Slashdot Mirror

First time accepted submitter skywire writes "After years of forcing innocent customers to navigate a Kafkaesque process to unfreeze their funds, PayPal has announced that they are preparing major changes to alleviate the pain. From the article: 'The company routinely freezes funds for 21 days if it thinks there's a fraud risk, and its terms give it the right to extend the freeze for up to 180 days. To get access to their money, users are often asked to provide the kind of documentation that a product seller would have, like several months' worth of sales records. But if you're running a fundraiser or selling tickets to an upcoming conference, you don't have that paperwork. Even for those with extensive paper trails, the appeals process can take months to resolve. The Web is filled with enraged blog posts, websites like paypalsucks.com, and a Tumblr called "Conferences Burned by PayPal."'"

scharkalvin writes with this excerpt from the American Radio Relay League's site: "'For the second time since 1992, Heathkit Educational Services (HES) has shuttered its doors. Rumors of the legendary kit-building company's demise were posted on QRZ.com, with several readers bringing the news to the attention of the ARRL. In August 2011, Heathkit announced it was returning to the kit building business, and in September, that it would once again be manufacturing Amateur Radio kits. ... On LinkedIn, a popular networking site, HES Chief Executive Officer Lori Marciniak listed her employment ending at Heathkit as of March 2012. Likewise, Heathkit's Marketing and Sales Director Ernie Wake listed his employment ending in April 2012. An unsubstantiated report on Wikipedia states that "[in] December 2011, Heathkit Educational Systems laid off most employees and in March 2012, the company indefinitely suspended operations."' It looks like Heathkit is gone for good. Their plans on re-entering the kit market died with the current economy."

marco13185 writes "AT&T's new Terms of Service give AT&T the right to suspend your account and all service "for conduct that AT&T believes"..."(c) tends to damage the name or reputation of AT&T, or its parents, affiliates and subsidiaries." After cooperating with the government's violations of privacy and liberties, I guess AT&T wants their fair share. AT&T users may want to think twice about commenting if they value their internet service."

Anonymous Explorer writes "Fresh off of its fly-by with the Saturnian satellite Phoebe, the Cassini-Huygens craft is set for Saturn Orbit Insertion on June 30, 2004. Cassini-Huygens has a planned four year mission ahead for Saturn and its many moons. With 450 watts of power for the electronics, this mission has plenty enough horses to run the stretch with plenty-o-pep to spare. Thanks to all that power, and the plethora of electronics on Cassini and the Huygens probe, we can now hear sounds from Saturn. Pretty cool stuff! Festivities are scheduled to begin on June 29th with a broadcast of Cassini Saturn Orbit Insertion Press Conference on Nasa TV. SOI [PDF link] will occur after Cassini fires its main engine for 96 minutes, in order to slow down and be grabbed by the pull of Saturn. As always we extend an invitation to everyone to join #cassini on irc.freenode.net and help us celebrate this historic mission."

Anonymous Explorer writes "The Cassini-Huygens probe is set to fly by the largest outer Saturn moon of Phoebe today. Cassini will be roughly 2000 km from the surface of Phoebe at 1:56 Pacific time Friday, June 11. Thats pretty darn close. The newest images of Phoebe are already thousands of times better than the previous ones taken by the Voyager 2 mission in 1981. Phoebe is interesting in that it maintains a retrograde orbit around Saturn. This has lead to the hypothesis that it is an ancient asteroid that has been captured by the gravitational pull from Saturn. Phoebe may provide some important insights into the composition of early building blocks of our planets. Phoebe was discovered in 1898 by American astronomer William Pickering. As always, discussion about this mission can be found at #cassini on irc.freenode.net."

Anonymous Coward writes "I saw this link over at HardOCP. Finally, a definitive (well, they hedge a bit at the end) guide that explains where to use each one of those little screws that come packed with new PC cases. All that and a 'test your knowledge' quiz in the bargain. Definitely bookmark-worthy."

newsdee asks: "An enormous controversy is going on at the X1000 forums over laptop parts. Some Centrino-based laptops bear a label advertising the Mobility Radeon 9200 brand, but users have found out that the laptop actually contains the 9000 chip. The list of affected machines is as follows: Compaq Presario X1000, HP Pavilion ZT3000 and the HP Compaq NX7000. ATI's and HP's response have been that the label is promising performance and not a specific chip. Yet users seem to not like this at all, apparently because most of them define 'brand' as equating to product. According to reviews, there are no differences (same scores, same clock speed) between the chips other than AGP 8x support, which the Centrino chipset does not provide. I seem to remember that this is not the first time that this kind of thing has happened in PC hardware. Can anybody share insights of whether this is right or wrong? Should I complain about my 9000 chip that delivers what the 9200 brand promises, knowing it has not been overclocked?"

buford_tannen writes "According to this New York Times Article (registration, etc.), Google may be considering a merger with Microsoft in the near future. As many people know, Google's search services are powered by Linux. "

Joseph Wharton writes "Mini-ITX.com has a review of VIA's new Nehemiah M10000 EPIA-M motherboard and processor. Some of the new features include a full-speed floating-point unit (finally!), SSE instructions, 64KB of full-speed L2 cache, and (get this) a hardware-based random number generator. Also, there's IO/APIC support in these new procs, potentially paving the way for dual EPIA boards."

The Other White Meat asks: "I want to put a computer in my kitchen. For space reasons, I want to make it an LCD; a 15" screen would be perfect. This monitor is going to be exposed to harsh conditions (flying food, jumping cats, general mishandling). I don't want to spend so much money on it that if I came home and found it broken that I would be upset by it. I figured there must be plenty of places that will sell LCDs with dead pixels or columns, where I might be able to pick one up in the $50-100 range, but so far I have found nothing. Surely there must be a market for 'Grade B' LCD monitors, for precisely this sort of low life expectancy sort of usage? So fellow readers, can you succeed where Google® has failed, and lead me to the cheapo LCDs?"

Michael Breeden writes "Star Wars has apparently taken another step in becoming part of our national history. The Washington National Cathedral, during its expansion, has placed a sculpture of Darth Vader's head into the carvings around one of the exterior arches. This space is normally reserved for grotesques (gargoyles), and ol' Darth seems to have fit the bill. "

The Angry Mick writes "Geek.com is running a blurb on a 50 year old CSIRAC computer that is apparently still functional, if lurking in an Australian museum. Sporting a whopping 2K of RAM and screaming along at a blistering 300 khz(!) it proves the adage that they really don't make 'em like they used to . . ." Yes, because if they did, they'd be really, really slow.

willybur writes: "The EFF reports: 'The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today filed a motion with the Los Angeles Superior Court on behalf of ICANN Director Karl Auerbach requesting the court grant him immediate access to corporate records that ICANN management has denied him for one-and-a-half years.' Read their press release and the support memorandum."

willybur writes "The Electronic Frontier Foundation just released a report (pdf) today detailing the last three years under the DMCA. It describes how the DMCA has been used to unfairly attempt to prosecute all of the various parties over the years, and gives yet another argument of why the DMCA needs to be struck down. It's worth a read." Slashdot has covered most of the incidents listed, but this is nice summary to hand someone who hasn't been following these issues.

PhxBlue writes: "Astronomy.com has released a report, submitted to the 5 April Science magazine, that an asteroid known as 1950 DA has 1:300 odds of impacting Earth and causing widespread devastation. The good news is, the impact wouldn't happen until 16 March 2880; and the solutions suggested by the scientists don't involve Tea Leoni or Bruce Willis."

willybur submits word of this Debian Planet story on the upcoming release of its next stable version. The article says: "According to Anthony Towns (our beloved Release Manager), woody is nearing release. All but three RC base bugs are fixed now, and the bugsquashing party is working through the RC bugs in standard. It's not all good news though. The bad news is that this means we're probably releasing soon, and that of the hundreds of less important packages with RC bugs (eg, bugzilla, craft, crossfire-{client,server}, epic4, fvwm95, gmc, gnome-admin, intuitively, kdepim, moon-lander, tkdesk, wine, and xosview) will be getting randomly ripped out of testing ... Check the stuff that's important to you and get it fixed before it's too late." Says willybur: "See the announcement on debian-devel-announce."

StephenMesser writes: "At the request of NASA, the National Research Council is conducting a planetary science community assessment of the priorities for the U.S. planetary research programs for the next 10 years. The Planetary Society has been asked to assist this "decadal survey" by seeking input from the general public about planetary exploration. Data must be input by January 31, 2002 to be counted on the survey. CNN has a story on the survey."

man_ls writes "Tom's Hardware has a review of a new Koolance water-cooled case. It has a built in watercooling system, to save people into overclocking the trouble of building their own. Unfortunately, it only works with Athlon, Duron, and Pentium IIIs. The P4 socket isn't compatible with it. "

ronmon writes: "DSLReports has discovered evidence of a creative Spammer / Data Miner who has managed to glean email addresses from their member's information pages. Apparently someone has gotten around to writing a script that decodes obfuscated addresses like imasobATspam_centralDOTcom, which was only a matter of time. Server logs show well over half a million requests from several IPs in a specific block and they have been advised that they are in a good postion to prosecute. They're asking for legal help, so any of you good hearted lawyers out there looking to boost your karma, here's your chance :)"

man_ls asks: "I am running a TELNET server for myself and some friends out of my house using Windows 2000 Telnet Services, and would like to provide them with the ability to send and receive e-mails through the command line. I'm currently using fmail unregistered, which has send-only ability, and tried PC-PINE but it wouldn't run on the command line. Does anyone know of a command line mail program that will run under Windows 2000, and can both send and receive e-mail messages?" And we all know how popular usable Such a program would be a cool thing indeed! Are there such beasts, or has the rather un-popularity of CLI apps under Win32 rendered such things obsolete?

man_ls asks: "I have a TVElite kit that no longer works. It was used for displaying my computer monitor on both a TV and computer at the same time. It came with an infared attachment to allow you to use the remote to control the volume on both devices at the same time, that seems to be made by EMC. Inside is an IR connector, an EMC IC, a serial connector, and an infared receiver I think. Does anyone have any more information about some 'fun' things I could do with this? (such as an IrDA for my desktop computer)"

man_ls writes: "I found this on C|Net, it's an HP Printer that also supports Bluetooth. You can read about it here. Not that the Bluetooth will do anything except interfere with 802.11 wireless networks, but it's an interesting feature to have." Actually, Bluetooth shouldn't interfere with 802.11 except in confusing product marketing, right? Nice to see that at least one printer will actually hit the market with a short-range radio interface instead of wire (inconvenient) or IR (poor interoperability).

iamblades writes: "Edward Felten is scheduled to present his research papers on SDMI on Wednesday at the annual USENIX security conference. Apparently the RIAA backed off their harrassment, which makes sense, as SDMI is almost completely dead already." And a Semi-Anonymous Coward writes: "Despite the RIAA's attempts to silence the Princeton Professor and his students, USENIX will broadcast the SDMI Crack Live via the web. The broadcast will be available for the world here along with a discussion concerning your Freedom."

cloudscout writes "According to this blurb at Go2Mac, the end is finally here for Metricom's Ricochet Network. Employees are being given one week severance. Now who is going to fill this vacuum? CDPD just doesn't cut it."

cloudscout writes: "The Business Software Alliance has been sending out threatening letters to companies across the US hinting that they may be audited for licensing compliance. This article on Yahoo, tells the complete story. First, the letters are really just a marketing tool to sell more software. The BSA has no intention of following through with their threats. Second, and possibly even more importantly, the tactics are often resulting in a switch to open source software. It seems that nobody likes a bully. Play hardball and people will start taking their business elsewhere." My mom was genuinely frightened when she got The Letter, precisely because of the threatening tone this article discusses.

drbrain writes: "They seem to have succeeded again, their Helios is their first success of a remotely, solar self powered aircraft. Looks kinda weird. They plan to use it for research and the military." Meanwhile, Guppy06 and many others sent in stories about a successful test of the Star Wars missile defense system, which will protect us from all those ballistic missiles that foreign nations don't have and would be silly to use, when you can just drive down from Canada with a suitcase nuke.

cloudscout writes: "This Report at SecurityFocus.com warns of a problem with the Apache webserver running under Apple's new MacOS X operating system with the case-insensitive HFS+ filesystem. HFS+ is the default (and recommended) filesystem for MacOS X, yet its case-insensitive nature circumvents directory-based security in the Apache webserver that comes with the operating system. The Server version of MacOS X ships with a module that fixes this problem, but this module isn't available unless you purchase MacOS X Server. So much for Apple's boast about 'giving back to the open-source community.'"
From looking through SecurityFocus, this doesn't appear to be the only problem.

Guppy06 writes: "There's an interesting tidbit here at the San Diego Union-Tribune about a guy who posted his local (Denison, TX) building code on the internet and prompty got nasty-grams from copyright lawyers at the Southern Building Code Congress International Inc. The bill in question was copyrighted by the group before it was sent to the local legislature, so the wording of the law belongs to them. So far, two Federal courts agree with the group. In the article, they seem to be taking the Microsoft-esque view of 'Who would write these things for free? Look at all the good it's done!'" And since many laws are written wholly by groups composed of non-legislators (the article lists a few), disseminating them on the Internet is a misdeed?

Guppy06 writes: "NASA's John C. Stennis Space Center (Mississippi, near the gulf coast) will be opening its doors to the public for the first time this Saturday. As part of its celebrations of the 20th anniversary of the first space shuttle launch (as well as flight-certifying a Pratt & Whitney fuel turbo pump), there'll be a 520-second static test of an SSME around 2000 CDT. Translating that into English for the non space geeks, that means they'll be lighting up a space shuttle main engine (attatched to a large steel frame, grounded in a big chunk of concrete so it doesn't go anywhere) for about 9 minutes around 8:00. The press release is available here. Now if only they did stuff like this more often, there might be more interest in NASA ..."

cloudscout writes "Macworld UK is reporting that Apple is threatening the Mac Themes Project for creating a theme editor. Apple accuses them of contributing to trademark infringement by enabling people to copy Apple's graphics. They've issued a cease-and-desist order insisting that MTP remove their theme editor from all webservers under their control, "including any hyperlink to other locations where the material may be available". They're even trying to invoke a shaky clause in their OS licenses which prohibit reverse-engineering the operating system since the theme editor utilizes unpublished specs. Apple is famous for its unfriendly attitude toward developers and tech media, but this is just ridiculous. How could they possibly suffer any damage by MTP's efforts? " I'm seriously disappointed to see this. Apple's lawyers are their own worst enemy: they've tried so hard to make Darwin open and gain acceptance, and then to pull crap like this. Its just so dumb I don't know how to respond.

Guppy06 writes: "According to this Interfax article, a senior engineer with Experimental Design Office 456 has come forward stating that the USSR attempted launching test pilots on parabolic trajectories (like what American Alan Shepard did in 1961) three different times in 1957, '58, and '59. According to Mikhail Rudenko, after losing test pilots Ledovskikh, Shaborin and Mitkov, the Soviets decided to start giving their cosmonauts special space-flight training, as well as deciding to forget the parabolas and try to reach orbit. Unfortunately, Mr. Rudenko seems to have neglected to tell us how this has yet to turn up in papers released by the CIA or KGB, or about how exactly these three died (on the pad? Re-entry?), but it seems to have a little more meat than the usual conspiracy theories (*cough* fake moon landing *cough*)."

alphaparadigm writes: "Is Star Wars: A New Hope the most violent movie ever? What I mean is, does it have the highest body count of any movie ever? They blow up a planet full of people and then a death star full of people! I figured if anyone would know, it would be you guys." That's a very good point. If violence is measured by number of sentient beings killed, then Star Wars Episode IV is going to be first on the chopping block when the Republicans come to censor our movies. And censor they will. Also there's the one episode of Star Trek: Voyager in which not just planets but entire species are wiped out, but then they crash Voyager into the time ship and the timeline reverts to the way it was so nobody ever really died ... or did they? Anyway these are the films, ladies and gentlemen, the mass-murdering films and TV shows, that John Ashcroft will ban, in conjunction with the Christian Coalition. Anyone standing up for them will be tarred as defending mass murder. Mark my words.

Guppy06 asks: "The big question about copying DVDs (other than legality) seems to be "What do you do after being able to decode it?" A cursory scan of Pricewatch shows that DAT tapes are now big enough to hold the entire contents of a DVD and then some. I know that tapes in general have been relegated to the back-up role because of their slow search times and, to some extent, slow read/write times. However, you don't exactly need ATA-100 (or even a 12x DVD-ROM) to watch DVD-quality streaming video from start to finish. So, my question is 'Would it be possible?' If not, what's standing in the way, and are those problems long-term or short-term? How fast are read/write times on DATs increasing, if any? DATs are an ancient technology (by computer standards), widespread, cheap, and not easily censorable in the near future. It might be a better alternative to bending over for the MPAA for playing/recording large media files." As long as the data transfer rate is sufficient for real-time playback of a DVD, I don't see why something like this can't be done. Of course you will lose the searching capabilities (playback in a differing speeds both forwards and backwards), but when you are just playing a DVD, do you really need those?

sacremon writes: "An article in EETimes describes research at the University of Nebraska on the development of an improved method for the generation of quantum dots. The researchers invoke the infamous 'five years away from having a small-scale quantum computer in the lab,' but the technique looks promising, particularly for generating a large array of quantum dots."

da3dAlus writes: "Beginning Sept. 4, Cartoon Network will be showing the long awaited Android Saga episodes of DBZ. ReBoot will kick off the Toonami block, followed by Sailor Moon, DBZ, Gundam Wing, Tenchi in Tokyo (which begins this Friday), and Batman. In addition to CN's new Toonami lineup, Thundercats will be replaced by SilverHawks beginning Sept. 5 at 3:30. The return of the SilverHawks has been a speculation for several months now, but my local cable listing proves that they are in the upcomming lineup." Looking forward to the new DBZ immensely, although I already have Tenchi in Tokyo on DVD. But silverhawks. God, was that ever a TV show designed to sell toys.

da3dAlus writes: "Cartoon Network has revealed its plans for Toonami for the end of the year. About.com holds the article that details CN's plan for the next wave of anime to hit U.S. shores beginning in September. This includes more Gundam series, Blue Submarine #6, two Reboot movies, Sailor Moon movies, and even some of their own material. Unfortunately, there will be no uncut Tenchi episodes." Blue Sub #6 is crazy but highly interesting (notable for amazing surround sound effects, and abnormal quantity of CGI, that isn't always perfectly integrated).

MwBay writes, "The Oscar winning actress has been cast as Lara Croft, bringing to an end months of speculation about who would fill Lara's shoes (and other garments) when the game makes the transition to the big screen. Read about it here." This is finally official from Eidos, after reading countless rumors in the submission bin. Good luck, Angelina! Oh, and if you Eidos guys are looking for extras, I'm interested. Update: 04/07 12:47 by CT : I remember when Angelina and I shared an issue of Rolling Stone... *grin*

borehawg writes "John Vranesevich of AntiOnline is accusing Attrition.org staff members of being involved with the "hacker" groups called "United Loan Gunmen" (ULG) and "Hacking For Girlies" (HFG). Attrition.org responds with this press statement. "

Planetes writes "Here's a post from Linus straight off linux-kernel (I only got it on my e-mail a few minutes ago) (I've attached it below. " The following was written by Linus and posted to linux-kernel

there's now a 2.2.0-pre9 on ftp.kernel.org, and when you compile it it will call itself 2.2.0-final. The reason is fairly obvious: enough is enough, and I can't make pre-kernels forever, it just dilutes the whole idea. The only reason the tar-file is not called 2.2.0 is that I want to avoid having any embarrassing typos that cause it to not compile under reasonable configurations or something like that. Unreasonable configurations I no longer care about.

Every program has bugs, and I'm sure there are still bugs in this. Get over it - we've done our best, and nobody ever believed that there wouldn't be 2.2.x kernels to fix problems as they come up, and delaying 2.2.0 forever is not an option.

I have a wedding anniversary and a company party coming up, so I'm taking a few days off - when I get back I expect to take this current 2.2.0-final and just remove the "-final" from the Makefile, and that will be it. I suspect somebody _will_ find something embarrassing enough that I would fix it too, but let's basically avoid planning on that.

In short, before you post a bug-report about 2.2.0-final, I'd like you to have the following simple guidelines:

"Is this something Linus would be embarrassed enough about that he would wear a brown paper bag over his head for a month?"

and

"Is this something that normal people would ever really care deeply about?"

If the answer to either question is "probably not", then please consider just politely discussing it as a curiosity on the kernel mailing lists rather than even sending email about it to me: I've been too busy the last few weeks, and I'd really appreciate it if I could just forget the worries of a release for a few days..

But if you find something hilariously stupid I did, feel free to share it with me, and we'll laugh about it together (and I'll avoid wearing the brown paper bag on my head during the month of February). Do we have a deal?

I've seen people working on a 2.2.0 announcement, and I'm happy - I've been too busy to think straight, much less worry about details like that. If everything turns out ok, I'll have a few memorable bloopers in my mailbox but nothing worse than that, and I can sit down and actually read the announcement texts that people have been discussing.

ObFeatures:

• m68k sync
• various minor driver fixes (irda, net drivers, scsi, video, isdn)
• adjtimex update to the latest standards
• vfat silly buglet fix
• semaphores work on alpha again
• drop the inline strstr() that gcc got wrong whatever we did
• kswapd needed to be a bit more aggressive
• minor TCP retransmission and delack fixes

Until Monday,

Linus

E.L. Green has begun work on a paper called FUD 101. It discusses what FUD is and how it is used to protect a monopoly. He still considers it a work in progress, and requests feedback on it from people who care to help make this doc better. Its been significantly rewritten since it was linked from elsewhere.

hazzmatt sent this blurb my way: "Here's an announcement linking Sun and Quark together in their fights against Adobe and NT, respectively. Nice to see Unix making some inroads on the content side. But is Quark hooking up with the right Unix? Apparently this is a bid to gain marketshare momentum on Adobe, who are rumored to be readying a Quark-killer version of Pagemaker."

Thanks to hazzmat for sending this one my way: In this article a Microsoft exec by the name of Matusow states that the BIOS in many new PC's will pass 1/1/2000 but recorrupt itself exactly one year later. Server networks fed data from these recidivist PC's will be at risk. This all independent of the OS and application's compliance status. Hey, how come they say things like this abroad, but not here in the US ? Another reason to buy an iMac ?