These are the slashdot stories I used for the IR example in my presentation. The reference document is first, and the documents I judged to be similar to it are indicated in the list. The full text of the files follows.
National Do Not Call List Opens for Registrations
Spam
Technology/IT
Posted by michael on Friday June 27, @09:50AM
from the ring-ring dept.
prockcore writes "The National Do Not Call Registry is up and running. Sign up so most telemarketers cannot call you starting October 1st. There are exemptions though, like for charities and political organizations." Note that many of the states which have opened their own registries will be sharing that data with the national list, so you may not have to re-register - check and see what your state is doing.
Solar Powered Helios Plane Destroyed in Test Flight
Science
Posted by michael on Friday June 27, @08:59AM
from the in-the-event-of-a-water-landing dept.
deglr6328 writes "NASA's solar powered Helios airplane has crashed into the Pacific off the coast of Kauai today during its first test using a regenerative fuel cell power supply. Helios held the record for highest prop propelled plane altitude at 96,863 (set 2 years ago) and was making preparations for a 96 hour continuous flight using it's 62,000 solar cells during the day while electrolyzing water into hydrogen and oxygen for use in its fuel cells at night. With the capability to carry 200 lb. to near 100,000 ft. for months on end, Helios was eyed with great anticipation by scientists and RF telecommunications buisnesses alike."
Microsoft Pulls Plug for Support on NT4
Windows
Microsoft
Software
Businesses
Operating Systems
Posted by CowboyNeal on Friday June 27, @08:04AM
from the being-put-out-to-pasture dept.
seymansey writes "According to Neowin.net and News.com, Microsoft has apparently announced that as of the end of June, support for the now aging NT4 OS will be pulled. NT4 Server users have until the end of 2004 for support. Windows 98 users will be the next on the list for axed support too. Of course, Microsoft will still provide its knowledge base, but we wont see any more patches, etc. developed for the OS. After 7 years, it's kind of sad to see NT4 go."
W32.Sobig.E@mm Worm Spreading Rapidly
Security
Technology/IT
Software
Operating Systems
Windows
Posted by CowboyNeal on Friday June 27, @04:49AM
from the guelah-papyrus dept.
mabu writes "Apparently there is another worm spreading online. Symantec has upgraded its severity to 'category 3.' This worm appears to primarily affect Microsoft systems, has an expiration date of July 14th, and searches users' machines for select files containing e-mail addresses that it uses to propagate itself."
Ice Detected Underneath Mars' North Pole
Space
Science
Posted by CowboyNeal on Friday June 27, @12:37AM
from the water-water-everywhere dept.
TheSync writes "A Reuters/Yahoo story says University of Arizona and Russian scientists have detected water ice uniformly distributed in the soil of Mars' north polar regions. The amount of hydrogen detected indicates ice of 80% to 90% of soil volume. Data was used from the Mars Global Surveyor and Mars Odyssey." It's worth noting that their study only detected large amounts of hydrogen; so much hydrogen that ice is figured to be the only form it could be in, although I kind of like the idea of Mars' pole covering a huge pocket of hydrogen gas.
The Rise of Casual and Mobile Gaming
Portables (Games)
Games
Entertainment
Puzzle Games (Games)
Posted by CowboyNeal on Thursday June 26, @11:05PM
from the puzzle-games-still-popular dept.
HardcoreGamer writes "The New York Times has a lengthy article about the simple pleasures and growth of casual mobile gaming. Trends show that 'more and more people are playing simpler, quieter types of electronic games on the Web, cellphones and hand-helds.' The growth in lighter, less time- and resource-intensive games (like those by GameLoft, Jamdat, and WildTangent) is spurred by the ability to play anytime, anywhere, as much as the rising development costs and production times for a traditional game. A wireless game can cost $40,000 and take a few months to develop, while full-fledged PC and console games can cost $5 million to $10 million and take years to deliver."
First Review of the Treo 600 Smartphone
Handhelds
Hardware
Posted by CowboyNeal on Thursday June 26, @09:32PM
from the kicking-the-tires dept.
jlouderb writes "Handspring debuted the biggest product at last week's lCeBit show in New York. Lots of news articles were written about the Treo 600, but I actually got to borrow one of the few prototypes for a day." Looks like the only real negatives are that there's no protection for the screen, and no removable battery, otherwise it's a tight little device. It'll be interesting to see the release model in action.
Slashback: Transparency, USB, Europatents
Slashback
News
Posted by timothy on Thursday June 26, @07:59PM
from the easy-access-to-your-accounts dept.
Slashback with a followup on the perpetual motion DeLorean, a word on RIAA bank-account-jacking, a reminder about the fast-tracked vote on software patents in the EU, the real meaning of "high speed USB" and more. Read on below for the details.
Now even less than a week ... mpawlo writes "As reported by Greplaw, although I am still looking for further confirmation, it seems like the EU vote on software patentability has been moved from the late fall to June 30, 2003. Yes, that is in one (1) week. If you have more information and another source - please comment on this news item."
Mikael writes: "Personally, I find it somewhat disturbing from a democracy perspective that this proposal seems to be fast-tracked in the middle of the summer, when most Europeans want to focus on whether they should have strawberry or vanilla ice cream. In Sweden, we also got our Swedish version of the DMCA this week. I guess the ice cream will have to wait."
DoSthAboutIt points out that "A 'Petition for a Free Europe without Software Patents' has gained more than 150000 signatures. Among the supporters are more than 2000 company owners and chief executives and 25000 developpers and engineers from all sectors of the European information and telecommunication industries, as well as more than 2000 scientists and 180 lawyers. Companies like Siemens, IBM, Alcatel and Nokia lead the list of those whose researchers and developpers want to protect programming freedom and copyright property against what they see as a 'patent landgrab.' The whole article can be found here, including some statistics like signatories by country"
The story of Peng. mantispraying writes "Looks like the college student who settled with the the RIAA for $12,000, his entire life savings, has recouped all of his money thanks to a very generous file sharing community. Also, the search engine he created that got him in trouble is back online, for demonstration purposes only, of course."
Reader T points out that while one of the students who lost his life savings to RIAA has made it back through PayPal donations, "the other, Dan Peng, is still short about $12,000. Brother, can you spare a dime?"
I'd prefer the garrote and the stick, but hey. Mark Ferguson writes: "I attended the FTC spam forum. It seems I was on their call list :-) I parlayed that into getting several others on the panels as well. While there I spoke with bulk emailers and other industry folks. Some people defined Confirmed OPT-IN to mean you sending a confirmation that the email address was subscribed so they were doing double, confirmed OPT-IN.
My heads spins.
What I figured from what I learned was these folks truly refused to accept real definitions the Service Providers have been using for years so I decided to do a site for just this. ... Anyway, reboot, aka Andrew Cockrell myself and another built The Carrot and the Stick to explain email, define the best practices and to get people to abide by them.
Thoughts, comments and/or suggestions?"
Sooner or later, that DeLorean's going to land someone in jail. hackwrench writes "According to channel WSMV news, Alternate Energy Inventor Carl Tilley's compound was raided. Tilley was previously mentioned on Slashdot here."
Tilley had announced the then-upcoming demonstration of his perpetual-motion DeLorean.
My nanodots can fit inside your nanodots! Rocky Rawstern writes "I recently had the distinct pleasure to interview one of my favorite authors, Wil McCarthy. Upon completing three of his latest books - two sci-fi and one work of non-fiction - I realized that others would probably enjoy his ponderings as much as I. The questions for this interview stem from my own interest in programmable matter, and the awe-inspiring possibilities raised by Wil in his book Hacking Matter."
How to succeed (not necessarily) in business. jameshowison writes "A few months ago Ask Slashdot published Kevin Crowston's question on what makes open source software successful ... well the results are in and the paper typed. We ran the responses through a funky content analyser (called Grad Students). The metrics that academics and the industry have used for years simply don't work for OSS.
More and more it seems that we'll need to survey the number of job offers developers get and the size of the community to get at this one ..."
You sound very familiar to me. Interested Observer writes "Thanks to a slashdot article discussing false positives using Soundex I thought if Soundex can be used for something as important as "no-fly" lists then certainly we should be able to get some entertainment value out of it! See if your Soundex last name-counterparts show up in a Google News search."
A member of the USB-IF Administration writes to dispel the confusion raised by the seeming conflict between many USB products' labels and their actual data-transfer speeds:
"The source of confusion derives from the fact that USB specification revision numbers and data-transfer rates are often being used in place of the logo on consumer packaging, a purpose for which they were not originally intended. The USB-IF's recommended nomenclature for consumers is 'USB' for slower speed products (1.5 Mb/s and 12Mb/s) and "Hi-Speed USB" for high-speed products (480Mb/s), as signified in the USB logos that were introduced in late 2000. In short, consumers wishing to be certain they are getting the performance they paid for in their USB products can use the logo for clarification.
The USB-IF's naming and packaging recommendations for low- or full-speed USB products, as listed at the website http://www.usb.org/developers/packaging, state that such products can carry only the basic version of the USB logo, which simply states "Certified USB." We state clearly that manufacturers should avoid using terminology such as USB 2.0 Full Speed, Full Speed USB or USB 2.0. These formal recommendations were published to the USB-IF membership and posted on the website in August 2002.
The USB-IF is a nonprofit industry organization. We do not and cannot control how manufacturers label their products. We do work continuously with system and peripheral manufacturers, striving to provide consistency in the use of this nomenclature and the logos. The logo indicates that a product's performance against and conformance with the standard have been tested, and that the product has passed the USB compliance program.
Anyone having questions about the performance of a product should contact the manufacturer for clarification.
For a brief Q & A on this topic, please visit our website at http://www.usb.org/info/usb_nomenclature."
Microsoft SPOT Watches
Handhelds
Microsoft
Hardware
Businesses
Posted by michael on Thursday June 26, @07:13PM
from the time-to-reboot dept.
Octagon Most writes "PocketPCThoughts has a report from a graphic designer who worked on wristwatches using Microsoft's SPOT. Tons of design images here and a soon-to-ship model from Suunto here. Data plans from MSN Direct will be USD$9.95 per month. This is the coolest vapor from Microsoft in a long time. It's geeky _and_ stylish!" Our older story about the watches also notes that since it's a proprietary service, when the service provider decides to stop providing it, the device becomes useless.
U.S. DoD Commits To IPv6
The Internet
United States
Technology/IT
News
Posted by CowboyNeal on Thursday June 26, @06:10PM
from the leading-the-way dept.
babaloo writes "According to this article the U.S. Defense Department wants to move it's entire network to IPv6 by the year 2008. Will this be what pushes at least U.S. based companies and providers to actually convert over?" It's definitely a shot in the arm that IPv6 needs. This seemed to be more of a priority back when NAT was much less prevalent, but it seems we'll eventually find ourselves on IPv6, even if we drag our feet there.
Microsoft Releases SP4 for Windows 2000
Windows
Microsoft
Software
Businesses
Operating Systems
Posted by CmdrTaco on Thursday June 26, @04:13PM
from the eye-patch-you-patch-we-all-patch dept.
Snake_Plisken writes "I checked Windows Update today on a lark and found that Windows 2000 Service Pack 4 has been released." You can read a short CNet article discussing the media player patches as well as one more about the fixes in SP4.
Appeals Court Sides With Microsoft On Java
Microsoft
Java
Technology/IT
Programming
Businesses
Posted by michael on Thursday June 26, @03:22PM
from the sweet-and-light dept.
burgburgburg writes "Reuters reports that the three-member federal appeals court in Virginia ruled today the U.S. District Judge J. Frederick Motz erred when he ordered Microsoft to include Java with the Windows operating system. Fortunately, Dell and HP, the top 2 PC makers, have already decided to ship Java on the PCs that they sell. Apple, Red Hat and Lindows have also agreed to include Sun's Java." The ruling is available.
World's Smallest Desktop Pentium4?
Hardware
Posted by CmdrTaco on Thursday June 26, @02:18PM
from the and-they-say-size-doesn't-matter dept.
Valour writes "The Jem Report has just published an in-depth review and installation guide for the new Iwill ZPC, a cool little Pentium4 ultra small formfactor PC. There have been similar designs in the past, but nothing with this kind of power."
Sorting the Spam from the Ham
Spam
Technology/IT
Posted by CmdrTaco on Thursday June 26, @01:27PM
from the for-the-beginners dept.
MrClever writes "The Sydney Morning Herald (Aust) is running an article about the merits of Bayesian filtering and a good plain-english description of how it works. Might be handy if you need to explain it to non-technophiles. The main thing that may be useful is a Bayesian spam filter written to drop straight into Outlook 2k/XP available here and written in Python by Mark Hammond." Math buffs might enjoy reading these pages or browsing this writeup and its many links.
Sharp Zaurus SL-5600 PDA Review
Linux
Software
Posted by CmdrTaco on Thursday June 26, @12:36PM
from the hardware-to-lust-after dept.
An anonymous reader sent us a link to a review of the Sharp Zaurus SL-5600 PDA. This Linux based handheld with a built in qwerty keyboard with decent connectivity. As with most PDAs, there are a lot of tradeoffs that have to be made yet. Read the review to see what they are.
Hacking the XBox
Hardware
Microsoft
Businesses
Posted by timothy on Thursday June 26, @11:45AM
Peter Wayner writes: "If you're a handicapped Windows user, Microsoft offers suggestions and assistance -- but XBox users were out of luck until Andrew 'Bunnie' Huang finished his book Hacking the XBox. Don't be fooled by the title. Officially, Huang's excellent book is not about helping the differently-abled. That would be against the law. Huang was forced by the DMCA to hide his humanitarianism under the cloak of 'reverse engineering' because this is one of the few legitimate uses given a small amount of protection by the law. But if you've got an urge to help the handicapped or any other reason to tinker with your XBox, buy this book before the Man sees through this ruse." Read on for the rest of Peter's review.
Hacking the XBox
author Andrew "Bunnie" Huang
pages 288
publisher No Starch Press
rating 9
reviewer Peter Wayner
ISBN 1593270291
summary How and why to crack the seal on your Xbox.
There are many reasons why you might want to take apart your XBox, but one of the best ones I can imagine is making it easier for people who can't see, hear or move too well to play the same video games as the rest of us. Searching Microsoft's web site for documents containing both "handicapped" and "xbox" reveals only a suggestion for how to change the degree of difficulty of your Zoo Tycoon Game.
Someone who might want to retrofit a new pointing device or some other enabling gadget onto the XBox might start with the chapter describing how to fix a real USB cable onto the XBox. The chapter, like most in the book, is heavily illustrated with step-by-step pictures and instructions for clipping the cables in the right place and soldering them back together. Some of this might seem a bit rudimentary, but the detail can't hurt. In many cases, the real challenge is finding a way to take apart the case or the pack of wires in the right way. Smashing it isn't always an option. This is a book about mathematics, electronics, and taking apart plastic boxes.
Alas, just doing a bit of soldering isn't going to be enough unless you can make the right drivers. To help those who might want to reprogram their XBox, Huang devotes much of the book to stripping away the layers of the XBox security system, a story that is part mystery and part journey through the security layers in the system. The book is arranged in a very roughly chronological order. While it is mainly a book that teaches you how to reverse engineer the XBox, it is also a story of how he overcame the obstacles presented by the encryption. He talks as much about the unsuccessful paths as the ones that paid off. (This is, I think, an ideal model for the scientific community. It's much more educational than the terse papers that present the results as fait accompli.)
This part of the book quickly gets quite complicated, because Microsoft obviously tried hard to produce a secure machine that could provide a fair platform for people to play games. Getting the XBox to run any old software is not an easy task, but Huang describes several major techniques for drilling through the various layers of security. Again, he offers detailed pictures and instructions for construction special tools that snarf signals from a bus. Then he explains how he managed to grab the right keys for decrypting some of the most important data. Although it's a technical book, it unfolds like a spy novel.
The book is also very politically thoughtful. While the clueless will equate the word "hacking" in the title with piracy, money laundering, terrorism, and not phoning home on mother's day, Huang frames every step with a discussion of whether it is motivated by good or evil. He's not interested in building a tool to pirate XBox games and points out that many of the modifications aimed at running Linux on the Xbox do not help the pirates in any way. If anything, they make the games entirely unplayable.
Huang does want to defend the right to tinker, citing Ed Felten and others in a defense of something we're rapidly losing. I've heard horror stories from Army Majors about Windows PCs that refused to boot after failing to find a C drive. Do we really want to build machines that can't be retrofitted or fixed in the field? Many war movies are saved by the young private who (like Huang) is willing and able to tinker.
If you don't respond to pulls on the heartstrings, you might want to read one of the concluding chapters from the EFF's Lee Tien about the current legal climate. There are few exemptions for tinkering and many of them are limited. Reverse engineering is okay if you're a big corporation making a competing product, but that didn't help 2600 magazine when they were accused of trying to help people view DVDs on their Linux machine. I can only imagine what they would do to someone with very bad vision who wanted to enable a special zoom feature on their Xbox.
The book was originally going to be published by Wiley, but the company balked when it realized there were stiff legal penalties for helping handicapped people use computers. Even the Massachusetts Institute of Technology felt that it would be better for Huang to disassociate itself from Huang and his humanitarian efforts. The university only relented after pressure from a few good professors who helped the university understand the value in Huang's mission. Huang decided to publish the book himself with the help of his girlfriend, Nikki Justis. The two of them should be commended for turning out such a beautiful, professional book. If you're intrigued by the xbox, interested in helping the handicapped, or just trying to learn how to reverse engineer things before things get worse, check out this book. It's a wonderful contribution to the literature.
To close, I'm offering a pair of cool projects with the hope that Huang's book will inspire people to tinker:
* Sonic Information -- The sound in games like Quake is pretty good, but what if it was rendered with enough precision to let blind people grok the scene? The echoes from the tapping of a white cane already carry plenty of information to the blind. What if they could compete on an equal footing with the sighted? Who would win?
* Eye Movement Measuring tools -- Tools exist for sensing the position of our eyes. A quadriplegic game could just look in the right direction and shoot. Clearly some work would need to be done to encode all of the shift-left-left-down-right maneuvers from the games. This could help all of us. The thumb you save from repetitive motion injuries could be your own.
Note: Since this review was written, Hacking the Xbox has found a publisher in the form of No Starch Press. The original self-published version will probably be a sought-after collectable ;)
Law Professor Examines SCO Case
Caldera
The Courts
Businesses
News
Posted by michael on Thursday June 26, @10:49AM
from the legal-eagle dept.
An anonymous submitter writes "This law professor from the University of California points out weakness in SCO's legal bluster, and further takes a poke at closed software, for those hungry for more SCO scraps. At the end, he references Slashdot for more info ('itself a demonstration of the power of dispersed individuals working together')."
US Army Signs $471,000,000 Deal for Microsoft Software
Microsoft
Businesses
The Almighty Buck
News
Posted by michael on Thursday June 26, @09:50AM
from the we-want-YOU-to-run-windows dept.
zero_offset writes "According to this article at Yahoo, Microsoft will provide software for 494,000 Army computers during the next six years. At roughly $950 per computer this clearly involves more than just the OS, although the article unfortunately doesn't provide details, and I was unable to find any references to this on the Microsoft website." The great things about this deal: the Army is going through a reseller, when clearly they have the purchasing power to buy direct; and most of the computers they purchase are normal consumer machines which will be purchased with Windows and Office already installed, so the Army will be paying twice for each machine.
PyraMac Pyramid G4 Case Mod
Hardware
Posted by michael on Thursday June 26, @08:53AM
from the beautiful-or-just-plain-hideous dept.
Factomatic writes "Kent Salas has unveiled his latest creation, the Pyramac G4 pyramid, which took six months to design and build. Salas says the toughest part was figuring out how to get all of those rectangular parts to fit into a pyramid, but he finally managed to cram in the motherboard from a 466 MHz Graphite Power Mac he bought on eBay for $600, a $400 1.4 GHz overclocked G4 upgrade card, 768 MB RAM, a 100 GB hard drive, an ATI 8500 video card and a CD-RW/DVD optical drive. You may remember Salas as the creator of the BlueIce modified Power Mac G4 tower with a front-mounted 5-inch LCD screen (also here). Wired News has an article and eight images of the Pyramac mod, but Salas has included the full set of 51 images on the building page of Pyramac site. I'm sure it won't be long before pyramid PCs show up at mini-itx.com... add a Webcam to the top and John Poindexter's vision of Total Information Awareness can be a reality in your home or office!"
Star Wars Galaxies: An Empire Divided Ships
Role Playing (Games)
Games
Entertainment
PC Games (Games)
Posted by Hemos on Thursday June 26, @07:59AM
from the clanging-bells-and-whistles dept.
TJPile writes "After months and months of beta testing and years of waiting, the Star Wars version of Ever-crack is now shipping. Order your copy today. There are already plans for an expansion pack in 2004 that will feature more character races, worlds, and even the ability to buy, fly, and fight in your own spaceship. The game will set you back $50, come on 3 CDs, require Internet access, and will cost around $10 a month (service subscription fee). Right now it's Windows only." Yep, I'm hoping to play as the Pit of Saarlac: The Ultimate Camper.
Transparent Web Caching Patented
Patents
News
Posted by simoniker on Thursday June 26, @07:32AM
from the time-to-get-the-checkbooks-out dept.
JohnQPublic writes "BIND author and all-around Internet personality Paul Vixie and Mirror Image Internet have recently received US patent 6,581,090, specifically '..technology that efficiently stores and retrieves content requests and balances Web traffic between origin servers to improve performance and speed' - sounds an awful lot like what Akamai do. There's a press release from last week that gives some lovely 'details', including this little gem from CEO Alexander M. Vik: 'We anticipate that these patents and our technology solutions will encourage large groups of corporations to become customers of Mirror Image services. We also recognize that this technology is a critical component of other content delivery services and we’ll be attempting to work cooperatively with our competitors and their customers to address this issue.' Can you say 'patent infringement suit'?"
Pioneer To Release TiVo/DVD Burner Combo
Television
Posted by simoniker on Thursday June 26, @05:07AM
from the geek-toys-get-cooler dept.
TK-421 writes "According to an official Pioneer press release, 'Pioneer is revolutionizing home video recording with the introduction of the world's first DVD recorders featuring the TiVo service. These new recorders offer consumers the control provided by the easy-to-use TiVo service integrated with advanced DVD recording for the option of short-term storage on a hard drive or long-term archival of broadcast programming on DVD-R/RW discs.'" The options include both 80 and 120GB models, starting at a not-inexpensive $1199, and there's more information via a CNET News article.
Zynot Foundation Forks Gentoo
Linux
Posted by simoniker on Thursday June 26, @02:01AM
from the awaiting-gentoo-sporking-eagerly dept.
deque_alpha writes "The Gentoo Linux distribution has been forked by a group of Gentoo developers and community members. This fork is being placed under the control of the non-profit Zynot Foundation, which will "hold the source code, trademarks, and any other intellectual property developed by and for its community." The goals of the fork include improving stability and cross-platform reliability to bring the Gentoo-developed technology to the enterprise and embedded arenas." Another reader points out Zack Welch's long article at Zynot.org on reasons for forking the Gentoo distribution.
Amazon Hacks For Fun and Money
Software
Posted by simoniker on Wednesday June 25, @11:32PM
from the sadly-no-hacking-of-prices dept.
An anonymous reader writes "There's a new BusinessWeek article looking at some of the cool hacks coming out of Amazon's open API and XML feed policy. Some nifty stuff - 27,000 developers have apparently signed up to build hacks on Amazon data. It seems '..most are only part-timers and hobbyists, but a growing number are serious programmers who seek to make a living selling products based on the data Amazon is offering on a silver platter.'"
Hall On Worldwide Open Source Movement
Linux
Posted by simoniker on Wednesday June 25, @09:18PM
from the its-a-small-world-after-all dept.
adamsmith_uk writes "There's an article up on ZDNet summarizing an interesting speech from Jon "Maddog" Hall about non-US open-source, as well as protecting open-source from 'looters' - well worth a read: 'The open-source development community is an international treasure and should be protected as such, said veteran Linux advocate Jon "Maddog" Hall, in a talk in Birmingham, UK, that emphasized the role of open-source software outside the United States.'"
Your Rights Online: Public Domain Act Introduced Into Congress
United States
Posted by simoniker on Wednesday June 25, @07:59PM
from the further-down-the-road dept.
AnElder writes "In his blog yesterday Lawrence Lessig said '...Congresswoman Lofgren (D-CA) and Congressman Doolittle (R-CA) have agreed to introduce the Public Domain Enhancement Act into Congress.' Today the Eldred Act website features two press releases announcing the act's introduction, as well as its immediate support by '...the American Association of Law Libraries, the American Library Association, and the Association of Research Libraries...'" We ran a link to the petition supporting this Act a few weeks back.
WiFi Exposes Sensitive Student Data
Wireless Networking
Posted by simoniker on Wednesday June 25, @06:52PM
from the a-great-thing-if-implemented-carefully dept.
cfarivar writes "'Like leaving a vault open, the Palo Alto Unified School District failed to place a number of highly sensitive computer files containing student information in a locked location on its network. Using a laptop with a wireless card outside the district's main office, the Palo Alto Weekly gained access to such data as grades, home phone numbers and addresses, emergency medical information complete with full-color photos of students and a psychological evaluation."
Comics On The Net - A Business Primer
Entertainment
Posted by simoniker on Wednesday June 25, @05:47PM
from the marvel-meets-pixel dept.
Snotty Pippen writes "There's a new article/report/white paper called Comics on the Internet: A Primer in 7 Parts that's showing up in all the right places. It's currently being cited over at Heath Row's Media Diet and The Comics Journal's Journalista blog. Media Diet says thinks it's the first report of its kind. The Comics Journal says it's how to migrate comic books from print to web and make it work. I think it's a somewhat comprehensive overview, and the bit about print-on-demand comics is interesting."
Games: Intellivision Operating System Revealed
Classic Games (Games)
Posted by simoniker on Wednesday June 25, @04:43PM
from the never-too-late-for-an-os-update dept.
Thanks to an anonymous reader for pointing to the IntyOS site, which has released Version 0.2 Alpha of a "multitasked operating system for the Intellivision console." According to the site, IntyOS "..includes a powerful GUI which handles a mouse pointer, windows, menus, icons, etc", and was "..written from scratch in CP-1600 assembly language in order to fit exactly to the hardware specificities of the Intellivision. Its main goal is now to see how far it's possible to go with today's technologies on such a limited system from the early 80's" There's also a site mirror available, and the demo ROM is viewable in a Java applet.
Small Footprint Computers
Hardware
Posted by timothy on Wednesday June 25, @03:46PM
from the cuteness dept.
Robert Cliff writes "VIA's Mini-ITX based computers have been covered in Slashdot before, but not by this company. This product is interesting because it is a SiS based, fanless 233 MHZ system measuring only 4.75 x 6.25 x 1.9 inches, and it can run off BOTH AC and DC. If you need something larger / powerful, they have other Mini-ITX based systems, which they claim is built "on same factory that builds the cases for many high-end audio products". These guys seem to be heavily promoting Linux."
RIAA To Sue Hundreds Of File Swappers
The Courts
Posted by timothy on Wednesday June 25, @02:33PM
from the you-and-you-and-you-and-you dept.
Shackleford writes "The Washington Post has an article saying that the RIAA is preparing hundreds of lawsuits against Internet users who illegally trade copyrighted music files. The lawsuits will target people who share 'substantial' amounts of copyrighted music, but anyone who shares illegal files is at risk, RIAA President Cary Sherman said in a conference call today. The first round of lawsuits will be prepared during the next eight to 10 weeks. They will ask for injunctions and monetary damages against file swappers. It seems that after a federal judge ruled in April that file-sharing services have legal uses and thus should not be shut down, the RIAA has found that it must go after individual users rather than the services that they use." palmech13 points to a similar article on Yahoo News.
Will Cellular Swamp WiFi?
Wireless Networking
Posted by timothy on Wednesday June 25, @01:38PM
from the different-tools-different-needs dept.
hhutkin writes "Sure, Wi-Fi is great for my home network. But what else can it do? After reading this article, I'm convinced that cellular is becoming more ubiquitous with wireless networking than wi-fi will ever be. Just look at all the devices that are coming on the market using cellular technology. I can send email and pics, browse the web, plus listen to MP3s all on one cellular device. It makes the notion of a hotspot almost meaningless." But 802.11x is high-bandwidth, and often unmetered ...
IP Shortage In Asia Just Myth, Says APNIC
The Internet
Posted by timothy on Wednesday June 25, @12:40PM
from the billions-and-billions dept.
rekkanoryo writes "News.com is carrying a story in which the Director General of APNIC (Asia Pacific Network Information Centre) says that the "shortage" of IP addresses in Asia is a total myth. There's also some talk of IPv6 in this article."
Managing IT As An Investment
Technology/IT
Businesses
Posted by timothy on Wednesday June 25, @11:45AM
Scott Abel writes "It’s no secret. To win at business, you must perform better than your competition. Better. Stronger. Faster. You get the picture. In Managing IT as an Investment: Partnering for Success, Ken Moskowitz and Harris Kern explore how changing the way you think about IT can help you develop solutions that exceed your strategic goals. To achieve the highest levels of profitability, the authors say, IT organizations must be well-tuned and in alignment with the goals of the enterprise to which they belong." Read on for the rest of Scott's review.
Managing IT As An Investment: Partnering for Success
author Ken Moskowitz, Harris Kern
pages 150+
publisher Prentice Hall PTR
rating 9
reviewer Scott Abel, Content Management Strategist
ISBN 013009627X
summary How changing the way you think about IT can help you develop solutions that exceed your strategic goals.
For far too long, the authors argue, IT has been incorrectly viewed as a separate part of the enterprise; a distant silo, relegated to the status of a “cost center.” Instead, the authors make the case for transforming IT into a “value center” – a mission-critical member of the business enterprise, managed as a strategic asset.
In order to get there -– and to maximize IT value -– the authors say organizations must realize that “IT is inseparable from the business and requires complete alignment with business goals.” Then, they have to admit that there’s “no such thing as an IT project.”
“IT is no longer a cost center and a growing number of highly successful firms are recognizing this,” the authors say. “IT is an investment and should be managed as such to increase revenue and profits. No matter what size project, IT is a member of the business team and should be accountable and responsible.”
Getting past old-world ways of thinking can be difficult for business and IT-minded folks alike; such transformations are often riddled with unexpected organizational change management issues. Moskowitz and Kern do a nice job of exploring some of these difficulties at a high level, but leave plenty of room for in-depth exploration by other authors.
They introduce readers to “Consequence-Based Thinking” in Chapter 2, a concept that promotes decision-making based on desired business results, rather than on the IT problems you face. The authors explore ways you can avoid “the Right/Wrong trap” (situations in which humans forfeit the desired consequences for the privilege of being right), develop jointly produced business cases (“a technology case is not sufficient”), and help each department in your organization contribute to the success of the enterprise mission.
In Chapter Three, “Partnering,” the authors illustrate the importance of creating a team that will support the goals of the enterprise. “It is key that members of IT teams see themselves and their work as core to the business itself, and not view the IT function as an appendage of the business.” As this happens, the authors say, “others will view them (IT) as critical and necessary partners that can be trusted to provide solutions that don’t merely serve a process, but truly serve business outcomes.”
Business partners must change the way they think of themselves as well. Business must think of itself as “a partner with, rather than a customer of IT,” the authors say. They recommend the development of formalized contracts that spell out responsibility and accountability for all involved; a “common vocabulary” (to help get everyone in your organization, regardless of role, on the same page); and provide words to the wise for management: “managers will never have as much information as people on the front line.”
Sizeable emphasis is placed on the importance of jointly developed business cases, which the authors say, “forces IT and business to engage in continuous dialog in order to ensure success.” Jointly developed business cases can help align IT with business objectives, and have the additional benefit of “moving the business agenda forward and creating partnerships and understanding.” A sample Business Case template is provided as an appendix.
Chapter Five, “Strategy” makes the case for building a big-picture strategy that “stresses an enterprise point of view over seat-of-the-pants, silo thinking.” Organizations without an enterprise strategy often end up creating what the authors call “islands of automation” that will later need to be integrated.
Strategic thinking is a skill and not something that comes easily. It involves adopting new processes and changing the way we think about our jobs. By adopting a “Business Strategy Formation Process” that relates an enterprise-to-an-individual and an individual-to-an-enterprise, the authors say organizations can make “consistent decisions that incorporate foresight.”
Chapter Six, “The Small Picture,” provides guidance on communicating the “big picture” to “small picture” folks by answering the question: “What’s in it for me?” Chapter Seven discusses ideas for setting up and managing IT departments as “value centers” while Chapter Eight, “Human Capital Management” deals with issues of people management, individualism, and job satisfaction.
Chapter Nine, “Investing In Values,” provides a brief overview of the importance of values, which the authors define as the “guiding principles and basic beliefs that are fundamental assumptions on which subsequent actions are based.” The authors provide several models to help you make which value decisions. They also discuss how to reap “the hidden harvest”—the rewards delivered through collaborating with others toward a common, understood and measurable goal, benefits not realized through traditional, inside-the-box thinking.
While Managing IT as an Investment is indeed a value-added resource, reading the book is not enough. You’ll need to do a little homework before you go tackling a major change in your organization. You’ll need additional guidance not provided in the book to help you decide whether your IT and business staffs should work in the same physical space to help reduce communication barriers and establish a sense of “team”; if you should re-organize your management structure so both IT and business team members report to the same manager; how you should communicate information about your project in order to create project evangelists; and whether your reward structure needs some revamping (is IT currently rewarded for “on time” delivery as opposed to delivery of quality solutions that deliver the highest return on investment possible?).
Despite these weaknesses, Managing IT as an Investment: Partnering for Success is an excellent addition to both business and IT literature. At only 150+ pages — 10 chapters, followed by 4 value-added appendices — you can read the entire book in an afternoon. The book is well worth the effort. Includes case study information and references to other published works. Perfect for those involved in paradigm-shifting projects where strengthening the relationship between IT and business can help ensure success.
Your Rights Online: Verizon Drops Opposition To Cell-Number Portability
Wireless Networking
Posted by timothy on Wednesday June 25, @10:56AM
from the you-can-take-it-with-you dept.
EyesWideOpen writes "Verizon has announced (NYTimes - free registration required) that it would drop its opposition to the proposed F.C.C plan that would allow callers to keep their wireless phone numbers when they switch carriers. Verizon, the nation's largest mobile phone company, was seen as 'the standard-bearer of the opposition against wireless number portability' but has shifted it's position citing the recent court ruling as the reason for doing so. The F.C.C has set a deadline of November 24 for it's rules to take effect. Other mobile phone companies such as Cingular Wireless and AT&T Wireless are still expected to appeal the court ruling. Several previous stories on number portability here(1), here(2), here(3), here(4), and here(5)."
Your Rights Online: RMS Cuts Through Some SCO FUD
Linux
Posted by timothy on Wednesday June 25, @09:59AM
from the scrupulous-thinking dept.
sckienle writes "ZD-Net has a commentary by Richard Stallman about the SCO case against IBM, kind of. It does provide some history on what the GNU organization did to protect itself from such lawsuits. Favorite quote: 'Less evident is the harm it does by inciting simplistic thinking: [Intellectual Property] lumps together diverse laws--copyright law, patent law, trademark law and others--which really have little in common.'"
Tim Brown On Current Design Challenges
Technology/IT
Posted by timothy on Wednesday June 25, @09:01AM
from the equipment-with-tiny-black-on-black-text dept.
prostoalex writes "Tim Brown is the CEO of IDEO, design company that is quite famous for its work on designing office chairs, Palm computers, Microsoft mice, Nike shoes, etc. MIT Technology Review interviewed Tim Brown on current challenges in the design world, exciting fields for a designer to be in, current annoyances in the user interface design."
Three Enterprise Operating Systems Compared
Operating Systems
Posted by timothy on Wednesday June 25, @08:03AM
from the or-none-of-the-above dept.
Anonymous Coward writes "Finally, a much awaited review of enterprise OSes. The guys from NW Test Alliance pitted Red Hat, UnitedLinux, and Windows against each other and rated them on several rubrics. Red Hat won by a slight margin on the basis of its high hardware compatibility and strong security integration."
Mozilla 1.4 RC3 Is Out
Mozilla
Posted by timothy on Wednesday June 25, @05:55AM
from the tension-builds dept.
zzxc writes "Mozillazine reports that the third release candidate for Mozilla 1.4 has been released. It is available for download from mozilla.org. Testing is encouraged to fix any bugs before the final release. No new features have been added to this release, though many bugs have been fixed. For more information, see the release notes."
Your Rights Online: Telstra Denies Selling BigPond Customers' Data
Spam
Posted by timothy on Wednesday June 25, @02:25AM
from the click-here-to-please-unsubscribe dept.
Red Wolf writes "The Age reports that allegations that Telstra sells email addresses of BigPond customers have been denied by the telco. Melbourne-based IT worker Mark Edwards had doubts in this direction when he began receiving unusually large amounts of spam at his bigpond email address. Edwards grew suspicious because some of the spam being issued to him was also addressed only to a number of users within the bigpond.com domain, indicating that the unsolicited mass emailings were being sent to lists of BigPond users."
Collapsible LCD Screens
Displays
Posted by timothy on Tuesday June 24, @10:54PM
from the sounds-tempting dept.
Schart writes "I can't seem to find any pictures of exactly what they mean by 'collapsible LCD,' but NEC today announced a new line of low(ish) priced LCD screens that 'fold up for easy portability.'" Anyone out there who can supply visual documentation?
KaZaA Wants to Be An Official Content Distributor
Media
Posted by timothy on Tuesday June 24, @09:34PM
from the open-up dept.
scubacuda writes "Detroit News: Nikki Hemming, CEO of KaZaA, says KaZaA wants to be the official online distributor for the entertainment industry. 'Realize that this technology is inexorable, and come to the table,' says Hemming to our friends Hilary Rosen and Jack Valenti."
MandrakeClustering Shows Off At ISC2003
Linux Mandrake
Posted by timothy on Tuesday June 24, @08:28PM
from the snap-together-modules dept.
joestar writes "Just released today at ISC2003, Germany, is "MandrakeClustering", a high-performance computing Linux distribution/solution, which sounds interesting, at least in the PR: Pentium support with optimizations made with the Intel compiler, 64-bit Opteron support (with in this case, up to 16 GB of RAM for each cluster's node!), parallelized URPMI (Mandrake's apt-get) and other dedicated tools. This product is based on a one-year research project "CLIC" involving MandrakeSoft and partners. A good snapshot of the product running a 3D real-time demo is available here. The interesting point now: MandrakeClustering's goal is to provide a system which is easy to deploy, easy to administer and use. Well... Mum would certainly love to play Quake with this toy."
Apple Hardware VP Defends Benchmarks
Technology (Apple)
Technology/IT
Posted by pudge on Tuesday June 24, @07:11PM
from the i-blame-florida dept.
Greg Joswiak, vice president of hardware product marketing at Apple, in a phone interview today, defended Apple's performance claims for its upcoming Power Mac G5, after they came under fire in the wake of yesterday's announcement. Read on for the details.
Joswiak went over the points in turn, but first said that they set out from the beginning to do a fair and even comparison, which is why they used an independent lab and provided full disclosure of the methods used in the tests, which would be "a silly way to do things" if Apple were intending to be deceptive.
He said Veritest used gcc for both platforms, instead of Intel's compiler, simply because the benchmarks measure two things at the same time: compiler, and hardware. To test the hardware alone, you must normalize the compiler out of the equation -- using the same version and similar settings -- and, if anything, Joswiak said, gcc has been available on the Intel platform for a lot longer and is more optimized for Intel than for PowerPC.
He conceded readily that the Dell numbers would be higher with the Intel compiler, but that the Apple numbers could be higher with a different compiler too.
Joswiak added that in the Intel modifications for the tests, they chose the option that provided higher scores for the Intel machine, not lower. The scores were higher under Linux than under Windows, and in the rate test, the scores were higher with hyperthreading disabled than enabled. He also said they would be happy to do the tests on Windows and with hyperthreading enabled, if people wanted it, as it would only make the G5 look better.
In the G5 modifications, they were made because shipping systems will have those options available. For example, memory read bypass was turned on, for even though it is not on by default in the tested prototypes, it will be on by default for the shipping systems. Software-based prefetching was turned off and a high-performance malloc was used because those options will be available on the shipping systems (Joswiak did not know whether this malloc, which is faster but less memory efficient, will be the default in the shipping systems).
As to not using SSE2, Joswiak said they enabled the correct flags for it, as documented on the gcc web site, so that SSE2 was enabled (the Veritest report lists the options used for each test, which appears to include the appropriate flags).
More Cheap Linux PCs
Hardware
Posted by michael on Tuesday June 24, @06:47PM
from the bottom-fishing dept.
prostoalex writes "The low-cost Linux PC market so far dominated by Lindows got a new entrant. According to News.com, Linare plans to sell a $199 no-monitor model with 1GHz VIA CPU, 128MB RAM, 20GB HDD, KDE, OpenOffice. An extra $50 would get the user upgraded to a 2GHz Athlon. Company is located in beautiful Bellevue, WA, which, as News.com noted, is quite close to another Seattle suburb - Redmond, WA."
Labelling RFID Products
Privacy
Posted by michael on Tuesday June 24, @05:52PM
from the bright-ideas dept.
John3 writes "Following Wal-Mart's recent announcement that they plan to push RFID in their stores, CASPIAN (Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering) has posted proposed legislation that would require a product to be labeled if it contained an RFID tag. Beyond the label requirement, the proposed legislation also sets up some strict restrictions on the use of RFID data. Even though RFID is not in widespread use, it's probably best to start working on these types of protections before the products are on the shelves."
Science: Internet Emulator
The Internet
Posted by michael on Tuesday June 24, @04:49PM
from the real-or-memorex dept.
John3 writes "InternetNewsM is reporting that PlanetLab is getting closer to reality. According to this article, a consortium of universities (including Princeton) is launching a test-bed platform based on Red Hat Linux. This project is different than Internet2 or some of the other "alternate Internet" networks being developed, and seems to offer the most benefit to distributed computing projects rather than generic WAN/Internet communications."
Your Rights Online: Microsoft Steps Up Anti-Spam Efforts
Microsoft
Posted by michael on Tuesday June 24, @03:50PM
from the we'll-be-the-only-spammers-around-here dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Bill Gates announces new focus at Microsoft to abolish spam. Read the announcement titled Toward a Spam-Free Future."
Mom Meets Linux - A Lindows 4.0 Review
Linux
Posted by michael on Tuesday June 24, @02:55PM
from the any-key dept.
JimLynch writes "We just put up the first review of Lindows 4.0, with a twist. I actually gave it to my Mom to see if she could use it. Find out if Lindows 4.0 passed the "Mom Test.""
Developers: Industry Leaders Discuss Java Status Quo
Java
Posted by michael on Tuesday June 24, @02:00PM
from the two-lumps-with-cream dept.
prostoalex writes "JavaPro magazine published a wrap-up report on Java discussions at the recent JavaOne. If you missed JavaOne, the video Webcasts of McNealy, Schwartz, Gosling et al. are available from this site. The round table mentioned above gathered people from Sun, Oracle, Borland, Novell, Motorola and others. The discussion topics included: Java vs. NET, integration issues, the impact of open source and top problems that Java is facing today."
What is Open Source?
Linux
Posted by michael on Tuesday June 24, @01:05PM
from the if-you-have-to-ask dept.
s390 writes "The Inquirer is running an article by Olliance about "What is Open Source?" It appears to be the first of a two-part series for managers about how to engage with the open source community. The writers seem to know their material. Are they on target or have they missed something important? Do PHBs really need to read this sort of introduction to get comfortable with the idea of using Linux and other open source software?"
Mastering Regular Expressions
Books
Media
Posted by timothy on Tuesday June 24, @12:15PM
gianluca writes "Having always been a heedful guy, I always duly did my homework, going through the lengthy manual pages of a number of regular expressions (regex) crunching tools. You name it: be it PERL, awk, emacs, sed or even one of the .NET framework languages -- any such program provides support for the same regex expressions (or at least, so they seem to the occasional observer). After some years of regex practice with these tools, I had the pretentious conviction that I knew my way through the intricacies of patterns, grouping, greediness, and the like. When I first stepped into Mastering Regular Expressions, looking at the nearly 500 pages which build up Friedl's book, I wondered what could someone ever have to say about regexes to fill so many pages." Gianluca ended up finding plenty of worthwhile content; read below for his review.
Mastering Regular Expressions, 2nd edition
author Jeffrey E. Friedl
pages 460
publisher O'Reilly
rating 9.5
reviewer Gianluca Insolvibile
ISBN 0596002890
summary An in-depth guide to lead the apprentice to mastering regular expressions' wizardry
My first suspicion, I admit, was that I was facing one of the countless "man page reprints" that you find these days. It was only after reading the book that I eventually understood: before then, I had had no idea of what regexes were really about.
What it's about
The book is logically divided into three parts: the first one (Chapters 1, 2 and 3) introduces the reader to the basic concepts of regexes, building a common ground upon which the subsequent chapters will be based. The introduction is clear and straightforward, and lets the readers quickly grasp the key points in the regex business. This part is more or less a good summary, presenting information that can be found also in existing manual pages (albeit presented in a distilled form, which lets you perceive that the author has very clear ideas about the matter). If you already know something about regexes, you could skip this part entirely -- even if reading it turns out to be a nice occasion to brush up and overhaul your knowledge.
The second part (Chapters 4, 5 and 6), is the one that struck me most for the depth of provided information and the richness of though. Rather than throwing at the reader usage dictates on one or another regex flavour, the author explains with a wealth of details the inward mechanisms which make regexes run and how you can exploit such knowledge to write better expressions.
Chapter 4 presents the different families of regex processing engines (namely, DFA, traditional and POSIX NFA), whose internal behavior differs so greatly that writing a regex in the appropriate way can make a substantial difference in both efficacy and efficiency. If you thought you knew it all about greedy and lazy regex operators, possessive quantifiers, backreferences and lookaround, you'd better think again: I was pleasantly surprised to discover how ignorant I was (to be honest, I had never heard of lookaround operators before!).
Chapter 5 slows down a little bit to let the reader absorb the massive previous chapter. Some simple (but still tricky) examples are presented, showing how to apply the techniques explained up to this point. A couple of examples are perhaps too contrived (ever needed to match aligned groups of 5 digits in an unspaced stream of characters?), but it is instructive anyway to follow the reasoning behind the construction of a complex regex.
Chapter 6 focuses on efficiency, considering how backtracking and matching can drive your regex engine to exponential complexities. Optimization techniques are then presented, first by explaining the automatic optimizations performed by the most common regex engines and then by giving a practical list of hints that you can follow to be sure that your expression will run as fast as possible. Again, I was quite surprised to find out how small changes in a regex can make such a big difference to the engine (and give rise to noticeable performance penalties if ignored).
What I absolutely liked most was that the author explains exactly why a certain optimization works, based on the information given in Chapter 4 (and provided that you have been able to assimilate it in the first pass). Finally, a paragraph entitled "Unrolling the loop" really put me in a good mood, reminding me of the past times of "old school" asm programming.
The third part of the book devotes three chapters to PERL, Java and .NET, respectively. Each chapter goes through the syntax and features of regexes for each language: while the information provided on Java and (VB).NET is quite commonplace, in the case of PERL the author deals with aspects rarely covered elsewhere, like dynamic regexes, embedded-code constructs, regex-literal overloading and specific optimization techniques.
What's to like
In one word: insight. The author is definitely knowledgeable of regular expressions and the whole book is filled with thoughtful suggestions and hints. Still, a friendly and straightforward writing style makes reading pleasant and seldom boring (well, you wanted details, didn't you?) while you learn internal regex mechanics rarely available elsewhere.
A further nice point is the broad view offered to the reader, starting from regexes in general and focusing on specific flavours only in the final part of the book. The second edition also offers up-to-date information, covering the .NET framework and the latest versions of PERL (5.8) and Java (1.4).
What's to consider
Despite the book's reassuring conversational tone, dealing with such a specific topic with so many in-depth details might sometimes become boring, especially if you do not have a strong interest in getting the most out of regular expressions or in knowing how they internally work. If you are just an occasional regex user and dwell in manual pages, you can probably live without this book. Also, it is a pity that specific sections on Tcl, emacs and awk have disappeared in the second edition (maybe they were not as current as the .NET framework ?) and that pcre (a C regex library) is barely mentioned.
The summary
Regular expressions are tied so strongly to the *nix culture that everyone who has been exposed to that culture has come to use them in a more or less conscious way. Still, most of the documentation around lags on basic features and presents only the most common regex operators. Mastering Regular Expressions is the book to read if you want to go further and get serious about regexes: even if extreme optimization might not be a big concern today, understanding how regex engines work under the hood greatly helps also in creating everyday small expressions.
Table of Contents
Preface
Chapter 1. Introduction to Regular Expressions
Chapter 2. Extended Introductory Examples
Chapter 3. Overview of Regular Expression Features and Flavors
Chapter 4. The Mechanics of Expression Processing
Chapter 5. Practical regex techniques
Chapter 6. Crafting a Regular Expression
Chapter 7. Perl
Chapter 8. Java
Chapter 9. .NET
Netflix Granted Patent on DVD Subscription Rentals
Patents
Posted by CmdrTaco on Tuesday June 24, @11:27AM
from the almost-as-bad-as-one-click dept.
A few folks noted a new patent showing up from netflix. They apparently now have a patent on their model of subscribing to rentals- where instead of being charged per disc, you are charged a monthly fee and can keep the rentals indefinitely without late fees. You can patent anything! Get on the bus!
GNU/Linux bootable CD on XBOX: dyne:bolic
XBox (Games)
Posted by CmdrTaco on Tuesday June 24, @10:41AM
from the getting-easier-and-easier dept.
jaromil writes "The dyne:bolic bootable CD distribution is almost getting to its final 1.0 release, includes a whole bunch of multimedia applications making it easy to edit and stream audio and video, encrypt mails, share p2p and of course play games, all with a fancy GNUStep desktop. download the 1.0 alpha 5 ISO (~350Mb) and try it on your PC or XBOX!" One more reason to mod an xbox.
Novell Nterprise Linux Services Announced
Linux
Posted by CmdrTaco on Tuesday June 24, @09:54AM
from the couple-years-late dept.
eer writes "At BrainShare (Novell's customer/developer conference), Novell customers reacted positively to the news that they would have the choice of running Novell’s network services on Linux or NetWare or both. Today the company provided more details by introducing Novell Nterprise Linux Services, which will give customers file, print, messaging, directory and management services in an integrated package that runs on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SuSE Linux Enterprise Server distributions--along with providing those customers with comprehensive Novell technical support, training and consulting services for Linux. Partner companies, including IBM, HP, Dell, Red Hat and others, also voiced their support for Novell's Linux."
Apple: Apple's G5 Speeds Challenged
Technology (Apple)
Posted by CmdrTaco on Tuesday June 24, @09:02AM
from the some-hype-with-your-coffee dept.
An anonymous reader was the first of a seemingly infinite stream of people to submit a URL to an argument that makes the case that the G5 isn't quite what Apple wants you to think of it. The evidence? Apple's own press material. Worth a read.
Will Video Surfing Become Reality?
Media
Posted by CmdrTaco on Tuesday June 24, @08:17AM
from the not-on-my-modem dept.
alinv writes "Australia's CSIRO has developed a multi-media browsing tool callled CMWeb, which makes surfing audio and video content as esy as text (view a screenshot here). The tool, called Continuous Media Web (CMWeb), enables user to activate a link within a video or audio file,and be taken to a related clip in another file, and then return to the original or follow further links into other subject areas, in much the same way they currently do with Web pages."
Phish Moves To FLAC
Music
Posted by timothy on Tuesday June 24, @05:56AM
from the what's-the-downside dept.
sethadam1 writes "Due to customer feedback, Phish, who have served as pioneers in the pay-per-download online music arena with their livephish.com site, have recently converted to FLAC compression for their high-quality download offerings. Could this be an indication that FLAC may be adopted as the de facto lossless audio compression standard?" And fans were using it long before ;)
Niue Gets Island-Wide WiFi
Wireless Networking
Posted by timothy on Tuesday June 24, @02:24AM
from the vatican-city-is-next dept.
NinjaPablo writes "Business Wire is running a story about the polynesian island of Niue. Niue has just completed an island-wide wifi network, making it the first country with nationwide free wifi access. This comes after countrywide email was started in 1997, dialup access in 1999, and broadband this Spring, all free for anyone."
Culture Clash: SCO, OpenLinux, Linus And The GPL
Linux
Posted by timothy on Monday June 23, @11:06PM
from the what-part-of-non-discriminatory-don't-you-understand dept.
hobsonchoice writes "SCO has issued a letter saying SCO Linux customers won't be sued. The same does not seem to apply if using a non-SCO distribution such as RedHat." LightSail points to the SCO letter itself, and raises an interesting point: "If they approve the use of 'their' IP in Linux in a single kernel, then the GPL holds that IP SCO allows to be used by a select few must be freely released to any and all. It appears that all Linux users everywhere were just given a license to continued use of Linux even if SCO would win their suit with IBM." And Haikuu writes "eWeek recently posted an interview conducted by e-mail exchange with Linus Torvalds regarding his recent move to the OSDL and the SCO suit."
Chip Firm Hit By 45-Year-Old Patent
Patents
Posted by timothy on Monday June 23, @08:59PM
from the welcome-to-the-free-marketplace-of-ideas dept.
JPMH writes "The Register is reporting that a Taiwanese chip foundry is being sued over two chemistry patents, one over 45 years old. The patents at issue were filed in 1957 and 1964, but are still in force because they were not granted until 1987 and 1992 respectively. The first patent, 4,702,808, details an apparatus and method for initiating chemical reactions by focusing "radiant energy, such as a laser" onto streams of particles. The second patent, 5,131,941 also details an apparatus and method for initiating chemical reactions, but this time radiation is used to provide the energy kick needed to get the compounds to interact."
(When) Will Linux Pass Apple On The Desktop?
Apple
Posted by timothy on Monday June 23, @07:49PM
from the my-little-3-percenters dept.
EisPick writes "A column posted today on Slate ponders projections that Linux PCs will pass Apple in desktop market share next year. Will Linux do to OS X what it already has done to Tru64, Irix, HP/UX, AIX and Solaris and emerge as the only viable competitor to Windows on the desktop?"
Ask Slashdot: Innovative Uses for a Computer Classroom?
Education
Posted by Cliff on Monday June 23, @06:48PM
from the non-tech-classes-in-a-tech-environment dept.
flard asks: "I will be teaching a Freshman English class at a medium sized public university, in a computer classroom for next semester. Every student has their own machine with an internet connection. I am thinking about using a weblog for them to post their work and critique each other. Do you guys have any other cool ideas on what to do and what NOT to do?" How can the computers best be applied to assist in teaching a non-technical class? Use of a weblog is a start, but are there other pieces of software that can be deployed in such a setting?
Top 500 Supercomputers Ranked
Hardware
Posted by simoniker on Monday June 23, @05:53PM
from the my-zx-80-came-in-501st dept.
Shadow Wrought writes "The Register is reporting on (alternate ZDNet article) the latest list of the top 500 supercomputers in the world. Top of the list is the Earth Simulator Center in Yokohama, Japan, with a benchmark performance of 35.86 Tflop/s. HP and IBM claim 159 and 158 of the systems respectively. I wonder how many teraflops Deep Thought could have done?"
Business Software Needs A Revolution
Technology/IT
Posted by simoniker on Monday June 23, @05:02PM
from the let-them-eat-bug-reports dept.
An anonymous reader writes "According to a Businessweek Online article, today's high-end business software is bloated, buggy, and too expensive - no surprise to those of us who have paid our bills by adding pointless features to some piece of software arbitrarily priced at $100k. Evidently, firms are now re-evaluating their software purchases, and finding that they're not working out the way the sales guys told them they would."
Red Hat Plans Open Source Java
Java
Posted by simoniker on Monday June 23, @04:10PM
from the jump-java-and-wail dept.
sthiyaga writes "According to a ComputerWire article, Red Hat is in discussions with Sun about launching an open source version of the Java platform. 'There's always been an interest in an open source implementation of Java developed in a clean room that adheres to the Java standards,' Szulik told ComputerWire. 'We're in discussions with Sun. We'd like to do this with their support.'"
New G5 Power Macs "Fastest Desktop In The World"
Desktops (Apple)
Hardware
Posted by pudge on Monday June 23, @03:18PM
from the want dept.
In the hardware part of his keynote address at WWDC, Jobs officially introduced the G5-based computers previously leaked on the Apple store.
The new G5 machines, with the IBM 970 processor, use the "world's first 64-bit desktop processor" (and the "fastest 64-bit processor ever") but run both 64-bit and 32-bit apps natively, and run up to 2GHz. The bus is 1GHz ("fastest ever") and it is designed for dual processing and full symmetric processing.
Beyond the many numbers, the bottom line is that the new machines have a new architecture, and that the memory speed is now the bottleneck, not the processor or bandwidth speeds. So they can have up to 8GB of 128-bit DDR RAM, as it is efficient to keep data in memory. The memory bandwidth is one of the most talked-about features of the new architecture.
USB 2.0 is now included, as are FireWire 400 and 800, Bluetooth, AirPort Extreme, and digital audio in and out. The 4x SuperDrive is now standard, and it can house up to 500GB of internal storage.
For video, the GeForce FX5200 is standard on low-end models, Radeon 9600 Pro on high-end models.
The case of the new machines is redesigned too, from the ground up, focusing on decreasing noise and heat. It is an aluminum enclosure, with ports for FireWire and USB on the front, and a door on the side to get into the box. It has four distinct "thermal zones" with computer-controlled cooling with its nine (yes, nine) independent fans. And it is much quieter than its predecessor.
The G5 is 10 percent slower than the P4 and Xeon in SPEC int scores in single-proc units, but 20 percent faster in FPU scores, and the dual-proc G5 beats the dual-proc Xeon in all SPEC scores.
The models are a single 1.6 GHz ($1999), single 1.8GHz ($2399), and dual 2GHz ($2999). They will ship in August. A 3GHz processor will be available from IBM in 12 months.
Apple notes that recompiling apps for the 64-bit architecture is easy, and in some cases can be done in minutes.
There was no word about the heavily anticipated redesign of the 15" PowerBooks.
Jaguar is Over
OS X (Apple)
Software
Operating Systems
Posted by pudge on Monday June 23, @02:07PM
from the sir-my-mac-is-on-sir dept.
Steve Jobs announced the end of Jaguar, and the newness of Panther, today at his WWDC keynote address. Panther is to be available as a preview release now, and by the end of the year retail, for $129.
Mac OS X 10.3 / Panther has 100 major new features, according to Jobs. Lower-level enhancements include NFS file locking, built-in X11, FreeBSD 5.0, IPsec-based VPN, and various SMB and Active Directory enhancements.
The Panther Finder is brand-new, with a new brushed metal appearance, and enhanced column view, with the items used most commonly in the far left column. Searching is "live" and a lot faster, and is more user-centric instead of computer-centric.
The Finder now has labels, and icons can resize with window resizing.
The iDisk now caches itself locally, so it can be used offline, and the user can copy to and from it more efficiently (with the real copies happening in the background).
A new feature called Expose allows minimizing into a smaller window, all open windows, to temporarily move everything out of the way, sort of like workspaces.
File Vault can encrypt a user directory and decrypt it "on the fly."
Faxing is now built-in, and available system-wide.
Pixlet is a new compression codec that does video compression without noticable artifacts, for 48 bits per pixel: at 960x540 and 24 fps, can be decoded on a 1GHz Power Mac.
Preview is significantly faster, with searching, and PS to PDF conversion.
Panther features fast user switching, a feature in Windows XP, allowing under-one-second (on the demo machine) switching between two different users.
FontBook is a new "pro" app for font management.
iChat AV is an update to iChat that does audio and video conferencing in addition to text, that works with any built-in or USB mic, and any DV video camera, connecting using only a user's screen name. It is going to beta today, and will be included in Panther, and will be sold for $29 to Jaguar users. Apple will sell iSight for $149, a small camera that does audio and video over FireWire.
Apple is preparing a new set of developer tools called XCode, which works with GCC 3.3, does distributed compiles (using available resources on the network), and has other cool stuff. It is fast, it has improved searching (like the Finder, and over entire projects), and it looks like an iApp (though it isn't metal). It removes the need to link; onnly link objects you need to launch. It starts compiling while you are editing, cutting the time you need to compile drastically. It can modify the program while it is running.
Bid On eBay To Speed Up Your Commute
News
Posted by simoniker on Monday June 23, @01:43PM
from the lastminute-sniping-stops-drive-home-griping dept.
malfunct writes "The traffic in the greater Seattle area is atrocious, and the State Government has been working hard to find a way to solve the issue. In the interim, they may use eBay as an innovative solution for estimating demand and raising funds. According to a MSNBC article, the plan is to use eBay to sell stickers that allow access for single driver vehicles to the car pool lane. The idea is to use eBay to find just how much a speedy commute is worth to drivers."
Your Rights Online: Piracy Deterrence and Education Act Introduced
United States
Posted by simoniker on Monday June 23, @12:51PM
from the funkadelic-copyright-protection-league dept.
Bootsy Collins writes "Last Thursday in the U.S. Congress, H.R. 2517 was quietly introduced and referred to the House Judiciary Committee. The bill, authored by Lamar Smith (R-TX) and co-sponsored by Howard Berman (D-CA), directs the FBI to develop methods of deterring copyright violation through use of peer-to-peer networks, including efforts to facilitate sharing information about suspected violators amongst law enforcement agencies. It also directs the Justice Department to develop programs to educate the American public on why copyright violation is bad. Berman, you may remember, introduce a bill last year that would give the RIAA and MPAA wide latitude to crack suspected violators' computers. " Update: 06/23 17:03 GMT by S: We also covered a variant of this story on Saturday.
Mac OS X Unleashed (2nd Edition)
Apple
Software
Businesses
Operating Systems
Posted by timothy on Monday June 23, @12:00PM
emmastory writes "Mac OS X Unleashed is not a pocket guide. It's more of a massive tome than anything else - at over 1500 pages, it's probably the heaviest technical book I own. (And that's including Deitel & Deitel's C: How to Program.) Since Mac OS X Unleashed describes itself as 'a complete guide and reference for Mac OS users,' my biggest question when approaching the book was whether this is in fact the case. It seems like if you're going to shell out for an OS X book of this size and price, then it should ideally be the only OS X book you'll have to buy."
Mac OS X Unleashed (2nd Edition)
author John Ray, William C. Ray
pages 1560
publisher Sams
rating 7/10
reviewer Emma Story
ISBN 0672324652
summary A massive book that aims to be a complete OS X reference
What I Liked
There's no shortage of good things about Unleashed, but the best is probably that the authors assume, for the most part,that you already know how to use your computer. Although there are many good books out there for those new to Macs, this is not one of them and does not try to be. That means that if you've already achieved a basic working knowledge of Mac OS, there's still well over a thousand pages of information intended especially for you. A line from another review of Unleashed (posted anonymously on Amazon) that rang particularly true after reading the book: "If you're looking for a book that says 'this is called a mouse' and tells you where to find iTunes in order to click on it, or drops the bombshell that command-p will print in many applications, you don't need this volume, but if you want to get your hands dirty, it's an excellent resource."
However, I can understand that many people do want the basics in an OS X book. In fact, another Amazon reviewer makes this very point: "Coverage of the iApps is far less than it should be, and there isn't enough information for a novice user like myself. I thought the author spent far too much time on the UNIX and Terminal side of Jaguar and not enough on the real-world tips that I've found in other books." Still, I personally don't really see that as a problem. There are plenty of real-world tips as long as your real world involves a shell, and if there's one thing I've never needed a book for, it's the iApps. In fact, I've always found it irritating that other OS X books spend so much time on them. But that's me, and I'm not everyone.
There were several sections of the book that surprised me, including the chapter on web programming. It makes sense, though - the book is intended to "unleash" OS X, after all, and OS X does come with an Apache installation (even if System Preferences calls it Personal Web Sharing). Given that every OS X box has a webserver, it makes sense that many OS X users would want to know more about related topics. In fact, the chapters that focus on system and network administration comprise a pretty thorough introduction to the BSD side of OS X, and were fairly impressive. These were my favorite sections of the book, probably because they're topics rarely dealt with - or at least rarely dealt with well - in Mac books.
What I Didn't Like
The book suffers from some minor issues typical of most massive technical volumes - it's informative, but also dry, dense, and not terribly readable. Also, while I appreciate the depth and scope of the book, it is a little unwieldy. This isn't something you'll be reading in bed or on the subway. It's not a cheap book, either - its list price is $50. These problems are neither hugely important nor terribly surprising, but they're also not inevitable - reference texts can be thorough without being dull, it's just that this one happens to be both.
Probably the only other real complaint I have with the book is that at times it seems as though it can't decide who its audience is. As I mentioned above, one of the things I liked about Unleashed was that most of the book seems firmly aimed at the intermediate to experienced user. And yet if that's the case, then the chapters that cover things like Desktop Accessories (Calculator, Clock, Key Caps) seem out of place. It doesn't seem like the introductory material offered in the book would really be enough to serve as a tutorial for an absolute beginner (as evidenced by complaints like the one I quoted earlier), but at the same time it's difficult to figure out who else would need it. However, I'm not suggesting they skimped on advanced topics to squeeze in inappropriate Clock coverage - if there's one thing this book has, it's plenty of everything.
The Bottom line
I believe that Unleashed does live up to its title, and does a good job in the process. It's not an introduction to OS X - it's about getting more out of your system after you've already learned the basics. It doesn't (usually) try to be a beginner's book, but a quick-learning novice would probably do fine with it, and any moderately experienced Mac user will probably find that it serves his or her purposes effectively and efficiently. If given the choice (and funding), I'd probably still go with a couple different books, but I think Unleashed has in fact reached its goal of being a complete guide to OS X. You could do just fine with only this book, and at $50 it may be cheaper than buying a couple smaller books separately.
And Furthermore
Other reviews and sources of information on the book:
* Review at macosxhints (from whence another Mac book, incidentally)
* Review at osnews.com
* Review at mymac.com
* Epinions page for the book, which as it turns out isn't all that useful
* Amazon's page for the book, including many customer reviews
US Supreme Court Upholds CIPA
United States
Posted by Hemos on Monday June 23, @11:41AM
from the and-filtering-for-all dept.
TheMatt writes "The US Supreme Court today has upheld CIPA, the law that required public schools and libraries to put internet filters on computers or lose federal funding. Quote: 'The court in a 5-4 decision ruled that the Children's Internet Protection Act does not violate the First Amendment, but that filters sometimes, do block informational Web sites.'" The decision will be posted on the US Supreme Court website later today. The case is United States v. American Library Association, 02-361. We had covered this story before.
Building Longer-Lived Fuel-Cell Stacks
Science
Posted by Hemos on Monday June 23, @11:04AM
from the make-it-portable dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Ballard Power Systems tells Wired that they have built a hydrogen fuel-cell stack that runs uninterrupted for 20,000 hours straight. But DuPont's Nafion membranes are very delicate, which makes the roadworthiness of fuel cells an issue."
Homebrew Rackmount Watercooling
Upgrades
Posted by Hemos on Monday June 23, @10:17AM
from the if-you-build-it-they-will-cool dept.
Airspirit writes "For those of you who believe that bigger is always better and have multiple computers in your house, this system may be a way to keep them all cool and organized. As an added bonus, it will heat a medium sized apartment all by itself! This article at Pro/Cooling gives a step by step walkthrough describing the evolution of this five gallon monstrosity. Not only does this cover the construction of the cooling system, but the drawbacks such as algae prevention and maintenance as well."
Microsoft Rolls Out Pocket PC 2003
Handhelds
Posted by Hemos on Monday June 23, @09:34AM
from the brand-new dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Monday, June 23 was a big day for Microsoft's mobile devices software strategy. The company: (1) rolled out Pocket PC 2003 (and renamed it); (2) unveiled a new "Windows Mobile" branding strategy; and (3) launched a collaboration with three leading high-speed wireless service providers to provide easier access to more than 3,500 Wi-Fi wireless "hot spots" by Windows-powered PDAs throughout the US. All this (and more) is covered in this "special report" at WindowsForDevices.com (including a detailed list of enhancements in Pocket PC 2003)."
P4 3.2GHz Reviews
Intel
Posted by Hemos on Monday June 23, @08:42AM
from the tide-goes-in-tide-goes-out dept.
Nathan writes "The Intel 3.2GHz Pentium4 has passed its NDA with reviews coming out over the net, including this one at MBReview, This one at HardAvenue, This one at TweakTown and this review at HotHW." Yay. Benchmarks. Wowee-zowee.
NYT On Online Reputations
The Internet
Posted by Hemos on Monday June 23, @08:07AM
from the building-the-systems-of-truth dept.
prostoalex writes "New York Times analyzes the importance of online postings for the company images and product success/failure rates. Intuit's TurboTax DRM "feature" is mentioned as one of the bad ideas, that was quickly and vociferously opposed by the Internet folk. The movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding got quite a nice cash flow even though the advertising budget was low, but opinions on the Internet regarded the movie highly. Rating systems of Epinions and Slashdot are also discussed briefly."
Incas Used Binary?
Science
Posted by Hemos on Monday June 23, @07:14AM
from the how-do-you-count-to-one-in-pi? dept.
Abhijeet Chavan writes "An article in the Independent reports that a leading scholar believes the Incas may have used a form of binary code 500 years before computers were invented. 'Gary Urton, professor of anthropology at Harvard University, has re-analysed the complicated knotted strings of the Inca - decorative objects called khipu - and found they contain a seven-bit binary code capable of conveying more than 1,500 separate units of information...If Professor Urton is right, it means the Inca not only invented a form of binary code more than 500 years before the invention of the computer, but they used it as part of the only three-dimensional written language.'"
Your Rights Online: Digging For Truth Online Is Up To You
Censorship
Posted by timothy on Monday June 23, @06:36AM
from the and-here's-a-shovel dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has released the second annual report on obstacles to the free flow of information online. Vint Cerf wrote the forward, where he argues it is the responsibility of every citizen to test the truth of information on the Web, and draw attention to incorrect information, rather than the government's responsibility to dictate the 'truth.' ZDNet Australia has an article on the report."
Developers: Linux Router Project Dead
Linux
Posted by timothy on Monday June 23, @03:25AM
from the hand-of-fate dept.
An anonymous reader submits: "The Linux Router Project is no more. This single-floppy distro was a great tool for building a number of simple super-low-cost network devices. The maintainer has a lot of bitter words about its demise, and it is sad to see it go."
Games: Building A Homemade Chess Supercomputer
News
Posted by simoniker on Sunday June 22, @11:35PM
from the chess-or-gta-dilemma dept.
nado writes "There's a new article on Chessbase.com which has GM John Nunn showing you his chess-orientated PC upgrade to a double Xeon system, with some Fritz benchmarks." Elsewhere in the article, John Nunn discusses the unique computer needs for chess computation: "One of the problems with currently available processors is that they are not particularly well suited to the integer calculations used for chess. A Pentium 4 will be slower at chess than a Pentium 3 of an equivalent clock speed."
Tiny Sites Aren't Small Potatoes
The Internet
Posted by timothy on Sunday June 22, @09:23PM
from the making-up-for-it-in-volume dept.
xtrucial writes "Jakob Nielsen of usability fame has a new article up about the perhaps-unexpected power of tiny websites: 'Considering that the Web as a whole will have about 4 trillion page views this year, the [low-traffic] sites might seem irrelevant with their pitiful millions of page views. But within their niche they dominate.'" (In particular, Nielsen is talking about weblogs.)
JVC Announces Media-Centric Pocket PCs
Handhelds
Posted by timothy on Sunday June 22, @08:06PM
from the will-even-play-oggs dept.
An anonymous reader writes "infoSync World writes about two new high-end Pocket PC models from JVC, the MP-PV131 and MP-PV331. Running on Windows Mobile 2003, the Pocket PCs boast 128 MB SDRAM, built-in Wi-Fi and MPEG4 video and audio streaming and capture capabilities. The new devices are also equipped with software for use along with JVC camcorders. The new models will be available in the U.S. in September at $499.95 US and $599.95 US respectively"
Real Life Doom With Point-And-Shoot Positioning
Technology/IT
Posted by timothy on Sunday June 22, @06:48PM
from the but-i-was-born-with-this-ability dept.
SoupIsGoodFood_42 writes "A company called GeoVector has come up with a system that lets you point out a location. They say it could be used to get info on buildings and objects. E.G. pointing your mobile device at a movie theater could tell you what's on. They've also developed a "real world" version of Doom. So don't be surprised if you're in Japan early next year and see people running holding their cellphone/PDA like a gun."
SCO Protest And Anti-Protest In Provo
Linux
Posted by timothy on Sunday June 22, @05:24PM
from the please-stop-beating-my-wife dept.
a.ameri writes "On Friday, June 20, the Provo Linux Users Group decided to head on over to SCO's offices and hold a protest; information on the event, including pictures and press coverage, can be found on the PLUG page. Among other things, the protesters claim that SCO employes came out and joined the event holding pre-prepared signs saying things like 'I love software piracy' and 'Try communism - use Linux.'" There are some funny shots linked here (thanks to reader lucif latum). Daddio64 points to the press covereage in the Deseret News and Provo Daily Herald.
Your Rights Online: IDSA Forces Arcade Game Manual Archive Offline
Games
Posted by timothy on Sunday June 22, @04:19PM
from the legal-scrooge dept.
AtariKee writes "The IDSA and the DMCA has struck again, this time forcing the maintainer of Stormaster.com, a coin-operated video game manual and tech information archive, to shut down. Stormaster has been an invaluable resource for collectors of classic coin-operated video games for years, and this loss further demonstrates the idiocy that is the DMCA. I can understand ROM images to some extent, but 25 year old coin-op operator/tech manuals? The full text of the IDSA's letter can be read on Stormaster's site." Previous Slashdot posts about IDSA (Interactive Digital Software Association) show that this is typical of the organization.
Smart Cellphone Would Spend Your Money
Handhelds
Posted by timothy on Sunday June 22, @03:19PM
from the not-for-the-weirdo-spender dept.
jonknee writes "MobileTracker pointed to an article in the latest New Scientist about some new 3G mobile phone software that tries to learn your habits and start making your decisions for you. This sounds like science fiction, but it's happening now. The phone will be able to make reservations for you at your favorite steak house and then save seats for you at the hot event in town. Neat!"
Asia's Space Race: China vs. India
Space
Posted by timothy on Sunday June 22, @02:18PM
from the let's-not-fight-it-out-please dept.
securitas writes "London-based military historian and commentator Gwynne Dyer writes about Asia's developing space race with plans from China and India to land people on the Moon, previously mentioned on Slashdot in China's case. In April India announced it will send an unmanned probe to the Moon by 2005 and a manned mission by 2015. Critics say it's a waste of time and money for India to pursue the goal. Meanwhile, Russian space experts are quietly helping China in what is seen as a growing alliance and a somewhat alarmist op-ed piece from the Washington Times worries about China's 21st century space dominance and monopolization of strategic resources like H3, used in nuclear fusion."
Happy Birthday, Dear DNS
The Internet
Posted by timothy on Sunday June 22, @01:12PM
from the better-than-most-tlas dept.
Shloka writes with a snippet from Wired News: "Twenty years ago Monday, two computer scientists at the University of Southern California created a key component essential to the modern Internet. Jon Postel and Paul Mockapetris ran the first successful test of the automated domain name system, or DNS..."
Legitimate uses for DeCSS
Encryption
Posted by CmdrTaco on Sunday June 22, @12:10PM
from the stuff-to-read dept.
Tabercil writes "Interesting article at the Washington Post, which among other things points out that DeCSS does have valid uses, and that the industry's paranoia over DeCSS is overblown." A reasonable mainstream summary of all the DVD related legal hype. Interesting that the libdvdcss folks have never had a bump with the law, but instead DeCSS takes all the brunt even tho nobody uses it.
55808 Trojan Analysis
Security
Posted by CmdrTaco on Sunday June 22, @11:16AM
from the crawling-about-in-the-digital-wild dept.
espo812 writes "This analysis of the 55808 trojan that has been circling the internet was just posted on Bugtraq . The good news (i guess?) is that apparentally it is just a proof of concept distributed scanner. The bad news is they think they just caught a copycat version of the origional trojan. ISS also has an analysis."
RIAA Not Done With Jesse Jordan
The Courts
Posted by CmdrTaco on Sunday June 22, @10:24AM
from the billion-dollar-organization-vs-kid dept.
digime writes "In a recent Slashdot article it was reported that 19-year-old college student Jesse Jordan gave up his life savings to the RIAA for running a campus search engine. He has recovered over 83% of his savings lost to the RIAA, and his search engine is back up. "The RIAA started yelling and tried to rescind my order of dismissal after they signed it because of comments that I made on CNN.", Jordan says on his site. "A very well-known top lawyer at the RIAA, while making threats of further legal actions, referred to himself as a 'dentist' that I would not want to 'have another visit with'"
Artists Protesting Single-Song Downloads
Music
Posted by CmdrTaco on Sunday June 22, @09:22AM
from the won't-somebody-please-think-of-the-artists dept.
prostoalex writes "The 99 cent downloads are stirring some discussion in the music community. Linkin Park, Radiohead, Madonna, Jewel and Green Day are protesting music stores' policy of single-song downloads and introduce some stipulations, requiring their work to be sold as albums. "The fear among artists is that the work of art they put together, the album, will become a thing of the past," says attorney Fred Goldring, whose firm represents Will Smith and Alanis Morissette."
What's Behind The Odd Data?
Security
Posted by timothy on Sunday June 22, @06:46AM
from the to-ask-your-advice dept.
citking writes "CNet is reporting that 'network administrators and security experts continue to search for the cause of an increasing amount of odd data that has been detected on the Internet.' While this has been going on now for a few days and some experts have already declared victory against the 'trojan', others aren't so sure that the real culprit has been identified yet. Other stories can be found here(1) and here(2)."
nForce2 GART Driver Finally Released For Linux
Hardware
Posted by timothy on Sunday June 22, @03:52AM
from the expanding-choices dept.
Rejoice, Radeon owners! For those of you who bought an nForce2 motherboard with the hopes of doing a bit of linux gaming on it, I'm sure it was a pretty hard let down to find out there was no AGPGART driver for the nForce2 -- until now. nVidia has finally released a kernel patch for the 2.4.20 release that is now providing GART support. Perhaps this means that nVidia is re-thinking their closed source-isms in favor of a more open policy in the future. A note on AGP 3.0: Note that AGP 8x mode is not available in 2.4.xx series kernels. If you find that X will not start, try disabling 8X mode in your BIOS. AGP3.0 has been implemented in the 2.5 series.
How Labels And Artists Divvy Up Your Dollar Online
Music
Posted by timothy on Sunday June 22, @12:26AM
from the heads-i-win-tails-you-guessed-it dept.
Subliminal Fusion writes "Business 2.0 has an article that breaks down where that $1 goes when you buy a song from iTunes or other online music services. Key figures: the site takes .40, the labels take .30 and the artists get a measly 12 cents for each download."
PocketPC 2003 Reviewed
Handhelds
Posted by timothy on Saturday June 21, @10:40PM
from the posted-from-a-zaurus dept.
Sander Sassen writes "Prior to the official launch of the Microsoft PocketPC 2003 platform next Monday, Hardware Analysis puts an Asus MyPal a620 PocketPC to the test and details what new features PocketPC 2003 brings to the table and whether it is worth it to upgrade from 2002."
Games: Aussie Company Releases Xbox Mod-Chip Designs
XBox (Games)
Posted by timothy on Saturday June 21, @09:15PM
from the like-a-radar-detector-in-virginia dept.
An anonymous reader submits: "According to an article in the Australian Financial Review, An Australian computer chip designer will this weekend risk the wrath of Microsoft by making its sophisticated Xbox mod-chip designs freely available over the internet. This release is the second and most advanced design to date that has been released by this company, the earlier release of a much simpler design was covered by a previous article on slashdot. Go get'em while they're hot everyone. When you consider what has been happening to companies who irritate console makers, these files might not be around for long!" The AFR article requires subscription, but the AussieChip site has more information, including a link to the terms under which the designs may be downloaded -- looks like they're looking for some dedicated amateurs ;)
Flight Simulator 2002 With 13 Monitors And 9 PCs
Games
Posted by timothy on Saturday June 21, @08:07PM
from the that's-a-lot-of-lead-and-glass dept.
Ant points to Steve Ferris' site demonstrating what Ferris has done "using Wideview software, Multi Monitors and Fs2002 Panel Interior view Bitmaps. 9 PC's & 13 monitors. Server PC is a 2.0ghz AMD and has 1 Asus 4800se G4 AGP and when Motor flying 4 PCI graphic cards for the instrument panels.. All 8 Clients have AGP cards and are AMD 800 to 1.5ghz... My Ask21 Glider with 3 Asus 4800se G4 cards on the front 6 monitors, giving great downward landing view. When you sit in front, all screens line up reasonably well ... Windows XP on the 3 front PC's and 98se on the rest."
Your Rights Online: Bill Would Let FBI Police File-Sharing
United States
Posted by timothy on Saturday June 21, @06:59PM
from the what-would-liddy-do dept.
vnguyen6 writes "According to an article on MSNBC, a bill introduced in the Senate gives the FBI power to police file sharing. As if the FBI didn't have their own messes to clean up such as the handling of pre-911 intelligence, FBI agents turned spy (Robert Hanssen), the Los Alamos lab debacle, double agent Mrs. Katrina Leung, need I say more?"
Your Rights Online: Honeypot For Identifying Email-Harvesters
Spam
Posted by timothy on Saturday June 21, @05:49PM
from the off-with-their-heads dept.
Cheese Man writes "Mark Pilgrim describes a simple way to identify email-harvesters: "In each page I serve, I include a bogus email address, encoded with the date of access as well as the host IP address ... This has allowed me to trace spam back to specific hosts and/or robots." There's even a simple one-line example done with PHP. (Thanks to BoingBoing for the links.)"
Your Rights Online: Website Posts Partial SSNs of Politicians in Protest
Privacy
Posted by CowboyNeal on Saturday June 21, @04:34PM
from the alliteration-never-gets-old dept.
John3 writes "The Foundation for Taxpayer & Consumer Rights has posted partial Social Security numbers for several California politicians to protest their vote against pending privacy legislation. According to a San Francisco Chronicle story, the SSNs were purchased on the Internet for $26." Now there's an effective way of showing the problems of the status quo.
Nimble V5 - The OQO Killer?
Hardware
Posted by timothy on Saturday June 21, @03:25PM
from the bargain-at-half-the-price dept.
prostoalex writes "OQO was supposed to be a big advance in the personal computing field, but, alas, made it quick to vaporware list. Now another company will try its luck with a mini-mini-PC. The Register, PC World and MSNBC are all running paragraph-long blurbs about pocket-size Nimble V5 from Nimble Microsystems. The specs are - VIA 733 MHz, 128 DDR266, 30 GB HDD, USB 2.0, PCMCIA, no display, $699, supposed to ship this fall. Full specification available from company's Web site."
Managing Bandwidth and Bandwidth Costs?
The Internet
Technology/IT
Posted by Cliff on Saturday June 21, @02:37PM
from the preparations-for-a-slashdotting dept.
azav asks: "The company I work for has bandwidth requirements that occasionally spike to satisfy the immediate requirements of a several meg download to say 30,000 users. We hope to make this several million in the future. With that in mind, this request is directed to any person who manages a site that must deliver content on an irregular schedule. How do you manage your bandwidth costs? How do you manage the availability of bandwidth?"
"I'd like to illustrate the second concept. When you have your (for example) T1 and you're not really using it, you are still paying for all that bandwidth. It's like the car that sits in your garage, you're still paying insurance and car payments on it even though you're not using it. But then you put up a new game, serve new media or suddenly become the 'Site of the Day' and your bandwidth is flooded and maxed out. For that case, it's like you've bought a car that only goes 40 miles an hour but while the demand exists and only while that demand exists, you need a car that goes 150 miles an hour. You don't want to pay the money for a car that goes 150 because you only need it occasionally. Later, you know you'll need that car to go 220 but you're not there yet.
So if this makes sense with regards to bandwidth, it is like you'd want burst-bandwidth depending on need. Do any of you face this problem? If you do and have solved it, I'd love to hear about your strategy. Once this is solved, we get back to the first question, how do you manage that cost, put a number on it and either fit it in to your business model or pass it on to your customers?"
Microsoft-Sony Plan: A Media-Rights Ploy?
Microsoft
Posted by timothy on Saturday June 21, @01:32PM
from the just-sign-here-and-here-and-here-and-here dept.
sk8rboi writes "Missing in Wed.'s (CNet) reports about the Digital Home Working Group (DHWG) effort from “Microsoft and Sony to make sure DVD players and cell phones can communicate with each other over a home wireless network” is the real reason for the work--it's a DRM (digital rights management) play in disguise. Look at it logically. Why would an industry alliance need to define a standard to share an MP3 file between a smart phone and a PC? According to EmbeddedWatch, the answer is, it wouldn’t. The file can already be shared via wireless email or WiFi. And both can read the file, since both support MP3. Consumer-electronics systems and computers can already interchange all sorts of files. But what they can’t do--and what companies like Microsoft and Sony wish they could--is regulate the transfer of such files (aka block them if they’ve been downloaded for free from KaZaa). (DHWG, by the way, is actually led by Intel.)"
Apple: Screenshots of Mac OS X 10.3 Panther Leaked
OS X (Apple)
Posted by CowboyNeal on Saturday June 21, @12:35PM
from the brand-new-eye-candy dept.
gorman writes "Screenshots of Apple's next major update to OS X, Panther (10.3), have finally been leaked to the web. For months very little has been known about Panther, with only several minor rumors here and there. These screenshots show off many new features, including the return of labels, a brand new Safari-like finder, and an interesting window management system called Exposé. In addition, the screenshots show off refined visuals and improvements to all of the included Apple applications, such as video support in iChat and enhanced spam filtering in Mail. While these screenshots show off a pre-release version of Panther, it's definitely interesting to see what Apple is working on! Steve Jobs will demonstrate Panther during his keynote this Monday at WWDC and will make it available to developers."
Your Brain May Have Amazing Powers
Science
Posted by jamie on Saturday June 21, @11:30AM
from the uptake dept.
I've never given much credence to the "only use 10% of our brains" urban legend, but this article, Savant for a Day, is making me reconsider. I'd like to see controlled, double-blind studies, but Snyder's machine already sounds very interesting -- hey, anyone can learn to draw, but I want to flip a switch to put my brain into calculator mode. EM-brain experimentation has taken off since Michael Persinger's work and other recent research.
Comdex Pursues Edification Rather Than Entertainment
Comdex
Posted by CowboyNeal on Saturday June 21, @10:33AM
from the turning-the-ship-around dept.
XarsonX writes "Infoworld has an article talking about some of the changes coming to Comdex this year. Amongst other things, a $50 price tag for uninvited attendants, and less free gear handed out. Is it still possible to get enough free vendor-wear to fill your entire wardrobe?"
Games: FreeCraft Cease and Desisted by Blizzard
Real Time Strategy (Games)
Posted by CowboyNeal on Saturday June 21, @09:30AM
from the calling-it-quits dept.
mandreiana writes "As of June 20th, FreeCraft is shut down. The development team received a cease and desist order due to the name 'FreeCraft' causing possible confusion with the names StarCraft and WarCraft, and also some of the ideas within the engine were too similar to WarCraft 2. There will be no more updates to this game, and it is no longer available for download." Way to go, Blizzard, now the only competitors to worry about are the ones who can afford lawyers and actually hold competing market share. Of course, not using a *Craft for a game project might have kept it under the radar a while longer.
CPU Cooling with 15 Liters of Water
Hardware
Posted by michael on Saturday June 21, @07:30AM
from the longer-than-a-tercel dept.
ninjagin writes "While not an OC-er, I do enjoy reading about the lengths people will go to on their way to a better CPU cooling solution. I ran across this very interesting article at overclockers.com about this guy's immense 15-liter water cooling rig for his home office PC. Might be just the kind of thing to have the contractors include when they pour your next garage slab."
Apple: Gentoo, Fink, and DarwinPorts Join Forces
OS X (Apple)
Posted by michael on Saturday June 21, @04:46AM
from the darfinkgen dept.
Mr. Quick writes "From Metapkg, "In order to better provide freely-available software to users of Mac OS X and Darwin, we Fink, Gentoo, and DarwinPorts commit ourselves to work together." A unified front for free software on Mac OS X is something that was needed."
Sysadmins Restore Iraqi ISP
The Internet
Posted by michael on Saturday June 21, @01:41AM
from the taking-one-for-the-team dept.
Hen3ry writes "Brian McWilliams of Wired News reports on the dedicated staff of Iraq's State Company for Internet Services, or SCIS, and how they built, maintained, and rebuilt Internet access before, during, and after the war. Ba'ath Party loyalists still run SCIS but their dedicated employees continue to press on. Fascinating stuff about how one sysadmin managed to keep the country online up until a US missle struck the roof of the Ministry of Information building."
Build a Rotisserie Scanner With Legos
Toys
Posted by michael on Friday June 20, @10:38PM
from the yes,-the-plural-is-legos dept.
WalkingBear writes "All you 3d geeks out there should take a look at this. This guy has built a 3d scanner (scans 3d objects resulting in a 2d cylindrical image map) out of a flat bed scanner and Lego. Also has a turntable style for use with digital cameras."
Games: Anarchy Online Gamer Responds
Role Playing (Games)
Posted by michael on Friday June 20, @08:48PM
from the not-100%-accurate dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Thought some people might be interested in seeing a follow up on the NYT article about the Anarchy Online player. His reaction to it was less then supportive. You can read about what he had to say and what other players had to say." See the original story for background.
The Downward Spiral of Music Retailing
Music
Posted by michael on Friday June 20, @07:19PM
from the nine-inch-nails dept.
chundo writes "Business Week has an article about the financial problems plagueing specialty music retailers. Tower Records, Musicland, and Sam Goody are all "hemorrhaging money", despite efforts to move sales online. Some chains are trying to adapt - Virgin Megastore is testing an in-store service to download songs to portable players, and their Radio Free Virgin unit hopes to break into digital music retailing. Is the failure of conventional music sales reinforcement that the RIAA's business plan just doesn't work, or will it just provide them with more ammunition against the P2P crowd?"
Developers: Debugging in OSS Always Faster
Programming
Posted by michael on Friday June 20, @05:57PM
from the bugging-also-always-faster dept.
dex@ruunat writes "Damien Challet and Yann Le Du of the University of Oxford studied a model of software bug dynamics, which resulted in a paper on cond-mat this morning. In this paper they study the difference in evolution of number of bugs in open and closed source projects. They conclude: 'When the program is written from scratch, the first phase of development is characterized by a fast decline of the number of bugs, followed by a slow phase where most bugs have been fixed, hence, are hard to find'. Another, perhaps surprising conclusion is that debugging in open source projects is always faster than in closed source projects."
Games: Fun is Fine - Toward a Philosophy of Game Design
Games
Posted by michael on Friday June 20, @04:45PM
from the less-thinking-more-blowing-stuff-up dept.
David Kennerly writes "The Entertainment versus Art debate flares perennially. These participants may be having fun, but the dichotomy is uniquely inappropriate to games. By the end of this article, we may disentangle the faulty dichotomy. After reconsidering what we think we know about a game, fun, and art we may come to discover that Nomura and Costikyan are correct: 'If you were to write a Seven Lively Arts for the 21st century, the form you'd have to mention first is clearly games.' --Greg Costikyan"
My Visit to SCO
Caldera
Posted by michael on Friday June 20, @03:41PM
from the leave-molotov-cocktails-at-home-please dept.
Ian Lance Taylor writes "I signed the SCO NDA and visited them to discuss their claims against Linux. My essay about it is on the Linux Journal web site. The short version is that SCO's claims are unproven, as indeed I expected would be the case before I went. The amount of information they were willing to show me was extremely limited, and did not by itself prove that their claims were true, nor that their claims were false." Other SCO-bits: Sun is doing their usual foot-in-mouth routine, thinking that two FUDs makes a Solaris purchase, or something like that. IBM is now joining the contact the customers bandwagon. Eric Raymond has been keeping himself busy - here's a story about him. SCO hates BSD, too, but they're not taking it lying down. And of course Cringley has his two cents.
The Next Step in Fighting Spam: Greylisting
Spam
Posted by michael on Friday June 20, @02:37PM
from the ideas-are-a-dime-a-dozen dept.
Evan Harris writes "I've just published a paper on a new and unique spam blocking method called "Greylisting". The best thing about it other than achieving better than 97% effectiveness in blocking spam, is that it practically eliminates the main problem of other solutions: the false-positive. There's even source code for an example implementation written as a perl filter for sendmail, along with instructions for installing, so you can get up and running quickly."
Getting Law Enforcement Action for a Large-Scale Hack?
Security
Technology/IT
The Internet
Posted by Cliff on Friday June 20, @01:41PM
from the oh-my!-who-do-you-call dept.
HeelToe asks: "Two nights ago, I sat down to do a few chores with finance websites and check my mail. To check my mail, I use an ssh connection and read it via mutt. I had already hit Slashdot for my semi-hourly dose of content, but then noticed my ssh client complaining about a difference between its cached copy of the server key and the server key presented, so I started investigation. After figuring out what was going on, I contacted the tech support line for my service provider (Charter Communications) to no avail, as well as the FBI and NIPC, again, both to no avail. There are all these laws and all this hype about enforcing these computer crime laws - what must an end user do to get some enforcement done? Read on for more, much more..." Update: 06/21 19:13 GMT by C:As it turns out, the issue wasn't a hack at Charter but a particularly nasty form of Spyware. Stll, the question is valid, and some of the suggestions already given, have been real informative. Keep 'em coming!
"So I determined that I was connecting to xxx.p5115.tdko.com instead of xxx. I started looking at dns settings. Of course, under Windows, the default is to accept the default dns domain specified by a DHCP server for the PC's ethernet connection. There are settings to disable this, but I hadn't thought about it until now. It turns out, Charter Communications' DHCP servers were infiltrated and were providing p5115.tdko.com as the 'Connection-specific DNS suffix', causing all non-hardened Windows (whatever that means in a Windows context) machines to get lookups from a hijacked subdomain DNS server which simply responded to every query with a set of 3 addresses (66.220.17.45, 66.220.17.46, 66.220.17.47).
On these IPs were some phantom services. There were proxying web servers (presumably collecting cookies and username/password combos), as well as an ssh server where the perpetrators were most likely hoping people would simply say 'yes' to the key differences and enter in their username/password.
Has anyone else seen this type of attack before? Pretty sneaky. I bet it would slip by most people that don't use anything but a web browser. This makes me want to step up my plans to put an OpenBSD firewall in place and allow it as little trust of the outside world as possible, providing more trusted DNS/DHCP services to the hosts on my network. It would be nicer to be able to boot the thing self-contained-and-configured off read-only media and have no writable access to anything from the operating system to totally prevent break-in/tampering.
With respect to the law enforcement issues. I first called Charter, and after 10 minutes on hold was told to submit a report to their abuse account. I asked the tech support rep if they really wanted me submitting the incident report through a hijacked proxying web server. I hadn't yet reconfigured my Windows systems because I wanted to collect as much information as possible while the attack was still live. The long and short from the tech support rep was they'd look at it, but couldn't do anything with respect to responding to me about it unless I submitted that report.
I moved on to calling the FBI. The after hours person had no idea what evidence collection procedures I should follow, nor if their office would even be interested in investigation. I was told to call back during business hours. I did a little searching and found the National Infrastructure Protection Center. I gave them a ring and was asked to fill out an incident report. I was told it would be reviewed in the NOC quickly and a decision made about further investigation. The rep answering the phone said to collect any and all information I could think of regarding the attack. I got a response later this morning that their NOC personnel had evaluated the report and decided not to investigate further.
I called the FBI back this morning, only to be told they generally didn't investigate these types of crimes for individuals, but usually only for companies that had lost at least a couple thousand dollars. To inflate my ego a bit, I asked if I could count my time cleaning up/investigating as a loss of this magnitude and was told no, that it would have to be a financial loss like is associated with internet credit card fraud. Given how Kevin Mitnick was convicted and sentenced on 'evidence' that included employee time for investigation and cleanup, why is this any different for me?
With respect to getting some action on any future attacks - what should I do? Who should I call? I'm not a h/\x0r, and I have reasonable investigation skills, but aren't there professionals doing this to uphold the law? What's the point of all those federal laws anyway? Monitoring of third party communications, without the consent of either party; unauthorized access to Charter's systems - the list can go on a lot further depending on the activity happening at those proxying servers. Are these laws just tools to oppress unpopular computer criminals but just plain not enforced most of the time?
I found this situation and particular method of attack interesting... hopefully this was fun to read. If you have suggestions for what I should do in the future to handle attacks, I'd love to hear about it!"
Science: Nanotech Pinball and Miniature Engines
Science
Posted by michael on Friday June 20, @12:45PM
from the tiny-bubbles dept.
glenmark writes "Researchers at the Solid State Electronics Laboratory at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden have developed the world's smallest pinball game. The video is fascinating. The flippers are electrostatically-actuated monocrystalline silicon cantilevers. I hope Pat Lawlor and Steve Ritchie see this. I have a feeling they would get a kick out of it." And in another nanotech story, psmears writes "Three hundred times more powerful than ordinary batteries, but much lighter and smaller? Researchers at the University of Birmingham have developed a micro-engine that will allow people to charge mobile phones using lighter fluid. Further information at Research-TV including photos and a film."
The Cassini Division
Books
Media
Posted by timothy on Friday June 20, @12:00PM
danny writes "Friends have been recommending Ken MacLeod's science fiction to me for some time, and I've finally read The Cassini Division. Read on for my review - and check out my other science fiction reviews." Nothing says the start of summer like some paperback science fiction.
The Cassini Division
author Ken MacLeod
pages 240
publisher Orbit
rating 7
reviewer Danny Yee
ISBN 1857237307
summary politics in the 24th century
At the beginning of the 24th century, the inner Solar System is dominated by the socialist Solar Union. Their front-line fighting force, the Cassini Division, defends against viral attacks from post-human Jovians and keeps careful watch on a wormhole. Ellen May Ngwethu, a member of the Division's Central Committee, travels to areas of Earth occupied by "non-cos", low-tech anarchists who still use such antiquated devices as money. Her goal is to find the physicist Malley, whose help is necessary to find a way through the wormhole. And after taking the losing side in a debate over whether to bomb the Jovians or to try to communicate with them, Ellen travels through the wormhole to ultra-capitalist New Mars.
After a slower opening, there largely to link back to earlier books set in the same universe, The Cassini Division rattles along at a good pace. It is not particularly compelling as a novel, however, with no characters that really come to life. Ellen has centre-stage throughout but remains something of a cipher, her dominant feature her dedication to "the true knowledge" on which the Solar Union was founded ("self interest") and her hostility to non-humans, both rooted in her personal history. And none of the other characters gets much play at all. Suze, for example, is a sociologist who joins Ellen early on in the story and has as high a profile in it as anyone else, but she could still have been trivially edited out.
The science is "space opera" style, deployed when necessary for the plot but otherwise passed over, and the intellectual interest comes from the politics. This takes the form of open discussions of political theory and depictions of different forms of social organisation in action, but it never becomes didactic or stodgy. MacLeod himself is a Trotskyist libertarian, a label which gives some feel for his eclecticism, and he depicts very different political systems working reasonably well -- though he often verges on parody. There are also plenty of little jokes, such as a statue of Mises in the Central Planning Committee building.
A significant factor is that aging has been stopped, so many people are centuries old and have political views formed in the 21st century. This makes the recurrence of current political ideologies three centuries down the road more plausible, but it is also a key stabilising factor. Whether in non-co areas of Earth, in the Solar Union, or on New Mars, to a great extent the system works because it's what people are accustomed to. And even the Jovian "fast folk", descendants of humans who moved into computers and experienced a kind of singularity, have some continuity with their past.
Overall? There's not much more to it, but The Cassini Division makes a decently entertaining action story, with plenty of ideas for anyone interested in political theory. I'm not going to rush off and buy Ken MacLeod's other books, but I'll keep an eye out for a chance to borrow them or scam review copies.
The Future of Digital Cinema
Movies
Posted by michael on Friday June 20, @10:57AM
from the sticky-floors dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The New York Times recently had an interesting article on the future of digital cinema. The article talks mainly about the Digital Cinema Initiatives consortium (formed last year by a group of seven major studios) and its work towards establishing a set of standards for theatrical digital projection. DigitalCinemaMag also had an article back in February about the consortium's efforts which included a few more technical details."
Games: Neverwinter Nights for Linux
PC Games (Games)
Posted by michael on Friday June 20, @10:00AM
from the better-late-than-neverwinter dept.
Marshall writes "Today I received an email from Tux Games that I never thought I'd get: confirmation that they were shipping me Neverwinter Nights complete with Linux installer! I didn't believe my eyes, so I checked out bioware's web page, and it was confirmed, the linux client is complete. Also check tuxgames.com which states that they are completing the installer and plan to ship games on Monday, 23 June."
Your Rights Online: RIAA Warns Individual Swappers
Music
Posted by CowboyNeal on Friday June 20, @09:05AM
from the shutting-it-down dept.
Joey Patterson writes "CNET News.com reports that the RIAA has sent cease-and-desist letters to four individuals for allegedly pirating its music on P2P networks." They have yet to publicly release the names of who they have contacted, but 4 of the 5 were Verizon subscribers involved with their previous high profile case.
Apple: Apple Marketing Hypes New PowerMacs
Desktops (Apple)
Posted by michael on Friday June 20, @08:12AM
from the feeding-frenzy dept.
Wacky_Wookie was only one of many who wrote in with a mention of Apple's "leak" of specifications for a new line of PowerMacs to be dubbed "G5", apparently running the new PowerPC 970 CPUs. No offense, but anyone who thinks it was a mistake or leak doesn't understand marketing. :) Update by J: In case those linked sites get taken down too, try MacNN.
Mini-ITX PC in an Atari 800
Hardware
Posted by CowboyNeal on Friday June 20, @05:47AM
from the retro-look-with-brand-new-feel dept.
tgeller writes "As case mods go, this one's not the weirdest, But it has its own retro charm. Musician and geek Andy Hutson slipped a Mini-ITX motherboard into an Atari 800 case... and used an old cartridge as the mouse! Too bad the original keyboard's not functional." This almost makes me want to tear apart my old Apple //c and see what I can make. Almost.
Flexible Computers in the Future?
Handhelds
Posted by CowboyNeal on Friday June 20, @02:28AM
from the bend-like-the-reed dept.
An anonymous reader writes "New Scientist is reporting on Sony bendable input devices. When computers become too small to be operated by buttons, how will we control them? The only option will be to gently bend them, according to engineers at Sony's Interaction Lab in Tokyo." The diagrams make it look like a warped Game Boy. Looks pretty cool, though.
GIF Patent Prepares to Expire
Patents
Posted by CowboyNeal on Thursday June 19, @11:18PM
from the all-skate-everyone-skate dept.
pajamacore writes "It's worth noting that 20 June 2003 is GIF Liberation Day, the day on which US Patent 4,558,302 expires. The patent describes the LZW compression algorithm used in .gif files. That said, maybe the prices of image editing applications will drop slightly when corporations don't have to pay fees to Unisys."
Senator Orrin Hatch a Pirate?
United States
Posted by CowboyNeal on Thursday June 19, @09:37PM
from the kettle-retorts-to-pot dept.
Stigmata669 writes "Remember a few days ago when Senator Orrin Hatch decided that software piracy was punishable by destruction of computers? Well a bored and unemployed Sys. Admin in Houston smelled a rat when he was rooting through Hatch's website source. As it turns out Sen. Hatch is a common software pirate himself."
RIAA CEO Hilary Rosen to Become CNBC Commentator
Music
Posted by CowboyNeal on Thursday June 19, @08:10PM
from the changing-of-the-guard dept.
alen writes "According to a story by the New York Post the CEO of the RIAA is stepping down. She is going to be an anchor on CNBC. Maybe this is going to signal a change in the way record companies think about file sharing?"
Games: KnoppiXMAME 1.0 Released
Classic Games (Games)
Posted by michael on Thursday June 19, @07:06PM
from the mame-in-a-box dept.
Ant writes "KnoppixMAME is a bootable arcade machine emulator with hardware detection and autoconfiguration. It works automatically on all modern and not-so-modern hardware, including gameports and joysticks. It is powered by Knoppix Debian GNU/Linux, X-MAME, and gxmame." Update: 06/19 23:18 GMT by S: Although there are earlier versions in the release directory, looks like V1.0 hasn't made it onto the FTP just yet. Meanwhile, Jim points out the AdvanceCD image, which is "..also a bootable ISO image of a minimal Linux distribution containing MAME, but weighing in at 16 MB rather than 200 MB so there is more room for ROMs."
Ask Slashdot: Experiences with Alternate Local Phone Companies?
Technology/IT
Posted by Cliff on Thursday June 19, @06:39PM
from the dodging-the-baby-bells dept.
chasmosis asks: "In the last few months, I've moved about 25 minutes outside of St. Louis and discovered that the local baby bell charges exorbitant rates (at least in my view). I've explored alternate local carriers like Sprint and others who have had uncompetitive prices, poor customer service records, or were unclear on things like 'specifically what exchanges can I call that are still considered local calls'. Right now I'm on SBC's Metro plan where I can call to and from much of the St. Louis local area as a local call instead of a toll call. I'd dump my landline entirely and get another cell if I didn't need it for dial up internet, since I live in the sticks and there is no cable, no DSL, and the top speed for dialup is 28.8. What are other people using for alternatives to their local telephone provider? What are your experiences, good and bad?"
Using Sling Shot Power to Hurl Into Orbit
Science
Posted by CmdrTaco on Thursday June 19, @05:05PM
from the still-wating-for-my-space-trebuchet dept.
the_2nd_coming writes "space.com has an article about a new application of a very old technology. NASA is putting money into Momentum-eXchange/Electrodynamic Reboost tether technology -- MXER for short -- an innovative concept that if implemented would station miles and miles of cart-wheeling cable in orbit around the Earth. Then, rotating like a giant sling, the cable would swoop down and pick up spacecraft in low orbits, then hurl them to higher orbits or even lob them onward to other planets."
Your Rights Online: EFF Supporting Home DVD Editing
Movies
Posted by CmdrTaco on Thursday June 19, @04:15PM
from the another-front-to-worry-about dept.
cheesedog writes "The Electronic Frontier Foundation has filed a brief in federal court in support of companies that offer software to edit violence or sex from a user's DVD. The full story can be found in this article from the Salt Lake Tribune."
UK Govt Warned: Don't Buy GPL
Linux Business
Posted by CmdrTaco on Thursday June 19, @03:26PM
from the just-download-it-instead dept.
JPMH writes "ZDNet is reporting that a UK IT industry body backed by Microsoft, IBM, Intel, BAE Systems and other high-tech heavyweights has urged the UK government not to commission open-source software, and particularly not software covered by the General Public License. According to Intellect, which lobbies for about 1,000 UK IT companies, the requirement of open-source licences for software funded by the government could have a negative impact on competition for contracts, the quality of the resulting software and even the confidentiality of government departments. In particular, Intellect recommends that the government drop the GNU General Public License (GPL), the licence upon which the GNU/Linux operating system is based, from its list of acceptable default licences for government-funded software, and steer clear of the GPL generally."
MSN Planning to Take on Google?
Microsoft
Posted by CmdrTaco on Thursday June 19, @02:38PM
from the only-a-matter-of-time dept.
asyn42 writes "CNet is reporting what should be no surprise, Microsoft appears to be readying itself to take on Google for a position as the top search engine. The long range impact on the relationship between MSN and Yahoo/Inktomi is likely at risk."
Digital Baseball Umpires
Technology/IT
Posted by CmdrTaco on Thursday June 19, @01:52PM
from the better-than-instant-replay dept.
Dekaner writes "Wired is running an article on an electronic umpire that tracks each baseball pitch and judges whether it is within the "strike zone" has been installed at 10 major league ballparks in the U.S. The QuesTec system uses several cameras that track each pitch and compare the machine's judgment with that of the umpire standing behind the catcher. At the end of each game it provides a summary of its ratings and compares them with the umpire's calls. In general there is reasonably good agreement. In a recent test the QuesTec system judged that 32.1 percent of pitches were within the "strike zone", while the umpire called 31.4 percent as strikes. However, the umpires association has filed a complaint about the system's unreliability and incapability to replace the human 3-D, real-time view. "
Science: Genetically Engineered Pets Hit the Market
Biotech
Posted by michael on Thursday June 19, @01:00PM
from the hypoallergenic-cats dept.
psoriac writes "According to this article the Taiwanese Taikong Corporation is starting to sell "Night Pearls" - zebrafish that glow in different red and green patterns thanks to genes from jellyfish and marine coral. US sales are expected to follow."
Linux Clustering
Linux
Software
Posted by timothy on Thursday June 19, @12:00PM
SPK writes "A colleague and I recently discussed how New Riders's most highly regarded book -- Paul DuBois's MySQL -- corresponds to O'Reilly's worst dud: MySQL & mSQL. Charles Bookman's Linux Clustering does nothing to improve New Riders's reputation. The book is divided into eleven chapters, unevenly distributed among three sections: an overview of clustering for Linux, building clusters, and maintaining clusters. Four appendices provide brief information about online clustering resources, options for RedHat's 'Kickstart,' options for DHCP, and information on 'Condor ClassAd Machine Attributes.'" To find out why Krause was so displeased with this book, read on below for his review.
Linux Clustering. Building and Maintaining Linux Clusters
author Charles Bookman
pages xv + 265
publisher New Riders
rating 2/10
reviewer Steve Krause
ISBN 1578702747
summary A guide to clustering software, networking, and journaling filesystems
Bookman emphasizes a central piece of wisdom that no system administrator should ignore: redundancy. In the case of high availability clusters, parts redundancy is the name of the game, but one should not forget the human component; no administrator should be caught with only a cell phone -- keep a pager just in case. However, in a post-modern turn that might seem brilliant if it were applied in a work of fiction rather than a technical book, the author seems to apply the concept of redundancy to the text itself.
That the book began not as a book but rather as a collection of talks or presentations, or some other smaller format, is evidenced by the repetition of information between chapters and sections. Such nearly poetic repetitions also occurs within sentences and paragraphs (e.g. "nightly backups each night" on page 25).
An editor never looked at Linux Clustering; the book had two "technical reviewers" but their contributions seemingly didn't include fixing mangled syntax and strained style. On page 14 in the second paragraph a large segment of a sentence from the previous page is pasted into another sentence, resulting in a nonsensical block of text. The number of hyphenation, syntax, word choice, and subject-verb agreement errors is atrocious and makes the book difficult to read.
Some of the misinformation in the text appears to be unintentional (but ignorance is no excuse for a UNIX systems administrator); some is due to the fact that the author deals only with old (2.2) kernels (though the book came out 18 months after the 2.4 kernel release), old versions of journaling filesystems, and old distributions; and yet other misinformation is the result of misplaced attempts at humor (such as stating that GNU stands for the Gateway Naming Utility; one can only hope that this was intended to be funny). Other jokes often misfire, but do point to the intended audience (consider, for example, the section heading "Space: The Final Frontier").
In the Introduction, the author indicates that the book should be read by "Linux enthusiasts and users who want to get a Linux cluster up and running with the least amount of fuss." The organization of the book will not, however, aid this enterprise, for there is little "how to" information provided, but rather a great deal of background information on compiling kernels, various types of journaling file systems, and RedHat's Kickstart (perhaps inappropriate considering that the book specifically states that basic information will not be covered). Another section or two deal with basic networking and security. Various types of clusters are discussed, as are a few of the types of clustering software (e.g. Condor and Mosix) available.
The book, however, is clearly intended for administrators of clustering systems; a special emphasis is high-availability and load-balancing clusters. Parallel computing and the types of applications end users would wish to run receive far too little discussion.
Almost all technical books regurgitate the contents of freely available FAQs and HOWTOs to some degree, yet the good ones summarize the relevant points, make dry documentation more accessible, and give the reader some new insights. Because Bookman's Linux Clustering suffers from heinous spelling, grammar, and style errors; deals primarily with outdated software; contributes little new to the discussion; and doesn't speak to non-admins, I can only recommend that those interested in Linux clustering stick to online FAQs and HOWTOs.
Honda Crash Detection System
Technology/IT
Posted by michael on Thursday June 19, @11:07AM
from the pre-crash,-that-is dept.
MImeKillEr writes "MSNBC is reporting that Honda Motor Co. unveiled an early crash-detection system for one of their vehicles. The system is unique in working even before the driver responds. A radar in the front of the car stashed behind the Honda logo detects vehicles within a range of about 300 feet ahead. It then taps the brake and tightens the seatbelt. A buzzer goes off and a light on the dash is illuminated. If the driver responds, the braking power is boosted. If the driver fails to respond, the system kicks in and brakes more while also tightening the seat belt. Unfortunately, Japanese regulations don't allow for the system to fully stop the vehicle."
The Power Behind the SCO Nuisance
Caldera
Posted by michael on Thursday June 19, @10:10AM
from the luke,-i-am-your-father dept.
akahige writes "Forbes has a fairly detailed story about the sordid history of The Canopy Group and all the various companies they've sued -- Microsoft (who they beat) and CA (this case is still pending), among them. Before joining Caldera, Darl McBride sued IKON Office Solutions, for whom he worked -- and won. And it also seems that a bunch of Canopy power players also sit on SCO's board of directors. The short summary is, 'these guys are professional litigious bastards -- be exceptionally wary.'" A local user's group is planning a protest for tomorrow. Reader myst564 writes: "After reading all of this SCO press I remembered that SCO once offered up all of their 'Ancient UNIX' (their words, not mine) source to the world while retaining all copyrights (i.e, no OSS license). Interestingly enough it WAS located here but isn't any longer: SCO's Ancient Unix. What's more you can read about the original release here at: Linux Today. I downloaded the source myself way back then but never did anything but delete it! Anyway, check out this comment. It's interesting that this was predicted in 2000!"
Win4Lin 5.0 Reviewed
Linux Business
Posted by michael on Thursday June 19, @09:17AM
from the necessity-calls dept.
uninet writes "About a month ago, NeTraverse contacted OfB Labs with an early release copy of Win4Lin 5.0, the follow-up to the already impressive Win4Lin 4.0 released in May 2002. Win4Lin, for those not familiar with it, offers near-native (or better) speed "virtualization" of a Windows box so that one can run Windows 9x (95/98/Me) inside GNU/Linux."
PCI Express - Coming Soon to a PC Near You
Hardware
Posted by michael on Thursday June 19, @08:23AM
from the time-to-replace-all-your-cards-again dept.
Max Romantschuk writes "I've been following the emerging of PCI Express for some time now. PCI Express, previously known as "Third Generation I/O" or "3GIO", is the technology set to replace PCI. PCI has been with us for around ten years now, and is rapidly running out of bandwidth. Last week Anandtech ran an interresting story on PCI Express. The techology has previously been covered by Hexus and ExtremeTech aswell. I feel this technology looks all set to replace PCI, and we really do need some new bus technology to keep up with the bandwidth demands of today's applications. Or is this just yet another way to force us into a new upgrade cycle?"
Your Rights Online: Brokerage Instant Messages Must Be Saved
Privacy
Posted by simoniker on Thursday June 19, @07:09AM
from the casual-bathroom-conversations-also dept.
DrEnter writes "According to an AP story on Yahoo!, the National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD) has told its members that they must keep a copy of all instant messages sent or received by employees for at least three years. This is similar to their requirements on keeping e-mail, although technically not nearly as easy. The NASD is a self-regulatory organization, and U.S. federal law requires almost all of the 5,300 U.S.-based securities firms and brokerages to be a member of it. There's a news release from the NASD concerning the requirement - it looks like the daunting technical issues have already resulted in some firms banning the use of IM completely."
Science: Scientists Grow Decaffeinated Coffee Plants
Science
Posted by simoniker on Thursday June 19, @05:03AM
from the lack-of-oomph-kerfuffle dept.
An anonymous reader writes "According to a CBC News story, researchers have genetically modified coffee seedlings to produce up to 70 per cent less caffeine." The Japanese researchers quoted in the article say "..demand for decaffeinated coffee is growing worldwide. Caffeine can trigger palpitations, increase blood pressure and disrupt sleep in sensitive people", and so "..used a tool called RNA interference to genetically engineer the one-year-old plants." Seems like these boffins may be competing against the University Of Hawaii researchers we mentioned last year to take away your buzz.
Gemstar Ebook Crashes, Burns
Handhelds
Posted by simoniker on Thursday June 19, @02:12AM
from the charred-digital-characters-pooling-together dept.
Robotech_Master writes "In a lengthy announcement on its ebook catalog page, Gemstar, owner of TV Guide and the Rocket/Gemstar eBook, has announced it is going out of the ebook business. Gemstar will not be selling any new devices or ebook content after July 16th. Of particular interest to those who purchased the newer Gemstar eBook models that eliminated the ability to install free content directly on the devices: 'We will also continue to provide the newly released Personal Content feature available through the web bookstore at least through July 16, 2006.' It's too bad, really; I've heard that the Gemstar has one of the most legible displays of any of the ebook alternatives available. They could have done quite well as general-purpose reading devices, if Gemstar had not locked them directly to its own overpriced content in a stunning demonstration of self-proctology."
U.S. Imposes Big Tariffs On Korean Chipmakers
Technology/IT
Posted by simoniker on Wednesday June 18, @11:32PM
from the catfish-also-plan-to-sue dept.
dipfan writes "This is serious - the U.S. government has decided to levy steep import tariffs on South Korean computer chips (and Vietnamese catfish). The result is a 44 percent tariff on DRAM semiconductors made by Hynix. The case was brought by Micron Technology on the grounds that the South Koreans were receiving unfair subsidies. Hynix says the tariff is 'outrageous', and the South Koreans plan to appeal to the World Trade Organisation."
Science: Tourist-Class Soyuz Spacecraft Seats Open
Space
Posted by simoniker on Wednesday June 18, @09:58PM
from the lance-bass-wears-suit-to-get-upgrade dept.
brandido writes "Put another notch in the belt for space tourism - Space.com is reporting that: "If you're looking for the ultimate in get-up-and go, take note: Tourist-class seats will be available on a Soyuz spacecraft bound for the International Space Station in 2004-2005. This off-planet trek comes courtesy of a deal struck between Space Adventures, a U.S. adventure travel firm, Russia's RSC Energia and the Russian Space Agency (Rosoviakosmos)." However, NASA has yet to be officially notified or to give formal approval, so there are still some speed bumps in the road map."
Your Rights Online: Sweden To Outlaw File Sharing, Crypto Breaking?
Censorship
Posted by simoniker on Wednesday June 18, @08:55PM
from the bad-things-afoot-in-scandinavia dept.
Martin Kallisti writes "The Swedish Department of Justice has today proposed a bill to be put into effect, if it passes Parliament, on the 1st of January, 2004. It is in accordance to EU directives, but will also criminalize the downloading of material from the Internet without the explicit permission of the copyright holder. Furthermore, it will become illegal to break cryptos, circumvent copy protection (mod chips et al), copy books, and as I understand it, use software that is designed to help with any of these tasks, and many other things." An anonymous reader points to an English-language article about this Swedish EUCD proposal, which also mentions a hefty $4 levy on blank digital media such as CD-ROMs.
Slashback: Sorveteria, Rockets, Anger
Slashback
Posted by timothy on Wednesday June 18, @07:59PM
from the ants-everywhere dept.
Slashback tonight with more on model rocketry (and metaphysical rocketry to boot), Metallica's music online -- this time voluntarily, the fall of Ars Digita, nmap's reaction to SCO, and more. Read on for the details.
Games: The Return Of Shareware Games
Games
Posted by simoniker on Wednesday June 18, @06:40PM
from the commander-keen-looking-smug dept.
An anonymous reader writes "CNN has a new column up looking at the re-emerging trend of shareware as a means to distribute games. With development prices soaring and space on retail shelves getting scarce, smaller companies like PopCap Games and GarageGames are returning to gaming's roots - and making money in the process."
USB 1.1 Renumbered To USB 2?
Hardware
Posted by timothy on Wednesday June 18, @05:46PM
from the there-has-never-been-a-usb-1.0 dept.
Teese writes "According to this Bangkok Post article, in December the USB Forum renamed USB 1.1 to USB 2, and USB 2 stayed as USB 2. They did this because consumers were demanding that the computers they buy have USB2 on board. The story also claims that both Sony & toshiba have released laptops with the USB2 that is really USB1.1. This was the first I had heard of this and the article said the change took place in December, has the USB Forum really been able to pull a fast one on us?"
Science: Closing In On The Quark-Gluon Plasma
Science
Posted by timothy on Wednesday June 18, @04:45PM
from the no-cataclysm-yet dept.
Martin writes "A series of presentations and a press conference was held today at Brookhaven National Laboratory about new results from the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. The latest run was finished only a few weeks ago. The results are a new milestone in the search for the Quark-Gluon Plasma, a new state of nuclear matter. The data were analyzed on large Linux clusters at BNL and in Japan and France, with the biggest cluster of about 1100 dual-CPU nodes located at the RHIC Computing Facility. It's nice to see that results are out so soon after the data were taken. There were previous stories about RHIC on /., here(1), here(2) and here(3)."
Your Rights Online: Europe, Free Speech, And The Internet
The Internet
Posted by timothy on Wednesday June 18, @03:49PM
from the never-enough-busybodies dept.
drdale writes "Declan McCullagh responds at CNET.com to a proposal by the Council of Europe to require Internet sites to publish replies by individuals whom the sites criticize. This would apply to all web sites, apparently, including blogs. Per McCullagh, the Council's proposals do not have the force of law, but often serve as the basis for new laws." Imagine the chilling effect if McCullagh's own politechbot and similar sites had to follow such rules.
Handspring Shows Treo 600 Smartphone at CeBIT
Handhelds
Posted by timothy on Wednesday June 18, @02:51PM
from the many-buttons dept.
securitas writes "Handspring unveiled its final product before being acquired by Palm: the Treo 600. It runs Palm OS 5.2 on a Texas Instruments ARM processor with 32MB of RAM, has a 160 x 160 color display, comes in GSM and CDMA versions, includes a digital camera plus various camera applications and supports Good Technology's Goodlink e-mail software, competition to RIM's BlackBerry. Of course it also comes with a keyboard, SMS capability, MP3 player, Web browser and Secure Digital/MMC memory-card expansion slot. Measuring 4.41 inches x 2.26 inches x 0.87 (LxWxD) and weighing about 6 ounces, analysts say that the Treo 600 is what clinched Palm's takeover of Handspring. The only problem that they forsee is a seriously crowded market for PDA/mobile phone combinations. Availability for the Treo 600 is this fall. Images at eWeek, SFGate or Reuters. Streaming movies from Handspring (QuickTime dial-up 56k| QuickTime dsl/cable 300k)." Reader Michael Ducker points out this longer article at TreoCentral as well.
Your Rights Online: Using Closed Standards To Pay For Open Ones
GNU is Not Unix
Posted by timothy on Wednesday June 18, @01:59PM
from the compound-public-interest dept.
An anonymous reader points to a story at NewsForge, writing "EGOVOS analyzes the recently passed South African OSS plan and proposes a great way to fund Open Source education and development until companies comply with open standards. Microsoft pays a 10% penalty until their products comply with open standards. That would be billions of dollars to Open Source to compensate for an unlevel playing field until it is leveled. All the policy guidelines for governments are worth reading. This looks like a workable plan from a credible group." Reader johndiii clarifies: "From what I have been able to see, the strategy document is 'proposed,' not 'recently passed,' and is not yet official policy of the South African government."
Dynamic HTML: The Definitive Reference (2nd Ed.)
Programming
Posted by timothy on Wednesday June 18, @01:05PM
honestpuck writes "Many years ago I learnt my AppleScript skills from a book by a gentleman by the name of Danny Goodman and I was happy to find him tackling the subject of dynamic HTML in "Dynamic HTML: The Definitive Reference". Indeed this is the second edition and seems supremely up to date." Read on for the rest of honestpuck's review.
Dynamic HTML: The Definitive Reference (2nd Ed.)
author Danny Goodman
pages 1343
publisher O'Reilly
rating 9
reviewer Tony Williams
ISBN 0596003161
summary Truly definitive reference for a huge topic
Goodman has tackled a complex subject. With changing standards and even quicker changing browser compatibility it can be a nightmare trying to get a dynamic web site working across disparate browsers and operating systems. A guide that tells you exact syntax and exact compatibility can be invaluable, but is only as good as the research behind it, an area where I cannot fault Goodman.
This volume covers XHTML, CSS and DOM with a large smidgeon of JavaScript. It's not an easy book to get into and consume in large chunks as it does little hand holding but as I was prepared to knuckle down and work at the topics (with much help from various web sites such as CSS Zen Garden) I found it perfect for me. Goodman has recently released JavaScript & DHTML Cookbook which I have found to be a marvelous volume to assist the process of understanding these technologies, though I am still looking for a good, up to date tutorial on CSS (recommendations welcome).
The target audience would be best summed up as those who have done a fair amount of HTML hand coding and some work in dynamic HTML. The book also adds that you should have "the basics of client-side scripting in JavaScript" and I would agree, when I first acquired this book my JavaScript skills were exceptionally primitive (mainly at the 'plug in example' stage) and found the latter sections of this book heavy going and not much help; now that I am a better JavaScript programmer I find these parts much easier to understand and use.
The book is divided into four parts, 'Applying Dynamic HTML,' 'Dynamic HTML Reference,' 'Cross References,' and 'Appendixes'. I found the first part particularly helpful when converting my old site across to a more dynamic CSS-based site as it helps with various strategies for making sure your content works across browsers and various methods for making sure that visitors with older browsers and search engines can still retrieve valid pages. Goodman's approach of increasing complexity through this part also suited a movement from a straight HTML site to one using XHTML and CSS. This is also where Goodman's writing can shine: it's an excellent guide to all the technologies and acronym soup. The appendices are marvelous, from 'A,' a list of colour names with their RGB value, through a list of character entities to a 50-page list of all HTML tags, their attributes and if they are supported in the two HTML 4 and three XHTML 1 standards.
The reference parts are well structured with extensive notes on browser support and which particular standard (DOM 1, DOM 2, CSS 1, CSS 2, or none) the tag or attribute comes from. For example, in the DOM section the reference gives you the object name, which versions of Navigator and Explorer support it, the DOM version (if any), a short explanation, then an object reference example, list of properties, methods and event handlers. For each of the properties it gives an example, the type and if it is read-only or read/write. For methods it gives the return value and parameters. This sort of attention to fine detail is taken throughout the book. You end up with a book 1343 pages long and a 51 page index. Goodman mentions in his preface that the book now encompasses 'more than 15,000 unique instances of properties, methods and event handlers,' a figure I'd believe.
O'Reilly have their usual page for this book that includes a sample chapter in PDF, the Index, Table of Contents and an Errata page. There are few Errata and only one in the code examples. Speaking of examples, you can download the complete set of code examples from the book.
There is also a page at O'Reilly for the author, Danny Goodman with links to some excellent articles and book excerpts on dynamic HTML and JavaScript.
I found this a hard book to review, as are most references. The questions I asked were: one, Does the book cover all the material?; two, Is it correct?; three, Is it easy to find the entry you want? and four, Are the entries laid out in an easy to understand manner? In these criteria this volume rates well, with the added bonus of some good material in the first section for understanding the nuances of dynamic HTML in a multiple browser, multiple operating system world.
If you are doing a lot of work in dynamic HTML then this book is probably an essential. While I don't consult it every time I start working on HTML when I run into trouble it is the first place I turn to make sure my syntax and browser compatibility are straight. This book ain't cheap, and it ain't small but I'd recommend it for your desk if you're working with web sites.
Hans Reiser Speaks Freely About Free Software Development
Programming
Posted by Roblimo on Wednesday June 18, @12:10PM
from the burn-your-ties-and-suits! dept.
Okay, here are Hans Reiser's answers to your questions about ReiserFS, starting and managing (and publicizing) a free software project, earning a living writing free software, and the good and bad points of being considered somewhat of a curmudgeon. As a free bonus, Hans adds a little insight into the politics of Linux kernel development, as in what gets accepted and what doesn't. Good stuff!
1) Guideposts? - by TopShelf
Having obtained financing for the project, how does that impact the future direction of development? How do you balance the interests of developers, users and sponsors to choose which updates to pursue?
Hans:
There will always be more features that I would like to implement than I can implement. Users and sponsors for the most part want good things to be added, and it is really not so bad to first implement the features that someone is willing to pay for, and hope that in a few years someone else will pay for other features. I take a 30 year perspective on the project, and I have as my final objective the elimination of reasons to not use the filesystem as the unifying namespace of the operating system. That makes for quite a lot of features that I am willing to add.;-)
There is an common situation though where pressure from sponsors is severely negative, and that is when they want a quick hack that meets their needs but lacks elegance. It is not usually the features they want that are wrong, it is the timeframe they want them in and the shortcuts they expect to be made to meet that timeframe. This happened with ACLs and extended attributes for instance. I turned away 4 different sponsors for ACLs before I was lucky enough to find DARPA.
All of the commercial sponsors wanted some quick hack that would not be consistent with the semantics I am evolving ReiserFS towards, and would leave us with unwanted additional primitives. To DARPA I proposed that filesystem designers were not providing security researchers with the right infrastructure that they needed, and this lack of the right infrastructure was leading to inelegant hacks. For instance, I argued that there was no need for extended attributes, that instead there was a need for *files* that
1. were efficiently accessed many at a time (new system call that reads and writes many files in one call)
2. were accessed atomically (transactions infrastructure)
3. had constraints on their allowed values not just who can write to them
4. inherit some contents/metadata from other files/directories (note that streams share a common metadata)
5. could be made invisible to readdir
6. could be both files and directories depending on whether you accessed them as files or directories
7. could be implemented via a rich plugin infrastructure that allowed one to compose new plugins by selecting methods from already existing plugins, and only writing from scratch that which was truly unique to the plugin
8. efficient storage of small files (V3 was suffering a performance loss when tails were turned on (that is, when small files are packed several to a block) that V4 cures)
You can probably imagine small appliance vendors not being willing to wait 18 months and spend lots of money when all they want is for ACLs to work well enough that they can sell a samba server, yes?
With DARPA, if you advance the field of security research by developing along an angle the proposal reviewers thought was interesting, it is enough to get the funding. It is easy to think that private industry is sufficiently well motivated to fund long-term research, but unfortunately long-term research tends to benefit a lot more than just its creators and funders, and only the government funds work whose benefits will be mostly diffused throughout society. Or at least that is one theory to explain what happens. The observed reality is that venture capital does not fund long term research, persons wanting to do long term research mostly must pursue government funding, and the readers are encouraged to suggest other explanations of that if they have them.
I would be curious to know if privately held companies without plans to go public (such as Namesys) generally tend towards more long term research. Surely society needs long term research.;-)
DARPA is really quite excellent to work for. Having the right customer is very important to the development of a product, and I learned an enormous amount about serious approaches to security that I would never have learned without participating in their environment. Their accounting requirements are exacting, but it all has a reason, and for each requirement you can easily imagine the taxpayer being abused by someone without it. Actually I was a bit reassured as a taxpayer about how the DoD spends our money by seeing them in action, and being a small company we learned a lot about generally good professional accounting practices by adopting their requirements.
2) Good business planning - by mao che minh
Did you embark on this project in hopes of making a profitable business? It certainly seems that way, considering that you went looking for sponsorship and even planned pay-per-incident support, showing that you were prepared to work the whole "support revenue" angle.
Now you just need to hire someone to desire a modern, more "commercially pleasing" website. =)
Hans:
We make enough from pay per incident at www.namesys.com to support 1/4 of a programmer, and monitoring all requests to ensure that a professional response is always given consumes some of my time. This revenue is steadily growing though, but since we make so little money from it we don't bother with trying to charge a lot ($25 currently), instead we just hope that word of mouth will make it continue to grow, and maybe in a few years it will become something more significant. I think we were key to deflating some of the excessive per incident support rates that were out there for Linux, and this is good, because who can afford $250 to be told how to make Xwindows work?
Where I had originally planned to make money was by using Linux as a market sampling methodology while selling to OS vendors. That a bunch of hackers who had written software I used myself would get to use it for free was ok with me, and a product that was used by the OS vendor's engineers at home would be an easier sell I thought.
Unfortunately, paying money just to catch up to Linux does not seem to excite OS vendors, even if in reality it is very important that they do so. It is theoretically irrational but reality real that the proprietary OS vendors have not yet bought a license.
Instead, I have sold to storage appliance startups who need a code base to start from, and this has been slightly more than half of our income.
We have only sold one priority support contract (this is where you have the right to wake us up and you pay in proportion to the amount of hardware you have), but we sold it to Lycos, and they keep doubling their usage of ReiserFS every year and increasing the contract accordingly. They have been very happy with the support we provided. This one contract is much larger than all our pay per incident fees combined, and thanks much to Lycos for being a customer.
It would be nice if I could sell some government a nice ReiserFS support contract....
Many users don't realize it, but we don't make a lot of money here at Namesys, the programmers are very much overdue for pay raises, and there are many good people I can't hire because we have no funds for it. Hopefully this will change though as ReiserFS increases its technical lead over other filesystems with time. Reiser4 is going to give us some very compelling performance and security advantages, and we will be the easiest filesystem to hack on thanks to the plugin infrastructure. That infrastructure is really going to accellerate development by a lot, and provide us with a compelling competitive advantage. It is interesting to watch Nikita casually toss together a couple of plugins in an afternoon when it suits his whimsy. We can already see how much easier it is going to make doing the semantic enhancements we have planned, and then once we have the semantic enhancements out there and in use, performance will no longer be the primary decision point for users.
As for the website, by "commercially pleasing" I assume you mean using bland and uninteresting graphics, and corporately styled, with lots of insincerity everywhere.;-) Forgive me if I read too much into your comment, but you would not be alone if I read you correctly.
It is important to be true to oneself. You should maybe understand that some years ago I put the suit my mother bought me into the fireplace along with all my ties. If a restaurant requires a suit and tie, I just don't go there, it is not for the likes of me. If you need some corporately commercial justification for our website design, then let it be that I am willing to be cool and appealing to the younger generation, etc., instead of bland. If a pedagogical justification will work for you, then let me point out that military manuals with their cartoon based approach are far more effective in engaging the reader than the pedagogical techniques employed by most college textbooks. The military is more advanced in its pedagogical technique than the university system, which is really rather amusing, and I think it is due to the greater pretentiousness of universities in this matter.
3) Versioning - by tjansen
Beside the finding and organizing files, the biggest problem for desktop users today is probably that changes on the file system are not recoverable. It is easy to accidentally overwrite a file and lose your work, and the only only sane way to solve these kinds of problems would be to make it possible to revert changes.
Several research systems have been created, like the Elephant File System, but none of them made it into the mainstream free and commercial operating systems. Are there any specific reasons why nobody offers recovery (high complexity in implementation, very bad effect on performance, etc) or is it just because FS designers don't see the need for it?
Hans:
Actually, there is a version control filesystem called Clearcase that costs thousands of dollars per seat. (If I wanted to make more money, I could return to working as a Clearcase sysadmin --- there are some jobs that pay very well because nobody wants to do them.;-) ) Clearcase was written a bit too quickly, and its performance sucks as a result (though I am told that has improved since I left that field). If it used Reiser4 as a backend it would be a lot quicker.
Version control definitely belongs in the filesystem. Clearcase may have a lot of implementation uglies, but as a concept it clearly works. Filesystems manage files, and that should include managing file versions. Our support for transactions and compression should make it easier to implement version control in Reiser4. As soon as someone offers to sponsor it, we will do it.
Larry McVoy makes a lot of arguments about how the economics of version control means it has to be expensive. I think this would not be true if three things changed simultaneously: 1) it was integrated into the filesystem, 2) it was free, 3) it was easy to understand for average users. For 3) to be true it has to become as easy as, say, .snapshot directories on a NetApp are, for the average user. It should also be as well integrated into apps as version control is in MS Word. I predict that in 20 years version control in filesystems will be standard and expected by all users as a basic feature.
4) Filesystems and metadata by androse
In your Future Vision white paper, last modified in January 2001, you outline several very interesting ideas about metadata.
Several developements have taken place since; the extensible attributes of BeFS has been buried with BeOS, the database-like metadata of Longhorn (aka Yukon) may actually be a separate layer from the filesystem altogether, and Apple is also moving all metadata out of the filesystem to XML files shared between applications (see iLife package).
My question: What is your current take on the metadata debate? Do you still think the filesystem is the right place to handle metadata? Any predictions?
Hans:
Reiser4 required some fundamental breakthroughs in tree balancing technology before small files could be combined into one block without adding additional seeks for typical usage patterns. In particular it required discarding the BLOB paradigm, recognizing that BLOBs unbalance the tree, and creating a new more height balanced tree. (See www.namesys.com/v4/v4.html) It does not surprise me that the other filesystems failed to find these techniques; until we had benchmarks no one but me on the team thought this new stuff would work. I think you can reasonably assume that MS abandoned its efforts to put the database into the filesystem because their algorithms failed to deliver good performance. Without these techniques, extensible metadata causes performance problems that constitute a market entry barrier.
I should be careful in my phrasing here: Reiser4 does not support attributes, it merely supports files that you can choose to use for metadata, and its files have all the functionality you need for doing the usual metadata tasks should you choose to use them that way.
Oh, and BeFS is probably not all that dead, Dominic Giampaolo the author is working for Apple now, and since he is very bright and capable there are likely to be interesting things coming out of Apple in the future (probably not called BeFS though).
5) Researching filesystems - by ProteusQ
I'm going back to school this fall, and in a year I hope to be admitted into a Masters of Computer Science program. I'd like my main research focus to be on filesystems.
I'm preparing by reading everything I can find: I'm working on Tanenbaum & Woodhull's "OS Design & Implementation"; I've read "Design and Implementation of the Second Extended Filesystem"; Steve Pate's "UNIX Filesystems" is waiting on my shelf; and of course, there's the FAQ and ReiserFS v.3 Whitepaper at www.namesys.com [namesys.com]. Specific questions: what branches of math are useful in this line of research? Any books, articles, etc., that I haven't listed that are a 'must read' or 'should read'? Those who have succeeded in building a better filesystem: what have they done that I should also do? Any mistakes I should avoid? Anything that no one told you about filesystems that you wish you had known up front? And are there any special tricks (above and beyond mastering your subject) to getting hired in this field once a degree is in hand?
Hans:
I was never able to get hired in this field, so I am probably not the one to ask about how to get hired.;-) Hmmm. Oh I know one! Don't tell your potential employer that you are working on your own file system nights and weekends, and you will retain all rights to it, and you won't stop work on it once they hire you.;-)
You should probably read about Plan 9, and about namespaces generally. The literature on namespaces seems to be just about hierarchical namespaces, but the notion present in that literature that they should be unified is a good one. I rather liked Gerard Salton's book on automatic text processing. Ted Nelson's Xanadu project was interesting reading, and you'll want to read Codd and Date about databases. Mikhail Gilula's book about set theoretic databases is a good one.
In regards to math, study the design of new mathematical models. Study closure, and its importance to various models ranging from algebra to relational algebra. Understand why mathematical models were designed to have the structure they have rather than learning what those structures are, so that you can learn to construct your own models. I don't know of any courses that teach that, but it is what is important to learn.
Are you sure that it wouldn't be better to hang out in cafes and bookstores for 4 years, and at the end of it write some piece of a filesystem? Cafes, bookstores, and attending random seminars will educate you better, and writing some piece of a filesystem will employ you better.
If only one could get student loans for the purpose of hanging out in cafes and bookstores for 4 years I would have been so happy....
6) where next? - by wfmcwalter
Hans,
Reiser FS is already a pretty mature, stable, usable product. Once V4 is done, is there really much work left to be done on ReiserFS proper? Do you have a giant to-do list that'll keep you and the guys occupied for years, or do you intent to work in a diffent direction (SAN, networkFS, databases, etc.)?
(or perhaps you'll just retire to Portugal and play lots and lots of golf)
Hans:
V4 is a local host storage layer. V5 will make it a distributed storage layer. V6 will enhance to the semantics to where one can do semi-structured data queries. Whether V5 or V6 comes first depends on funding.;-)
A new model for doing semi-structured data queries was my original goal, and it remains my primary goal, and the storage layer was just a necessary prerequisite to getting there. I describe the enhanced semantics I plan at www.namesys.com/whitepaper.html.
7) Starting Large Free Software Projects - by unsinged int
When you began a file system project as a free software project, you must have known that (assuming it worked) it had the potential to turn into a big project. How did you determine how long to work on it as your own project before making the first release? I imagine there must have been a strong temptation to just get it "out there" knowing its potential, yet certainly releasing too soon would make it look unprofessional and thrown together.
Hans:
When something becomes stable enough for you to use it yourself without it crashing, and you don't know how to make it crash, you should release it (with lots of warnings). Fortunately, there are people who like to play with technology, and they will help you find its bugs while understanding that it is still experimental code. Each order of magnitude increase in the number of users will find as many bugs as the previous order of magnitude. After some number of years, if you are kind to your users and only do new features on a new branch, the stable branch will get to where months go by and there are no bug reports at all even though there are millions of users. It was this way with V3, and it will soon start to happen with V4.
8) Raising Awareness - by blinder
One question I always have with regards to successful (meaning funded, wide acceptance, large user/developer community etc.) is how did you raise the awareness of your project to get it from just a side project to something that it is today?
Did you use traditional PR techniques, or just through a community of connections?
Hans:
There are two things that work, and not much else does:
1) Word of mouth from users brings people from seeming nowhere.
2) Being open and eager to make a bit of effort to work with people makes you friends or at least allies.
Heinz wasn't able to get the time of day from the ext2 team, and he needed a resizer for LVM to happen. We said yes, sure, we'd be happy to do it. He introduced us to SuSE, and SuSE paid us $5k to write a resizer. That led to SuSE becoming a sponsor, and then once we were stable they made reiserfs the default filesystem.
Word of mouth from the users is the most powerful tool free software has. If you combine that with being open, willing to work with other people, and not being an exclusivist, things happen randomly out of nowhere that keep your business alive.
The only times I am not eager to work with people are when I think their technical direction is wrong (e.g. extended attributes), and this is sometimes the significant short term price paid for having clean design.
9) Rules of thumb - by realnowhereman
In your future visions paper early on you talk about Reiser's Rule of Thumb #2. However, I can't find Reiser's Rule of Thumb #1 -- what is it? Is it a secret? Does it contain the sum of all human knowledge?
Hans:
I think it was this, and when I write a book in a few years, I think I had better go looking through some of my old versions of that paper, because it used to have a lot more design principles in it, and I cut them in some ill-conceived effort to reduce the length for some reason I no longer clearly remember. For the convenience of readers I have included the entire context of it.
The Little Inconveniences Dominate What We Do
Do the small inconveniences caused by fragmentation of name spaces really add up to something that should dominate the design concerns for the name spaces of an OS?
Information Diffusion Rule of Thumb: The extent of information diffusion is divided by the effort required to navigate the name space.
Information owners tend to think of the cost of access as only subtracting from the value of their information. but it does much worse, it divides it. The economics are little different from what they would be if money rather than time were the cost, and since we all know that halving the monetary cost of a silicon chip more than doubles its usage, it should seem reasonable to the reader that halving the time cost of a piece of information would double its usage. Three seconds rather than 1/3 second of access time means that the same information will spread to an order of magnitude fewer people, be used by them an order of magnitude fewer times, and be an order of magnitude less useful to the organization as a whole. A common mistake by authors of information is to not realize that most of the total utility of their piece of information will be felt by those to whom its utility is either rather small, or for which its value is speculative to the person considering accessing it. The other common mistake is to not realize or care how much harm will be caused by others expending the time cost of accessing their information only to find it irrelevant. Since we all have limited lifespans in which to do our research, time spent accessing rather than reading information detracts from our ability to wander speculatively after information that might be useful. The quality of the name space design determines these costs.
Example of the evils of name space fragmentation at work: Every employee must create a job description, and then store it in the dreaded Hyped Document Storage System for easy access by all. Mr. B. Bizy just enters HDSS, types Bizy duties, and it pops onto his screen inside a full blown Hyped Editor with lots of features. Easy. Unfortunately the only editor he knows how to use is emacs. Emacs doesn't know how to navigate or edit Hyped Indexes. He takes a moment to swear at the paucity of features possessed by emacs, and then he spends fifteen minutes paging through the Hyped manual. Finally he figures out how to put the document into a file. He edits it using emacs masterfully to achieve a new level of job description ambiguity, and puts it back in HDSS.
His boss comes by, sees him working on his job description, and tells him to compare the list of employees, as entered into the REGRES payroll relational database, to the list of those who have entered a job description into HDSS, to make sure everyone is complying with the "describe your job" directive recently issued. Unfortunately, HDSS is a keyword system and REGRES is a relational system. Neither HDSS nor REGRES can use each others' indexes, and while he could write a program to compare the output from the two applications, he can eyeball the output from the two faster than he could write the program. His eyeballs grow tired.
In general, whenever Mr. B. Bizy wants to act on information namable within one application and operate on it with another application, he must extract it from the first application into a file (at best a pipe), sometimes he must hand massage it into a form that the other application can enter into its own database, then he must put it into the second application, do his work, re-extract it, possibly massage it some more, and finally put it back into its original application indexes. It is never a thoughtless read or save, though it is always tedious. Mr. B. Bizy would prefer to spend his thoughts on other activities.
This is why most of the time the employees of Mr. Bizy's company store most of their data in flat files in the semantically impoverished filesystem: the greater connectivity pulls them there.
10) On being one of those "outspoken" people - by salmo
Mr. Reiser, first off I have no complaints about ReiserFS (which is a high compliment), I use it on almost all my machines, except a couple are running EXT3 because they're not heavily used and I'm lazy at times. But thats neither here nor there.
You fall into an interesting subcategory of project managers or whatever you want to call them. I'll call it the "outspoken genius" category (even though the first word might be understated and the last is probably hyperbole). Basicly your work is technically interesting, applicable, etc. That's a give in. But there are quite a few people who have personal issues with you and your manner and usually cite some exchange or another. Sometimes this is the basis of an argument to reject the use of your work, which I think is somewhat silly. You're not the only one, and certainly not the first to be interviewed here.
So what do you think about this? ie. Do you think you made interpersonal mistakes that landed you here or do you think you've been misunderstood? Does it bother you? Why do you think people enjoy egging on folks such as yourself and then citing the moment you get annoyed with them? Do you think this question ever has a prayer of being moderated higher than someone following the method of the previous question?
Jeeze, I realize I just wrote an essay question in the style of one of my old Philosophy professors. You know the kind, here's a statement now write some stuff (I guess I'll give you a few ideas of where to go).
Hans:
I am not a genius, I am just never satisfied and very very persistent. I approach science like a blind man with a stick who is determined to fully understand what is going on. The difference between me and my competition is that I poke more than they do. I observe, find something to be unsatisfied with, try something to fix it, most of the time it fails and I try again. You don't see the failures because they don't get released. Why haven't other people already fixed the traditional balanced tree algorithms and made them effective enough for storing files? Because it was too much work, and they were smart enough to avoid the work, that is all. We simply rewrite more times and more deeply than others do, and that is how we get our results in our admittedly obscure field.
Now if you think about it, who wants to be around a blind man with a stick, someone who keeps insisting things aren't good enough and they need rewriting?
There is yet another way of looking at it though.
Linux is an ecosystem, and in this ecosystem there is fast growth vegetation and slow growth vegetation. The fast growth vegetation are the people who took what had already been done by Unix, and without changing its design they copied it while making coding improvements.
Then there are those who look at Unix, err, Linux, and see something just barely begun that needs a complete overhaul. These are the slow growth vegetation. Namesys is slow growth vegetation that got started a long time ago.
Now it is human nature that however a human being is, he is inclined to think that is the right way to be. There are those who think that design does not matter, and one should just make incremental coding improvements. There are also those who think that just coding without introducing fundamental new ideas is unimportant. Both of these sets of persons are fools. To say that one approach is better than another is like saying that grass is better than trees, or trees are better than grass. For Linux to prosper as an ecosystem it must have both.
Unfortunately the fast growth vegetation is actually developing a culture of exclusion, kind of like grass working to strangle the tree seedlings. Linux is developing more and more of an insider circle. Those who cannot code well enough to survive on the merits, must politick to exclude the threats....
A sad thing about this is that the most talented young security researcher I know doesn't want to develop for Linux because of the attitude of the inner circle to new people, and I can't really blame him, it is why I didn't develop ReiserFS for BSD back when BSD was....
Almost certainly he is not alone....
It is all very fine to discuss the sociology of herd formation, exclusion, and prejudice in the abstract, but one should never say that particular persons are making particular decisions on the basis of their herd instincts unless one wants to be truly hated by them and all of their numerous friends, and this was my mistake over and above the choice of what sub-herd to be part of.
I don't think anyone "eggs me on" though. I press released benchmarks of ReiserFS vs. ext3 the day ext3 was formally released at a conference, before ReiserFS had been included, and is it a surprise one of them was pissed at me? My competitors didn't and don't want ReiserFS in the kernel, and I wanted and want it in, and the result has all the dignity of a food fight. Filesystems that are less threatening nobody cares enough about to seek to exclude them. Many thanks to Linus, who chooses to allow healthy competition among the filesystems in his kernel.
If only the largest distro was so permissive....
You do all understand that while the GPL doesn't permit tying by license, distros have now moved to using threats of invalidating support contracts to achieve the market leverage they need to exclude competitors, yes? By doing this they can exclude mainstream official kernels from being used, exclude rival filesystems, exclude whatever might lead to less customer lockin.....
This is why you should try to avoid buying support contracts from distros and only buy support from those who agree to support you the customer doing whatever you choose to do, even if it is something fringe like using a kernel from Linus.;-)
They will tell you all this nonsense about how they can't support whatever software you choose to use. Buy better support from an independent and you won't hear this nonsense (www.Namesys.com/support.html is $25 a question and there are plenty of others). Most independents will support you using whatever distro you want, using whatever configuration you want, and they have the skill to cope with that. Sure, they will tell you that such and such gcc release on such and such distro was a lemon, or maybe even that the only reasonable fix for your bug is to upgrade to a recent release, but your support provider should never be telling you that you can only use what they sold you.
I am trying to convince the GSA that they should avoid procuring free software support that constrains the government's choice of what software to use, and they are at least considering the point of view. Why bother to have the GPL if you accept this loss of freedom?
Ummh, maybe these sorts of statements are why I am not so popular....;-) Well, glad to have answered your question!
We should all keep in mind though that there aren't any hard core greedy evil people in our industry. They are all basically good hearted people who chose trying to create a better society as their life's work at a substantial cost in personal income. Petty, bickering, overly impressed with ourselves, flaming, yes that describes most of us Linux kernel developers, but there isn't enough money floating around to attract any genuinely bad folks into our industry.
Not yet....;-)
--
Hans
Developers: GU4DEC Live On The Web
GNOME
Posted by timothy on Wednesday June 18, @11:23AM
from the no-credit-card-necessary dept.
Programmers and others interested in the GNOME desktop environment gather annually for an event called GU4DEC, the GNOME Users and Developers European Conference. This year, there's extensive live coverage of GU4DEC (currently in progress, at Trinity College, Dublin) on the web, including a growing online photo album, audio recordings and video streams, and presentation materials. (The schedule is handy if you want to follow along.) I hope there's a similar sort of integrated documenation / dissemination from the upcoming KDE developers' conference at the Czech Republic's Nove Hrady.
Mozilla 1.4RC2 Released
Mozilla
Posted by timothy on Wednesday June 18, @10:24AM
from the if-it-ain't-baroque dept.
levell writes "Mozilla 1.4RC2 has been released. It looks like the final version of 1.4 may be out soon. It looks good although there are some problems with java on old linux systems (discussed here). 1.4 will be a long lived branch that some distributors will base versions of their own software on (e.g. Netscape planned release, codenamed "buffy"). 1.4 will be the last version of Mozilla released as a suite, after that the switch to separate browser, e-mail etc. applications will take place."
Your Rights Online: Microsoft Files 15 Lawsuits Against Spammers
Spam
Posted by timothy on Wednesday June 18, @09:27AM
from the better-use-of-lawyers dept.
Popsikle writes "A Seattle Paper reports that 'Microsoft Corp. announced it has filed 15 lawsuits against alleged e-mail spammers in Washington state and the United Kingdom on Tuesday.' It states the tough anti-spam laws in UK and Washington allows ISP's to sue spammers. This could be a good test of the new anti-spam laws." There's coverage on CNN as well. Microsoft has picked a good venue for such a case.
SCO Berates Linus' Approach To Kernel Contributions
Linux
Posted by timothy on Wednesday June 18, @08:27AM
from the how's-that-dinosaur-ride dept.
Matthias_305 writes "The New York Times has an article about a new court document in which SCO critizes Linus Torvalds touting the 'inability and/or unwillingness of the Linux process manager, Linus Torvalds, to identify the intellectual property origins of contributed source code.' They claim to have got evidence from a conversation on the kernel mailing list in which Torvalds advocates programmers shouldn't care about patents. According to the article he stands by his view which is at least 'candid'." On a related note, BobDowling points to a proposal at The Inquirer ("Shutting down SCO's FUD machine") regarding SCO's claims. "SCO won't let people see the contested source code without signing an outrageous NDA but the article gives a mechanism for publishing appropriate MD5 checksums which allow code trees to be compared without anyone else seeing the code. This is offered as a means to locate the source of SCO's contested code. ... This mechanism gives a concrete procedure that SCO can be challenged to follow as part of the community's "put up or shut up" response. There would be no threat to SCO's claimed IPR."
Your Rights Online: SMS, SARS, And Censorship
Censorship
Posted by timothy on Wednesday June 18, @07:37AM
from the beware-the-email-centralizers dept.
angkor writes with a link to this article about "How SMS messaging in China forced the government to acknowledge the 'fatal flu in Guangdong.' And the steps the Chinese government is taking to make sure it does not happen again."
Addison UK Server Roadshow for Schools
Education
Posted by timothy on Wednesday June 18, @04:16AM
from the pluggy-but-fun dept.
NeTraverse writes "Addison UK is doing a Linux server roadshow demonstrating Linux at schools throughout the UK. This is a easy way for schools to see how Linux could be implimented in their school. Nice resource for those schools thinking about becoming enlightened. They are demonstating thin client computing using Linux and Windows-to-Linux migration software WinLin Terminal Server from NeTraverse..."
Developers: Tom's Hardware Looks At WinFS
Operating Systems
Posted by timothy on Wednesday June 18, @12:35AM
from the straight-to-the-nsa dept.
Alizarin Erythrosin writes "Tom's Hardware Guide has an article about the new WinFS file system. The article talks first about some of the problems and advantages with FAT[16|32] and NTFS, then talks briefly about WinFS. Here is the summary: 'Microsoft is breaking new ground with Longhorn, successor to XP. The upcoming WinFS file system will be the first to be context-dependent, and promises to make long search times and wasted memory a thing of the past. Today, THG compares it to FAT and NTFS.' Personally, I still have reservations about using a relational database to keep track of files. Unless they can keep the overhead to a minimum, I can't see it being as efficient as a file system should be."
Ask Slashdot: Working with ADHD?
Education
Posted by Cliff on Tuesday June 17, @10:59PM
from the keeping-focus-on-the-career dept.
Famanoran asks: "I've recently been diagnosed ADHD? and am now taking Ritalin. I've found that it helps me rather significantly, but I'm keen to try other things that may help. My question is to the ADHD'ers on slashdot: How have you coped with ADHD, and how have you found it affect your work performance? Do you object to having ADHD? Have you tried natural alternatives such as DPA/EPA (Omega3), 5-HTP (natural precursor to serotonin), and what were your results? Also - How do you find it working in groups of people, either as the only ADHD'er there, or in a group of ADHD'ers? Do you think that your ADHD contributes to your abilities technically, or is it a hinderance?" Previously, Ask Slashdot dealt with ADHD in children, now what suggestion do you have for the grown-ups, with the additional burden of a career, who find themselves in the same situation?
Apple: iBox Episode 2
Hardware
Posted by timothy on Tuesday June 17, @08:31PM
from the bits-is-bits dept.
coolgeek writes "According to this article on Wired, the iBox (original SlashDot post), later renamed to the CoreBox, has run into some trouble. Their strategy is to clone Mac computers using spare parts from repair centers. Evidently, the supplier of the repair parts was reminded by Apple Computer's Legal Department that supplying to a computer manufacturer was a breach of contract. Consequently, the supplier has chosen to stop supplying parts. More information on at the CoreComputing website, and they say the game isn't over yet..."
Your Rights Online: Sen Hatch Would Like To Destroy Filetraders' PCs
United States
Posted by timothy on Tuesday June 17, @07:32PM
from the don'tcha-wish-this-sounded-like-a-joke dept.
CBackSlash writes "Sen. Hatch is interested in technology to remotely destroy computers. But it would only be used if you're downloading copyrighted material, and only the copyright owner should be able to wield this awesome power, since having the feds do it would be against the law. Here is the AP story from Yahoo!."
Developers: EU Moves Towards Single European Patent Standard
Patents
Posted by michael on Tuesday June 17, @06:38PM
from the patent-leather dept.
theodp writes "A European Parliament committee Tuesday moved toward setting the first pan-European standard for software patents, but outlawed the U.S. practice of patenting business methods, such as Amazon's one-click Internet shopping. 'The European law sets the right benchmark rather than the looser U.S. system,' said the director of public policy for Europe at the Business Software Alliance, which represents 20 software companies including Microsoft and Apple. Amazon representatives in Brussels declined to comment on the new European legislation."
Platform Evangelism
Microsoft
Posted by michael on Tuesday June 17, @05:47PM
from the witnessing-for-the-faith dept.
An anonymous submitter writes "James Plamondon, a former Microsoft employee is writing a book on Technological Evangelism at Microsoft. He's posted the first chapter, "Evangelism is War." Robert Scoble, a current Microsoft Evangelist doesn't like the metaphor, but Micah Alpern is concerned Microsoft could use similar strategies against Macromedia Flash."
Wireless LAN Equipment Shipments Up
Wireless Networking
Posted by CmdrTaco on Tuesday June 17, @04:50PM
from the no-surprise-here dept.
MrBounce writes "Worldwide shipments of wireless local-area network equipment increased by 120 percent in 2002 from a year ago. So who are the current market leaders in this field?"
Your Rights Online: ICANN Stacks Board with Non-Critical Appointees
The Internet
Posted by michael on Tuesday June 17, @03:55PM
from the all-pretenses-of-public-input-eliminated dept.
Froomkin writes "ICANN's outgoing dissident Board member, Andy Mueller-Maguhn, has leaked the slate that ICANN's so-called NomCom (actually an appointments committee) has picked. The new public representatives are mostly a mix of incumbent ICANN Board directors who don't rock the boat, corporate executives, and ISOC members. Dissident Andy Mueller-Maguhn got replaced by a former member of the board of Deutsche Telekom. Dissident Karl Auerbach (who had to sue ICANN to get to see its documents) got replaced by the President of the U.S. Council for International Business. At least the Board Squatters are finally going to be history. Details at ICANNWatch." ICANN is an interesting study in how a ruling regime can usurp a democratic institution and turn it into an autarchy.
Robots Without a Cause
Hardware
Posted by michael on Tuesday June 17, @02:59PM
from the second-law-applies dept.
WG55 writes "Have you noticed that more and more technology is more ingenious than useful? Stuart Jeffries of The Guardian writes in his article Robots without a cause that much technology produced today will change our lives little, if at all. He writes, 'Our response to being bored and rich is not to discard our possessions and live more simply, but to buy more stuff to reduce the space in which we might contemplate our shame.'"
Apple: Mac OS X NWN Technology Demo Released
Games
Posted by michael on Tuesday June 17, @02:08PM
from the late-to-the-party dept.
h0tblack writes "At long last the Mac OS X demo of Neverwinter Nights has been released. We now have a torrent running to get the demo distributed and take the load of off the official servers (macgamefiles should have the demo soon). Download the BitTorrent for Mac OS X client if you don't already have it. Then grab the torrent file for the tech-demo from bytemonsoon.com. After downloading the demo, PLEASE leave your BitTorrent window open, this will mean that the load is shared amongst us all and more people can download faster."
Special Ops
Security
Posted by timothy on Tuesday June 17, @01:15PM
If maintaining the security of networked machines running Microsoft Windows is part of your job (but you need a touch of Oracle and UNIX advice, too), take heart. elwing writes "Don't let the cover title and camo look turn you away -- Special Ops is a no-nonsense guide to securing your network from inside attackers. This is one of the first books I've seen which covers this topic in detail. It doesn't skimp on external threats, but the majority of the book deals with host based security." Read on for the rest of elwing's review.
Special Ops: Host and Network Security for Microsoft, UNIX, and Oracle
author Erik Pace Birkholz, et al.
pages 1040
publisher Syngress
rating 8 - Worth Reading
reviewer elwing
ISBN 1931836698
summary Taking a look at securing your network from the inside.
In order to get the most out of Special Ops, I suggest that you brush up on your system administration skills, particularly Microsoft technologies. The book is aimed primarily at security and systems administrators, but several of the chapters are either aimed specifically at management (Chaps 17 & 18), or could easily be understood by them (chaps 1-3).
The authors write in a conversational, matter-of-fact style, including personal anecdotes and experiences where appropriate. The editors did a great job of "smoothing out" the styles of the different authors to give Special Ops a consistent feel.
One of the best features of Special Ops is the end-of-chapter content. These summaries include a "Security Checklist" which creates a nice list for admins to take into the field, a one-page summary of the chapter, links to relevant web pages, relevant mailing lists, other books to read for more in-depth information, a "Solutions Fast Track," and a FAQ. Some chapters list all of the freeware and commercial tools used/mentioned in that chapter. The Solutions Fast Track is a great section to hand to your slightly more technical manager explaining why you should secure a specific service. These chapter extras make Special Ops a great reference book, even if you never bother to read the rest of it.
Another great feature is the "Notes from the Underground ..." sections scattered throughout the book. All of the authors have worked in security for several years, and they share specific examples of attacks or other interesting tidbits they've seen over the years.
I had trouble giving Special Ops a rating of 9 or 10 for a few reasons. Even though the book is an easy read, it's a lot of information to digest. The subtitle makes it sound as if Microsoft, UNIX, and Oracle would receive equal treatment: not so. While there are 7 chapters on Microsoft specific technologies, UNIX and Oracle rate one chapter each. I would have preferred to see Special Ops split into 2 or 3 books, giving equal attention to all of the technologies.
The authors' bias towards certain commercial tools shows through as well. Granted, the majority of the authors are also Foundstone employees, but they should have given equal treatment to all tools. Explain the strengths and weaknesses of each tool and allow the reader to decide on the "best" tool.
All in all, Special Ops is a great book. It will definitely reside on my reference shelf for years to come.
Table of Contents
1. Assessing Internal Network Security
2. Inventory and Exposure of Corporate Assets
3. Hunting for High Severity Vulnerabilities (HSV)
4. Attacking and Defending Windows XP Professional
5. Attacking and Defending Windows 2000
6. Securing Active Directory
7. Securing Exchange and Outlook Web Access
8. Attacking and Defending DNS
9. Attacking and Defending Microsoft Terminal Services
10. Securing IIS
11. Hacking Custom Web Applications
12. Attacking and Defending Microsoft SQL Server
13. Attacking and Defending Oracle
14. Attacking and Defending Unix
15. Wireless LANs: Discovery and Defense
16. Network Architecture
17. Architecting the Human Factor
18. Creating Effective Corporate Security Policies
More Incompatible DVDs and CDs Coming Your Way
Media
Posted by CmdrTaco on Tuesday June 17, @12:33PM
from the don't-make-us-modchip-our-stereos dept.
wwwssabbsdotcom writes " More DRM is coming to DVD and CD shelves in the future. Looks like more incompatible discs for players around the world. Rip-proof and self-destructing seems to be the latest DRM craze."
Palm OS Wristwatch
Handhelds
Posted by CmdrTaco on Tuesday June 17, @11:52AM
from the but-can-it-tell-time dept.
countach writes "Amazon are taking orders for a new Palm OS Wrist Watch. It has an infra-red port, touch screen, back-light, stylus and 2MB of RAM. Price is $US 295.00." Because sometimes you don't look nerdy enough ;)
Your Rights Online: Microsoft Backs Down on Windows 2000 EULA
Microsoft
Posted by CmdrTaco on Tuesday June 17, @11:00AM
from the step-in-the-right-direction dept.
nachoboy writes "After the fiasco surrounding the overly intrusive EULA for Windows 2000 SP3, it seems Microsoft has backed down a bit with the upcoming release of SP4. The section concerning automatic updates now states simply "You consent to the operation of these features, unless you choose to switch them off or not use them." The EULA then proceeds to list the five services liable to connect to the internet without explicit confirmation. A reference copy of the SP4 EULA may be found here. We can only hope for a similar move with Windows XP."
Plan9 is now Officially Open Source
Operating Systems
Posted by CmdrTaco on Tuesday June 17, @10:22AM
from the now-isn't-that-special dept.
DrSkwid writes "The OSI have approved the revised license for the plan 9 operating system according to attendees returning from this year's Usenix Bof."
SCO Amends Suit, Clarifies "Violations", Triples Damages
Caldera
Posted by CmdrTaco on Tuesday June 17, @08:38AM
from the whole-scoop-o-sco dept.
Bootsy Collins writes "This evening on C|Net contains three new items. First, they've upped the damages they're seeking to $3 billion. Second, they claim that by making SMP technology generally available through Linux, IBM violated federal export controls and thus breached their contract with SCO through committing an illegal act. Finally, they elaborate on one specific technology they claim rights to which IBM inserted into the 2.5 kernel series -- the read-copy update memory management features which went in at 2.5.43. Unclear is why SCO thinks they have the rights to RCU, since the technology was originally developed by Sequent in the early 1990s."
Linus Moves To OSDL, Will Work On Kernel Full-Time
Linux
Posted by timothy on Tuesday June 17, @07:45AM
from the send-linus-more-penguins-for-his-desk dept.
worldwideweber writes "With the announcement of the release of the 2.5.72 version of the Linux kernel came the news that Linus Torvalds will be leaving Transmeta for OSDL to work on the linux kernel full-time. The email calls this a leave of absence for about one year." Update: 06/17 17:19 GMT by T: As many readers have pointed out, the length of Linus' leave is not actually specified in this email.
Your Rights Online: Lobbyists Urge South Australia To Drop Open Source Bill
Software
Posted by timothy on Tuesday June 17, @04:53AM
from the commonwealth-means-what-again dept.
Red Wolf writes "The Age reports that South Australia has caused eyebrows at the Initiative for Software Choice (ISC) to be raised in concern, with the organisation writing to Premier Mike Rann over a proposed Open Source software bill. The ISC, by its own definition, is a "global coalition of large and small companies committed to advancing the concept that multiple competing software markets should be allowed to develop and flourish unimpeded by government preference or mandate"."
Science: Making Ice Cream With Liquid Nitrogen
It's funny. Laugh.
Posted by timothy on Tuesday June 17, @01:39AM
from the something-for-the-nothern-hemisphere dept.
JasonMaggini writes "Popular Science has an article on how to whip up a batch of ice cream in 30 seconds or so by using liquid nitrogen. Just the thing for those hot summer days. The article is by Theodore Gray, creator of the ultra-spiffy Periodic Table Table."
Sony Launches 2 New "Video" Clie Models
Handhelds
Posted by timothy on Tuesday June 17, @12:15AM
from the just-happy-to-see-you dept.
boss_ton writes "Sony is launching its newest Clie handhelds(NX80V, NX73V ), a combination personal video player and personal digital assistant, to the United States.Its already a huge hit in Japan. Amazon is reporting the launch date as July 11th. The NX80V is priced at $600. Here's the scoop on CNet. The official product page is here."
(Short-, Medium-, Long)wave Radio Meets Digital Stereo
Technology/IT
Posted by timothy on Monday June 16, @09:13PM
from the use-tubes-they're-smoother dept.
cryptec writes "Today shortwave radio will have some new life pumped into it as the German broadcaster Deutsche Welle will be the first full time shortwave broadcaster of DRM (Digital Radio Mondiale). DRM is a full stereo fully digital broadcast system. The quality of the broadcasts are close to that of FM radio. For samples check out this link." Akai adds this link to an article in the San Francisco Chronicle with some more information, like the involvement of the BBC and Voice of America in this undertaking.
Worms Going Further, Faster
Security
Posted by timothy on Monday June 16, @08:18PM
from the thanks-for-your-attention dept.
Major Byte writes "Rob Kolstad's MOTD (pdf) column in Usenix login; passes along a few distilled factiods from a CAIDA analysis of the 'Sappire/Slammer' Worm. When it was at full blast it was scanning over 3 billion systems per hour--a speed that 'a "better" vulnerability would have enabled infection of the entire internet in 15 minutes, a "flash worm" or a "Warhol Worm."' I think 'better' to mean 'able to infect across a lot of platforms.'"
IBM Responds To SCO: Business As Usual
Unix
Posted by timothy on Monday June 16, @07:10PM
from the long-walk-short-plank dept.
Newsforge is running a statement from IBM on its decision not to bow to SCO's demand that they stop shipping AIX. In a statement this short, there's not much room for weaselly language, but the even-shorter version is this: "IBM's Unix license is irrevocable, perpetual and fully paid up. It cannot be terminated."
Hydrodemolition Robot Crushes With Water
Technology/IT
Posted by simoniker on Monday June 16, @06:14PM
from the supersoaker-with-extra-evisceration dept.
Roland Piquepaille writes "In 'Robot pummels roads with water', the Augusta Chronicle says that a hydrodemolition robot is going to restore seven bridges in Georgia. "It's a robot that destroys everything in its path with a crushing stream of water 15 times more powerful than a jackhammer. The robot looks like a street cleaner machine on steroids and is expected to begin use August 1 to resurface seven bridges on Gordon Highway from Walton Way to the bridge at the South Carolina state line." This kind of robot needs only two workers to operate it, instead of 15 workers for a jackhammer, is less noisy and more gentle for the foundations. You'll find more details in this summary."
Your Rights Online: UK To Hold Public Enquiry On Spam
Spam
Posted by simoniker on Monday June 16, @05:18PM
from the obligatory-egg-and-beans-reference dept.
feepcreature writes "Is something going to be done about email spam at last? In the UK, the All Party Parliamentary Internet Group is to hold a public enquiry into spam. These politicians seem to understand the scale of the spam problem, and they are considering a new global level organization to deal with the Internet, as well as new laws, inter-government action and technical solutions. But will more international bodies help? Would laws work?"
SCO Terminates IBM's Unix License
Caldera
Posted by CmdrTaco on Monday June 16, @04:29PM
from the lets-get-ready-to-rumble dept.
AKAImBatman writes "SCO has terminated IBM's license to use Unix code. SCO is filing for an injunction that will require IBM to cease all sale of AIX as well as accrue damages for each day IBM continues to sell AIX."
Science: Chinese Manned Space Flight Set For Autumn
Space
Posted by simoniker on Monday June 16, @03:48PM
from the vatican-city-next-on-launchpad dept.
brandido writes "According to an article at Space.com, "Chinese space officials remain on schedule for the first piloted flight of that nation's Shenzhou spacecraft. Chief designers and mission directors say Shenzhou 5 will be launched in autumn, reported the People's Daily last week." Between this, the X-Prize, and multiple launches of Mars probes in the last few weeks, it looks like the space race may be heating back up?"
Steve Jobs And Jeff Bezos Meet The Segway
Books
Posted by simoniker on Monday June 16, @02:59PM
from the jobs-and-bezos-meet-frankenstein dept.
deadwood writes "Ever wanted to know what Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos really thought about the Segway the first time he saw it? At the Harvard Business School site, there's an excerpt from the new book 'Code Name Ginger', giving a recounting of the Apple and Amazon bosses' first impressions of the device. Steve Jobs' gut reaction, quoted in the article: 'I think it sucks!'"
Truck Stops Get Wireless Internet
Technology/IT
Posted by simoniker on Monday June 16, @02:10PM
from the gonna-roll-this-truckin-convoy dept.
Makarand writes "According to SFGate.com, a company called IdleAire Technologies are building high-tech truck stops to provide drivers with air-conditioning, television, Internet access and phone service in truck cabs, so that they can turn off their engines. Trucks will pull into bays, where flexible tubes ending in vents for hot or cold air, and touch sensitive screens for Internet access can be pulled inside the truck's cab. There's also a separate wireless Internet option, where drivers don't have to pull into the bays. The basic services provided cost less than the fuel spent in idling a truck."
Ask Slashdot: Convergence of Biology and Computers?
Biotech
Posted by Cliff on Monday June 16, @01:21PM
from the extrapolating-technology dept.
Pankaj Arora asks: "This summer I am working on both Bioinformatics and Molecular Biology research projects at the Mayo Clinic Rochester. Being an MIS major with a heavy CS background, I've been learning about biochemistry performing polymerase chain reactions (PCRs) and RNA retranslation among other things. I've learned biology works a lot like computers; binary has 1s and 0s, DNA has nucleotides: A, T, C, and G. Binary has 8 bits to a byte, DNA has 3 nucleotides to a codon. Computers and biology seem to have a natural fit; information is encoded and represented 'digitally' in a sense. I was wondering what people thought about the future of biology-based and genetics-based computing due to the immense efficiencies that lie in nature. This has been discussed to an extent here, but there were some specific aspects that I feel are quite important and were not discussed thoroughly, thus I have a few questions to pose to the Slashdot community."
Linux Network Administrator's Guide, 2nd Edition
Linux
Posted by timothy on Monday June 16, @12:30PM
Dan Clough writes "I read this book to improve my knowledge of Linux networking, and in that regard it was a huge success! It was also an enjoyable and easy-to-read book. I am pretty much a Linux beginner, and know 'enough to be dangerous.' My existing home LAN consists of 5 machines: one running Mandrake Linux 9.1, one RedHat 9 (laptop), two Windows XP, and one Windows 98. These are connected to a commercial (Siemens Speedstream) router/switch and share internet access via a cable modem. All the computers can communicate with each other and share files, using Samba. The router also functions as a print-server for a laser printer, which the Linux machines print to via CUPS." Whether your network is bigger, smaller, or hypothetical, Dan's review (below) suggests that O'Reilly's Linux Network Administrator's Guide, 2nd Edition would be useful to have at hand as you build or troubleshoot. Read on for the rest.
Linux Network Administrator's Guide, 2nd Edition
author Olaf Kirch & Terry Dawson
pages 475
publisher O'Reilly
rating 8/10
reviewer Dan Clough
ISBN 1565924002
summary How to get your machines talking amongst themselves.
This book cleared up many questions I had, enabling my home network to run more efficiently and securely. For example, I learned about many options that can be adjusted in the kernel configuration to allow building a customized kernel which is optimized for your system and needs. This took me one step closer to being ready for my first attempt at compiling my own kernel. I also learned about and implemented some changes to my DNS configuration (improvements to /etc/hosts and /etc/resolv.conf), which resulted in faster name resolutions for web browsers and file managers. I found the information to be detailed enough so that I got what I needed, but not so overwhelming as to turn off my interest level. Another positive note was that the descriptions and examples given throughout the book are "distribution-neutral." I'm using Mandrake 9.1 and RedHat 9, and the configuration file instructions matched up perfectly with both filesystem structures. I believe they would also apply directly to other mainstream distributions, or be easily adapted to slightly different locations.
The book covers some history of networking, and explains the TCP/IP protocol in great detail. Issues covered include IP addressing/subnetting, name resolution, routing, kernel considerations, and drivers. The next several chapters discuss how to configure many kinds of networking hardware and software, such as ethernet, serial/SLIP/PPP, and NIS/NFS. There were great examples of the configuration files that require editing, with understandable explanations of why you were doing it. A make-believe small business is used as an example throughout the book, as they build and expand their corporate network and integrate with other branches of the company.
The next section covered how to set up a firewall/router, again with great example configuration files and scripts. This part went into just the right amount of detail, and included discussion on packet filtering, firewall testing, IP packet accounting, and NAT/masquerading. I'd say I got the most amount of useful knowledge from this section, and will refer to it many times again when I get around to building a router for the home LAN. I now feel that I have enough knowledge to replace my LAN's commercial router with an older computer I have laying around, running Linux with a customized iptables firewall. The IP/packet logging and accounting procedures I now understand will make me feel much more comfortable with what's going on in my network, and the security issues involving the internet interface.
There are several chapters dedicated to setting up and understanding various network services that you may with to install and administer. These include email server/client, UUCP/Usenet news, NNTP and INN, and DNS. There are excellent diagrams, tables, and examples throughout the book. If there was one area I would have liked to have seen addressed (maybe in the next edition?), it would be to have at least an introductory chapter addressing the use of Samba, as it is a common, easy method of integrating a Linux network with Windows computers. Overall I was very pleased with the book, and would recommend it to anyone interested in Linux networking. It has something for everyone, at all skill levels. The table of contents and index are excellent, and you can find exactly what you're looking for very quickly. Additionally, the book offers an excellent list of other reference books, websites, newsgroups, and user groups to assist with getting more in-depth information. I'd like to extend a "well done" to the authors, and to O'Reilly Publishing!
Interviews: Syllable's Kristian Van Der Vliet Interview
Operating Systems
Posted by Hemos on Monday June 16, @11:43AM
from the write-your-own dept.
Andreas Louca writes "OSNews.com has a nice interview with Syllable's Project Leader, Kristian Van Der Vliet. Syllable is one of the teams that raised off the ashes of AtheOS. They talk about the future of Syllable and the current status. "
TCP/IP Connection Cutting On Linux Firewalls
Security
Posted by Hemos on Monday June 16, @11:08AM
from the better-then-vasectomy dept.
Chris Lowth writes "Network security administrators sometimes need to be able to abort TCP/IP connections routed over their firewalls on demand. This would allow them to terminate connections such as SSH tunnels or VPNs left in place by employees over night, abort hacker attacks when they are detected, stop high bandwidth consuming downloads - etc. There are many potential applications. This article describes how a Linux IPTables based firewall/router can be used to send the right combination of TCP/IP packets to both ends of a connection to cause them to abort the conversation. It describes the steps required to perform this task, and introduces a new open-source utility called 'cutter' that automates the process."
Your Rights Online: Europe To Force Right of Reply On Internet Communication
The Internet
Posted by Hemos on Monday June 16, @10:18AM
from the you-must-be-able-to-respond dept.
David Buck writes "Today, the Council of Europe (an influential quasi-governmental body that drafts conventions and treaties) is to finalize a proposal that would force all Internet news organizations, moderated mailing lists and even web logs (blogs) to allow a right of response to any person or organization they criticize. This would mean that you would be required to post the responses as well as authenticate their origin and make the responses available for some period of time. This will likely have a chilling effect on Internet communication (at least in Europe)."
Three LindowsOS PCs Reviewed
Linux Business
Posted by Hemos on Monday June 16, @09:31AM
from the making-use-of-them dept.
Eugenia writes "Not one, but three LindowsOS-based PCs (in the value range of $199 USD) were reviewed online by WashingtonPost. A TigerDirect PC, the traditional WalMart/MicrotelPC and one from Nova Computech. The reviewer says that these PCs while are very low-end today, compared to PCs 2 years ago, are actually pretty good solutions for home usage. The reviewer found them lacking in the gaming (no respectable 3D gfx card included), expandibility departments and while he mentions that Linux-based LindowsOS is affordable, is not a panacea as it lacks in good USB support and other demanding areas of our modern times."