The drive to be an evil genius is an easily understandable one. Riches, power, eventual fame, and plenty of minions to order around are just some of the perks of the vocation. Vivendi's Evil Genius (flash required) gives you the opportunity to exercise your lust for worldly power in a seriously stylish way. A rich musical score, tons of polish, and enough dastardly deeds to keep even Dr. Claw happy are the game's high points. An overabundance of micromanagement and a lack of proper GUI interaction marrs what have could been a classic in the strategy genre. Read on for a more in-depth examination of the first real-time strategy game whose tag line could have been "Mwahahahahahahahaha!"

jg21 writes "This article on "Penguin-Driven" JVMs takes a look the performance of Java GUI applications based on the JFC/Swing API, and contends that the JIT-powered JVMs can't match a JVM with an ahead-of-time compiler ported to the Linux/x86 platform. With AOT compilation, says the CTO who has written this piece, real-world Swing applications performed perceivably faster. One is left wondering, will we now see the 'microbenchmark war' carried into the Linux camp?"

cgjherr (Jack Herrington) writes "The Cult of Mac, a new book by Leander Kahney, is a love letter to the Macintosh community. The book seeks to simultaneously define and evangelize the Apple cultural phenomenon. With 25 million users (in the author's estimation) there is a lot of culture to go around. The tattoos. The modified machines. The pilgrimage to MacWorld. The sub-cult of iPod. It's all here." Read on for the rest of Herrington's review.

museumpeace writes "Technology review (in exchange for a revealing cookie) has a short article describing a PDA browsing improvement from Microsoft/Asia research. The basic idea is to put the palm top user back in control of page layout by letting them zoom/shrink arbitrary regions of a page with a single stroke of their stylus. A more complete disclosure of the technique will be presented at Seventeenth Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST 2004), in Santa Fe, New Mexico on October 24 to 27."

He starts by clearing up my error in saying he was a Unix co-creator in the original Call For Questions. From there he goes on to answer your questions both completely and lucidly. A refreshing change from the politicians and executives we've talked to so much recently, no doubt about it.

hajokirchhoff writes "The first public release of The Lit Window Library (for C++) is now available at from LitWindow itself. The goal of The Lit Window Library is to speed up C++ GUI coding by a factor of 10. It greatly reduces the amount of work needed to code user interface requirements. This is not just another "better widgets" library. The library introduces two new, different concepts to UI coding: a data abstraction layer (reflections) and rule-based programming."

stuck in a bind asks: "I am currently coding a civilization-type game (in C) but on a galactic scale. OpenGL is used to draw everything so far. However I have been unable to find a decent, nice GUI, practically all of them are coded in C++. The only other options I can think of is coding my own toolkit (too much work, and I would hate to reinvent the wheel here), using SDL to draw 2D bitmaps on top of my OpenGL window. The last option would be to switch to GTK and use the GTK GL widget. What would the educated gamer/programmers of Slashdot recommend?"

norburym writes "W. Jason Gilmore and Apress have put together an impressive volume, both in girth and content, in Beginning PHP 5 and MySQL, From Novice to Professional. At first glance, it appears that any technical manual that tries to approach such heady stuff such as PHP and MySQL for an audience ranging the span from beginner to the uber-geek is headed for failure. Happily, I can report that Gilmore and Apress have given the world one book that will replace many other PHP and MySQL volumes. This is one that the reader will consistently rely on and keep near to hand." Read on for the rest of Norbury-Glaser's review.

cying writes "Today, Laszlo Systems released their entire rich internet applications platform (standards-based, zero-install, all-singing / all-dancing) under the CPL. Check out their cool Laszlo-powered web site and see some rockin' groovy demos. Also, read the press release, news, and blogs; download the goods; and join the community."

Today we return to our Slashdot interview roots with a "Call for questions" for Rob "Commander" Pike, who has been involved in the development of many modern programming concepts, GUI advances, character sets, and operating systems. We'll email 10 - 12 of the highest-moderated questions to Rob and post his answers as soon as he gets them back to us.

kwiens writes "We had such a positive response from Slashdot with our Free-As-In-Beer Mac disassembly instructions last time around, we decided to do it again: We've made six more FixIt Guides, perfect for those intrepid road-warriors who refuse to trust anyone else to work on their 'Book. Now there's nothing stopping you from trying that LNO2 overclock on your PowerBook-- or just a hard drive upgrade. The new Guides have professional photos, a new GUI design, and screw guides (no, not this). Guides are now available for all iBook G3, PowerBook G3, and PowerBook G4 models (including the oft-requested 12, 15, and 17 Aluminum 'Books)."

`Sean writes "Pepper Computer debuted their $800 Pepper Pad 2 at DEMOmobile 2004 this week. Specs include a 624 MHz XScale processor, 8.4" 800x600 TFT touchscreen, 802.11b+g, and 20 GB HDD running MontaVista Linux CEE. Out of the box the Pepper Pad 2 loads the Pepper Keeper as its GUI, but a full-blown Linux distribution with Java 2 JRE and X-Window System is sitting under the covers just waiting be customized. I personally can't wait to get a hold of one of these to turn into an OBD-II and telemetry workstation for the rally car."

Mik3D writes "Looks like a Linux based phone has finally arrived in the US. It's called Identity and it features an interesting skin technology that allows users to purchase a faceplate with embedded ring tones, gui, etc... The phone is being offered by Dobson Cellular, an also-ran cell phone company that services those of us up here in the frozen north."

FlipmodePlaya writes "Linux Today reports the first release candidate for Gnome 2.8 has been released. A look at the new stuff can be found here. Notably, the possible inclusion of Evolution, and some networking goodies. My opinion: the GUI changes look too much like Windows/Internet Explorer for my tastes; I guess it's not just KDE."

jhealy1024 asks: "I'm looking for a way to replace our FileMaker DB solution with an open-source RDBMS. Problem is, FileMaker's GUI and report design tools are pretty darn good, and I can't find a suitable replacement. Anybody out there have a solution that doesn't require me to take a year off to hand-code a replacement solution?"

Anton Chuvakin writes "Here is a really cool security book that made me lose half a night's sleep when I first got it. Richard Bejtlich's Tao of Network Security Monitoring (Tao of NSM) covers the process, tools and analysis techniques for monitoring your network using intrusion detection, session data, traffic statistical information and other data." Read on for Chuvakin's review of the book.

Thanks to GameSpot for its news story reporting that Sony is intending to use the PlayStation 2's CPU chip in a flat-screen TV that will be released in Japan this fall. According to the story: "Sony plans to take advantage of the PS2 chip's CG capabilities to create a high-quality graphical user interface (GUI) for the flat-screen TV [apparently similar to the PSX's DVR menu in style], which will allow smooth and easy control in navigating the TV's menu." There's no indication of any game-like functions for the TV, but: "The release of the new flat-screen TV can also be considered as the prelude to Sony's next-generation electronic products, some of which are expected to operate using the PS3's Cell chip when they are released in 2006."

sympleko (Matthew Leingang) writes "In Volume I of The PHP Anthology, Harry Fuecks showed some of the basic PHP functionality to solve a few simple problems, including how to object-orient your code, how to use PHP's hundreds of built-in functions, and how to use well-developed existing classes, be they from PEAR or other sites. In Volume II, he intends to 'blow your socks off by tackling some traditionally complex problems with the same principles--to great effect.' It's summertime and I'm sandals-only for the time being, so my socks remain safely in the top drawer. But the volume is nonetheless exciting." (Read on for the rest of Leingang's review, and check out last week's review of Volume I.)

Omega1045 asks: "I am a software developer, writing client/GUI software in C# (.NET) on Windows and server software in a UNIX environment. I have used Linux in the past as a firewall, server and more but have never used it seriously as a desktop. What Linux distro and tools should I look to for a switch? I definitely still need to run Win2k (in a VM would be preferable) for testing and other purposes, but want to live as much of my monitor facing life as I can in Linux. I also need the best laptop and Wireless PC Card support (D-Link in my case) from the distro I choose. Have any Slashdot readers gone this route? What are your recommendations?"

Glen Low writes "Apple has just posted the list of Apple Design Award winners for 2004. Big Bang Chess walked away with two awards: Best Product and Best Technology Adoption, and my very own Graphviz port was runner-up in Best New Product and won the Best Open Source Product. And yes, the GUI is all BSD-licensed Cocoa goodness."