the floor to other options. They want a LDAP enabled, web based email and calendar that could hopefully plug in or replace Exchange, and if the solution can be load balanced between more than one server to ensure reliability and uptime, that would be even better. Slashdot readers come from many walks of life and I am sure some of you have gone through a similar experience and could give some insight to this problem. The fan boy in me would like to see a complete Open Source to meet this need, but that may not be possible. Have any of you done similar migrations, and to what solution did you go to?"

Linux.com (also owned by OSTG) is running a quick look at Trustix, a Linux distro designed for servers that focuses on ground up security and stability. From the article: "No operating system can claim to be completely secure. There will always be zero-day exploits, configurations errors, user errors, and other factors that can defeat the best security for any system. On the other hand, it's always good to start from a secure base and then add more security. Trustix provides a reliable and secure Linux distribution that you can build upon. There are no wasteful graphical displays and no wizards to set up your firewall. If you aren't comfortable with the command line, forget about Trustix. [...] That said, Trustix does a good job of keeping your system up-to-date, and if you have the required experience, you'll find that it's a robust distro. As a simple server distro with a high level of security and customizability, Trustix is a worthy contender."

With the release of the fourth chapter in the Elder Scrolls saga last week, UGO has put together a piece looking back on the long and successful history of Bethesda's Elder Scrolls series. From the article: "Some RPGs take the restricted world premise so far that they are practically on rails. Thankfully, the team at Bethesda Softworks decided back in 1994 that that wasn't the way things would be for their series The Elder Scrolls. Now at its fourth installment, we have decided it was about time to take a look back at the series that broke the mold on what an RPG should be and that gave players the most important ability of all - the ability to choose how to play the game. So ready your horse, grab your finest set of gauntlets, and prepare to embark on a journey through the history of the series that brought the amazing world of Tamirel to life, and don't be afraid to slay an orc or two in the process."

Don Church writes "DesktopBSD is reporting that the 1.0 Final of DesktopBSD was released today for both 32-bit and 64-bit x86 architectures. This cutting edge FreeBSD derivative now includes KDE 3.5.1 and a host of tools designed to make the BSD experience more palatable to novices. The DVD release even includes Amarok, Firefox and other popular software ready to go. They are offering downloads via several mirrors or the official torrent."

Gamasutra has a piece looking at the story so far for the newly buddied up Bioware and Pandemic. They sit down with Pandemic CEO Josh Resnick, and BioWare joint CEOs Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk to talk about the future of their alliance. From the article: "I'm actually hoping that our coming together will at least open the door, or challenge other developers to start thinking along similar lines as well. The big thing that we did here is we capitalized the business. And by capitalizing the business, that has allowed us to have a much longer time horizon for our products. We're hoping it's going to give us more creative control over our products, and less encumbrances for our original IPs we're developing. And it's allowed us to come to the table with our publishing partners truly as partners with them."

capt turnpike writes "Since losing the patent case filed by Eolas, Microsoft has to change radically the way IE works with a lot of content, especially video and other ActiveX controls. eWEEK is reporting that Microsoft has gotten a one-time, 60-day extension in which developers and companies can try to re-engineer their Web pages and ads to work with the new regime. If devs don't make that deadline, users could face pages asking them to activate much of the content, plus ads."

Wagner James Au writes "Thought y'all would be interested in part two of my 'Preview Ho' series for Kotaku -- in it, a media buyer tells me how Gamespot and Gamespy sells editorial space on their sites to big publishers for thousands of dollars. In other words, the games you see on the front pages of those sites are often there because publishers paid for that privilege. In their defense, Gamespy's Vice President of Content Publishing tells me the practice is 'pretty common both in print and online'." Nothing surprising here, but it's interesting to see it laid out like this.