In addition to all the other books he has insightfully reviewed, chromatic has written this review of CGI Programming With Perl. This books sounds like a great resource for the builder of dynamic Web sites with a Perl background. And isn't it nice to see a book with "an unapologetic Unix flavor"?

ScottMan asks: "The company I work for is interested in WAN emulation software that does stuff like create false latency, random packet dropping, etc. After scouring every resource I know, I was able to find only one piece of software called The Cloud (at $4,000 a license) Does anyone know of ANY WAN emulation software that is GPL or similar?"

duffbeer703 wrote to us with a ZD story regarding Transmeta's Crusoe speed and benchmarking. As we've heard the benchmarks haven't overwhemled people - but are we measuring things the wrong way? Of course emulation is slower then native chipsets - that's a given - but are the other elements of Crusoe enough to make up for it?

JayBonci writes: "The emulation and classic gaming world has been a large grey area for a while. The subject of reverse engineering other products for the sake of emulating has come up numerous times (see also the Bleem and Connectix lawsuits), but what about emulating your own stuff? It seems that Capcom is going to use emulation as a standard way to make more games cross platform. The blurb is short, but an interesting though. How viable a solution is this? If the performance hit is fairly minimal, how will this affect the future of cross platform game development? It's an interesting solution, IMO."

More news from the protecting-the-children front in Indianapolis (and it's good news, even if fleeting); bits on emulation and long-ago video games from a British perspective (and another wacky British story that you can tell your kids as a cautionary tale); and educational news of Cosmic significance, all below. And I promise, apart from this paragraph, there will be no mention of Lieberman, Gore, Cheney or Bush.

Davy Mitchell writes "Interesting article on emulation on the BBC's site Good interview with Paul Burgin - author of several Dragon 32/64 emulators. This makes his views on copyright quite surprising!" It's a good article on emulation, and the revival of the old style computers. Good nostalgia.

nontrivial writes "Linux Medical News has a decent review of Win4Lin, a MS Windows emulator. The article and submissions also touch on other solutions for having to run Windows applications. I use Win4Lin daily, and I must say it is rather spooky how well it works. The review doesn't spell it out, but Win4Lin 2.0 does include sound and serial and parallel support, and so far I've had no problems with the beta. It runs Windows in a SDI type interface, comes with DOS emulation, and can be run in many odd resolutions if you don't like running it in it's own virtual console. The bad news is that it technically requires a licensed copy of Windows (95, 98, etc, not NT), it is intended for business applications (so no DirectX support for example), and only TCP/IP networking is supported within the emulation. But overall it's stable (no more crashes than MS causes, and it doesn't take the whole box down when you see blue), it's fast (native speed), and it's cheap ($35). IMHO it's the best transition software I've used."

gribbly writes "Forget emulation -- now you can read classic Atari design docs!" It's all documents from the early 1980s, I think, and looks totally...I dunno. It's like taking a journey into the past.

Jake Pinsky writes: "3DGN posted a large emulation feature discussing arcade emulation, Super Nintendo emulation, and even Sega Genesis emulation. It's a nice look back on the games we used to play, and it even has places where you can get the ROMs. In the section on MAME (a popular arcade emulator), the writer even discusses building your own arcade machine, and there are some photographs of the one he hollowed out and put a computer in. There's nothing like having an arcade machine in your home that can play over 400 games..."

adagioforstrings asks: "A couple years ago I remember hearing a lot about an open source operating system called Freedows. It used the concept of a cache kernel in order to provide emulation for several operating systems (among them Windows, Linux, MacOS). I was looking at the Web site and there haven't been any updates for nearly a year now. What happened to the project? Too ambitious, or did it just never get enough steam going?" According to the site, it looks like Freedows didn't quite make it out of the specification stage. Is the project still alive? Is it dead? Or is it in suspended animation waiting for the right set of people to reanimate it?

dragonfly_blue writes: "Just wanted to let you know, OpenBSD 2.7 is out, with significant advances; including OpenSSH2, better Linux binary emulation, DSA encryption, and (my personal favorite) support for encrypting your swap space. Theo and the gang have also expanded the ports and packages collections considerably, so get 'em while they're hot!" (More.)

Robotech_Master writes "According to this article in Wired News, a court has just dismissed many of Sony's charges against Connectix in the Virtual Game Station emulation case, noting that 'both copyright and trademark law favor broad consumer choice.'"

martial writes: "I saw the information on IGN; it seems that the people at Bleem! are going to release a DreamCast version of their software to play PC Playstation Emulator."

rapett0 writes "Sega of Japan has decided to take a much welcomed step and support downloading and playing of Genesis/Mega Drive and PC Engine/TurboGrafx-16 games on the Dreamcast via a service called DreamLibrary. Apparently they will cost $1.50 per download/per day and you lose the game after you turn off your system, but can redownload if you still have rental time left on the game that day. The same article makes mention that Bleem! might be released for Dreamcast as well. " Granted, this is only for Japan right now - but it's a cool step.

In our third and final part of the 'Making Music with Linux' trilogy, we try to make sense of the alphabet soup of the Linux sound world by exploring OSS and ALSA, and we investigate musical notation systems and software available for Linux.

Cacl, a PhD student at University of Michigan in their School of Information Divison has written a feature addressing the concerns and problems of preserving digital information. This is an area of study of his - and interesting to read about.

Pretender writes, "Donald Knuth is interviewed here, and the questions have more depth than you usually see in his interviews. Gets into a little nitty-gritty about TeX, fonts, and Crusoe's possibilities with MMIX emulation. The cartoon at the bottom is hysterical. "

We asked Jim Hall a bunch of questions Monday. Today we get answers about the reason for and future of FreeDOS, along with a sprinkling of advice for FreeDOS users and developers. Thanks, Jim, for taking the time to do this. (Guys like you, who work on "lower profile" open source projects, don't get nearly as much recognition as you deserve.) Click below for the complete interview.

I've gotten the first round of details about Transmeta's *two* new chips (Thanks Chris!). It's very cool - x86 compatible, Linus has written "Mobile Linux" to run on the chip, and totally insane power consumption. Click below for details - and we'll be updating this story throughout the day so check back again for more. Update: 01/20 02:33 by E : David Cassel, who was at the unveiling, sent in his notes and some great quotes from the unveiling. His take is appended to the end of this article.

This week's "main" interview guest is L0pht Heavy Industries as a group. (We hope to have answers from Linux International head Jon "maddog" Hall tomorrow). Many insightful questions for the L0pht guys were posted Monday. Today, lots of insightful answers on everything from political controls on the Internet to hardware hacking. (Click below to read.)