Alex Moskalyuk writes "PHP and XML seems like a marriage made in heaven. Powerful manipulation functions and support on the core language level in PHP5 combined with universal extensibility of XML make it a technology of choice for quite a few Web enthusiasts and companies out there. However, anyone inspired by PHP's ease of use can probably find a good cure from insomnia when facing with XML specs. With all the DTD's, XML Schemas, XSLT and XPath queries one can easily get the impression that the world is changing on them, and perhaps sticking to hard-coded HTML with PHP statements combined with SQL statements for data retrieval would be within the zone of comfort." Read the rest of Alex's review.

skywalker107 asks: "I am a one man IT department for a small Company (~100 PCs 4 Servers). I know that the bigger companies use alot of admin tools for inventory, documentation and management. Right now all of my information is spread out over documents, spreadsheets, and diagrams. The software I have tried has been poor at best and only covers one of the areas I need. What do the other small IT departments use to bring this information together and help manage the madness? Is shareware/freeware a good route? Does the open source movement have anything to fit a small scale setting?"

Long have Slashdot Editors made known the fact that we'll review pretty much any interesting gadget shipped our way. This week we have the OWC "Mercury On-The-Go", a 2.5" external hard drive featuring FW800 and USB2 ports and available in 40 to 160gb flavors. Read on for my review of the drive.

ZombieRoboNinja writes "The New York Times is reporting that Sony's press conference has confirmed the delay of the PS3, which is now slated to come out in November. More interestingly, the article claims that PS3 will ship with a 60-gig hard drive, built-in network card, and Linux!" Serious stuff here, with Sony's shares falling on the delay confirmation. There was a lot more news handed out at the conference than just the delay. Next Generation has details from Ken Kutaragi's 10 Point Breakdown. From the NYT article: "'We were discussing selling it in September, and some even said put it out in July,' Mr. Kutaragi said. Some analysts were immediately skeptical of this explanation, saying Sony needed to get the console out as soon as possible to combat Microsoft's head start, and the expected release this year of Nintendo's next game console, Revolution. They said Sony may be trying to buy time to bring down the production cost of key components, particularly untested technologies like Blu-ray and Cell. While Mr. Kutaragi did not reveal a price on Wednesday, analysts say Sony will likely try to sell PlayStation 3 for about $500." Please see related links and commentary below for more coverage.

An anonymous reader writes "Well, looks like rumors are flying, and Dell may have bought Alienware according to an article on cnet. It really would fit Dell well. They are the last big manufacturer not to use AMD, and this would fill that void. Acquiring this company would also help them grow their business to where they want it to be ($80 billion anually). One can only hope that Alienware support and hardware won't be ill effected by this acquisition."

buanzo writes "The US Army is deploying armed robots in Iraq that are capable of breaking Asmov's first law that they should not harm a human. SWORDS (Special Weapons Observation Reconnaissance Detection Systems) robots are equipped with either the M249, machine gun which fires 5.56-millimeter rounds at 750 rounds per minute or the M240, which fires 7.62-millimeter rounds at up to 1,000 per minute. " update this story refers to this article from 2005. But com'on, robots with machine guns! I don't get to think about that most days!

An anonymous reader writes "Player gets banned for playing World of Warcraft under WINE and using a Logitech Gaming keyboard. "I am an experienced network engineer for an ISP and I am often running World of Warcraft on Linux through the use of WINE..."" Although the e-mails exchanged are unclear my guess is that the programmable keyboard was more the problem then WINE. Not that you'd ever know that given that Blizzard communicates with their users seemingly almost exclusively with form letters.

Arleo writes "Student Melanie Rieback and others, part of a Tannenbaum research group in Amsterdam, have proven that RFID-tags are vulnerable for infection with viruses. In a research paper titled "Is Your Cat Infected with a Computer Virus?" is shown how an altered RFID tag can be used to send a SQL injection attack or a buffer overflow. They describe on the rfidvirus.org website possible exploits of this types of viruses: from altering the backoffice of a supermarket to spreading RFID viruses by infected bags on airports."

twitter writes "Computer equipment from the Lancaster Intelligencer Journal was seized for alleged improper data access and disclosure. From the article: 'If the reporters used the Web site without authorization, officials say, they may have committed a crime.' Journalist are understandably upset that confidential information, that has nothing to do with the investigation, will be found and used for retribution."

Stefane Fermigier writes "French open source software vendor Nuxeo has recently released version 3.4.0 of its Zope-based enterprise content management system CPS. CPS is a platform for building content management, collaboration and business process applications, that has been used in several majors projects in the French administration and industry. The result of more than one year of work by 30 contributors, CPS is one of the first major products to leverage the new Zope 3 component architecture."

Ant writes to tell us Darknet has a summary of the ten best LiveCD distributions dealing with security. With links to download and a little information about each one." An great overview of some handy tools, some you know and probably a few you don't.

dlaur writes to tell us that today Amazon announced their Simple Storage Service (S3) allowing users to store unlimited amounts of data at $0.15 per GB paid monthly. From the article: "S3 was purportedly built to support both Amazon's own internal applications and the external users of the Amazon Web Services platform. That should be proper motivation to build a service that's fast and robust enough for mission critical use, yet flexible enough to support any storage task thrown at it."

OSS_ilation writes "Red Hat was all about virtualization in a recent announcement for an 'integrated virtualization' initiative with XenSource and chipmakers AMD and Intel. The move was seen as a way for Red Hat to bring its commitment to virtualization technology into 'sharper focus [...] with the release of a product roadmap that includes virtualization technology built into its enterprise version of Linux.' Red Hat's CTO, Brian Stevens, said the move would remove the complex 'rocket science' aspect of virtualization, and drive the technology into more enterprises as a result."

Jane Walker writes "In an effort to dispel some of the FUD surrounding this impressive product, this article puts forth several of the most commonplace reasons for a user to dismiss PostgreSQL." From the article: "While PostgreSQL's adoption rate continues to accelerate, some folks wonder why that rate isn't even steeper given its impressive array of features. One can speculate that many of the reasons for not considering its adoption tend to be based on either outdated or misinformed sources."

DarkNemesis618 writes "NASA decided on Tuesday to delay the launch of Space Shuttle Discovery until July, squashing all hopes that it would launch in May. The external fuel tank is again the culprit, but this time it's not the foam. One of the four fuel sensors in the fuel tank that control when the space shuttle's main engines cut off was discovered to be faulty. This delay does however, give NASA the time it needs to decide what to do about the small crack found on the robotic arm. Over a week ago, a worker bumped the arm leaving a small crack in it. The arm is key to this next mission as the cameras and lasers used to inspect the shuttle for damage are mounted on the robotic arm. All things aside, NASA engineers are saying that the next possible launch date will be July 1st."