Slashdot Mirror

bargainsale writes with an account at Ars Technica of "the inspiring story of Newegg vs the patent troll. Perhaps the system does work after all." Newegg's lawyer Lee Cheng has some choice words for the business model employed by Soverain Software, the patent troll which tried, with some success, to exact money from online retailers for using online shopping carts. Newegg has prevailed, though, and Soverain's claims are toast. From Ars: "The ruling effectively shuts down dozens of the lawsuits Soverain filed last year against Nordstrom's, Macy's, Home Depot, Radioshack, Kohl's, and many others (see our chart on page 2). All of them did nothing more than provide shoppers with basic online checkout technology. Soverain used two patents, numbers 5,715,314 and 5,909,492, to claim ownership of the "shopping carts" commonly used in online stores. In some cases, it wielded a third patent, No. 7,272,639."

New submitter HarryatRock writes with news that former News of the World editor Rebekah Brooks and five others have been charged by police for their involvement in intercepting voicemail messages left for a murdered girl. From the article: "She is charged with conspiring with her 49-year-old husband, personal assistant Cheryl Carter, chauffeur Paul Edwards, security man Daryl Jorsling, and News International head of security Mr Hanna to "conceal material" from police between 6 and 19 July. In a second charge Mrs Brooks and Ms Carter are accused of conspiring to remove seven boxes of material from the News International archive between 6 and 9 July. In a third charge, Mr and Mrs Brooks, Mr Hanna, Mr Edwards and Mr Jorsling are accused of conspiring to conceal documents, computers and other electronic equipment from police officers between 15 and 19 July."

piphil writes, "LiveJournal.com has just announced via their Business Discussions journal that they are introducing 'sponsored communities and features.' This has lead to an outcry from those who watch this community, who accuse LiveJournal of starting down the 'slippery slope' towards placing advertising on users' journals — some of which users already pay for the privilege of not having to see ads on the site. Read more below."

Interestingly, a few years ago — before LiveJournal's takeover by SixApart.com — the management released a "Social Contract" stating that LiveJournal would remain advertisement-free. Unfortunately it is impossible to link to this page at LiveJournal, as it has been silently deleted. However, we can read a copy of the document on the Internet Archive.

The user outcry has so far been limited to those who actively watch the lj_biz community. However, users are employing their own "viral marketing" techniques to spread the word across the user base. Many are worried about a MySpace-like descent into user-targeted advertising.

All this comes after the user base resisted introduction of advertising-supported user accounts, which swapped paying for extra features for seeing "targeted" banner adverts on the site.

These events raise prickly issue of user rights on such websites, and the validity of "user contracts" that can be changed at will by the provider with no subsequent compensation to affected users.

GrahamHood from WorldCommunityGrid.org writes "The World Community Grid is proud to announce the release of a Linux Agent, for the current Human Proteome Folding Project. Team Slashdot, being the #1 team on the World Community Grid, will be pleased to hear that it is now available for download."

Twyko64 writes "The UK police may need 90 days to hold terrorist suspects because it takes that long to crack a suspect's PC hard drive." From the article: "Combining the analysis, the translation and second stage analysis, add inter-country co-operation and interview strategy formation, and from the police point of view, the existing 14 days is inadequate and 90 days doesn't look excessive. Another factor is encryption sophistication. If 256-bit triple-DES or similar techniques are used then decryption could require supercomputer-levels of cracking."

Rogueywon writes "The UK's Times newspaper has a featured interview with Toru Iwatani, creator of Pac-Man. The article offers an insight into the inspiration behind the old arcade classic and reflects on the lack of material gain that the franchise has brought to its creator." From the article: "Iwatani sits down and tells the whole story, starting exactly 26½ years ago when a 24-year-old Namco programmer strolled into a now demolished restaurant in central Tokyo, called Shakeys. It was here that he ordered the marguerita pizza that, with one slice removed, provided the visual inspiration for Pac-Man's famous profile. "

seanbhoy writes "Do you have any information on games that can be played by myself? I am disabled from the neck down, and use a headmouse to access the Internet, etc. To get an idea of my disability, I have almost the same injuries that Christopher Reeve had. Can you point me in the direction of similar would-be gamers and computer users? Also do you have any information on games that may work with the headmouse I use?"

Twyko64 writes "A UK startup called Dataslide aims to develop 'hard drives' made of oscillating sheets of LCD-screen-like material with piezo-electronic actuators and many, many read:write heads. A 'hard drive' could be the same size and shape as an LCD screen. I wrote a this piece on Techworld about it."

Thanks to RetroGames for pointing to a new review of the Terminator 3 pinball machine from sole remaining pinball manufacturer Stern, which features "a Rocket Propelled Grenade launcher in the backglass" as its chief gimmick. Unfortunately, there's no actual high explosives, as "..this interactive mechanism fires balls into targets for high score and progressive game play", but the official product page does point out that this machine was "..designed by Steve Ritchie, formerly of Williams.. [and creator of] Black Knight, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Firepower, and High Speed." The UK Pinball News site has a review of the pintable with plenty more pictures, but concludes that, though fun, Stern's previous release, The Simpsons Pinball Party was probably more enjoyable.

Crispyking writes "Finlay Dobbie has been a leading contributor to the Darwin project, most notably helping track down the infamous PPP-hang bug. He's been nominated to become a Darwin contributor (which comes with limited check-in privileges) but when going through the process, Apple found out he's under 18 years old, and not only refused to let him be a contributor to this 'open source' project, but canceled his Apple Developer Connection membership (which gives him download access to the source code) on the grounds that because he's under 18, he can't be legally bound to the small-print agreement." Update: 03/26 00:26 GMT by P : Finlay wrote in email that he wasn't getting the Darwin source through his ADC account, but through a third party development project, which he resigned from as a result of all the red tape and the ADC account being disabled.

Imran Ghory writes: "The UK government has put out a consultation paper on the use of open source software in government,background research into OSS commisioned by the government is also available, including a comparision of OSS office suites." Check out the formats in which the document is available.

Catherine Ellerman asks: "I'm after a couple of REALLY low-profile video cards to put in a firewall/router. Motherboards with built in video and networking are available but the reason why I don't really want to go out and buy a new motherboard is because a lot of the processing power would be wasted. Back in my parts store I've a couple of 120Mhz Pentium motherboards that will do the job nicely and a friend of mine helped me source the low-profile NICs (at just over an inch high they're hardly noticeable). All I need now is someone to help me find a couple of low-profile video cards and get the bugs out of the latest kernel."

John Ineson writes: "There is a bug in the latest kernel releases, that causes fs corruption on umount. A lot of people have already been hit by this, so for now I suggest you hold fire on booting those new kernels. More dead-duck than greased-turkey. Two possible fixes are being discussed on linux-kernel." Colin Bayer adds links to a story at the Register and Al Viro's fix. Update: 11/25 00:39 GMT by T : Tarkie writes "Linux 2.4.16-pre1 is out, as detailed at NewsForge. If you've been having the filesystem corruptions, might be worth a try so that 2.4.16 can be out ASAP!"

zmower writes: "John English has just put his out-of-print "Ada 95: The Craft of Object-Oriented Programming" online at http://www.it.bton.ac.uk/staff/je/adacraft/ I've read this and a few other Ada books. This was a good read and definitely the best introduction to Ada book."

More on the Battlebots trademark dispute, proof that some of your are listening to Dr. Who on the Beeb, and a memorial -- finally -- for Alan Turing, in tonight's round of updates, corrections, and further info.

That eerie, eerie theme music will get in your head all day. sideshow-voxx writes: "The BBC has announced that there will be more installments of the Audio Adventure Dr Who - Death Comes to Time available on the web in the New Year."

This is cool news (the accompanying art is a nice touch with this Dr. Who presentation), but it would be nice if they would put the episodes into more audio formats as well.

Things always seem to get more complicated. Eric Molitor, ("Linux hacker and Builder of Violator - Linux powered BattleBot that competed in May") wrote about the BattleBots vs. Battlebots story of the other day, saying:

"As a BattleBot competitor I was horrified when I noticed your article but here are some corrections... BattleBots INC != BattleBots the show.

BattleBots INC is suing and not the TV show. (Comedy Central tapes the tournaments and airs portions of the finals on a TV show. But thats just like showing NFL games mostly. The TV company just pays a licensing fee to broadcast the event.)

Do a little research and the guy registered his domain at least a year after the first BattleBots competition in Long Beach. (Early 1998) In fact the battlebots.org domain was registered after BattleBots.com, and after BattleBots applied for their TM.

So this kid (running a script kiddie hosting service no less) registers a domain after somebody applies for the TM and then asks for $5K to give it up. Sounds like cyber-squatting to me. Also take a look at the dates on the website for the replies, etc. Things don't look right ....

Still BattleBots is dumb not to have registered the .org domain.

For a little history on BattleBots and the law suits, etc. that RobotWars got into that nearly destroyed this sport take a look at http://www.robotcombat.com/history.html.

Greg and Tray gave up a lot and everybody got together to dodge RobotWars/Profile records lawsuits to prevent the sport from happening. I'd hate to see them unfairly get a bad name."

Thanks, Eric.

Something to see in England. slathering wrote with news that the Alan Turing memorial written about in this Slashdot story has finally materialized. He writes: "I read about this in this months IEEE Annals of the History of Computing (who doesn't have a website). But I found the website for the memorial itself. Apparently funding was found for the Alan Turing Memorial since it was unveiled June 23, 2001 in Manchester, England. It was funded without any donations from the computing industry."

Tonight's slashback with news of how you can help rebuild the foundations of the Internet (at least a small corner), more on slimming down the old Cathode Ray Tube, a new compiler which costs a bit more than GCC, and more.

Why not put 'em on Freenet while you're at it ... Imran Ghory writes: "Google has put out an appeal to get NetNews CDs (produced by Sterling Software and CD Publishing Corporation) which archived usenet between 1992 to 1995. Looks like Google is reviving Deja's idea of a total usenet archive."

This sounds like a worthy objective, worth rooting around for -- maybe they'll even give you a credit somewhere.

They know that of which they speak. Hot on the heels of the inexorable GCC project's 3.0.1 release, zealot (and a number of other people) wrote with the news that "Intel will release its latest compilers (the ones that optimize for P4 and can do some auto-vectorization of code) for Linux this Thursday. I'd love to see some performance numbers for compiled code on a P4 if anyone gets their hands on this ... maybe the autovectorization could help some gimp plugins speed up."

You cannot stop the chess updates Álvaro Begué writes: "Junior is the new World Micro Computer Chess Champion, Shredder won in the single processor category (five years in a row) and Goliath won the blitz tournament. Congratulations to all of them. Check out the official website."

Maybe the durned things will stick around forever. In addition to the IBM research on making ultra-slim CRT monitors, an Anonymous Coward points to another article on the future of CRTs: "This is a new technology that can integrate into existing production lines and can halve the depth of a CRT type tube. A TV normally 22 inches deep would be only 11 inches."

John Turnbull writes "The Observer newspaper (UK) reports that Sir Arthur C Clarke, the author of 2001, is backing a colourful British computer entrepreneur in his bid to launch a mass-market version of HAL under the brand name the Clarke Omniputer. It will be the first time that Clarke, now 82, has given his name to an electronic device on the market. The Clarke 1 Gigahertz Omniputer is being dubbed as the most advanced personal computer in the world, verging on artificial intelligence." Riiiight.

Imran Ghory writes "The NASA spacecraft, Deep Space 1 which is based upon an ion drive has achieved the longest operating time for a propulsion system in space. So far it has travelled 332 million kilometers(206 million miles), daily logs are available here."