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 sour