Slashdot Mirror

Sfing_ter writes "According to this press release, Mandrake Linux has won a contract to provide a secure linux solution for the French Ministry of Defense. Would this make the FMOD more secure than the USDOD?"

treebeard77 writes "BusinessWeek has posted Linus Torvalds interview ' The creator of Linux says "I can't be nasty" when leading the open-source movement since it's all built on trust and teamwork' "

AnamanFan writes "The Mozilla Foundation, with Novell and IBM, announced the formation to implement the W3C's XForms 1.0 Recommendation on the Mozilla platform. XForms is the forms module in XHTML 2, developed by the W3C. The project enables developers to deliver the type of next-generation, rich, portable web-based applications desired by corporate IT. Is this one step away from the corporate world's dependence on ActiveX? We can only hope."

DLWormwood writes "Secunia has recently issued yet another advisory about web browser vulnerabilities, this time concerning the use of frames in web pages. Originally discovered to be in Internet Explorer, the security experts apparently worked overtime just to make sure the same "flaw" is found in just about every other browser out there. Doesn't this notice simply complain about a specified design feature of frames? (Note their official "advice": "Do not visit or follow links from untrusted websites.")"

Psiolent writes "According to a recent article on Space.com, the universe is pretty big (156 billion light years across, to be more precise). Some recent research examining 'primordial radiation imprinted on the cosmos' has led to this conclusion, as well as a few others. This finding is particularly interesting considering the universe is only 13.7 billion years old (which would mean the universe has been expanding faster than light travels), but the article does a good job addressing this seeming paradox."

dacarr asks: "An associate on a mailing list I am on recalled an article (which he, in turn, does not recall), in which the author managed to reduce his spam some 80% by, of all things, using the provided 'unsubscribe' mechanism in the messages. This is totally counterintuitive to what most of us have learned (doing so was a spectacularly good way to actually *confirm* your address) - but perhaps this isn't the case anymore, based on this. Has anyone else had any luck as far as this goes? By following the aforementioned unsub links, said associate found a number of broken links and dead addresses (and one link that tried to create an attachment and email it out (which he stopped)), but after three days and 400 unsub links, he trimmed his spam levels 'from an average of 250 a day to just 40 today' - that's just around 17% of what he was getting. Maybe spammers are getting their act together and listening for a change." Do any of you have any anecdotal evidence to provide to confirm or contradict this? Have you been able to lower your spam volume by "unsubscribing"?

Chibi Merrow asks: "Matt Hartley in his latest GnomeReport speaks of supposed browser hijacker programs that are now targeting Mozilla FireFox instead of IE. While this is in a way cool (since that means the browser's now considered mainstream), it's also hard to believe. It doesn't help that his article is very light on details. Now there have been some discussion about spyware masquerading as valid extensions; but they require user intervention to install. Most people think of a browser hijack as something that automatically installs itself. Has anyone ever encountered an actual self installing browser hijacker/spyware program that has targeted Mozilla Firefox, or is this a bunch of FUD?"

Tooky writes "The BBC is reporting on a survey carried out by Jupiter Research which found that most consumers were only storing about 1000 songs on their portable MP3 players, claiming that ' The finding seems to be borne out by the demand for Apple's Mini iPod'." According to the piece: "Jupiter said digital music players with capacities of 5,000 songs will provide too much space for most people. It added that consumers rate other features as highly as the ability to store all the songs held on their PC."

Currawong writes "Apple has, as rumors predicted, speed bumped its line of portables. The PowerBooks now come in 1.33 and 1.5Ghz G4 versions, including either NVidia 5200's or Radeon 9700 video hardware. The iBooks can now be had at 1 or 1.2Ghz with Radeon 9200 video included. All can be purchased at the Apple Store. This complements nicely the recent speed and feature increases on the eMac range."

mengel asks: "So this last week, I repeated my annual ritual of trashing my scratch partition, making a FAT filesystem on it, booting Microsoft Windows(tm), and installing tax software to do my taxes. I had hoped, with the advent of Xandros, and of Linspire (formerly Lindows), that one of these increasingly important commercial companies would have talked someone like Intuit, or the Tax Cut guys, into developing this years tax software against Wine, so that it would also run on Linux under Wine as well as on MSWindows. So what has to happen before the companies who write Tax Cut and TurboTax will do versions that least run under Wine, much less native Linux versions? What can we do to help make that happen?"

"Tax Preparation is the only reason I boot MSWindows anymore, and each year it gets more arduous, as soon I'm going to be forced to upgrade the MSWindows partition to XP, just as a few years ago I had to upgrade from MSWindows 3.1 to MSWindows 98 -- so in effect my tax software costs me double, because I keep getting forced to buy a newer MSWindows upgrade every 3 years or so as well as the tax software."

il dus writes "The Christian Science Monitor is reporting that the Child Online Protection Act (COPA), which seeks to restrict adult content on the internet, will be reviewed by the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday. This law has already been declared unconstitutional twice by federal appeals courts because it is, in their opinion, overly broad and restrictive of free speech on the Internet."

mbstone writes: "A California appellate court has upheld [PDF link], 2-1, a Garden Grove, California ordinance requiring so-called 'cyber cafes' to impose a curfew, hire security guards, and install video surveillance cameras capable of identifying patrons. The opinion is a must-read; the dissenting judge called the law 'Orwellian,' and pointed out that 'even the government of Malaysia' was 'too ashamed to enforce' a similar proposal." It appears that the ordinances were enacted in part due to crime involving "gang activity" and to curtail school-children from using the facilities during school hours (unless accompanied by a guardian).

hcg50a writes "AP has a story on Yahoo about a theory that a blast of gamma rays from a distant supernova destroyed the earth's ozone layer, allowing normally shielded intense UV radiation from the sun to kill life on earth. The second-largest extinction in the Earth's history, the killing of two-thirds of all species, may have been caused by ultraviolet radiation from the sun after gamma rays destroyed the Earth's ozone layer. Astronomers are proposing that a supernova exploded within 10,000 light years of the Earth, destroying the chemistry of the atmosphere and allowing the sun's ultraviolet rays to cook fragile, unprotected life forms."

Many of you have submitted this, so this will be a condensing of the relevant information. WebfishUK writes: "The BBC has just released this story which announces the failure of the latest and possibly best chance to contact the British built Mars probe, Beagle 2. Given that Mars Express was designed to communicate with Beagle (unlike the earlier attempts with NASA's Mars Odyssey), this may indicate that something catastrophic has happened to Beagle 2." From Bromrrrrr: "[The] ESA is reporting that the Mars Express, which everybody was hoping would be able to get through to the poor lost puppy, has failed its first attempt. 'We have not lost hope yet to contact Beagle 2, but we also know that it has landed on an unforgiving planet,' said David Southwood, ESA's Director of Science." and I-R-Baboon adds: "The Mars Express mothership from the EU passed 350 km over the intended landing site of the Beagle 2 hearing only silence. Although nothing was heard, hope has not been given up yet, as scientists will keep trying until February, with more passovers of the Beagle 2's landing site on January 8th, 9th, 10th, 12th, and 14th." Additional updates can be obtained from the Beagle 2 homepage as well as from the ESA's homepage for the Mars Express. Here's hoping that the lander is only down, and not out.

Guppy06 writes "The Houston Chronicle has an article about how a 7000-turbine windfarm in Altamont Pass, California (the world's largest collection) has killed an estimated 22,000 birds during the past 20 years or so of operation, 'including hundreds of golden eagles, red-tailed hawks, kestrels and other raptors(.)' There are efforts to keep the operators from renewing their permit until they take measures to protect bird populations. To put things in perspective the article goes on to point out that the Exxon Valdez spill is estimated to have killed around 250,000, while the whole story can just about be summed up by one quote by a biologist: 'When you turn on your lights you kill something, no matter what the source of electricity.'" Killing 3-4 birds per day doesn't seem too bad. It's a shame that larger, rarer birds are getting killed, but... How many birds would die from the acid rain that a coal power plant would cause?

chadjg writes " Jim Tour, of Rice University says "Our research shows that ordered precision isn't a prerequisite for computing. It is possible to make memory circuits out of disordered systems." The article on www.e4engineering.com says the team has made "NanoCells", self assembled devices made from gold nanowires and organic conductive molecules. These NanoCells are the first devices of their kind to be made into working microelectronic devices, apparently." Yep. Let an untold number of machines try to create NanoCells, and statistics says you'll find the most efficient kind.

dr.matrix writes "Read in Heise (German) how Tholos Systems wants to create a huge outdoor 360 degree video conference between all european capitals, starting with London and Vienna." Pretty impressive technology, but the purpose is still a bit unclear.

epiphani asks: "This weekend the Womens World Cup soccer finals took place between Germany and Sweden, and a German exchange student, whom is staying with us, was very interested in seeing this game. We don't have cable television at home, however we do have broadband. Now, thinking an event such as this should obviously have a webcast stream somewhere, I went on a search so my German friend could watch the game. After looking for close to an hour, the closest thing I could find to live coverage was a text-based ticker that followed the game. Where is webcasting? Almost all radio stations now have live feeds to the internet, and yet a major sports event such as this doesn't have a video webcast? What is holding this back? The technology exists, and I suspect there would be demand. Are the cable and satellite television distributers preventing it to maintain their business model, or is there some technical aspect that hasn't been addressed?"

PoisonousPhat writes "NPR has an article on a new idea for concertgoers at the Aspen Music Festival. Dubbed the 'Concert Companion', the concept used a PDA (a Sony Clie PEG-NX73V for those of you that MUST know) as a 'listener's guide...that updates you with information about what you're hearing, in real time.' The concept seems similar to the audio headsets available in museum tours. Read the bleeping article here."

Cinematique writes "Reuters reports that a California-based lawsuit alleges the Redmond software giant produces software with little concern for security and that their products are highly susceptible to, "massive, cascading failures." Should Microsoft's software be treated any differently than, say, automobiles?"

avayre writes "Nintendo is to press the pause button on production of its GameCube consoles while it clears inventory of unsold machines. the company's president said on Thursday. But Satoru Iwata promised the struggling games company was developing a radical new product to be announced next year -- however he gave few details save to say it would be a departure from mainstream gaming consoles 'that will have a big impact on the world.'" My prediction is that it's just downtime until Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles ships. That'll help move those units that are gathering dust.

The Night Watchman writes "Italian scientists have produced the world's first horse clone, according to Yahoo News. Racing is likely to become slightly more interesting in the coming years..."

CodeHog writes "The WP reports about a student working on a PhD and how it relates to national (US) security. Very interesting that he has been able to get all this information. It raises some very challenging questions, should some of this information be classified?"

cdn-programmer asks: "I've got a couple UPS's that are now about 5 years old. They are MGE EL4 units - rated at about 450VA /280W. These originally came with a battery rated for 2x6V - 7.2Ah I've found an inexpensive replacement battery: SBS60 rated at over 50Ah and I've done a little mod so the unit 'fit' together. I've also done as much reading as I can on float currents and ripple currents and so forth basically covering the care and feeding of your UPS battery system. People can find some good information in the SBS web site and the specific data sheets are here. Look under the SBS section for the manuals. If people find alternative batteries there seems to be some excellent tech specs here. Having read these it seems to me that there should be no reason that I cannot 'redesign' the UPS to give it a significantly increased power reserve. The load is the same... the only difference is that a larger battery is used so this means that the recharge times will potentially be much much longer. So what? We are not interested in cycling the battery. Indeed the power here is quite stable and we get very few outages per year."

"Now - the SBS people have been very professional and have provided good technical engineering data. I haven't been able to find much data on the MGE EL4 and I wonder if this cheap little UPS has the proper smarts to take good care of my new battery? If it does not - then why not and what models/manufacturers should we be considering?

For instance, what is the ripple characteristics of the EL4 and how can I measure it? Since the SBS60 is HUGE in comparison to the original batteries (Panasonics - 7.2Ah - 2x6V) is ripple even something to worry about?

Does the EL4 charging system 'cycle' in a harmful way? I tested the float voltage levels and found that they varied from 13.89 to 13.42 over the course of a day. But this battery has only been hooked up for a day so maybe its stabilizing. The nominal float should be 2.27 per cell according to SBS so that works out to 13.62 for the battery.

Does the EL4 have a temperature sensor? This is something else that the charging system should do according to the SBS people because optimal float voltage varies with temperature.

Finally, I'm interested in doing a load test to determine how healthy by batteries are. I'm thinking that a very simple test can be a couple lamps - say 100 watt - that can be plugged into the UPS. Since I've never done anything like this before the thoughts in my mind are that all I would need to do is take a voltage reading say every 5 minutes over the next few hours and if I can find the proper curves this should yield enough data to determine the life expectancy of my battery.

If anyone has actually done tests like this it would be wonderful if they could tell us how to do this."

Slashback tonight with more on model rocketry (and metaphysical rocketry to boot), Metallica's music online -- this time voluntarily, the fall of Ars Digita, nmap's reaction to SCO, and more. Read on for the details.

How is this sanguine? peterb writes "Slashdot has previously reported on Eve Andersson's whitewash of Ars Digita. Her screed placed responsibility for all the problems fully on the shoulders of the Venture Capitalists, while ignoring the role of those that asked the VCs for money. Ars Digita's Michael Yoon has a somewhat more sanguine and less hysterical version of the same story."

I wonder if shoulder chips can be recycled as fuel ...

All them perls don't come cheap. dogma01 writes "It's been almost a year since I submitted this story on Slashdot about the Perl Foundation Fund Drive. With a new year there has been a new round of grants. Every dime helps improve the community and bring us one step closer to Perl6. Please donate here."

The largest model is actually the one that's currently in use. joshamania writes "I knew when I saw the first post about the 'largest scale model of the solar system' I should have piped up. The second post has driven me over the edge. I call shenanigans! The Maine model is not the largest, and Peoria, IL, my hometown, has had the largest model for many years now, the Pluto model (in Kewanee, IL) being over 60 miles away from the sun model. In fact, a bicycle tour of the model is organized every summer and reoccurs in August."

Still at maximum. Danta writes "As the QNX site seems to have received an indirect slashdotting, here is a BitTorrent link to the free version of the QNX OS."

And what's in your makefile? JediTrainer writes "Community backlash begins! The author of Nmap has decided to remove all support of the SCO operating system as of version 3.28. Quoting the changelog, 'SCO operating systems are no longer supported due to their recent (and absurd) attacks against Linux and IBM. Bug reports relating to UnixWare will be ignored, or possibly even laughed at derisively. Note that I have no reason to believe anyone has ever used Nmap on SCO systems. Unixware sucks.'"

Speaking of backlash ... Ransak writes "Speak out! Space-Rockets.com has started a letter/fax campaign to sway political opinion, but needs your help! This hobby enjoyed by thousands of future scientists and astronaunts has been put in serious jeopardy by bad legislation. Senator Herb Kohl was one of the coauthors of the Safe Explosives Act, who not surprisingly, is blocking an amendment to ease restrictions on model rocketry. Wisconson geeks, take note of your Senators actions!"

... and speaking of rockets: BuR4N writes "The x-prize foundation has decided not to accept an application from a Budapest based team called GCT (Gravity Control Technologies) due to their highly questionable proposal. GCT pitched a "propellantless propulsion technology" that quote "is capable of controlling gravity for flight". Here is the full story. It would be very interesting to hear from the scientific community if this is just silliness or something that eventually could lead anywhere.."

I hope these guys don't take up making ham sandwiches. acidblood writes "Following up on yesterday's story concerning ice cream and liquid nitrogen, it appears someone was keen to try it out, and this is the result."

I can't tell from the page when exactly this was made. Whether it was truly in response to Gray's recipe or not, this site certainly provides more amusing visual aids.

The medium is the message, or something like that. LineNoiz writes "There is an interesting article over at MSNBC outlining Metallica's attempt to take advantage of the internet as a music distribution medium. It seems their newest album 'St. Anger' has a code on it which can be used to access their "Audio Vault" where users can download MP3 recordings of live concerts. The site's motto? 'Download. Burn. Share. Kick Ass.' Is this just a flagrant attempt to recapture the interest of the thousands of fans they lost in their battle with Napster, or a genuine good idea?"

Readers may recall this interview with Metallica's Lars Ulrich.

stagmeister writes "According to the BBC, the Viking probes to Mars in the 1970s "detected strange signs of activity in the Martian soil - akin to microbes giving off gas," and that while those findings were not acknowledged as proof of life then, "in 1997, reached the conclusion ... that the so-called LR (labelled release) work had detected life." At the same time, the British are launching a probe to try to find life on Mars."

Babylon Rocker writes "An interview with one of the inventors of Ethernet." Metcalfe talks about the history of Ethernet as well as what he's been up to for the last couple years. (Not surprisingly, he's now a VC ;)

Plissken writes "Nasa along with the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency have launched a towards Saturn in hopes of obtaining vital data to help understand the mysterious, vast region. The Cassini-Huygens mission is composed of two elements: The Cassini orbiter that will orbit Saturn and it's moons for four years, and the Huygens probe will dive into the depths of Titan and land on it's surface. If all goes well, more than 200 scientists worldwide will study the data collected."

freakyfreak2 writes "Crossover Office 2.0.0 was just released. Finally can get Office XP apps to run. Here's from the announcement. "The changes in this release are as follows: Support was added for Photoshop 7, Access 2000, Word XP, Excel XP, and Powerpoint XP. glibc 2.3 issues were fixed. The setup GUI was dramatically improved. Tablet support for Photoshop was added. File locking and file change notification support were added. Scripts were added so that the technically inclined can have Windows applications open specific file types using Unix applications, for instance, opening PDF fies with the Unix Acrobat Reader. Many other cleanups and bug fixes were made. " Here's the homepage and here's the change log. I'm still waiting on getting Dreamweaver MX to run."

SlightlyMadman writes "Cornice, Inc. has unveiled a new alternative for small devices requiring large amounts of storage. With an expected OEM price of about $100, it blows the smaller microdrive out of the water (at least until this fall). The days of cramming bulky 2.5" disks into mp3 players may finally be over."

numbski asks: "As a systems administrator, I find myself moving from machine to machine to machine on a daily basis. I happen to be a FreeBSD/MacOS X nut, so on a given day I move from my 17" iMac at home, to my 12" Powerbook at work, to any one of my 16 FreeBSD Servers. That's not to mention any of the Win2k Servers that have Cygwin loaded. All of that said, there is a longing in me to have a simple $HOME that all of my systems use and understand. I've considered the Knoppix way of dealing with this problem using a USB key device from this previous Slashdot article, however I don't know how many systems I could get away with consistently having my USB device picked up and used correctly without scripting changes to fstab, not to mention the issue of choosing a filesystem that just about every OS will recognize: FAT32. Windows is going to be unhappy no matter what I'm afraid, as it doesn't understand symlinking. c:\Documents and Settings\$USER can't just be moved off to another volume. The one glimmer of hope I have is this article on ftpfs and webdavfs. Using these one should be able to set up a single, persistent home that follows you from machine to machine over the internet. I guess I would like to know how others have gone about setting up a mobile $HOME. I look forward to having all of my preferences, dotfiles, and bookmarks follow me around."

JoeCotellese writes "There is an article in Discover magazine about computer scientist/musician Tim Blackwell and his Swarm Music software. This software creates improvisational music based on models of swarming and flocking. The observation was made that interaction among musicians is interdependent and yet independent and this dynamic parallels flock dynamics. Computer generated music has been around for a while but according to his web site, this project was the first application of swarm theory to music. Sample MP3s are available on his website."

Corrado writes "According to this article over at Linux Box SuSE Is "Reevaulating Our Relationship" with SCO Group. There is also a reference to this article in wired about OSS developers rallying behind IBM. The best line of the article is "Eric Raymond called SCO's move 'deeply stupid...'""

Guppy06 writes "The Houston Chronicle reports that, seventeen years after the Challenger disaster, NASA is pushing forward its Teacher in Space program again. Christa McAuliffe's original back-up, Barbara Morgan from Idaho, is scheduled to go up this November. NASA intends to recruit more teachers in the future. Between this and rumored Mars missions, it seems new NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe is keeping himself busy."

Frank Buckheimer writes "The CES 2003 show in Las Vegas will give us some pretty nice introductions of some brand new products." Other submitters sent in news about a "Mini PC" the size of a paperback book, and a spiffy digital sound projector. mbstone writes "Bill Gates announced a line of MS wristwatches that receive email, stock quotes, sports scores, etc. by FM radio. Gates claims it's a 'whole new product concept that was completely incubated by Microsoft Research,' but it's really just a reprise of the Seiko MessageWatch -- mine became just a watch, sans atomic time, as of 12/31/99 when Seiko called it quits. Once bitten, twice shy. Has anybody proposed an open standard for such gadgets so that new wristwatch-data-service providers can enter the market when the old provider leaves?"

murky.waters writes "The responses to this year's Edge.org question have been published; basically, people were asked to imagine they were nominated as White House science adviser and the President asked them what are some important issues in science and what we should do about them. There are 84 responses, ranging in topic from advanced nanotechnology to the psychology of foreign cultures, and lots of ideas regarding science, technology, politics, and education. The responses were written by academics (e.g. Roger Schank, Marvin Minsky), journalists (Kevin Kelly), Nobel Laureates (Eric Kandel), and others (Alan Alda). Some of responses are politically loaded but the majority has either a more specialised proposal, or general remarks about our world. Many are absolutely fascinating: funny, insightful, interesting, hell even informative. ... One of the most public supporters of the Singularity 'religion', Ray Kurzweil, is a regular at Edge, and currently discussed issues range from said transhumanism to early-universe theories, and many other kinds of exciting and novel science."

tres3 writes "I stumbled across this item on Wired about Verio cutting off The Thing's Internet access after seven years of service. It seems that The Yes Men have upset DOW Chemical with their parody press release concerning a poison gas leak at the Union Carbide plant (now owned by Dow) in Bhopal, India, in 1984, that killed thousands. It was posted by RTMark.com, one of hundreds of customers (mostly artists and political activists) of The Thing, but has gone missing following the DMCA claims by DOW. Some European sites are now hosting the site here and here (slightly different). What really sent me into orbit was Dow's response to all of this. While writing this submission I noticed that I have become a victim of The Yes Men and "Dow's" response is actually one of their parodies! :-) The story is still valid but the only thing I could find that really came from DOW was the DMCA complaint (pdf) to Verio. To add insult to injury (and death (pun intended)) Dow has committed a reprehensible act, even for corporate America, by suing the survivors for ten years of income ($10,000) for protesting Dow's failure to clean up the mess. Greenpeace has set up a site for you to protest this action." We did an earlier story on this.

saddlark writes "internetweek.com has another article about spam and false positives. They've talked to Barry Shein, president of The World (the worlds first dialup ISP) - someone highly affected by spam. Quote: We're victims of crime, and nobody gives a damn. That's a nice feeling -- your business is being pounded into dust by criminals, and people say, `Live with it,' Shein said." ISPs have it pretty bad since their SMTP servers are often being hijaaked to send email that nobody wants. As annoying as spam is to us (113 messages so far today!), it's even worse on that side.

mkeke writes "In a post over at OpenBSD Journal, Theo states that he has written a spam blocker that works with pf and Spews. It looks darn cool :)"

new-black-hand writes "The A.L.I.C.E Bot-off has produced some interesting results. It basically involved taking two instances of the A.L.I.C.E conversation bot and pointing them at each other. The results show that the bot is not really that intelligent, and relies more on human input."

Maverick TimeSurfer writes "Four months ago, in July, a few fellow LEGO Maniacs and I got fed up with the fact that LEGO doesn't have a magazine specifically for MindStorms. So, we got together and set up The Lego MindStorms Monthly Newsletter. Now that we've published four issues and are working on the fifth, it looks like we'll survive for a while. Though the name leads you to believe that the newsletter is strictly for LEGO robotics, we'll publish just about anything original that's related to robotics, and we gladly accept submissions from the public."

acidblood writes "The distributed.net forum held up in SlashNET today has just finished! Lots of questions regarding stats, future projects and other subjects were answered. A log of the conversation is available here. Thanks to everybody who participated!"

Ever seen one of today's garden variety computers running on sea-going vessels? How about in other places where water, or salt water is a large part of the environment? Today's Ask Slashdot deals with 3 questions surrounding the construction of computer systems that can survive in such a harsh environment. What does it take to harden a PC to survive in such a place, and how much more expensive will it cost to make one? Are there other issues to worry about aside from the salt and the humidity?

To start us out, frostman asks: "A friend of mine is living on a sailboat, and would like to set up a nifty computer system. It doesn't need to be too powerful, but it should be small, rugged, fairly quiet, and cheap. He has a standard PII/400 mid-tower system he can gut for parts (400Mhz would probably be enough). He wants to do normal internet stuff, watch DVD's, listen to MP3's (with good speakers)... and he needs it to run on 12 volts when he's sailing. Any suggestions from the hardware gurus on Slashdot?"

websensei continues with this query: "I am about to become a full-time live-aboard on my sailboat. I'm in the process of selling all my machines and plan to spend about $2000 on a new laptop for the boat. I'll use it for work and play (movies, gaming, TV via USB TV tuner?) etc. Please share any advice/experiences relating to computing on boats or other harsh/damp environs."

And last, but not least, Alioth asks about fishes, not boats: "How about computers in fish factories? Not only do we have to contend with the room being jetwashed, but the atmosphere is very salty. I've been looking at stainless steel enclosures - what's their salt water resistance like, not just the stainless parts, but the parts that fasten the stainless parts together, not to mention being able to keep the computer cool as well (meaning it's got to vent somewhere)?"

MobyTurbo writes "In an article on BSD Vault a careful reader posts that in the latest Windows Media Player security patch, the EULA (the "license agreement" you click on) says that you give MS the right to install digital rights management software, and the right to disable any other programs which may circumvent DRM on your computer." So if you want your machine secure, you also want microsoft to have free reign on your PC.

slakdrgn writes "I'm looking into building my own set-top box using Linux. Unfortunately I've only been able to find Windows programs for this, for certian reasons (cost mainly, I like to stay legal ;), I can't go to windows for this. My current setup is a Duron 700 with 512MB ram and a TNT2 w/TV Out, how would you go about building your own set-top box? I've searched all around, would like to build something using a simple UI with a nice remote control. I've tried adapting some car audio programs with no luck." We've dealt with cases for set-tops, now what about stuff to put into it (hardware) and the code that will run on it (software). For those of you who have done this, what suggestions would you like to give for those who will follow in your footsteps?

texchanchan writes "The BBC reports that a chunk of rock, clearly from space, might have originated on Mercury. Analysis of its chemical makeup leads to this tentative conclusion. Specifically, it seems to have originated on something with 'a core of molten iron [and] an outer covering of silicon and aluminium that formed a basaltic crust.' This meteorite classification site sticks to the earlier theory that NWA 011 is from a Vesta-like source."

Mr. Slippery writes: "Several /. stories have discussed the problem of disposing of electonic gear laden with hazardous materials. The EPA, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Virginia, West Virginia, DC, and about a dozen corporate sponsors have launched a pilot program to collect and recycle computers and electronics. The objective is to collect data to "develop a long-term cost effective system to remove computers (including monitors & peripherals) and TVs from the municipal waste stream." (My car is now loaded up with five monitors, 3 old HP RISC worksations, several partial PCs, an old TV, and various parts and pieces for the Baltimore County drop-off tomorrow...if any area geeks are looking to scavange old gear this might be a prime opportunity.)"

Jucius Maximus writes "The configuration of base stations in cell phone networks has always been problematic because you can never predict how many phones will connect to which base station. And sometimes adjacent antennas will use the same frequency leading to dropped calls. Such configuration challenges may have solutions in autonomous computing. An article on C|NET describes how British Telecom is examining the development of fruit flies, hoping that nature has already found the solution to this problem. This technology could also be applied to 'threat-sensing' on computer networks."

Gerv writes: "mozilla.org are in the last stages of the Mozilla relicensing project (from [MN]PL to a [MN]PL/LGPL/GPL tri-license), but are still looking for a number of Mozilla contributors to ask them for permission to relicense. They want the help of the community in tracking them down. Have you seen these hackers?"

jfengel writes: "According to Newsbytes, some Windows XP users are finding random words inserted into their text as they write. The problem is caused by XP's speech recongition system, which is turned on by default by some manufacturers. It's listening to the random noise you get even when the mic is turned off. Kind of an insight into your computer's subconscious, perhaps."