Slashdot Mirror

pdclarry writes "A Boeing 747 that serves as an Air Force One backup and two F-16 fighters escorting it caused a brief panic among office workers at the World Financial Center in lower Manhattan this morning, as large numbers evacuated the buildings. The incident was also spurred evacuations in Jersey City across the Hudson River from Manhattan."

dutky asks: "What devices does Slashdot recommend for the programmer on the go? Recently I went on vacation to Vietnam. Before we left my wife asked what I would do if I couldn't program for a month. I tried to assemble an inexpensive and portable programming environment using a Palm 130, but it was less than satisfactory. With the recent article on the Zarus PDA I have gotten to thinking about the problem again. Notably, I -don't- need a whopping amount of RAM, disk space, or processor speed, and I can live with fairly modest screen sizes. I was unable to find anything that matched all these criteria in about two weeks of occasional (and hurried) research. Do any such beasts exist?"

"My requirements are pretty simple:

• Small and durable (I was packing three and a half weeks of clothes and stuff in a moderately large backpack)
• Long battery life (able to get in a good 8-hour programming session without interruption)
• Able to use a keyboard (I can't write C code from Grafitti)
• Reasonable screen resolution (I need to be able to see at least 80 columns by 40 lines)
• Ability to run a wide variety of programming tools (at least a good editor, C compiler, and probably several common scripting languages as well)
• External mass storage of some kind (I'd settle for SD or CF cards)
• Relatively inexpensive: $200-$400 is a good range (I don't want to be too upset if it gets lost, stolen or dropped off of a cliff)"

Slashback tonight with another round of updates and errata regarding recent Slashdot stories. Read on for more on domain slamming, the process behind fixing and revealing the recent OpenSSH vulnerability, early photography, and a special note for residents of Maricopa County, Arizona.

Quick work by smart people. ciaweb writes "The OpenSSH group has revised its security advisory about the recent OpenSSH vulnerabilities. In it, they describe their decision-making process for releasing the bug information. It is interesting to contrast their procedure, which appears designed to maximize user protection, against Microsoft's, which appears to maximize Microsoft's protection."

Pardon me, sir, would you mind if I SLAMMED THIS HAMMER ON YOUR FINGERS?! D0wnsp0ut writes "I thumbed through my mail today and found what appeared to be a renewal notice for my domain. This one came from "Domain Registry of America." Verisign attempted something similar back in March and Bulkregister.com fought back and won an injunction, against the mailings. So watch out if your domain is getting close to expiring. I talked to my registrar (Register.com) and they're aware of it.
I'll scan the letter but have no place to post the pictures. Can anyone lend some bandwidth?"

Half the world has never eaten a Krispy Kreme donut, either. cshirky writes "I've just written an essay on the phrase ' Half the world has never made a phone call'. It's more 'voice telephony-y' than the usual telecom stories here, but after seeing the interest in media and the market that surfaced during my /. interview, I thought it might be of some interest."

Please stop sending my money to Redmond, OK? TrumpetPower! writes "All that brouhaha over Maricopa County's policy prohibiting companies or persons convicted of antitrust violations has had an effect. I just received the following note announcing a public forum scheduled for this coming Monday.

You recently inquired about the County's use of Microsoft products and the manner in which we license their software. We appreciate your interest in the County's technology plans. To provide a forum in which to discuss our technology direction and address any questions you may have, we will have Information Technology staff members available to meet with citizens at 8:30 am on Monday July 8th. The meeting location will be the County Administration Building at 301 W. Jefferson in Suite 420. Please RSVP your attendance so we can ensure that adequate facilities are available for the meeting.

Thank you for your inquiry,
Paul Allsing
Deputy CIO
Maricopa County
301 W Jefferson, Suite 420
Phoenix, AZ 85003"

Ah, but what about the first annoying family photographer? 7h3_B055 writes: "Contrary to this article on Slashdot claiming the first photograph was created in 1826, much evidence is pointing to the fact that the Shroud of Turin may have been an earlier example (substantially earlier) of photography using ingredients as basic as egg-white for treating cloth (the photopaper) and urine for developing it. The camera itself could have been a simple box with a hole in it and the exposure time would have been lengthy."

Of course, there are a lot of theories about the Shroud of Turin, and a google search is likely to intrigue you for days.

Cheviot writes: "It seems Apple's new iTunes 2 installer deletes the contents of users' hard drives if the drives have been partitioned. I personally lost more than 100gb of data. More information is available at Apples Discussions board. (registration required). Apple has pulled the installer, but for hundreds, if not thousands, the damage is already done." The iTunes download page has a nice warning about the problem. Ouch.

Patrick McAllister was one of the folks who wrote to us about a report talking with John Carmack [?] regarding id's sales of Linux games. Apparently, it's been pretty absymal - enough to cover costs, but "they wouldn't make a bean-counter blink". I wonder what Loki's experience has been.

Ten years ago Jim Willard was a happy, prosperous computer company executive. Then he came up with the idea of making disposable "paper computers" that could be used for census forms, voting ballots, catalog ordering, utility bills and payments, and countless other "disposable" applications. Now Jim's life is in ruins because of his obsession with paper computers, but his idea is starting to get some attention. Will paper computers become the Next Big Thing? Will Jim finally be able to afford new front disk rotors for his rusted Nissan pickup? (Click below for more.)

One of our favorite Great American Myths is that of the lone inventor toiling in his garage or basement to produce a product that will revolutionize society. More often than not, in both the myth and real life, the inventor dies penniless and unrecognized, his invention either cast on the trash heap of history or adopted in a slightly mutated form by a Big Corporation that doesn't pay him a cent for his years of self-financed labor. But a few inventors - just enough to hold out hope for all the rest - strike it big and provide inspiration for all who follow.

Jim Willard hasn't struck it big. He may yet, but there's no telling. His idea was originally an outgrowth of the defense wind-down after the Soviet Union gave up on the Cold War, when defense contractors like the large systems integration company Jim ran during the glory years of DoD spending started looking for ways to make a living in the civilian world. There was no public Internet back then, but there were plenty of computers that required large amounts of remote data input, and this was the market Jim lit upon.

Imagine a census form made up of several glued-together layers of paper with simple keyboard-patterned membrane switches printed in between the layers, and a tiny, triggerable RF transmitter built into it. People would fill out the multiple-choice forms by pressing printed "keys," hit an "enter button" when they were done, and mail the thing to the Census Bureau, where the forms could be automatically read, via the RF interface, without even opening the envelopes. If - and Jim believes this goal is easily achievable - the cost of the "paper computer" forms can be held below $5 or so, the total cost of printing, mailing, and processing them would be much less than it is for traditional, non-electronic census forms.

Jim also found another lucrative-looking market for his product-in-the-making: polling places. He'd already done a study of a voting machine's life. "It sits in a warehouse for two years," he says, "then some grandmother is going to set it up and run it for one day. It's got to be easy for her to use, and its a true mission-critical application. It turned out cheapest to build a stripped-down PC, send it to the polling location, then throw it away after election day and buy a new one the next time around."

And having only one stripped-down PC per polling place, instead of one at each voting station - with paper computers used as the actual ballots - would lower the cost even further.

During the course of his study, Jim found that absentee ballots were even more expensive to process than those cast in person; in 1991 and 1992, he says, Fairfax County, Virginia, spent about $16 per absentee vote cast, and he figured he could easily get it down to the sub-$5 range using his paper computer technology. But no contract was ever signed and no functional test was ever made. Instead, Jim spent his time and personal resources in a years-long search for venture capital that he continues, still fruitlessly, today.

Fairly or unfairly, Jim blames most of his failure to make something big out of the paper computer concept on the flakiness of the venture capital business. "They won't even look at something unless it's presented by friends," he says, "and even then, if it's not something that immediately jazzes them, uh-uh."

Worse, he claims, venture capitalists live and die by industry fads. "One week they're doing nothing but biochem, the next week they're all doing dot coms," he says. "Paper computing is not a 'sexy' project, just a good market, so they're not interested."

The Thinnest Thin Client Ever

Here's the most recent incarnation of Jim's basic concept: a super-cheap piece of multi-layered paper with a flexible light-emitting polymer screen, a low-end dedicated processor, a stripped-down modem, and membrane switches built into it. You could use this technology to make a Web terminal so cheap that you could send it as a direct mail piece. Plug it into a phone line and it would automatically dial the company that sent it out, call up catalog info, and let you place orders. Computer knowledge (and investment) required by the user would be exactly zero. Jim engagingly paints the mental picture of a poster for Victoria's Secret from which you could directly order the products it displayed, literally making the poster into a point of sale terminal that would both make a sales pitch and "close" the sale, all on the spot, for next to nothing in the way of either cash investment or floor space.

Beef up the concept a little, add a decent general-purpose microprocessor and a bit of RAM, and Voila! - an electronic PDA that costs less than one of the binder-enclosed, paper-based "Executive Organizers" you see in office supply stores.

You'd think Oracle, with all of its talk about networked "thin client" computers, or Sun, where the network is (supposed to be) the computer, would be all over Jim. He says this isn't going to happen; that these companies "...have divisions that have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in current technology. I walk in to see the heads of these companies' thin client divisions and tell them they can close the doors, that everything they're doing is obsolete, they're going to laugh. Why would they want to put themselves out of work?"

In this story published on November 11, 1999, CNET News.com reporter Brooke Crothers quoted Jim extensively, but also mentioned research done by IBM that may lead to ultra-thin computing devices similar to his. Does this mean Jim is dead in the water? That he should give up hope the way so many small software developers have given up on projects once they found Microsoft had something similar in the works?

Jim has invested years in a concept that, if handled right, could change the way computing is done and Internet connections are made, and could change the way remote data gathering is done by governments, retailers, and many others. But Jim is running low on stamina - and is out of money. The comment about his old Nissan pickup needing new brake rotors he can't afford isn't a joke; it's a sad fact. This slow descent into poverty, followed by a life of bitterness and regret, is the fate of most independent inventors. Will it be Jim's? Or will he be one of the few who manages to turn a profit (and receive at least a little acclaim) from his work?

Here, for your review, is Jim's Paper Computer Corporation Web site. Take a look at it. Then let Jim know what you think, either by e-mail or, better yet, by posting a comment here on Slashdot. Jim will be reading what you have to say and taking it to heart. If he has time, he may even jump in and respond directly to your comments.