Slashdot Mirror

If you consider Niven's (and Pournelle's) self stated political beliefs and the current climate in Hollywood, I'd say he stands a good chance of royal treatment by Hollywood.

Thanks to the google cache... about two thirds down the page posted by "Jesper T". Had to use the cache because the direct link to my original search came back with a resource denied (original google search text: "Western in space. Kinda campy but did have its moments. Very memorable characters. Fanbase: Big enough to get a few movies going after its cancelation. Noteworthy:").

Maybe there, Google might be able to image it, because it sure can't on Earth.

I'm not quite sure I see the point of this, besides throwing HP a bone in return for having iTunes pre-installed on their machines.

You don't see the point? Then let me show you...

HP is the second largest PC supplier in the US.Apple, is not. I can gaurantee you Apple will ship more ipods in the next 6 months with HPs platform to sell from than they have for the last year. HP has a market reach that is far in excess of Apples, and is an entirely different demograph. Apples target market of young fashion nerds with fat wallets already know about or have ipods, but HP can sell ipods to people that wouldn't be normally reading /. or apple.com.

With this and Microsofts entrance into music sales, it'll be an interesting few months running up to Christmas.

an interesting little insight from a disgruntled staff member.

Top 5 things Best Buy doesn't want you to know

I should have posted this long ago. As a former employee, here is an insider's look at the top 5 things from the HT department of Best Buy (where I worked) that I guarantee they do not want their customers to know.

5. Barely legal bait and switch schemes. They push the limits of the laws with many of their flyer ads with some cheap product, like a 40 dollar DVD player to get you in the store, in hopes of encouraging you to buy something better, ie more expensive. That's the salesmen's job under any circumstance, so it doesn't change with these cheapo sales events either.

4. Open box items are usually returned items, not something that just happened to get opened in store, which rarely happens. I've seen many store employees try to avoid saying it was returned, in fear of losing the sale. Also most employees don't take the time to properly label the open box tags so you may think you are getting all accessories when you are not.

3. I've discussed this before, but here is more on this subject. As part of employee training, monster cables are drilled into employee's heads as a part of all applicable sales add ons from day one. In fact it is part of the "Total Solution" mechanism in place that all employess are to follow during their sales routine. Employees are told straight up that monster's products are superior, but never given any detailed reason why this is supposedly so. The employees I witnessed would typically memorize much of the fluff that was written on the package, on their own behalf, as a way to more quickly answer customer questions, preserve "expert" status, and eliminate possible reservations that the customer might have about spending more on something that was already provided in the box. In fact, this was often lied about. Employees don't like telling customers that zipcords come with their dvd player when asked. If they employees are forced into telling a customer, they will be quick to point how poor in quality they are in comparison to monster's products. One manager would actually say "The only thing (the customer) better be using zipcords cords for is to hold their trunk shut after they've just bought something". AR cables and recoton cables are seen as a failure of doing a proper sale at Best Buy and used only as a last ditch effort to get the customer to buy a little something extra. If an employee doesn't ask you "do you want cables, an antenna, blank discs, tapes, etc. with that?" when you are buying an applicable product, then they are simply not doing their job as instructed.

2. Employee know how. There was a recent Home Theater magazine article on the knowledge of Circuit City, Ultimate Electronics, and Best Buy employees. The rag was trying to determine how well each store knew their stuff. I knew what the results of this absolutely retarded article were going to be before I even began reading it, but as a former employee I read it anyway for curiousity's sake. The results, of course, depended on the individual knowledge of the employee that the writers happened to speak to.

Best Buys's policy is for each employee to know as much as they can about the products they sell in their primary area of responsibility. Yet, in order to do so they have to research the product almost entirely on their own time. During slow times throughout the day when you would think an employee could do a little studying, typically this is when the merchandising manager obegins running around being his/her most concerned about the store's cleanliness and the straighntess of the product on the shelves etc., so employees rarely get to know their products that well and also because of the constant product turnover. Also keep in mind when selling something such as a DVD player you can

Since aeiveos.com seems to have burst in flames here is the cached page from Google.

The Whitehouse has announced President George W Bush will be taking less holidays

This rock is HUGE.

The BBC article linked to gives the size as that of "a small island", this other BBC news article gives it as "the size of the Isle of Man". According to the CIA World Factbook, that is 572 sq m., or "three times the size of Washington, DC. It also metnions that the rock is already in motion.

Actually, this PDF (Google HTML version) gives it as between 150 and 500 cubic km of rock. That is obviously far too large to get rid of. If it slides into the sea at 100 m/s (as in a volcanical eruption), it could cause waves of up to 25m high in the Americas (well, it's 10 to 25 for the biggest rock size).

(Excuse me if some of the above links are actually in the story, I had read a bit about it already so didn't look closely at the given links)

And the brain-dead morons of the jury
did award those useless monitors... with gold.
How inapropriate.

Google Cache link:

clicky

I read somewhere a while back, that Sun were going to open source java
going to open source java

Or was that before Microsoft and Sun slept together?

Nick ...

Another games reviewer here. Got mine yesterday morning from the lovely PR people. It's a much nicer bit of kit than the original - almost all the design flaws are sorted and fixed, and there appears to be a wave of halfdecent games on the way.

I wrote a postmortem of the original N-Gage [google cache] which details what the QD fixes - I would add though that the QD is by no means a 'small' phone, it's almost the width of an old Nokia 1610!

Google Cache

How about going to the Google Cache whilst you enjoy your alien-worm excrement!

Does anyone know if TechTV will still be letting users watch old episodes online or by request (e.g., copy of the episode). I am particular looking for video segment on The Ant Farm case mod (invalid link now) online or on tape/whatever media. I did e-mail TechTV staff a few months ago after this mod story was posted on /., but never received a response. I doubt I will get one after sending another request today. Anyone got this segment in their TechTV collection? ;)

I managed to savage the Web pages and thumbnails from Google Caches. Archive.org didn't have this Web story when I tried the original URL. :(

I thought that was Al Gore...

You are probably talking about the ARPANET [wikipedia.org] while I was talking about the World Wide Web [wikipedia.org]. Please read this Wikipedia article [wikipedia.org].

I thought that was Al Gore...

You are probably talking about the ARPANET [wikipedia.org] while I was talking about the World Wide Web [wikipedia.org]. Please read this Wikipedia article [wikipedia.org].

I thought that was Al Gore...

You are probably talking about the ARPANET [wikipedia.org] while I was talking about the World Wide Web [wikipedia.org]. Please read this Wikipedia article [wikipedia.org].

This is nothing but FUD. The World Wide Web was created by Microsoft. That is why the Internet Explorer is an integrated part of the Windows Operating System. All this Berners-Lee fellow did was make an Open Source clone of Internet Explorer called 'www', and as with other Open Source clones, it has a crappy UI and hardly no features. It is all in text, for christ's sake.

This is simply not true. Please let me quote the most relevant parts of this Wikipedia article [wikipedia.org]:

"Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee KBE (TimBL or TBL) (b. June 8, 1955) is the inventor of the World Wide Web and head of the World Wide Web Consortium, which oversees its continued development.

"Berners-Lee was born in London, England, and as a child, studied at Emanuel School in Wandsworth. He is an alumnus of the Queen's College of Oxford University, where, interestingly, he built a computer with a soldering iron, TTL gates, an M6800 processor and an old television. It was also at Oxford where he was caught hacking with a friend and was banned from using the university computer soon after.

"Before he invented the World Wide Web, he had plenty of programming experience. He worked at Plessey Telecommunications Limited in 1976 as a programmer, and in 1978 he worked at D.G Nash Limited where he worked on typesetting software and an operating system.

"In 1980, while an independent contractor at CERN, Berners-Lee proposed a project based on the concept of hypertext, to facilitate sharing and updating information among researchers. With help from Robert Cailliau he built a prototype system named Enquire.

"After leaving CERN to work at John Poole's Image Computer Systems Ltd, he returned in 1984 as a fellow. He used similar ideas that he used in Enquire to create the World Wide Web, for which he designed and built the first browser (called WorldWideWeb and developed on NeXTSTEP) and the first web server simply called httpd. The first website

"The first web site Berners-Lee built (and therefore the first web site) was at info.cern.ch and was first put online on August 6, 1991. It provided an explanation about what the World Wide Web was, how to get your own browser, how to set up your own web server and so on. It was also the world's first web directory, since Berners-Lee maintained a list of other web sites apart from his own.

"While the component ideas of the World Wide Web are simple, Berners-Lee's insight was to combine them in a way which is still exploring its full potential. Perhaps his greatest single contribution, though, was to make his idea available freely, with no patent and no royalties due. In 1994 he founded World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and in 2003, the organization decided that all standards must contain royalty-free technology, so they can be easily adopted by anyone.

"Berners-Lee became the first holder of the 3Com Founders Chair at MIT, and is now a Senior Research Scientist there.

"In 1997 he was created an Officer in the Order of the British Empire, and in 2004 was further awarded the honour of Knight Commander as part of the New Year's Honours.

"On April 15, 2004 he was named as the first recipient of the Finland's Millennium Technology Prize for inventing the World Wide Web. The prize will be awarded on June 15, in Helsinki, Finland.

"He is a Distinguished Fellow of the British Computer Society, an Honorary Fellow of the Institution of Electrical Engineers, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2001.

"He received the Japan Prize in 2002."

I hope the above quotations will clarify the apparent misunderstanding.

This is not clearly stated in the summary, but for those who don't already know, Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee is the one who has singlehandedly invented the World Wide Web and has written the first browser and server. See this.

This is not clearly stated in the summary, but for those who don't already know, Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee is the one who has singlehandedly invented the World Wide Web and has written the first browser and server. See this.

A page containing the word "tobornottobe" is NOT a correct match for a search for "to be or not to be".

Ist *is* a site about Shakespeare, so one could argue that it's related, and since the word jammed together are in the domain name (where you can't use spaces), I'm willing to cut them some slack there.

I did try the quotes around the phrase.

I hope you did! Without them, Google will ignore everything but the word "not" (an tell you so above your results).

Do not mention "but the pages linking to it contain the phrase!". That is only used for ranking of results, and not for actually finding the results.

Oops - that's wrong. Take a look at this cache of a comic strip called "To be or net to be" - up in the Google heading it says:

These terms only appear in links pointing to this page: to be or not to be

Apparentl,y many people misspell the strip's name and it managed to get into the top 10 for the misspelt result with that.

Another example is a search on "AB RAIN". One of the first 10 returns is incorrect.

That looks really problematic: As long as there are results for "ab rain", I shouldn't get "abrain" or "a brain" in the tops.

Baumi

Hmm, I was trying to be humorous in the parent, but guess it does deserve to be informative for the benefit of the US readers though (after-all I guess it's was as inappropriate as telling jokes about Stalin )

And while I got the soapbox, the grandparent is not "Redundant", it's hilarious, so what if the summary mentions AYB, it is a modification/extension.

As an earlier poster pointed out, this has already been done!

How about right now?

CARD-SAFE(TM) WALLET

"Protects Credit Cards And Other Valuables From EMF Damage"

The magnetic strip on your credit card can be damaged, even erased by exposure to strong magnetic fields. Ordinary magnets will do it, but so can less obvious sources such as anti-theft scanners in department stores or libraries, small electric motors, even speaker magnets (someone told us that electromagnetic harassment can be used to erase credit cards too)! This handsome black leather wallet is discretely lined with both RF and magnetic field shielding materials and offers excellent protection. Includes 2-compartment bill fold, 6-compartment credit card holder and change pouch, all shielded. Measures about 4" x 4½" when folded. Quality European craftsmanship, equally attractive for men and women.

Mirror list, mostly FTP but some HTTP as well.

The source...
http://66.102.11.104/search?q=cache:ZhF3hhvPgwQJ:w ww.theonion.com/onion3311/microsoftpatents.html

Post-it note prank
Balloons

He slashdotted himself... Anyway, here you have the Google cache.

google cache of new scientist is here.

Ask Hitomi Kitahara

Is the system to instantly correlate the billion biometric files that might be created if everyone falls for biometric passports.

If every European, Japanese, American, basically everyone with a passport is made to deliver up their fingerprints, photographs and maybe iris scans, there will need to be a system to cross check all of this "At the speed of Google", every time a passport holder crosses a border anywhere in the world. Google will provide this service to governments, over an SSL secured web interface.

Google has the experience, they have the hardware in place, and they are going to make a fortune out of this. If they do it, it will be the greatest switch from good to pure evil in the history of software.

I use the word "might" above because this Biometric Net may not be created if everyone simply refuses to be fingerprinted and photographed. Of all the countries in line for this, the Americans will probably shout the loudest. Fingerprinting is for criminals; to be forced to get fingerprinted and biometrically photographed to get a passport, the data of which will be stored by other governments and anyone with an RFID reader is simply too much to swallow for any freedom loving person.

Can someone mirror it please?

No problem: Here is the mirror

I think I might write a script to simplify Google search URLs.

http://66.102.11.104/search?q=cache:www.google.com looks much more pretty.

Site is already slashdottet. Here's Google's cache of the document.
So - how are the plans going with implementing a slashdot cache?

buy one here (with screenshot).

And the Google cache

Realdolls are apparently freakishly realistic.

Registration required? Google cached it anyway.

In France you cannot buy a pay as you go simcard without showing ID. Its bullshit of course, they will sell you one even if you show someone elses ID.

These self immolating morons dont know anything about security. If they knew even a little, they would switch SIMS for each call, and then discard the SIM. But even that would be no good, because if they were always calling from one of ten cells to another set of ten always used cells, you can build a pattern up and start moniroting all the relevant calls. This as all Slashdotters know is Traffic Analysis.

They should be sending messages via a human courrier who memorizes messages. Its slow, but what do they care? They waited years to kill themselvs the first time - anything that reveals their locations is a huge risk...thankfully. What we now have to ask is how many people are they actively monitoring, and if its even one person, why have they not (if they have not) picked these people up?

GWB has hinted that they are bumping these people off - maybe they are all (ex) GSM users?

Mu favourite GSM/Combat related story is the one where MOSSAD blew off the head of a top Hammas man, by switching his cellphone for one that had an explosive charge put into it. Aparently, he was able to use his phone normally. It was detonated only when a call came from a specific number and he answered it, presumably with a suitable delay for him to lift up the phone to his ear and say "Hello". Cellphones are being used for this sort of thig more and more. Fascinating.

In the end it comes down to the intelligence of the thief, the amount of computer experience they have, and the reason the laptop is stolen in the first place. The two reasons would be data recovery, the other to just sell the hardware. (I suppose a third would be to use it themselves).

The future of this technology I believe will be a BIOS based service. Something hard- coded in the BIOS that will be used to track the laptop. The car industry uses a GPS satellite to track some of its more expensive automobiles and perhaps that is where the laptop industry will go.

[..]

Systems hard coded with small GPS tracking units will creep into the corporate world, and users will be able to track where their laptops are if they?ve been stolen, and recovery will be more and more common.

Bingo. And of course European airlines have already agreed to share passenger profiles with the US. (Google cache, original URL no longer works)

Here

Here is the Google cache for the site revised in the article. It even works! ;-)

Cached here

since i couldn't rtfa, i went looking for the google cache. cache

"But as the theme progressed, it came into the heart of Melkor to interweave matters of his own imagining that were not in accord with the theme of Iluvatar; for he sought therein to increase the power and the glory of the part assigned to himself."

"He now wove the new thoughts into his music, and straightway discord arose about him, and many that sang nigh him grew dispondent, and their thought was disturbed and their music faltered; but some began to attune their music to his rather than to the thought which they had first."

-- J.R.R Tolkien, The Silmarillion

I honestly do not undestand the apolegtic attitude for Peter Jackson expressed here on Slashdot. Especially I do not understand the claim that all the changes Jackson made were neccessary for the film to be succesful. In fact I say that most of the changes were not needed: Peter Jackson just had to make the story "more American" and "more dramatic" by changing the delicate web of characters, events and themes created by J.R.R. Tolkien. It appears that Jackson thought that he could create a better LotR than Tolkien by introducing exaggerated battle scenes and gut-wrenching folk psychology -- the problem is Jackson's overgrown ego, not the structure of the book.

It is obvious that the book needed to be edited into a script, and that is OK to me. That editing, however, should have taken place by cutting away some scenes and spoken lines from the book. To corrupt the basic ideas and themes of an original work can not be forgiven. Peter Jackson made (especially in TTT) compeletely inexplicable choices, and for instance perverted Theoden's character from a great warrior king to a mindless follower of others.

Tolkien himself commented an early non-filmed script (1958) by Zimmerman in his letter to Forrest J. Ackerman. Some of his comments are very thought-provoking, and seem to be directed straight to Peter Jackson. I urge everyone to read the letter and see what Tolkien really thought about movies based on his books.

The site is being slashdotted! Here is the Google Cache, compliments of Mookore.

http://66.102.11.104/search?q=cache:roh4iA_wsJcJ:h ttp://www.arrl.org/tis/info/HTML/plc/+&hl=en&ie=UT F-8

This cache provided by MooKore 2004. Posted anonymously to avoid karma whore.

http://66.102.11.104/search?q=cache:roh4iA_wsJcJ:h ttp://www.redvsblue.com//+&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

And i'm pretty sure it has to be one of the best investments I've done in my life, great piece of hardware.

Mplayer is also great, before having the KiSS I watched all my media with mplayer, but theris claims are, like nearly always, plain stupid.

How they got access to the C code for the comparisons if the ROM is closed source? It's there for download, only a click away of the firmware page!

Mplayer are famous for two main reasons: first, for programming a killer app for linux, and second, for their constant insults to others developers... Have we forgotten the "Joe Barr can't install mplayer"-affaire? A simple google search gives us pearls as "Joe Barr became infamous by writing a less than favorable MPlayer review." WTF!?!? Complete text here, at the end of page.

In fact, you only have to go down a few post in their main page to read this:
# MPlayerHQ was cracked on November 16 17:50, but noticed 10 minutes later due to some hidden traps. Possibly due to recent lame Linux kernel vulnerability (greetz to kernel devs for not publishing details much earlier).
# Debian sucks - that's the opinion of most of the core developers

That's the way they are, so, please, think twice when you run in their defense!

(Sorry for my bad, bad english)

Come on, I can't believe none of you AC's noticed... First, please use these links instead:

Science with 100m telescopes - PDF Version
Science with 100m telescopes - HTML Version

Second, the AC modded as Troll is using a web redirect for the second link, which explains the confusion about whether he's posting a goatse image or not. Sometimes, it points to one, other times it doesn't. By the way, the first link of the parent was broken and corrected now.

If you like it you are probably an "otaku" (and don't realize that it's an insult in Japanese).

Caltrops.com seems to be down now so here's the Google cache of the only Xenosaga review you need:

http://66.102.11.104/search?q=cache:On37B5AYF1kJ:w ww.caltrops.com/review0012.php