Slashdot Mirror

With his first accepted submission, aglider writes "A number of different science publications are reporting on a recent announcement made by NASA and Hubblesite.org. Quoting: 'A team of scientists [headed by Rice astronomer Patrick Hartigan] has collected enough high-resolution Hubble Space Telescope images over a 14-year period to stitch together time-lapse movies of powerful jets ejected from three young stars. The jets, a byproduct of gas accretion around newly forming stars, shoot off at supersonic speeds in opposite directions through space.' The report is also accompanied by a number of photos and, of course, astounding small movies. The complete scientific study, which dates back to 2011.07.20, has been published in the Astrophysical Journal (subscription needed) but is also available on the ESA's Space Telescope site (PDF)."

Anonycat writes "Michael Fricklas, a lawyer for Viacom, has an opinion piece in the Washington Post laying out Viacom's side in their $1 billion lawsuit against YouTube. Fricklas asserts that the DMCA's 'safe harbor' provisions don't apply because YouTube is knowledgeable to infringement and furthermore derives financial benefit from it. He also argues that putting the onus of spotting infringement onto the content providers represents an undue burden on them. Fricklas caps the argument by stating, 'Google and YouTube wouldn't be here if not for investment in software and technologies spurred by patent and copyright laws.'"

Kaal Alexander Rosser writes "The BBC is reporting that a doodle left behind at a Davos press conference given by Tony Blair, Bill Gates and Bono shows the writer to be: "an unstable man" amongst other things. The Gates Foundation has confirmed the doodle was left there by Bill Gates."

z4ce writes "It seems that Daniel Lyons of Forbes just wrote yet another article on the IBM vs. SCO law suit. Now, Daniel seems to seeing SCO for the liars they are. One of the choice quotes include, "What's the point of hassling people who make chips and set-top boxes? Don't ask SCO's top execs. They don't know anything about this stuff, remember?""

HardcoreGamer writes "The New York Times has a long article on Xbox hacking, why Microsoft hates it, and who does it (Google). 'Xbox hackers are exploiting Microsoft's business model, which is to sell Xbox hardware at a loss...' but Microsoft doesn't make the money back on software -- as it planned to -- if you decide to load up Xbox Linux. Where else can you get a PIII-733 with graphics and audio for $180? The reporter talked to the IDSA; Andrew Huang, author of 'Hacking the Xbox: An Introduction to Reverse Engineering'; a Manhattan exec who hacked his Xbox and said 'The reality is that if you could bypass Microsoft's operating system you would end up with a fairly powerful computer for less than $200;' and others. The article discusses the DMCA, modchips, the Xbox Linux Project and lots more. A good -- if long -- read. A shorter version of the story is at the International Herald Tribune. Best quote? 'Microsoft is a company passionate about innovation and creativity. We are also very committed to respect for others' intellectual property and we request the same respect applied to our innovations.'"

HardcoreGamer writes "PC Magazine takes a look inside Mythic's PC MMORPG, Dark Age of Camelot. Camelot, it turns out, is in Fairfax, Virginia where the company keeps 120 dual-processor Pentium servers running Linux for its 225,000 players. An additional 30 servers handle customer support. Mythic claims that it can handle up to 20,000 simultaneous players per server but limits them to 4,000 per server for a better customer experience." Also mentioned is the fact that Mythic's next MMORPG, Imperator Online, "takes place in an outer space being colonized by the Roman Empire."

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."

HardcoreGamer writes "An Oregon amateur rocket group, the Portland State Aerospace Society, plans to launch a Linux-powered rocket weighing 12 pounds to 55,000 feet at a speed of Mach 3 in September, Wired News reports. The rocket's onboard computer is an AMD 586 processor and a Jumptec MOPS/520 PC/104+ board along with a power supply, a PCMCIA card carrier for an 802.11b card to transmit data to the ground, and a carrier board for a 128-MB CompactFlash card for long-term storage. The flight computer runs a stripped-down version of Debian Linux, with the 2.4.20 Linux kernel. The group will present a paper (HTML | PDF ) on the use of free software in rocketry at Usenix 2003. The real question is whether their network card will survive 10 seconds at 15 Gs!"

Slashback tonight brings you updates on the future of Iraq's cellular infrastructure, the real reason Buffy is departing, Intuit and Macrovision, and more. Read on below for the details.

Macrovision, everyone's favorite killjoy. byteCoder writes "Apparently Macrovision marketing is trying to put a good spin on Intuit's plan to eliminate the use of Macrovision's DRM software for pre-paid copies of TurboTax (as discussed last week here). This reminds me of the classic Monty Python line: "I'm not dead yet!""

That's got to be some spin -- An anonymous reader points to Eric Hellweg's Tech Investor on CNN, which suggests that the backlash which triggered Intuit's copy-protection reversal may have cost the company $100 million.

Can I use my Go Phone there? An anonymous reader writes ""In a follow-up to the Slashdot article 'CDMA vs GSM in Post-war Iraq,' The Reg has a story about how MCI has won the contract to rebuild the mobile phone system with GSM. This is a good thing for the people of Iraq that GSM is being used, GSM is the world standard and several U.S. companies (AT&T for one) are switching to GSM."

Adding Money to Insult. Neophytus writes "Remember the 'Star Wars Kid' that waxy.org found a couple of weeks ago? Well after over a million downloads the guy has been found. His name is Ghyslain, a 15-year-old tenth grader living in Quebec. Jish contacted him and got a brief, but interesting, interview."

No unlimited copy privileges in jail. the-dude-man writes "As reported here A 19-year-old pleaded guilty to costing DirectTV for leaking information about the secrets of DirectTV's most advanced anti-piracy technology to hacker websites. As part of the plea deal, Serebryany admitted to copying and distributing 800 megabytes of scanned documents from DirecTV, costing the company $68,000 in investigatory costs. Both sides stipulated to sentencing factors that carry six months to a year in prison under federal guidelines -- assuming no prior convictions. The sentencing court can depart from the guidelines only if the judge finds that the proposed sentence doesn't adequately reflect the facts of the case. According to court records affidavit, Serebryany's adventures began when he found himself with access to some of DirecTV's most coveted technological secrets while working for his uncle at a document imaging company at the office of a Los Angeles law firm, Jones, Day, Reavis and Pogue. The firm was representing the satellite TV company in a lawsuit against NDS, the makers of the smart cards DirecTV uses to control access to its signal."

For every 11 discontented customers, there's one of these happy oddballs! RedWingsSuck writes "A few weeks ago, I asked /. users what they thought about the wobble my 12" Power Book has developed. Last week Apple Care told me that I could send my laptop off for repairs. I decided to drive to the local Apple Store, about 15 minutes away, and drop it off. They had my laptop for less than 3 days. When I went in to pick it up, they told me that it was sent in and the BC (bottom cover) was repaired. It doesn't wobble anymore, so I am happy. I was really surprised with how fast it was fixed. I didn't mean to sound like I regretted my AiBook purchase in the last post, and now I even happier."

Relax, it's a television show. HardcoreGamer writes "Buffy creator Joss Whedon responds to questions from New York Times readers on Buffy the Vampire Slayer as it comes to the end of its 7 season run. He also discusses the now-canceled Firefly and concludes with one of the key reasons why the show is ending: 'I'm simply too tired.'"

HardcoreGamer writes "Today ATI shipped its Radeon 9800 Pro 256 MB DDR-2 card in time for E3 and nVidia announced the NV35-based GeForce 5900 which will be available in June. Early tests seem to say that while nVidia edges ahead of ATI in specific areas, overall ATI still has the better card. The caveat is that the next generation of DirectX 9-based games (like Doom 3 and Half-Life 2, demonstrated with ATI at E3) will truly determine which is the better card. Lots of coverage at PC Magazine, PC World, The Register (ATI) (nVidia), ExtremeTech, InternetNews, and Forbes/Reuters. Either way, at $450-$500, serious gamers are about to get another serious dent in their wallets."

lotussuper7 writes: "This story at newscientist (free, no registration, unlike the NY Times) has some insight into the amount of RF you may be getting from all those cell phones people around you are using. Might be time to buy a cell phone jammer."

Rikardon writes: "Adding a little fuel to the ATi-vs-NVIDIA fire started earlier today on Slashdot, NVIDIA and Square are showing a demo at SIGGRAPH of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within being rendered in 'real time' (four-tenths of a second per frame) on a Quadro-based workstation. Now that I think of it, this should also inject new life into this debate." Defender2000 points to the Yahoo article. Update: 08/14 09:30 PM by T : Original headline was wrong, said ".4FPS" but as cxreg pointed out, .4 frame per second isn't .4 seconds per frame. Sorry.

Blind RMS Groupie writes "According to this article at EE Times, DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) is developing a voice/data unit for infantry soldiers based on multiple StrongARM processors and embedded Linux. The radios will link together in what is characterized as a "mobile, ad-hoc, peer-to-peer network that uses frequency-hopping technology to avoid communication intercepts and location-finding capability.""

stigmatic writes: "The National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA), which provides maps to defense and intelligence agencies, has sponsored the project to see if a Open Source can benefit the world of spying. It sounds like a joke to some that a U.S. intelligence agency may soon rely on free software to turn complicated data from spy satellites into detailed maps. But a collaboration between the government, private industry and academia may lead to just that with OSSIM, or Open Source Software Image Map. Space.com is carrying the full article."

buss_error wrote to us with a breaking news story from ZDNN. 26 states, with three not attending/voting have decided to move towards simpliying their tax codes. Why? So that they can begin to try and tax catalog and Internet sales with their applicable state sales tax. I think it was back in 1967, the Supreme Court ruled that you had to have a "nexus" within the state for the state to charge sales tax because of the patchwork of different sales tax laws. Catalog sales are much higher than Internet sales currently, but the states can see the phenomenal growth of Internet sales and want to reclaim some of the sales tax they are losing. The vote here doesn't mean as much as the actual decision they will make - lots of negotiation still to come, I'm willing to bet. CNNfn has a more detailed report.

Whaddya wanna hear? a) Microsoft's licensing practices, while never to everyone's taste, perhaps, seem to have mellowed at least a bit from the projected future of pay-per-reinstall. 2) The SDMI boycott you read about here lately has lost a key proponent; the reasons are unclear and so is the eventual outcome. iii) If Linux is too cool, BSD too smug, Windows too ridiculous, perhaps you need ... a truly infernal OS. N) Yet more proof that Carnivore and its ilk may be annoying and a threat to the average user, but hardly a sting to a wired criminal worth his salt. All below.

Frankly, this would have been just too silly. steveha writes: "Microsoft just changed their 're-imaging' payment policy. Companies buying computers that come with Windows installed can once again re-image the system hard disk without Microsoft demanding an extra license payment. Here is the official Microsoft document. Computer Reseller News had the story."

Burn baby burn. rpeppe writes: "briefly, you can download Inferno here, for free.

you might remember from a month or so back that the UK firm Vita Nuova obtained rights to Inferno, a next-generation virtual/embedded OS created by the likes of Rob Pike, Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie. Inferno uses many of the ideas from Plan9 but, unlike Plan 9, there are no restrictive hardware requirements - it runs as a "virtual OS" under Linux, Windows, Plan 9 and others, mapping the resources provided by the host OS into a standard form for programs running within Inferno, which will run without change on any platform running it (including on bare hardware, such as SA1100 or MIPS)

we've just made free downloads available (for any use) for Linux, Windows and Plan 9. the actual kernel is not open source, but the download includes open source for all the user-level code in the system (applications, libraries, etc), plus unix-style documentation so there's plenty to tinker with.

this is a system that is genuinely trying to address the problems that are "too deep for unix to fix" and includes all sorts of interesting takes on some of the original unix philosophy (after all, it represents 30 years of evolution from the unix original). plus it's a really nice environment in which to write genuinely (and elegantly) portable programs."

Taking the meat from the jaws of Carnivore. An unnamed correspondent writes "Found a nice article on the circumvention of Carnivore which details steps one can take to avoid big brother. Article is nicely written which has a strange reference to the NSA's Verona project of World War II."

Nothing here may be all that new or surprizing to those already interested in online privacy or cryptography in general, but if you ever need ammunition in an argument about the nice government versus slithering heroin-dealing kiddie-porn terrorists, it'd be nice to point out how accessable these methods are to all involved.

OK, who has what up their sleeves, and why? Fervent writes "Interesting twist in the SDMI boycott -- Don Marti's backing down a bit. Apparently he and Leonardo Chiariglione, executive director of the SDMI, talked and found ways to get along about secure music. The article is here."

I'll be impressed if the music industry or anyone else can come up with a high-quality music format which can't be effectively copied with a modicum of hassle. "Anything that can be read," etc. Thta's not about to stop them from trying on both technological and legal fronts. Of the two, I'll take technological any day.

maw writes "It has come to my attention that Larry Wall is also Weird Al! Go figure...:) " That explains a lot of things.