Slashdot Mirror

schliz writes "MIT researchers have successfully embedded a gallium nitride layer onto silicon to create a hybrid microchip. The method could be further developed to combine other technologies such as spintronics and optoelectronics on a silicon chip. It is expected to be commercialized in a couple of years, and allow manufacturers to keep up with Moore's Law despite today's shrinking devices."

robkill writes "IBM and Fuji have announced a breakthrough in the amount of data that can be stored on magnetic tape, a 15X improvement to 6.67 billion bits of data per square inch. IBM estimates that it will be 5 years before this hits the mass market"

anomaly wonders: "I work for a company with a large IT infrastructure. We have lots of applications in our environment. For a number of applications, vendors provide the apps, and provide core support to those app servers. Our vendors are notorious for demanding superuser access to the boxes that support their applications. To protect our enterprise network from attacks allowed in by well-meaning but less-than-perfectly-competent vendors, we have set up a quarantined network for each vendor. This works well when the model is ASP-like and all of the components live on a single box, but fails when the application needs to be connected to one or more enterprise applications (RDBMS, smtp, they want backup, etc) or when it needs to be connected to lots of target systems inside our environment on lots of different ports. How can I restrict a vendor/application server's access to our enterprise network while still providing platforms to make the applications productive for our user community?" "Frequently vendors can't restrict their applications to run on a limited set of ports. Most of the time they stare blankly when we want their application to run as something less than superuser.

Our biggest challenge is keeping track of all of the dependencies and managing what ports need to be allowed to which destinations. Of course, when security is tight our business-types say 'you're breaking my application.'

What can you suggest about how to provide access to applications, patch/protect the OS on the app server, and protect the enterprise network? What does your organization do?"

CaptainT writes "According to this article in The Register Microsoft office was replaced by Open Office in the Israeli employment agency. MS scorns the defection... This follows current Israeli antitrust legislation and the recent release by IBM and Sun of Hebrew support in OpenOffice.org. Is the Israeli Defence Force going to follow?"

fermion writes "The FTC has settled with the Austin, Texas-based company, ClickForMail.Com, Inc, on a charge of deceptive trade practices. The FTC charges that ClickForMail promised a preapproved credit card through AllPreApproved.com but failed to deliver the product. We all have heard that such spam and schemes can be very profitable, but do we ever believe a large number of people will fall for it? In this case, thousands took the bait. The victims allowed AllPreApproved.com to deduct $49.95 from their bank accounts. In return the victims received not a credit card, but a list of hyperlinks which could be used to get credit cards." (Read on for more.) "As is usual, the settlement does not assign blame. The FTC made ClickForMail pay $815,000 and promise not to lie about its services in the future. Apparently ClickForMail is not prohibited from sending out future UCE. This investigation is part of an FTC task force which is filing actions against 45 companies. One of the scams is an update of the eternal scholarship con.

If anyone gets spam from Texas, or if you live in Texas, make sure to use the new Texas Spam Law. Individuals can sue for $10 per UCE, up to $25,000 a day."

JasonMaggini writes "Popular Science has an article on how to whip up a batch of ice cream in 30 seconds or so by using liquid nitrogen. Just the thing for those hot summer days. The article is by Theodore Gray, creator of the ultra-spiffy Periodic Table Table."

bmooney28 asks: "After maintaining a single permanent email address through 8 years and five ISP's (via a forwarding service), I lost it all in a day. My first sign of trouble came when I found a message undeliverable email in my inbox containing hundreds of failed email addresses. Apparently, my email address had been pasted as the return address in a mass mailing similar to this one sent to hundreds of random recipients. This process repeated a few times over the next day or so, effectively blacklisting my email address on various master lists and adding my address to thousands of random address books (virus magnets). In the past, I have had a great deal of luck fighting off SPAM and other unwanted email via throwaway email addresses and preemptive email filtering. Now, the email address that I use to communicate with friends, former students, and coworkers around the world is useless. Have any of you ever found yourself in a similar situation? Are there any legal steps that I could take against this company?"

aagha asks: "I'm working for a very small, three-person startup in Athens, Greece (with a dwindling budget), trying to create the first real, full-featured tourism website for this country. While we have our home-grown Java-based Content Management System up and running and our site working fairly smoothly, we're having one heck of a time finding an ad management system to to work with our system. We have URL's which contain params to build our pages dynamically and we can't find a solution to work with our JSP's to serve ads targeted by category and or article. I know that I'm not the only person writing software for a JSP site (uhhh, or am I?). I'm curious to know what others have done to meet their advertisement serving needs."

robkill writes "The Virgina Supreme Court ruled against AOL in its appeal, on First Amendment grounds, to throw out a subpeona by Nam Tai Electronics seeking the identity of an anonymous AOL user who posted 'false and defamatory' messages on a message board. Details can be found in the News.com article."

alpinista writes "Sorry, Redmond; according to Jay Beale, it's not yet time to throw away all those pesky insecure Linux boxes. Newsforge interviewed Jay and got some pretty straight talk from a guy that knows more that his share about OS security. In a nutshell: 'Beale's take on how you can make your system more secure, on the Linux vs. Windows security debate, and on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's impact on security testing.'"

robkill writes "According to GartnerG2, 77% of consumers believe they should be allowed to copy CD's for personal use in another device. 82% believe they should be allowed to make personal backup copies of CD's. Let's hope Senators Hollings and Berman are paying attention. More details can be found in this PC World article."

Slashback's updates tonight (read on below) have more on Dataplay, background on the PowerPC that Apple and IBM have been brewing, the return (triumphant?) of XviD, Neal Stephenson's next opus, and more.

Pins and needles, pawns and bishops. s20451 writes "It looked grim earlier in the week, but following a fifth game meltdown by Kramnik and a brilliant game 6 by Fritz, the computer has tied the match 3-3. Betting on the computer in game 6 would have brought you a 7-1 return! I'll be on the phone to Vegas."

The new, new, new economy has room for camels. SwiftOne writes "According to their website, The Perl Journal has gotten enough subscriptions to begin online release (the planning of which was previously covered, along with the concerns about not reaching their goal. The first (next) issue is expected in early November."

Maybe it was the 15th-mover disadvantage. melt writes "Dataplay, the Boulder-based manufacturer of quarter-sized recordable discs and drives, finally called it quits on Friday, October 11, 2002. The remaining 120 employees (who have been on furlough for the past few weeks) have been let go and the company has closed shop. They are looking for a buyer for the remaining pieces. Full story at the Rocky Mtn News web site."

Zoom in until you see little canyons ... Twirlip of the Mists writes "IBM's chief scientist for their iSeries family of servers (a.k.a. the AS/400 family) has an article on iseriesnetwork.com describing the somewhat confusing history of the POWER4 microprocessor. In light of recent speculation about a possible relationship between IBM and Apple, this article is of particular interest. It clears up-- at least partially-- some of the complex, incestuous relationships between the PowerPC architecture, the PowerPC processor family, and the POWER4 processor. As an added bonus, there's some talk about the upcoming POWER5 and POWER6 processors near the end. The key phrase (and disclaimer): 'expected to appear in 2004.'"

Shame on Sigma. Gruturo writes "After almost 3 months the XviD project and website have reopened, though Sigma Designs has not complied yet with all their requests (they still carry their copyright on many modified sources). In these last 2 1/2 months the project still went underway, although unofficially:
B-frames are practically ready, motion estimation algorithms have been improved, work started for Qpel implementation."

Please stop teasing us. If you liked Cryptonomicon, you've probably been impatiently watching the announcements of when the next Stephenson book would appear. wka writes "Previous false starts notwithstanding, Amazon says Neal Stephenson's new novel Quicksilver will be published in January."

And next week, building box-girder bridges. scubacuda writes "Lawmeme has released Part III to their Law School in a Nutshell series (Part I and Part II were previously featured on /.)"

aagha writes "According to this story on CNET's News.com, two Texas companies will offer software to give your PS2, Tivo-like functionality." I'm all for anything that gets more people PVRs or PS2s ;) Course I think the next GTA and Tony Hawk will do more for the cause of the PS2.

swight1701 writes "Sciencedaily.com is reporting that NASA has revealed its plans for developing Hypersonic aircraft within 2 decades. These plans include planes that could routinely go Mach 5+ and capable of taking off from an airport and visiting the IIS, or for you earthbound folk, from one airport to any other within 2 hours. And you thought your luggage gets lost NOW.:)" NASA's release includes some graphics showing what the test vehicles look like.

swight1701 writes: "MSNBC has an article about how E-bay and others are enacting contingency plans in case WorldCom goes under and no one steps in to run UUNet right away. Also talks extensively about how this is happening already in Europe with KPNQwest, who is telling their customers, 'During this week you can already expect outages to happen that we cannot solve any more. At the end of this week we expect that larger parts of the network will be down.' Can telecommunications giants realistically keep up with the public's need for ever-growing bandwidth without going bankrupt?"

robkill writes "The actions and intentions of the RIAA have been under close scrutiny in the folk music community as well as Slashdot. In addition to Janis Ian's article previously featured here on Slashdot, guitarist Harvey Reid has an article on the importance of internet radio for the independent music community. Besides posting a number of good links, he has started a signup webpage for independent artists and music labels who are interested in circumventing the CARP fee. Right now, it's only a mailing list for Artists and Record Labels who want to see internet radio succeed. So if you own the copyrights on some independent music, why not join the list? For the rest of us, it's a good list of musicians to support."

spacechicken asks: "I am studying at a major university in Australia. As is the case with (almost) all educational facilities there are never enough computers available for students. So I (with some friends) are thinking about setting up a computer co-op at (or near) the university. In exchange for membership, members will get a small amount of storage and reduced usage and printing rates. The hope is to not only provide word processing/web surfing (using Linux, Staroffice6.0 and Netscape) but also access to various apps needed for serious academic work (eg CATIA, ProEngineer). We are planning to run standard PCs, with higher end machines if needed. My question is, does anyone have any experience with this type of facility? Any advice?"

swight1701 asks: "I remember seeing the MAC G4 case open for the first time and it was like a ray of light dropped down from above, and the Case was good. This has to have been the easiest access case in history, to be able to flip down the motherboard without removing any card from your PCI slots, genius. So why is it, like most of Apple's more frivilous case designs , and colors, was it not copied by other case manufacturers? If anyone HAS seen this, or know the reason why it wasn't, please tell us all!"

udif writes: "Almost 2 years after it was originally announced, the first drop of the OpenWatcom C++ source code is here. 18,000 files, 78MB uncompressed source code (about 28MB compressed). It's version 0.80 and is incomplete, but most of the code is here."

robkill writes: "U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, over the vigorous objections of Microsoft, will allow the nine dissenting states to demonstrate a modular version of Windows. The software is based on Windows XP Embedded, and was built by computer consultant James Bach. Details can be found here [zdnet.com]"

NexUK writes "Guardian Online has an article about the imminent closure of the UK based AT&T lab , the place that brought us VNC, the popular desktop remote control system. The article talks about a nice "Toys" budget where the employees could buy gadgets without prior authorization." AT&T Strikes again, I'm surprised they haven't bought PARC and closed it down too.

Sprocket writes: "Water-cooled processors, currently the domain of supercomputers, high-end servers, and garage hobbyists, may be about to enter the mainstream. Hitachi has developed a prototype notebook PC that uses a water-based solution to cool down its Pentium 4 processor and is planning to commercialize the product for corporate users in the third quarter of this year... read more"

shanenewsom sent in linkage to a story running on the BBC which talks about the new Xybernaut Poma. A little light on the specs, although the headmounted screen is 640x480 and it runs WinCE. But it really does look like the first practical wearable. It should be available in March. Update: 01/21 18:52 GMT by T : Reader Eureses points out that the display is actually 800x600 rather than 640x480.

Larry writes "The most important part of the Standard Model, the Higgs boson, was not found in energies up to 115 GeV, according to this article on New Scientists. This, along with other drawbacks (such as the magnetic moment of the muon) delivers a severe blow to the Standard Model. This, along with yesterdays article on solid state physicists' theory, may call for major restructuring of current viable physics models."

abeowitz asks: "It seems like most of our calendar clients support iCalendar, like Evolution, but I can't find a working iCalendar server anywhere. OpenFlock appears to be in the conceptual stage and Star Office Scheduling Server has gone away with 6.0. Will Ximian or Samsung make iCalendar servers? What's available now?"

Rudolf writes: "The 16th International Obfuscated C Code Contest is open from now until 01 Dec 2001 23:59:59 UTC. Details are at the IOCCC web site. From the front page, the contest goals are: -- To write the most Obscure/Obfuscated C program (within contest rules -- To show the importance of programming style, in an ironic way. -- To stress C compilers with unusual code. -- To illustrate some of the subtleties of the C language. -- To provide a safe forum for poor C code. :-)"

David M. Sweeney writes: "Salon has posted a news item that states, "Rows of tiny crystals that armor the skeleton of a certain kind of starfish act as an array of microscopic lenses that would be difficult for even the best engineer to duplicate, researchers say." These lenses have a number of possible applications in computing and telecom. Wonder what PETA will have to say when Intel opens its first starfish farm..."

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.

palo0019 writes: "I'm sure Slashdotters who picked up Nintendo's new portable have found its screen to leave a little to be desired (Penny Arcade illustrates the point well). Adam Curtis has created a grassroots lighting project called PortableMonopoly.com. I know I would help out if I had any knowledge in the area, I'm tired of playing Castlevania in my bathroom." There's some interesting information about portable video display systems in there as well -- those game designers have some pretty tough compromises to make.

DarkenWood writes: "I found an interesting article over at BBC SciTech about a sports car that runs on rotting organic waste. 0-60 in under 6 sec. Very cool."

A nameless cretin writes: "Yahoo and Bigfoot are both noted for providing free services. They both seem to be planning to add fees for selected services. Yahoo's "Yahoo! by Phone" service, also known as "1-800-MY-YAHOO", provides various information services via voice phone, including the ability to retrieve e-mail. According to this page they are planning to charge a monthly subscription fee beginning May 7, 2001. Bigfoot provides a variety of e-mail services, such as relaying and filtering. They do not provide mail boxes. Although some of their pages still indicate their services are free, some member pages (requiring member login) indicate a $19.99 annual subscription fee will be required for many of their services. Although I am disappointed in these changes, I would like to thank them for the service they have provided us. I hope they are able strengthen themselves financially and continue to exist. I also hope they explore new means of providing free service." Any other free-beer services you've noticed being shut down or leaning suspiciously of late? It's been rather nice to have so many free email accounts in the meantime, eh?

A nameless cretin writes: "Yahoo and Bigfoot are both noted for providing free services. They both seem to be planning to add fees for selected services. Yahoo's "Yahoo! by Phone" service, also known as "1-800-MY-YAHOO", provides various information services via voice phone, including the ability to retrieve e-mail. According to this page they are planning to charge a monthly subscription fee beginning May 7, 2001. Bigfoot provides a variety of e-mail services, such as relaying and filtering. They do not provide mail boxes. Although some of their pages still indicate their services are free, some member pages (requiring member login) indicate a $19.99 annual subscription fee will be required for many of their services. Although I am disappointed in these changes, I would like to thank them for the service they have provided us. I hope they are able strengthen themselves financially and continue to exist. I also hope they explore new means of providing free service." Any other free-beer services you've noticed being shut down or leaning suspiciously of late? It's been rather nice to have so many free email accounts in the meantime, eh?

Sue Wilcox has been writing and speaking for years about ALife (Artifical Life), virtual worlds, and other technologies that define (and question) the fringes of life. The seemingly intractable question of whether there can be artificial life doesn't seem to bother Wilcox one whit: she asserts that there can be, and is. Here she reviews a book on making life, but not as we know it. "The author's challenge to himself," she says, "was to make life within a computer, not just unchanging, low-level life, but intelligent life. In this book he describes how to do it from first principles." (Read on for more.)

Creation: Life and How to Make it author Steve Grand pages 224 publisher Weidenfeld and Nicolson rating 8.5 reviewer Sue Wilcox ISBN 0-297-64391-6 summary The ideas behind artificial life, explained for a non-expert audience.

If God wrote a book about the way he put the universe together, why the laws of physics were the way they were, how he came to design humans and all the other life forms on Earth, and why they are interdependent with each other and with the planet, it would be a lot like Steve Grand's Creation: Life and how to make it.

Steve is a self confessed digital god -- and he can prove it: there are over a million lifeforms created by him running around in computers all over the world. They live in their own world of Albia within the computer game Creatures. These are not the run-of-the-mill scripted non-player-characters common in computer games. These little creatures aren't simply programmed to behave: their behavior emerges from the way they are. They are artificial life -- ALife.

This is a lightly written but mind-bendingly deep book. When you realize you have been smooth talked into abandoning the last fifty years of AI research and development along with the majority of current thinking on ALife you know the Grand philosophy has gotten into your blood.

Creation isn't just about the inhabitants of a game; it's about existence, the nature of life, and perhaps more important to humans, the nature of intelligence. What is a conscious mind, and can machines have one too?

This is not a book about exactly how to write the code behind Alife; instead it's about how to think about both simulations and actual living organisms, so that there's some point to writing the code.

Explaining how to think about the world, starting with understanding subatomic particles, then moving onto items of greater complexity -- atoms, then molecules, then autocatalytic networks, self-reproducing systems, adaptive systems, intelligence and mind -- is something Steve is very good at. It must come from all the thinking he does. He says that sitting in a darkened silent room and just thinking is one of his favorite occupations. It's left him with an almost Buddhist sense of detachment from reality as most people conceive of the world.

He's pushing for a paradigm shift in our view of reality, and like others before him who've tried that -- Copernicus, Gallileo, Newton, and Einstein -- he's finding it hard work standing the world on its head. But as with his predecessors once the ground has moved under your feet the new place you're standing seems completely right and obvious. It's a new way of seeing that is vital to continued progress.

If there has to be a God, I wouldn't mind letting Steve have a go at the job -- as long as he isn't answerable to another marketing department controlling what his creatures look like. Those cutesy Norns -- ugghh!

robkill writes "PCWorld has this article on a new drive by Maxtor, using 1 platter, 1 head and 70% fewer moving parts. Using one side of a 30GB platter, the drive holds 15GB and has a smaller height as well." Well, it's not huge, but it's sufficent size - and with more durability, putting it into mobile devices becomes easier to do.

Silent Node asks: "I am currently working for a ski and backpacking shop in Jasper, Alberta Canada (Everest Outdoor Stores). Right now all the inventory, sales system, rentals, etc. is being done the 'old fashioned' way (read: paper ledgers, circa 1980 cash register w/cryptically translated manual and 50 bytes of memory). This store is planning to computerize their POS (point-of-sale) system in the near future. I would like to advocate a Linux based solution, but don't really know what's out there." Quite a few people have been submitting questions about Linux-based point-of-sale systems, and we did touch on those waaay back in April, however now it's 2001 and to my knowledge at least one more vendor of Unix based POS systems has popped up on the radar. Are there any more options? And how have the systems mentioned in the previous article kept up with the times?"

"This is a small business (under $1,000,000 a year in inventory). This system needs customizable for both our rental and sales needs. Cost is a factor. What POS systems, and support packages are available that would fulfill our needs?"

And in a fortuitous happenstance 10 hours before press-time, swagr, who is assisting in the search for a Linux Point-of-Sale for a women's clothing store, slides in this bit of information: "I figured a Linux-based solution would be the lowest cost...so I did a search for Linux POS software and found only this. Doesn't seem like there's much to choose from. Anyone used this or heard of any open-source equivalents? Check out the (lack of) activity on the open source POS mailing list . What's your take on Linux in the retail sector?"

palo0019 writes "These are tough times for Sega fans, with rampant rumors of buyouts, sellouts, and every other scenario under the sun. The latest one actually makes sense, Microsoft needs a hot developer, and Sega needs a machine to call home. Gamers.com is reporting that the Xbox will be compatible with Dreamcast games. They are also reporting that that Sega is developing "a" Virta Fighter game, that may or may not be the new Virtua Fighter X. " Interesting rumor - I tried calling both Microsoft and Sega and got a firm "No Comment" from people. Update: 01/26 12:20 PM by H :Microsoft has apparently denied the rumor once more.

JasonMaggini writes: "ZDNet reports the American Library Association is planning to sue over the new federal law that is putting Web filters on public school and library computers. Great article title, too: 'Filter THIS!'"

LinuxOnEveryDesktop asks: "I am currently investigating which PABX has the best support for open OSes. I would like to see who's calling on the PC screen, run voicemail server software, do PABX administration, call logging, etc., on an Open OS. Most PABXs (like Lucent's Argent Office,...) come with Windows software, which is not an option for my employer."

Paul Gear asks: "I'm wanting to create a database using Berkeley DB that includes a lot of textual information, and because of the bulk of the data and its obvious compressibility, I was wondering whether it was possible to have the DB libraries automatically compress it at the file level, rather than me compressing each data (rather small) item before putting it in (which would result in much less gain in compression). Section 4.1 of the paper "Challenges in Embedded Database System Administration" talks about automatic compression, but that is the only place in the documentation that it is mentioned. Can anyone point me in the right direction?"

Blaede asks: "I've looking for one of these forever and can't find any that seem to make me want to spend my money. Most important, the audio quality must be tops, with good natural bass (I don't want to have to compensate too much with EQ). The speakers must be of full ear covering construction (no Walkman type units), and the transmitting unit must not be of the line of sight. If anybody knows where to obtain something like this, the info would be appreciated." If something like these exist, it might be a nice thing for those of you who, for one reason or another, find themselves on the phone for hours during the course of the day. I sure wouldn't mind having one, what about you?

udif writes: "OSTA, the Optical Storage Teechnology Association, (a standards body whose members include HP, Sony, Ricoh and others, and among other things, has defined the UDF filesytem for DVD's), is proposing a standard format for storing MP3's on CD, called CDA. Here is a quote from their press release: 'Many recently produced DVD players now have the ability to play back MP3 or WMA files. However, these players sometimes lack the ease of use of an audio CD when playing CD-R or CD-RW discs with MP3 or WMA files. Due to lack of standard format, discs containing MP3 or WMA files made in today's PCs with standard CD recording software often exhibit long initialization times and lead to a poor user experience ... CD-Text capable CD/DVD players will be able to display the names of artists and song titles and navigate the hundreds of MP3 or WMA files easily by selecting play lists or other criteria.'" CDA, by the way, stands for Compressed Data Audio. Seems like a good step toward at least good labeling of which players can play your shiny disks, whether they hold MP3s, home video in VCD format, or your digital pictures. Demo units using the spec should be at next month's Comdex.

anomaly asks: "I work for a fairly large company, and we're faced with the problem of maintaining images of hard disks for the hardware we use in our environment. We use Norton's Ghost for this process. We'd like to use a USB hard disk (because both the desktops and notebooks have USB interfaces) to store hard disk images, but Ghost requires DOS drivers in order to work. Does anyone know of a way that we could store, edit, and organize hard disk images as well as potentially installing the disk image via USB, or over a network? I suppose ideally we'd have some reliable, cheap network attached storage device (preferably in the $200-$500 range) - reliable in that we want to do 0 maintenance on these babies - so that many different hardware images could be stored and reinstalled as necessary. Any ideas?"

The list grows of how many OSes Plex86 can boot. Soon you may have an easier time of installing a new kernel (besides turning to page 207 of Running Linux). SAGE wants to know the intimate, personal, steamy details of how much you earn as a SysAdmin. Also, not everyone trusts the proposed data-escrow deal involving Celera and Science. All below, in this episode of Slashback.

Plex those muscles, yeah, and one and two and three ... dhunley expressed himself thusly: "A handful of days after getting Dos, Win95, and Linux to boot, Plex86 does it again! Initial support for booting QNX now works! Screenshot is here!" And shortly thereafter, the very same dhunley wrote: "Plex86 boots NT 4.0! Well, at least to the login dialog box. This is an old bochs disk image file. The mods will be uploaded to CVS soon."

Thanks, d. Watch out soon for an interview with bochs and plex86 lead Kevin Lawton, who promises to take time out from his busy schedule to tell you what's up in the worlds of emulation and virtualization.

While you're here, why not take a tour of the whinery? Apropros the wacky things that people have decided to put in the kernel lately (like GNOME ORBit), Booker writes: "Every time there's a major new kernel release, there's whining on Slashdot about killing uptime, and how much it sucks to have to reboot to get a new kernel. Well, whine no more.

Erik Hendriks at scyld.com brings us Two Kernel Monte, a 'kernel module which allows Linux to load another kernel image into RAM and restart the machine from that kernel.' The only major limitation appears to be that it will not work with SMP machines. Apparently Erik got the idea from the Linux Bios Project."

Now if some smart distribution maker (anyone, anyone) were to integrate that into their updates system, would that be so wrong?

We join this survey already in progress: Marketing Manager writes: "Anyone who's been in the job market knows how tough it is to find information about salaries and compensation. For system administrators, the search is compounded by the varieties of tasks, talents and responsibilities required to get the job done. Now there's something you can do to fix this.

SAGE invites you to participate in the 2000 System Administrator Salary Survey starting December 1, 2000. This annual survey is part of SAGE's ongoing effort to advance Systems Administration as a profession through information and advocacy. By participating in this survey, you join thousands of system administrators in examining the market and defining compensation according to your talents, your location, and your technical prowess."

So now you can find out where you stand in comparison to others with similar positions, perhaps a valuable bargaining chip come contract renewal (or incentive to check out a new city). The results will be available early next year -- automatically sent to SAGE members, available by request to everyone else.

Number One, can't you do anything about that rabble? bluets writes: "Some leading scientists and open-source advocates are attempting to raise awareness that the Celera/Science Magazine deal is a 'Big Mistake.' More details [here]."

And if you didn't know about this, it's only because you're not opening the barrel-of-monkeys Slashdot Science Section often enough. We're considering an experiment where everyone who opens it gets a food pellet, and everyone who doesn't ... well, do we have to bring out the Punishment Stick?

DanPeng asks: "I'm an inexperienced programmer who has been following the Open Source movement for a few years now, and recently I've been looking for opportunities to write some code and contribute to an Open Source project. As a a senior in high school, I've taught myself C, C++, Perl, and a few other languages. I have a basic understanding of algorithms from AP Computer Science, and I've toyed with GNOME/GTK+ and *NIX programming. I lack, however, any 'real' programming experience writing code for projects of any great size or importance. How should a new developer contribute to Open Source?"

"I've worked with no more than one or two other people on programs of no more than a few thousand lines of code each. The 80 MB sources of Linux and the 160 MB sources of Mozilla seem to me these enormous morasses of code far too deep and intricately interconnected to wade through at all. Surely there must be thousands of similar students with basic programmming skills who want to help but are intimidated by the sheer enormity of even finding their place in hundreds of megabytes of source code. I would think that after the experience of a few projects, one would get the hang of it, but how can a new programmer get a foothold for that first experience? What kind of project should he be looking for?"

stephenbooth asks: "I have been tasked with handling the creation of a data model and Metadata collection for a Data Warehouse that will pull data from a really wide range of backend systems. Basically if a system exists we've probably got it somewhere -- everything from DB2 and Oracle on Mainframe/big UNIX boxes down to Dataease, FoxPro and Excel on desktop PCs, also some fairly eosoteric stuff like a couple of PACBASE systems on a Bull mainframe. What we know for sure is that the RDBMS for the Data Warehouse will be Oracle (corporate standard and we have a lot of skills in Oracle in the IT departments) and that one of the frontend query tools will be Business Objects5i (version 5.1.1). My first concern is to start looking at Metadata tools to help with the analysis of the current data and manage our first stabs at the transform stage, it would be great if we could continue the same tools into the production system. We would also be looking to interface the Metadata tools to some CASE tools to help with the data modeling. I am hoping that some Slashdotters could suggest sites/publications that compare tools (I'm wary of taking what the manufacturers sites say at face value) and perhaps share some horror/success stories."

Steve Wight writes "Looks like Sony had a bit of robot envy the other day when Honda officially released their 120cm humanoid robot. Well, here is MSNBC's story about Sony's new walking humanoid robot which looks pretty cool, even if it is on 1/2 a meter tall. Fifteen meters per minute walking speed and can get up if it falls down. Although, the Honda robot could squish it under its foot. *grin*"

cnkeller writes with this snippet from an article in InfoWorld: "BERLIN -- THE much-anticipated 2.4 version of the Linux kernel will take at least another two months to complete, Linus Torvalds, creator of the open-source operating system, said here Friday. 'It's been a slower process than many people would like,' he said, remarking that developers are no longer adding new features, only fixing bugs. 'With luck, we'll see it in early December, and with not so good luck, I still hope that we can do it this side of the year.'"

scout.finch writes: "John Siracusa has just written a review of the new Mac OS X Public Beta over on Ars Technica. His thorough and unflinching reviews of previous developer releases have been the most accurate source of information on Mac OS X thus far, and this installation is no exception."

scout.finch writes: "Looks like Apple wasn't kidding. Their new front page proudly advertising "1-Click Buying" complete with registration mark." Very depressing. Usually I don't pay much attention to the stock market, but seeing what happened to Apple's stock this week... well, I don't feel bad for them at all. The more credit given to Amazon's lame patent, the harder it'll be to overturn.

Spyky writes: "A fairly new product from HP, the Jet Direct 4000 Printing Appliance includes a 266 MHz PC processor, a 5.2 GB HD, 64 MB of RAM and runs the Linux operating system. However, it fails to recognize Linux, or any non-Microsoft operating system as a valid client. In essence HP recognizes Linux as an operating system powerful and stable enough to trust their Printing Server Appliance to, yet are unwilling to commit to supporting that very same operating system as a client."