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chrisd writes "Sun is shipping binaries (no source code for you!) of some of Donald Beckers work, saying in their defense that "It says that anyone using its kit is responsible for ensuring that how it's used doesn't violate licenses, and that's not Sun's problem."" Update: 09/15 11:30 PM by CT :The article is somewhat confusing here: this is essentially a cross compiler, and Sun isn't distributing anything in violation of the GPL, and if they used their compiler to distribute binary drivers, that wouldn't violate the GPL either, assuming that they distributed the original driver source code as well.

An anonymous reader wrote in to say "I was having a look at ThinkGeek's 6 Gb MP3 jukebox, and was interested to see that the software is Linux-based. There's a link at the bottom of the page: download Linux source. Interestingly, this link requires I 'sign' a license agreement with Compaq before downloading the source code. The license, amongst other (scary) things, says: CUSTOMER acknowledges and agrees that COMPAQ owns all rights, title and interests in and to the SOFTWARE and all Intellectual Property Rights therein." That can't be right, can it? What's going on here? Is it a simple case of Compaq needing reminding about the ground rules concerning Linux distribution? Perhaps they have not made any kernel modifications, and this license is for their application software? " Update: 09/13 05:16 PM by CT : we screwed this one up. The link is somewhat misleading since it says its a link to Linux Source, but its not actually the linux source, its just some code that runs on linux. Stop flaming please. Move along. Nothing to see here.

A reader "This is for real. FuckedCompany.com is for sale! The owner is selling it on eBay. Six hours ago it was at $2.24 with 2 bidders, but now it's up to 40 bidders, at $20,300. See the auction right now. " Somehow, I think this is the logical extension of the eBay philosphy. You can read about it on the Web site as well. Update: 09/11 01:53 PM by CT : Two points: this is a real Web site, not just a domain name. Its actually really funny: you rate companies' chances of survival. But this really is just a stunt to draw press (like this) and traffic (if you happen to click the link above) to a clever site. It's a cute one and an interesting site for gauging people's opinions of companies.

On Aug. 30 several folks who have written Linux drivers and apps relating to the free barcode scanner mentioned here a few days ago were sent cease and desist orders demanding that they stop distributing the code. [updated by timothy 20:00 GMT: Please note that what flyingbuttmonkeys received is not officially a "cease and desist" letter; instead, it merely says that the longer the drivers are available, the "longer damages will accrue," citing "intellectual property rights owned by Digital Convergence." ] The barcode scanner is called a CueCat (with some lame marketroid colons that I'm not using because it irritates me when people name things like that). The code included a device driver written by Pierre-Philippe Coupard and a reader/decrypter written by Michael Rothwell. The code is afaik unavailable, but hopefully folks who downloaded it will have mirrors soon. I asked Michael to describe to me what his decoder did, and a few other questions.

> How complicated is the driver/what does it do?

It isn't terribly complicated. There's two programs that I wrote in the package, and one I did not. All are based on the "libcue" I wrote, also in the package. The deocder algorithm is a simple modified base-64 XOR 67. Jean-Philippe 'JP' Sugarbroad figured it out, and Colin Cross wrote code based on it and made me aware of it. I re-implemented it for the learning experience. The program named "decode" reads in a line of output from the cuecat for stdin or as first argument. CueCat output looks like this:

<ALT-F10>.C3nZC3nZC3nYDhv7D3DWCxnX.cGf2.ENr7C3b3DNbWChPXDxzZDNP6.

decode splits the Cue output into fields separeted buy ".". It ignores the first field and runs the rest through the base64+XOR decoder. This becomes the first line output. Digital Converegence added some additional "encryption" to their Web service; their program takes the output of the cuecat and inverts its case befoe sending it off to http://[server].dcnv.com/CRQ/1..[activation code].04.[cuecat scan].0

[Server] can be a, o, s, t, or u. [activation code] is supposed to be the activation code you get from your registration, but can be simply "ACTIVATIONCODE", which is actually what my spftware puts there. [cuecat scan] is the raw output of the device, minus the ALT-F10, with case inverted. Their servers send back a little blob of text containing several fields, including a suggested URL and description. Libcue parses those out and makes them available to its clients. Here's the scan of an NADA car-guide book:

The output of decode looks like this
DATA 000000001768443202 IB5 978034533392650599

CUE 0345333926
AMAZON 0345333926
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0345333926/104-2159322-9263954
Ringworld Larry Niven
http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0345333926.01.LZZZZZZZ.gif

The gnome panel applet reads in CueCat scans, looks up the :Cue at DCNV servers, and redirects Netscape to the suggested site, if any.

> What does their commercial software do exactly?

The same thing mine does, without the amazon lookup and with some annoying GUI features, like a tabbed CueCat panel.

> How many lines of code?

1258 according to "cat cuecat-applet.c cuecat-applet.h decode.c decode.h libcue.c libcue.h | wc -l"

Michael makes another interesting point in a seperate e-mail

When they sent the letter (Aug. 30), my software did not touch the DCNV servers to look up :Cues. It simply decoded the data, and if an ISBN number was scanned, the panel applet made Netscape go to the Amazon page blindly: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/[isbn number here].

So it was not the use of DCNV servers they objected to, but the mere decoding of the output of the cuecat. I didn't release the :Cue and Amazon lookup-enabled version until yesterday (Aug. 31), when the FedEx letter arrived by overnight delivery.

Thanks to Michael for taking the time to answer this stuff. It's pretty scary when the stuff that you have can't be poked at without a corporation demanding you stop. Imagine if Ford had said you can't open the hoods of your car a hundred years ago.

Update: 09/01 02:49 PM by CT : Freshmeat has a perl script CueCat Decoder that will also decode the CueCat's output.

Update: 09/01 02:57 PM by CT : Russel Nelson pointed out that Lineo's Driver has also been taken down following a cease and desist from Digital Convergence (CueCat's parent).

On Aug. 30 several folks who have written Linux drivers and apps relating to the free barcode scanner mentioned here a few days ago were sent cease and desist orders demanding that they stop distributing the code. [updated by timothy 20:00 GMT: Please note that what flyingbuttmonkeys received is not officially a "cease and desist" letter; instead, it merely says that the longer the drivers are available, the "longer damages will accrue," citing "intellectual property rights owned by Digital Convergence." ] The barcode scanner is called a CueCat (with some lame marketroid colons that I'm not using because it irritates me when people name things like that). The code included a device driver written by Pierre-Philippe Coupard and a reader/decrypter written by Michael Rothwell. The code is afaik unavailable, but hopefully folks who downloaded it will have mirrors soon. I asked Michael to describe to me what his decoder did, and a few other questions.

> How complicated is the driver/what does it do?

It isn't terribly complicated. There's two programs that I wrote in the package, and one I did not. All are based on the "libcue" I wrote, also in the package. The deocder algorithm is a simple modified base-64 XOR 67. Jean-Philippe 'JP' Sugarbroad figured it out, and Colin Cross wrote code based on it and made me aware of it. I re-implemented it for the learning experience. The program named "decode" reads in a line of output from the cuecat for stdin or as first argument. CueCat output looks like this:

<ALT-F10>.C3nZC3nZC3nYDhv7D3DWCxnX.cGf2.ENr7C3b3DNbWChPXDxzZDNP6.

decode splits the Cue output into fields separeted buy ".". It ignores the first field and runs the rest through the base64+XOR decoder. This becomes the first line output. Digital Converegence added some additional "encryption" to their Web service; their program takes the output of the cuecat and inverts its case befoe sending it off to http://[server].dcnv.com/CRQ/1..[activation code].04.[cuecat scan].0

[Server] can be a, o, s, t, or u. [activation code] is supposed to be the activation code you get from your registration, but can be simply "ACTIVATIONCODE", which is actually what my spftware puts there. [cuecat scan] is the raw output of the device, minus the ALT-F10, with case inverted. Their servers send back a little blob of text containing several fields, including a suggested URL and description. Libcue parses those out and makes them available to its clients. Here's the scan of an NADA car-guide book:

The output of decode looks like this
DATA 000000001768443202 IB5 978034533392650599

CUE 0345333926
AMAZON 0345333926
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0345333926/104-2159322-9263954
Ringworld Larry Niven
http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0345333926.01.LZZZZZZZ.gif

The gnome panel applet reads in CueCat scans, looks up the :Cue at DCNV servers, and redirects Netscape to the suggested site, if any.

> What does their commercial software do exactly?

The same thing mine does, without the amazon lookup and with some annoying GUI features, like a tabbed CueCat panel.

> How many lines of code?

1258 according to "cat cuecat-applet.c cuecat-applet.h decode.c decode.h libcue.c libcue.h | wc -l"

Michael makes another interesting point in a seperate e-mail

When they sent the letter (Aug. 30), my software did not touch the DCNV servers to look up :Cues. It simply decoded the data, and if an ISBN number was scanned, the panel applet made Netscape go to the Amazon page blindly: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/[isbn number here].

So it was not the use of DCNV servers they objected to, but the mere decoding of the output of the cuecat. I didn't release the :Cue and Amazon lookup-enabled version until yesterday (Aug. 31), when the FedEx letter arrived by overnight delivery.

Thanks to Michael for taking the time to answer this stuff. It's pretty scary when the stuff that you have can't be poked at without a corporation demanding you stop. Imagine if Ford had said you can't open the hoods of your car a hundred years ago.

Update: 09/01 02:49 PM by CT : Freshmeat has a perl script CueCat Decoder that will also decode the CueCat's output.

Update: 09/01 02:57 PM by CT : Russel Nelson pointed out that Lineo's Driver has also been taken down following a cease and desist from Digital Convergence (CueCat's parent).

Along with an adventuring band of others, tmatysik writes: "Came across this article in the New Zealand Herald the other day. Seems that Weta Digital is now moving over to Linux for the rendering work on Lord of the Rings. Two quotes from the article especially caught my eye: [1)] 'We were able to get the SGI 1200 servers for about $15,000 each or $7500 a processor, and they run more than twice as fast as the [$40000] Octanes for pure rendering.' [and 2)] 'Just by putting in a Linux processor, the price to do a frame is up to a tenth of the cost as on an SGI workstation [running SGI's Irix operating system] so the things we can attempt are more complex.'" Update: 08/27 09:35 PM by CT : Rebecca from WetaFX sent us pictures of the team, and the mighty stack that shall render lord of the rings.

Rand Race writes: "Lowend Mac is reporting here that Apple is considering dropping the G4 on most of its line in favor of IBM's Altivec-less G5. The G5 would appear in early 2001 at speeds from 700Mhz to 1Ghz in single, dual, and quad setups. Speeds up to 2Ghz should be reached by 2002. Updated G3s (750Cx/G3e) at 533-666Mhz will be used in iMacs and iBooks (maybe a 666Mhz G5 iMac SE), Dual and Quad G4-500s in midrange machines, and G5s in high end machines (733,866, & 1Ghz), Powerbooks (733 & 850), and Cubes (866 & 1Ghz). Disclaimer; this is a rumour and we all know about Apple rumors..." Update: 08/18 09:04 PM by CT : Several people noted that this is more then a rumor, its a blatant lie... they got very worked up about it too ;)

Patrick 'CaptTofu' Galbraith has completed a palm interface to Slashdot that you can access from this location if you're using the Palm VII's Web Clippings. Feel free to send him thanks/bugs/suggestions/feraris if you're moved to. Update: 07/29 12:15 AM by CT : Avantgo users could try this URL and consider deprecating the old use of light more.

tealover noted thatMSNBC has headline saying that Napster has been shut down by the judge. As of this writing, its still up, and the Napster MOTD is telling us to expect an announcement in a couple of hours. More when we got it. here is a zdnet story. I've attached the MOTD below. Update: 07/27 12:40 AM by CT : this washington post story reports that the injunction will go in effect PM friday. Boycotts against the RIAA are being discussed. This is the motd you get when you connect to napster as of 8:02 eastern:

You have probably heard in the news about the recording industry's lawsuit against Napster. The RIAA has asked a federal judge to shut Napster down, and an important hearing will be held at 2:00 p.m. PDT Wednesday, July 26 at the U.S. District Court in San Francisco.

Wednesday at 7:00 p.m. PDT we will give the Napster community a brief update of what happened in the courtroom via a live webcast that you can view at www.napster.com.

On Sunday night, the popular geek news site Kuro5hin.org was the victim of a denial of service attack that involved the abuse of their news submission queue and comment system by an unknown cracker. While the identity of the cracker or crackers is still not known, the all-volunteer Kuro5hin team is busy going through access logs, portscan information and other information to find out who caused the problem. In light of the attack, Kuro5hin was shut down today with a message telling their fans why they needed to take the site down. I spoke to some of the Kuro5hin staff to get some answers: How did it happen, and is there a light at the end of the tunnel?

Dylan Griffiths, known to Kuro5hin users as Inoshiro, gives us the sysadmin play-by-play:

"This started on Sunday night. Basically, I had been over at a friend's place, there had been a storm watch, and he's a ham radio guy. He's a member of Canwatch, which is a volunteer ham radio thing you can do once you get a license. We were out driving around all afternoon. We got home, watched some TV, and dropped me off at home. At that point it was pretty late and I was about to go to bed. Normally, I would just go to bed, but I sat in front of the computer to check out Kuro5hin, and I noticed that there were about nine stories in the moderation queue. I thought that was a bit odd, because we normally get one or two stories at a time, and they get voted on, so they either show up or disappear quickly. I went to the submission queue, and I saw one or two stories posted by people with handles, and the rest were all Anonymous Hero. I initially thought that perhaps some fellow had decided to post a few things on Sunday night so it would be there for Monday morning, because weekend traffic is about half of our weekday traffic. I figured I would just delete the extras. The subject lines for the submissions were all just random strings of text. I didn't know why that would be, so I deleted a couple of them, and noticed that a couple came back. So, I logged into the server and I was going to see if I could block the garbage submissions. I also logged into the IRC channel to see if anyone knew what was going on. That's where people told me about a user named Kano, and how he was angry that his story was voted down so quickly. In the interest of getting the facts, I wanted to block what was going on, and get more of the story. I blocked it, fired off a couple of mails to [Kuro5hin creator] Rusty (Foster), and talked with some of the guys on IRC because on the whole, they're nice people. Kuro5hin has a great bunch of people that helped me and Rusty through this. We talked about it, and one of the channel members mentioned that the machine the attacks were coming from looked like it had a bunch of ports open. When I traced it through the whois database, it was a part of a server farm in a hosting company. So, you'd think they'd only have web, and maybe ssh and telnet open for admin purposes, and everything else would be centralized, because that's what you do when you have 400 machines."

The team leaps to action

Inoshiro continues, "Rusty joined the chat on Sunday night, and the IRC channel users banded together. We banned two subnets, and the channel people helped us clean up the submission queue. The box on one of the subnets we banned was obviously cracked. In addition to ftp ssh and http, they had sunrpc open, nfs, mysql and irc. So, besides the obvious fact that mysql should be open like that and the Sunrpc services, irc is something you don't see on a webhosting farm. I don't think the spammer expected us to block him quite so quickly. It took me about 40 minutes for me to block him because a router between me and k5 went mad and was giving me 3000ms latency. It was the first time I'd actually had to do it. Once it was blocked, that's when the channel helped us clean up. Then, within 20 minutes, it started coming in again. That one was blocked within about ten minutes, and that was a proxy server. Everything else since then has been cracked boxes.

"I got it down to the point where we would see five scroll by, and when we got to the end, I basically ignored everything else I was doing, and blocked submissions as they came in. It wasn't until Monday night that the router between myself and k5 stopped giving us incredibly high ping times.

"I went to bed, and I slept in a little bit. I got up, joined the channel. Since I finished school earlier this month, I talk to people in the channel in the morning because most of the people I know are asleep or have a job. I've been sort of looking for employment recently, but I've been spending a lot of time working on k5. I usually talk to them in the channel, because Rusty was gone for two weeks and I was the only admin around. I'd been spending more time just talking to people. We had a bit of a chat, a few people proposed ideas about who they thought might have done it. Nothing was really resolved. Then I noticed that there was more stuff coming in the queue. I contacted Rusty at work, and he joined the IRC chat, and we talked about it. We spent Monday getting some of the scoop developers to disable anonymous story submissions, then we added logging to a bunch of things. Basically, Monday was the day when we were babysitting k5. The poster would switch their submission to a new cracked box. I was watching the output of the log and ipchains the subnet, look up the person responsible, and cc: it to Rusty. The people Rusty used to work for, intes.net, offered legal support. They've been really great about it because even though Rusty doesn't work for them anymore, they were still hosting the box until we get it all moved."

On Tuesday, the system abuse continued not only in the submission queue, but also in the commenting system used by readers to share their feelings or concerns about news items that Kuro5hin posts throughout the day.

More from Inoshiro: "I mailed [Slashdot Founder] Rob (Malda) on Tuesday morning, and I wasn't sure how he'd take it. Usually his replies are given out with as few words as possible. After a couple of replies, we were sending 8 or 9 paragraphs back and forth all day. He suggested a few things, and Rusty said he didn't realize it could have gotten that bad so quickly. My buddy from Sunday came over, and I watching Kuro5hin and he was helping me set up networking booting with an OpenBSD box I have here. It was ten o'clock, and we went to watch The Simpsons. While we watched, the guy had just been spamming the server more. he started spamming about fifteen minutes after we went to watch The Simpsons. How could someone do this? This is like proving a windshield is made of glass by smashing it."

So, at three in the morning at the Villa Hotel in San Mateo, Rusty Foster, Kuro5hin's creator, replaced his website with a black page telling the story of the denial of service attacks. I got a chance to speak to Rusty today while he was in his office at OpenSales.

Rusty said, "Today I'm bitter and hopeful. Yesterday I was bitter and depressed. It bothers me a lot, is the best I can put it."

The fact that Kuro5hin is entirely volunteer-run, added to the fact that they've got an active IRC presence and die-hard fans, lends itself to community building. People read Kuro5hin, post comments, and share their feelings and criticisms with people around the world. In the end, the Kuro5hin staff is resolved to not let the misguided destruction of one incident destroy the community they have built from the ground up.

"I think that we will get the site back up," Rusty said. "It will not be entirely the same as it was before. Anonymous access is gonna go. That's all there is to it. There's a place for anonymous access and I'm all for free speech, but there's also got to be a place for real people who will stand up and identify themselves, more or less. We're not even asking for identities, we're asking people to create a pseudonym and use it. Slashdot pretty much has the market cornered on free and open access, and I'm a lot more impressed now with the crap you put up with."

I'm aiming for a month. I'm leaving in August to go to Italy, and then immediately after that, my sister's getting married. I won't be back here with reliable access until the middle off August. There are a bunch of great developers that work on the code, and I'm going to put together a list of things that need to be done. Knowing them, they'll probably do most of them. Whatever remains, I'll do when I get back, and then we will re-launch amid great fanfare. I got a lot of great E-mails from people supporting the site, and a lot of them supprting my decision to close it until we've taken care of the problem, and I would like to thank them collectively for all their support, making me feel better, and inspiring me to actually get the site back."

Update: 07/26 08:59 PM by CT : Just wanted to throw my 2 bits in... VA Linux Systems is gonna help with some hardware since the Kuro5hin system really was strugglign to keep up with their existing hardware. That doesn't address the spam attacks which we've also spent quite a bit of time discussing. I'm personally finding this really interesting since I've gone through it all with Slashdot over the years, and seeing it done to someone else with the benefit of hindsight and experience is quite interesting. The frusteration you feel when something you work so hard on is screwed with by troublemakers is hard to describe: especially when you're just a volunteer. Slashdot wouldn't have survived that stage without help from a lot of people... Best of luck to you guys, and I hope to see ya pull through this.

jjr writes "An article over at TechWeb states the date for the release of the source code Star Office 6.0 is on Oct. 13 and it will be released at openoffice.org." We've been hearing rumors of this for some time now, but I'm still looking for confirmation of the license, but the rumor is that it will be Open Source compliant, and hopefully GPL (especially considering the (well deserved) heat they took over their previous license). Rumors about the license in German. I've also heard that the among the major goals is a GTK port of the suite. Update: 07/19 01:31 PM by CT : It's apparently official: Finally a story in English proclaiming that it will be released under the GPL!

Margin Walker writes "AppleInsider doesn't seem to be scared of Apple's legion of legal representation. They've posted photos of the G4 Cube and nifty new CRT and flat-screen displays." The site is pretty hosed, so if some folks could get some mirrors up, that'd be bitchin'. Update: 07/19 12:11 AM by CT : The Mac Junkie has mirrors of the pics, and claims that they are frauds along with some good arguments to back it up. Update: 07/19 01:27 PM by CT : Apple Legal shut both of them down with Cease & Desist orders. Mirrors are all over the place.

Margin Walker writes "AppleInsider doesn't seem to be scared of Apple's legion of legal representation. They've posted photos of the G4 Cube and nifty new CRT and flat-screen displays." The site is pretty hosed, so if some folks could get some mirrors up, that'd be bitchin'. Update: 07/19 12:11 AM by CT : The Mac Junkie has mirrors of the pics, and claims that they are frauds along with some good arguments to back it up. Update: 07/19 01:27 PM by CT : Apple Legal shut both of them down with Cease & Desist orders. Mirrors are all over the place.

Diablo 2 arrived at Babbages today. CowboyNeal picked up our copies this morning. I'm a level 10 Sorceress named CmdrTaco, so if you see me, give me cool amulets or something. They pre-ordered 1.5 million copies... 1.5 million sick days are expected to be called in tomorrow as 1.5 million users sit and home and swear that Blizzard's servers keep crashing. So far its been a lot of fun (excluding the stability problems: we were about to open the door to the boss that concludes act I when the servers melted down hard core). Update: 06/30 01:11 PM by CT : Pater & I are hanging out by the rogue encampment waypoint in a game named 'Slashdot' on USEast. We're just idling, but feel free to deposit tips at our feet so that we can be more 31337 ;) We beat Act I already: this is a damn addictive game.

Boone^ writes "Yahoo! has an article from ZDNet News that details how Compaq and Dell are shying away from Crusoe notebooks 'for now.' " Basically it says that the performance isn't so hot, and consumers are gonna be burned by the hype of the first generation of Transmeta based laptops. But then again ... the battery life sure ain't a bad thing. Mentions that Hitachi notebooks might be shipping as early as October. Update: 06/28 09:37 by CT : here's some pictures of transmeta laptops.

Today Jeffrey "Hemos" Bates got married to Adrienne Lane. We've posted several pictures for those of you who are visually inclined. I'd also recommend everyone send hemos@slashdot.org a congratulatory email to help celebrate this great occasion (and mainly because we wanna see how much mail we can get into his box). Now we're off to the reception ;) (BTW, thanks to CowboyNeal for getting these up asap. The photographers were me, Mandrake and Chris DiBona). Update: 06/25 03:01 by CT : The reception was nice. Keep those email to hemos coming.

BigZaphod writes: "BeNews has a story up that compares GLQuake and Quake2(GL) on BeOS R5 to Windows and Linux (Corel). They compare stats using a Voodoo2, Voodoo3, and a Matrox G200. BeOS wins almost every round -- sometimes by huge margins." Update: 06/19 09:06 by CT : several people pointed out that they did the tests under XF86 3.3 which of course is not an even remotely fast 3D platform. Restesting at the very least under XF86 4 w/ DRI would be necessary to get a fair comparison.

DAldredge sent us linkage to a ZD Net article that talks about Red Hat announcing that it would be sending the EFF ^[?] $70k to help with the defense in fair use and reverse engineering cases, specifically like the recent DeCSS hoopla. Update: 05/22 12:30 by CT : Marc Ewing wrote in to tell us that this $ actually came from the Red Hat Center, started by him and Bob Young.

Loquis was the first of seven billion readers to submit this story about the I Love You Virus and the UK. Its not really a virus: its a trojan that proclaims its love for the recipient and requests that you open its attachment. On a first date even! It then loves you so much that it sends copies of itself to everyone in your addressbook (slut!) and starts destorying files on your drive. Course they estimate that it's infected 10% of the UK. Pine/Elm/Mutt users as always laugh maniacally as the trojan shuffles countless wasted packets over saturated backbones filling overworked SMTP servers everywhere. Sysadmins are seen weeping in the alleys. Update: 05/04 03:12 by CT : My Roommate Kurt "The Pope" DeMaagd has written a better summary of the trojan and more importantly a HOWTO fix it. Windows users only ;) Requires registry hacking, so its not for everyone.

Once&FutureRocketman writes "According to this article, a Japanese court has handed down a decision that make it a crime to link to a page that contains illegal material. I don't think this crowd needs me to elaborate on the potential ramifications of this decision. " Update: 04/21 12:10 by CT : Ooops, this is a duplicate of an earlier article. I'm leaving it up 'cuz there's already a ton of comments.

An Anonymous Coward asks: "Over the years I have heard the idea of luring in Crackers into a honeypot, so you can watch them and see what they are doing. It has always seemed to me to be a better idea to keep the Crackers completely away with a low profile and a firewall. What do you think?" This is an interesting approach to security and one I have also thought about from time to time...assuming you can build a convincing enough trap so you can learn how they work. "Forewarned is forearmed", especially when it comes to Cracking. How likely would such traps fool really good crackers? Update: 04/07 03:09 by CT : originally this story misused 'hacker' quite offensively. I corrected it.

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*

silvergun writes: "According to FGNonline, the 1.25 million Playstation 2 units sold in Japan have been placed under a mandatory recall by Sony, due to the fact that they can play DVDs for territories other than they were intended. I'll say ouch for Sony." Update: 03/31 02:04 by CT : Several people noted that the recall was on the DVD Playing Software, not the actual PS2 hardware itself. Sorry about the confusion.

mTor writes, "Cnet.com is reporting in this story that Microsoft is willing to open the source to Windows to settle its case with government. " Personally I think this would be pretty sweet. It'd definitely be a boost for projects like WINE. Wonder what license they would use? *grin*. CT : several folks sent us this Yahoo story where Bill denies the cnet story linked above.

lymax writes "In a recent PCExtremist article they attack the DVD Forum for its further splintering of the already fragmented DVD recordable specs. - Interesting article. " Finally something on the subject that isn't about DeCSS. I still look forward to being able to use DVD-RW as a storage device. . . for that matter, putting Duckpins and Hamster Havoc on a Collectors Edition DVD would be super 'leet ;)

lymax writes "In a recent PCExtremist article they attack the DVD Forum for its further splintering of the already fragmented DVD recordable specs. - Interesting article. " Finally something on the subject that isn't about DeCSS. I still look forward to being able to use DVD-RW as a storage device. . . for that matter, putting Duckpins and Hamster Havoc on a Collectors Edition DVD would be super 'leet ;)

jd writes "In this article, Linux and Solaris were blamed for the DoS attacks. The claim was that rogue code could be inserted onto these systems, causing them to attack other machines. The article also claims that this cannot happen with Windows machines. Microsoft is trying to turn this entire DoS affair into one gigantic media coup. Is it possible it orchestrated the entire thing? " Update: 02/11 07:36 by CT : the article has been pulled due to 'flagrant inaccuracies.'

BigTed writes "Webmonkey has got an interesting article up about the VA Linux takeover of Andover and its effect on *gasp* Slashdot and the Open Source Community." Personal note: I almost quit when I heard about the merger, because I had exactly the same worries Jay Greenspan expresses in this editorial. Since then I have been personally reassured by Larry Augustin that VA Linux has no desire to mess with the content on any Andover site, including Slashdot. I'm posting this story, even though we've been over this ground before, primarily so that we don't get accused of bias by not posting it. And yes, we will continue to post news of Red Hat, Penguin Computing, and others in the Linux corporate community, same as before. Everyone who works on Slashdot, and everyone in Andover.net management, has sworn to defend Slashdot's editorial independence. Period. - Robin 'roblimo' Miller, Editor-in-Chief, Andover.net. Update: 02/09 05:16 by CT : here is a Salon Story by Andrew Leondard expressing the same concerns as the webmonkey bit.

This weekend Hemos & I went to California for Chris and Christine's wedding. Congratulations to both of them. It was a great ceremony and we're both super happy for ya... buuuut that's not the point of this story. What follows may frighten you, but it must be exposed. Geeks in Suits. Yes it's Rasterman, Mandrake (with Tammy) NeTTwerk, Horms, Kevin, Hemos and yes it's true, me: CmdrTaco (note: this is the first time I have ever worn a suit). Thanks to OctobrX for the pics, you can see more on his site. Update: 01/25 01:49 by CT : And sorry about those broken links. Email x@themes.org and tell him he's dumb ;)

Faré writes "It looks like a hole in the GNU GPL [may allow] people to practically turn GNU-free software into proprietary software, in as much as licenses are granted collectively rather than strictly individually. See the recent discussion thread on the cybernethics mailing-list. If collective licenses are enforceable, then there's nothing left to the GNU GPL (or any free software license); if so, I'll go to the bugroff license." Faré, who submitted this, is one of the main participants in the referenced discussion. Richard M. Stallman is another. They raise some interesting points. And the "bugroff license" is a hoot! An apology from Roblimo follows; click below to read it.

Public Apology

I posted this piece because I felt Faré raised some subtle but interesting ethical and legal points about the GPL that were worth discussion and clarification. I honestly did not expect to get flamed over my decision to post his submission.

I believe that software licenses and documentation, like software itself, should be discussed as openly and publicly as possible so that bugs can be exposed and repaired. However, words (especially legal words) are far more slippery than code. With words the question, "Is this a bug?" is often far harder to answer than it is in software.

But I was wrong to post this to Slashdot, which is obviously not an appropriate forum for discussion of subtle ethical matters, and it is apparent that any mention of even a hint of a possible tiny imperfection in the GPL does not belong here, and that anyone who dares to mention any such thing on this website must expect - and probably deserves - a series of harsh, even obscene, personal attacks instead of rational rebukes or comments.

Please accept my humble apology. I was wrong. I will try not to make the mistake of posting anything even remotely like this on Slashdot ever again.

- Robin

Update: 01/18 01:37 by CT :Another Public Apology I apologize for Robin's "Humble" apology. Robin posts many good stories on Slashdot, but sometimes when he gets flamed, he takes it very personally. The reality is that every author on Slashdot gets a big load of flame every day as part of their job. They get this for mistakes, misunderstandings, or just because someone had a crappy day. Those of us who have been at it for a long time just don't care any more.

I think Slashdot is a fine forum for arguing subtle points. I just think that when things like the GPL come into question, the hostile kneejerk reactions run rampant, and its a good idea to up your threshold a notch if you prefer a conversation to be a little more mature.

- CmdrTaco

You asked the questions Tuesday. Today, in response, Hemos and CmdrTaco spill their guts. Click below to learn what's going on at the world-famous Geek Compound in scenic Holland, Michigan.

1) Development issues
by dr_labrat

What important changes do you plan on making to the whole discussion thing?

Isn't it about time the moderation abuses and "first posters" are addressed?

Will we ever be able to moderate or score the articles themselves?

CmdrTaco:

I'm toying with removing anonymous moderation, but I'm concerned about the moderation becoming the topic instead of the topic. Maybe that's good.

I'm also looking into the idea of spinning off discussions repeatedly marked as 'offtopic' into a "Related Threads" sorta thing. Mainly I'm trying to encourage people to stay on topic, but also to allow people who want to move offtopic to be able to do so... but without cluttering up Slashdot for those who want things more ordered.

I also would like an internal messaging system so that the system can send users notes. This would be really useful so that the system could alert users that a comment they wrote had been replied to. Or maybe that they have just been meta moderated. And it would be fun for message passing too.

A lot of the other changes are backend: Optimizations to make it easier for us to post stories more efficiently. Right now we have 4 to 6 people working in the middle of the day, and we need better communication to make that work better.

- Isn't it about time the moderation abuses and "first posters" are addressed?

I think they are being addressed. Try reading at Score:2 and see how many first posts you see. Even at Score:0, the vast majority of First Post comments are caught minutes after they are posted. Moderation abuses happen, but they usually are caught.

- Will we ever be able to moderate or score the articles themselves?

I've been trying to figure out a clean way to generate a composite rating for articles, but it's tricky. I mean, what do I weigh into such a metric? It has to include traffic, comments posted, and average rating of posts, as well as some sort of rating of the Slashdot story itself. And then in the end, what do we have? "This story was a 6, but that story was a 9?" I don't think that it would really help.

Whenever I think about adding a feature I try to think about the problem it is trying to solve. I don't think this solves a problem. What would you use this new metric for? Setting your user preferences to say "I only want to read stories with a metric of 5?" That seems pretty pathetic since these numbers would have great fluctuation.

In the end, such a metric would be neat only to settle curiosity. I don't know if it would be useful so I don't know if its worth the work.

Wordy way of saying that I'll probably do something like that at some point, but since its only for curiosity, I don't see it ending up on the front burner for awhile.

Hemos:

We've been talking about a variety of issues - one of the things that's been tossed around is creating a system to let people know that their comments have been replied to. This would be an interesting addition, as I think it would promote longer discussions.

One of other areas that's been suggested is giving a way to look at how much comments have been moderated without having to look at the comments, like a scoring index or something. That'd be an interesting touch, if nothing else, to see how controversial particular comments are.

- Isn't it about time the moderation abuses and "first posters" are addressed?

I think that the revoking of auto-long comment bonus has done substantial work on that. My general feeling is that logging in and reading the comments at Threshold 1 goes a long way towards helping to sift out the abuse comments.

- Will we ever be able to moderate or score the articles themselves?

That's an interesting concept, but one that's difficult to implement. What do you take into account? Comments? Click-thrus to read the comments? Rating the story itself? And should the author be rated as well? Morever, what point does this accomplish? The same as reading comments, in that you don't read some below a certain level? But I don't agree that comments and stories are the same thing - I think that sometimes stories that wouldn't get much as much traffic, and thus a lower metric, should still get attention from readers.

So, long way of saying, yes, something could/will be done, but it's difficult to decide what exactly "it" is.

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2) Editorial Independence
by JordanH

Other media take steps to separate the Editorial from the business functions so as to maintain Editorial Independence.

What will Andover be doing to make sure we can continue to trust that Slashdot Editorial policy is not in thrall to advertisers' concerns?

Hemos:

Well, early on we had a couple struggles with that particular issue, but since they were settled things have been wonderful. They understand that we've got the vision for the site, and that if we compromise our vision Slashdot will suffer. They don't want Slashdot to suffer because it would hurt the amount of banner ads that can be sold on the site, plus the fact that they're simply being moral human beings.

Morever, we had a really good lawyer who worked with us on the deal. We've created a contractual situation to run things as we always have. Frankly, I don't like dealing with advertisers - even though I sold the banner ads for a while. It's not because I don't like selling the banner ads, but the notion of compromising is one that makes me squeamish inside.

I also get a huge amount of flame mail if anyone thinks we're compromising. Considering asbestos is hard to get your hands on these days, for my own self-protection I'll avoid it at all costs.

Closing: Basically, you need to trust us. You also need to tell us if you think it's happening. I don't think it will because of both Rob's and my non-desire for it, as well as, honestly, Andover's really good and sharp people, who actually have an understanding of Slashdot.

CmdrTaco:

Take our word for it? Part of the Slashdot contract with Andover guaranteed that Hemos & I would be given editorial control over Slashdot. Our editorial independance is very important... I had to explain this one a few times in the early days at Andover when sales folks would try to get me to post stories for advertisers. Once I explained the concept of integrity they backed off.

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3) Slash 0.4
by kuro5hin

For a long time now, those who want to use and improve the slashdot code have been wondering, and waiting, and hoping for the much promised 0.4 tarball. Many of them have in fact become quite irate about the lag between code releases, the lack of a CVS server, and the overall appearance that the slashdot gang doesn't practice what it preaches ("release early, release often"). How would you respond to these criticisms, and do you intend to change the development practices in any way in the future?

CmdrTaco:

I get a nice flamey email about once a week from some ass who calls me a hypocrite and slams me for not getting out a new release. My usual response is to tell them that I delay the release by 24 hours each time someone asks me when a new Slash tarball will be out.

Seriously, there are only 3 people who really know how much work a source release for this is: CowboyNeal, Patrick and Me. And the three of us have been working on a lot of stuff. As I write this, we are bugfixing and documenting and preparing for a source release. There is a private CVS server that one day soon will be publicly read only.

This isn't like other projects: it has been custom fit to our hardware and to our needs. It doesn't have install scripts or help or even comments in the code. We're just too busy to play tech support helping dozens of people compile mod_perl and tune Apache. We've decided to squash the bugs and make a clean release rather than rush it.

It's really easy for someone to complain that I didn't release a new version of the source code every week. Its also easy to forget that in the last 6 months we've doubled in traffic and we've had to optimize our code and hardware to handle that. A new source release is secondary: Our job is running Slashdot. We want to release new versions of Slash, but it is a definite second priority to keeping Slashdot moving.

Finally, it's coming soon. It'll be out when its finished. And if you ask me again I'll postpone it again.

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4) Meta-Moderation
by Royster

How well is Meta-Moderation working? What pergentage of Meta-Mods are unfair? Do you think that it has improved Moderation on /.?

Hemos:

I still meta-moderate on occasion, although the percentage of time that I do it has been dropping off. Why? Because in the beginning I was rating at least a few unfairs in every screenful, but at this point the percentage of unfairs I rate has really dropped off. I think that's a credit to the readers, really. We had huge numbers of people going through and rating the moderators, and we eliminated quite a number of moderators. The number of fairs is well north of the 90% range.

CmdrTaco:

Informally I've gone in and meta moderated myself several times over the last few months and found the percentage of bad moderations dropping. When I started, every page of 10 M2 moderations I loaded had a couple of unfairs on it. These days I can occasionally load a page and get only fair moderations. I definitely think M2 has improved Slashdot.

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5) Critical Person Insurance
by jsm2

How crucial are the two of you to Andover's vision of /.? Do you have a clause like Charles Schultz' that says that nobody else can edit slashdot? What happens if the whole thing stops being fun for you (as it very well might)? Do Andover suck in the loss, or do we get introduced to "Scrappy-Doo and SuperGeek, the ALL NEW slashdot crew"? Has Andover.net taken out critical person insurance on you in case something dreeadful happens? Could they, in principle, fire your asses, or force you to resign on matter of principle?

CmdrTaco:

Our contract says we're staying at Andover for quite awhile, and I'm cool with that. I spent 2 years tailoring a job to be exactly what I wanted to do, and now Andover pays me every other week to continue doing it. As long as I'm involved with Slashdot, I have creative control. And they can't fire us without 'just cause'. And we have a good lawyer! So I'm not really concerned about that.

Hemos:

Well, as I said before, we've got a really nice contract. Rob and I are both on contract with Andover for quite some time yet - it's over 2 years that we are going to be there. Frankly, both of us really like it here and wouldn't want to go anywhere else. Our jobs involve doing what we love to do. As for the insurance question - yes. That's under control.

Like I was saying above, Andover recognizes how critical we and our vision of Slashdot are to Slashdot itself, and that makes for a good working situation. That, and we can only be fired for just cause, which as far as I can figure means that I need to be convicted of a felony, shoot Rob, or reshape Slashdot into an interpretative dance site.

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6) One for all those grrls out there...
by kimflournoy

After going back and reading the archives from After Y2K, I have only one question, which I'm sure many of the women around here would like the answer to as well:

When will we finally see the "Men of /." pinup calendar at Think Geek?

Hemos:

I think the black-market calender has already surfaced on eBay. If I remember correctly, that's the shaved-and-baby-oil calender. The other, the one with the motorcycle picture, has been sighted as far as Beta Teugue and as close as 7-11.

CmdrTaco:

Just as soon as someone decides to start randomly gimping my face onto pictures of the hunks from Baywatch or something. Quite frankly, my real body ain't quite pinup-worthy, but with a little doctoring I could be super hunky.

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7) Personal life?
by Mark A. Storer

I guess this is a question for both of you:

How's life in meatspace?

Lets just lay all technical issues aside for a moment. I want to know Who You Are, as people, not webmasters.

We have a pretty good idea of the comings and goings of your professional lives, but what about your friends, family, and groupies?

Mmmm... groupies.

CmdrTaco:

Thats a big question for a little interview, isn't it?

I think anyone who reads Slashdot (or who has read Slashdot since Chips and Dips) has a really good idea of what I'm into: Linux, Hacking, Movies. CmdrTaco.Net shows a lot of my art. I'm into ceramics. I spend my free time with my girlfriend, who also is a homebody. I watch South Park and the Simpsons and the X-Files. I obsessively play my guitar whenever I possibly can (and drive hemos nuts: I keep my Les Paul in the office and play it far too loud whenever possible). I don't leave the house very often (I've put 2,200 miles on my car in the last 6 months) except to go to the airport for conferences. Most of my friends live here at the geek compound too.

Hemos:

Frankly, I've had the best year of my life. Slashdot's been doing really well, which makes me happy. I'm going to be getting married in June (24th, for all you wedding present purchasers. :)) and have moved comfortably into psuedo-parenthood of my fiancee's daughter.

At some point in the next six months I'll probably be moving. There's a couple of places in mind right now, one East, in the Boston area, while Ann Arbor, MI is also a contender.

Besides my recent housefire, I've had a really good year. I work with some of my closest friends, and have had more time recently go out hiking and spend time in the room-with-blue-ceiling. I think I'll be taking a vacation sometime in the next few months and may not even bring a computer.

Plus, Moby released "Play" which is one of the best albums ever.

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8) What About the Slashdot Story Submission Queue?
by nullspace

I think it would be interesting to be able to view the story submission queue. That is, what type of stories are being submitted, which stories are being rejected and why, and other interesting trivia. Would you allow users to be able to view this queue, and if not, why?

Hemos:

One comment: Having us write rejections is probably impossible. I've tried to do the math, but considering the sheer amount of submissions we get, the people-power to write the rejection reasons won't work. Perhaps as a drop-down box, but still - we're dealing with hundreds per day.

CmdrTaco:

This is in the FAQ dammit! I don't wanna answer it again! Thats what the FAQ is FOR! AAAAGGHHH!

Seriously, there are a lot of reasons that it would make sense to do this. Unfortunately there are a lot of reasons not to do this too. The reason is abuse. If you saw some of the crap that gets submitted, you'd understand. Besides that, I don't want the submissions bin to be littered with noise like "First Post" and "Meept". We're already really busy sifting through 300 odd submissions each day, and we don't need it to be a game.

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9)What happened to browser and os stats?
by John Ratke

There used to be a slashdot page where we could see the daily hit count by browser and OS. While sometimes depressing (2/3's browsing from Windows!), it was very interesting. Is there any chance we will see this again? Is this now information that you feel you need to keep private for some reason? What about the number of registered slashdot users? Could we find that out?

CmdrTaco:

I stopped logging it. I could stick it back in someday, but since I wasn't logging browser info, I couldn't generate those numbers. Maybe we'll do that again someday. Its fun trivia if nothing less.

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10)DeCSS
by Col. Klink (retired)

The DVDCA named /. as a John Doe in the DeCSS case. Will you guys be personally fighting this battle, or letting others? Will you be donating $ to EFF to help fight this battle?

Hemos:

We aren't personally fighting this. Because the case is based in Santa Clara, and Rob starts gibbering whenever he's taken outside, we won't be doing shuttle commuting to the hearings. Chris DiBona has been keeping an eye on it, and Andover's lawyers are obviously interested in what's going on. I think because of our corporate involvement in it, we won't be contributing money to the EFF, but will be using our own resources to help in the fight.

I think after the upcoming Jan. 14 hearing we'll take stock of where things are then, and if the situation is such that we need to get personally involved, than by all means.

CmdrTaco:

I don't really know what we're gonna do quite yet. As it stands, I really don't think they have much of a case: the First Amendment gives us freedom of speech. It means we can talk about things. It means we can share information. And it means that simply talking about a piece of code is no more illegal then talking about how you feel about Chechnya or how your Senator voted on something.

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11) One Definitive Day
by Effugas

It seems like whenever we embark on some crazy job, there ends up being one day we always remember, one set of circumstances that we could never have experienced without beginning that journey but never have predicted in advance.

Since the creation and subsequent explosion of Slashdot, what one day stands out in your mind as the most randomly odd of them all?

CmdrTaco:

I can't pick just one. Here are the most critical:

1. The day Mozilla's Open Source announcement hit. Many people were crediting Slashdot along with ESR for the big news. It was definitely a defining moment, and a major publicity thing. We doubled our traffic in the following weeks. That was when the mainstream media started skimming Slashdot for story ideas.

2. The day I quit my "Real" job and started work on Slashdot full time. I was freaked out for a week.

3. The night I changed the moderation system from 20-odd people to 500 people with a single database query. I knew that it was a major step towards creating a scalable system to encourage group discussion.

Hemos:

I think there's a few times that really stand out:

-One of them is the Hellmouth series. The post-Columbine writing really brought an outpouring of writing and people to Slashdot, as well as a lot of attention from the outside world.

-The Mozilla Story was one of our first stories that really got a lot of the outside world interested in Slashdot and what we were doing. This was probably our first stepping stone to building what we've currently got.

-Comments. The day that comments really started is when this whole sense of community really developed. Without comments, this interview wouldn't exist, and this site would not be what it is today.

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12) More "News for Nerds" Please...
by djohnsto

While others have commented on the degrading S/N ratio of the user comments, I would like to bring attention to the degrading S/N ratio of the stories.

I believe Slashdot got much of its "mature" geek following back when most of the headlines were apolotical in nature. A couple years ago, the biggest threads were generated while discussing new microarchitectures, physical limits of the lithography process, the size of the universe, and other *real* high-tech news.

Since the stories were less subject to political debate, the S/N ratio was good. Now, the only "tech" stories are about nanotech (thanks hemos!) or the Aibo.

With Andover.net now owning Slashdot, am I just SOL? I know that most of the stories are going to be Linux/GPL/Open Source related, and that's fine. But please, Please, *PLEASE*, don't forget that many of your readers are well educated, and would like to spend time thinking about something new and exciting in the tech world rather than reading 500 posts ending with M$ $ucks...

Hemos:

Thanks for the nanotech props. I love my nanites, as everyone well knows. It's a hard question to answer, though. I guess I think that there's stories that go up that I wouldn't really want to be on there. That's been an on-going struggle to define what we want to appear and what we don't want to appear. Remember, as well, that we are limited by what people submit to us, so we're choosing from that bin. We've been trying to do less on the main page, and more in the sections - like YRO, Apache, BSD, and now a Science section.

I'm open to suggestions as to how to keep that up - and please, submit all the stuff that you think is good signal - but remember that it might be someone else's noise.

CmdrTaco:

I don't think what we've posted has significantly changed in the last few years... I think that what happens is that each person only remembers the stories that mattered most to them. The brain has a fuzzy compression algorithm... so the thing that you remembered as being the best on Slashdot was microarchitecture and lithography... but I get email from other people complaining that we should post less of that sort of stuff and more about Linux "Like it used to be" when Slashdot never was just about Linux... they apparently are just remembering the Linux stories with more clarity.

The facts are that we post what people submit. If nothing cool happens in an area, then nothing gets posted. If nobody submits when something cool happens, well, then it won't get posted.

But when the sun sets, we've posted 10 to 15 stories that we think are interesting and we hope you do too. We've done this 8000 times (I've posted over four thousand stories alone!) in the last 2.5 years. Sometimes they're all good. Sometimes there are a few that aren't so hot. Other times so much cool stuff happened that we just couldn't squeeze it all in. But in a year, you're only going to remember the stories that hit you the hardest.

-------------------

Tomorrow: Steve Wozniak answers.

The Andover.net IPO quiet period is finally over. A lot of you have had questions about Slashdot; what's happening, what's going to happen, and so on, that we weren't allowed to answer. Now those questions can be answered, and no one can answer them better than CmdrTaco and Hemos. They're already starting getting stacked up with interview requests from other media, but we decided that you, the loyal Slashdot readers, deserved first crack at them. Submitted questions will be selected by moderators and the usual hangers-on and will be submitted Wednesday afternoon EST. Answers will appear Thursday. (Friday is reserved for Steve Wozniak, who unquestionably deserves a day all to himself!)

So with the end of the world less than 48 hours a way, it seemed necessary that CowboyNeal, Hemos, the Pope, and myself all pile into CowboyNeal's gigantic truck thing and trek over to the local mega grocery store to prepare for the upcoming apocolypse. Click the link below to read exciting excerpts from our shopping list... if enough of you do so, then we can officially declare our purchases as tax deductable! Now we'll just cross our fingers and hope that whatever regime seizes control of michigan on Jan. 2 honors deductions from the previous government. CmdrTaco & The Pope's shopping cart

First off I needed self defense. Since it was snowing, I decided that a large snow shovel would nicely fill the 2 roles: Convenient weapon to be used against intruders aiming to steal my waffles, and after the dust settles, I can also use it to prevent the pizza man from slipping on the ice on my porch and suing me (Or worse, dropping my pizza into the snow!)

Now that I can defend myself, its time to feed myself. I made a fatal assumption: Almost all of my food purchases were microwavable. I purchased a gigantic "Feeds 8" box of lasagna. Since I don't each much, I figure it can last me a month or more. Especially because I'll probably have to it it frozen. Nothing fills you up like an ounce or two of frozen lasagna. My other major food purchase was a box of 60 microwavable waffles, a jello dessert treat, and ingrediants to make tacos on 2 seperate occasions.

Since I'm not relying on my microwave to work, I purchased a bottle of Irish Whiskey and a bottle of Vodka. The Pope opted the yuppie route and selected a bottle of Bombay Saphire gin, vermouth, and olives. The world may be ending, but he'll be having a 9 martini end of days.

For entertainment, I selected 'Hercules', the classic disney film of only a few years ago featuring Susan Egan on vocals, and the amazing Andreas Deja animating a hero instead of the mega villian for once. Again, I realize this is short sighted since my DVD player will require electricity, so as a backup plan, I purchased the most recent issue of the National Enquirer so that after the fall of civilization I could thrill to the stunning tales of George W Bush's Jr's torrid affair, as well as Shania Twain returning to her hubby following... a torrid affair.

Hemos' Shopping Cart I suspect that Meijer's, a friendly local mega-grocery-hardware-pharmacist-greenhouse-furniture-photo-store was not quite anticipating the sheer flood of people coming in for the "The Apocalypse". However, through sheer perseverance, I was able to secure the most hallowed of all shopping treasures:

6 Gallons Distilled Water. And Whiskey.

That's right - not only will I be able to keep myself drinking clean water, and brushing my teeth regularly (With my new tube of toothpaste, Item #4125056208) as well as flossing (Item #381370099183) but I'll have also have the gift of alcohol. With my natural and well known affinity to Bushmills, I'm already planning how I'll turn the Geek Compound into the Midwest's most powerful distillery. I've drawn up plans on how to convert my former burned out home into a giant high class distillery. From there, we'll extend our control of surrounding area, and parley it into control of the Greater Great Lakes area.

Yes, the power of whiskey.

While those plans are working out though, unlike Rob, I've actually purchased canned goods that I can eat. Yes, stretching from tuna fish to chicken in a can, I'll be sitting and riding on the high hog post World Wide collapse. Assuming my can opener is Y2k compliant.

I also purchased quite a number of vitamins. To understand this point, you should understand that I take about five pills per day - ginseng, selenium, a multivitamin, and a B complex. Wanting to maintain my health and girlish figure for the next thousand years, I've procured the above vitamins - in bulk. Yes, if it weren't for that damn half-life problem I'd be popping vitamins and experiencing natural organic growth for the next thousand years.

sigh But the best purchase of all is the one I couldn't put on there. I've got myself a 50 gallon drum of nanites, which I'll be using to recreate the world as I see fit. I'm thinking Teletubbies.

CowboyNeal's Shopping Cart My list is short. I've been in survival situations before (I'm referring to family get-togethers here) so I know how to make the most of a situation and be resourceful.

First up, plenty of beer. I figured I was gonna need it to celebrate the new year anyway, and if something should go awry, it'll help dull the pain in my final hours, not to mention that a broken beer bottle makes an excellent weapon for hand-to-hand combat. My choice in brew (for the inquisitive) was Bass Pale Ale.

A snow shovel. Since I moved, I've been without s snow shovel, which has been a bit of a pain since Michigan is an area that seems to attract quite a bit of snow. If the apocalypse should happen to miss me, I still think there will be snow to shovel in the next millenium. Also, it makes a wonderful weapon for self-defense, but with a much longer range than the beer bottles. (CT:The epic battles between CowboyNeal and CmdrTaco will do for shovel combat what The Highlander did for swords. Check your listings for pay per view showtimes).

Candles. And not just any candles, I got religous candles. Each one has a prayer unique to that candle. I"m not even Catholic, but I figure I may need light when the power goes out, and why not have God's help on my side? If I am gonna survive, why not do it piously? I'm already thanking God that they were priced to move.

Batteries. My usefulness for a generator could come and go, but I figure batteries will stay in style well into the next millenium. I got enough to power my flashlights and some for my discman as well. Regardless of what happens, I'm sure they'll see some use.

I didn't concern myself with food or water so much, because I figured I could just melt some of the endless supply of snow outside for water, my parent's house is just a short drive away where my father will no doubt be out killing for food first chance he gets.

whostudios writes "According to this arricle at AppleInsider Apple will show their second generation 500Mhz dual G4 boxes at the MacWorld Expo this January. The same article also says that Apple is working on quad-processor boxes. " It'll be pretty sweet to have another SMP capable platform for Linux to run on. Update: 12/27 09:30 by CT : If you don't want to wait for Apple's solution, try this dual G4 board and roll your own.

Pzykotic writes "The great actor Desmond Llewelyn, who played Q in all but 2 Bond films died in a head-on car crash in England today at age 85. I loved that guy, he will be sorely missed." Here's the BBC story. 72 readers submitted this news before we got it posted, so obviously Mr. Llewelyn was a bit of a geek icon, eh? Update: 12/19 07:51 by CT : I just watched Thunderball last night. God he was cool.

Jacob Javits Convention Center, Manhattan,NY Tonight the Free Software Foundation gave out its Second Annual Award for the Advancement of Free Software. The nominees were introduced by our own CmdrTaco, fetchingly clad in a light blue plaid shirt. The awards themseleves were presentd by Richard M. Stallman, who wore a wonderfully fuzzy, warm-looking red, white, grey, and blue sweater. (More below)

The awards were given out in conjunction with theBazar, a gathering of Open Source experts, boosters, and devotees featuring a number of tutorials on assorted Open Source and GNU/Linux-related topics.

Last year's Award for the Advancement of Free Software went to PERL-meister Larry Wall. This year the three finalists were Donald Knuth, John Gilmore, and Miguel de Icaza.

And the winner was (drum roll please) Miguel de Icaza!

Miguel lent the proceedings a moment of extra drama by arriving - literally - at the second his name was announced, right after RMS said he was not there and could not, therefore, be expected to make a speech. But there he was, and the speech was both brief and charming.

A surprise award was also given to Blockstackers, which has donated a significant amount of money to the Free Software Foundation. This award was accepted by a shocked - and literally blushing - Rob Malda.

We join the Free Software Foundation in congratulating Miguel de Icaza.

See pictures of the award ceromony and participants here.

Apparently quite a number of people missed it the first time around, three weeks ago, but everyone and their brother has been submitting the fact that 3dfx is open sourcing its Glide API. As well as opening the Glide API, they will also be releasing the specs for all of their currently shipping products. Update: 12/06 04:34 by CT : check out linux.3dfx.com for FAQs, specs, drivers, XF86 Server Source and more.

Grey writes "The Age has a report that a Houston entrepreneur sold the name "business.com" for US$7.5 million. " Sheesh - I thought the Altavista domain name sale was really high. I think it's time for to start auctioning off such great names as Cowboyneal.net, CmdrTaco, and, of course, hemos.net. Do I hear 1 billion? *grin*

This week Bruce Perens ^[?] learned the hard way that Open Source development has become a popular spectator sport. Or, as I described it a few days earlier, a performing art. Like it or not, things are changing with Open Source development, with the Internet, with the way online news is gathered and spread, and with Slashdot. More ->

If you didn't read (or don't feel like going to) the story linked to above about Bruce's little foot-in-mouth moment, I'll summarize it for you: After getting (IMO justifiably) frustrated over some terms in the license for Corel's new Debian-based Linux distribution and Corel's refusal to change them, Bruce posted a little note on the debian-legal discussion list that said, in part, "It's time for us to bring suit against Corel for this 'can't download unless you're 18' stuff. That's not in our license and they know it."

Almost immediately, a Slashdot reader submitted Bruce's comment to us, and Hemos ran it as a story as soon as he checked to make sure that yes, Bruce had really written that comment. The Slashdot story got over 300 remarks added to it within two hours of its initial appearance, many of which said that Bruce had over-reacted to Corel's licensing intransigence, and many more which lambasted Slashdot generally, and Hemos personally, for having posted a "private" message on Slashdot without getting Bruce's permission in advance.

Bruce was an active participant in the Slashdot discussion that followed Hemos's post and, in the end, backed down his original "we oughta sue" statement. Hemos apologized for the post. And the comments kept on coming, because that's the nature of Slashdot.

There was also some e-mail exchanged between Bruce, CmdrTaco, Hemos, and myself. It was not vituperative. We all like and respect each other. Bruce has my home phone number, and I have his (somewhere). But that e-mail exchange led to this article, because this entire incident, and the way it got blown out of proportion, is a prime example of changes in the nature of online discussion, Open Source development, and Slashdot's role in it all.

Coincidentally - it had been scheduled to run for over a week - yesterday we had an Ask Slashdot piece about the demise of old-fashioned, local dialup Bulletin Boards. There was a lot of nostalgia expressed for the days when your "online community" was 20 or 30 people who all lived near you, and you could all get together now and then for a soda or a beer or whatever. There were no Anonymous Cowards in that kind of environment. Sure, people used screen names like "BBBopper," but if you were a member of the community, you knew that BBBopper's real name was "Bernard," where he lived, and where he worked.

I miss those days, and I'm sure Bruce does too. You could say damn near anything on your freewheeling local BBS, and if you *really* put your foot in your mouth you could either delete your comment or ask your friendly sysop to delete it for you. But it didn't really matter. The chances of a vituperative neighbor or a reporter for the local newspaper reading your post were virtually nil, and even if they were reading, so what? Back then, hardly anyone paid attention to the few weirdos who spent their nights dialing into each others computers.

Fast-forward to now: there are days when Slashdot does well over one million pageviews. Reporters from The Wall Street Journal (Hi Lee!), CNN (Hi, Ian!) and even Al Gore campaign staffers (Hi, Ben!), read Slashdot regularly. Stories that break here are often picked up by general-interest media or serve as inspiration (we say politely) for their own reporting. And Slashdot readers obviously subscribe to discussions like debian-legal, so the distance between a hasty mailing list post and the front page of a national newspaper can be as little as two clicks.

Calling your favorite mailing list "private" or "obscure" does not make it so. If any idiot who has a valid e-mail address can subscribe to it, it is not private. As for obscurity, that depends on the poster. An offhand comment made by Al Average is unlikely to make it into either Slashdot or the Wall Street Journal no matter where it originally appears. A comment by Bruce Perens or Richard M. Stallman or Steve Ballmer or Linus Torvalds or Larry Ellison or anyone else perceived to have "weight" in software development matters is another story. These people are celebrities, at least to Slashdot readers, so their words are going to be taken seriously, analyzed, and quoted, requoted, and even possibly misquoted as heavily as news of Cher's latest love affair will be discussed in the movie gossip tabloids.

In this "celebrity" context, there are two main differences between Bruce Perens and Cher:

• 1 - At least one billion people have heard of Cher, while only a few million (at most) have ever heard of Bruce Perens.
• 2 - Bruce Perens is more important than Cher, especially to Slashdot readers.

Despite her greater popularity, in the overall scheme of things Cher's "boy toy" adventures are inconsequential. But when Bruce advocates a lawsuit against Corel for violating the GPL, even if he rapidly recants, he's effectively putting any investment Corel has in Linux at risk. Just the thought of a threat of a suit can make investors leery of putting money into Linux-based ventures, because all this GPL and Open Source stuff is still alien territory to most "mainstream" stock market and other investment players. Whether or not a suit is justified or even possible, the idea that one could be brought is sure to be discussed by bigwigs at IBM, Red Hat, Oracle, Sun, and many other companies that have staked all or part of their future on Linux.

A better comparison than Bruce:Cher is Bruce:Alan Greenspan. If Alan Greenspan goes out to eat and tips a waiter 20% and makes a lame (but overheard) joke about waiters demanding higher tips because of the booming economy, two dozen financial pundits will immediately try to figure out if Greenspan is planning to raise interest rates, and the stock market is sure to blip one way or another in response to the "news" of Greenspan's "statement."

Like it or not, if Alan Greenspan makes his remark in a public place it is fair media game. As long as he is quoted accurately, there is nothing he can do about the appearance of his offhand sentence in newspapers and as discussion fodder on talking-head TV shows. Bruce Perens is nowhere near as influential as Alan Greenspan, but within the confines of the Open Source/free software community, his words may have more impact on investment behavior and are, therefore, more important to Slashdot readers who hold shares in Red Hat and other companies that live and die by Open Source software.

I growled a little at Hemos for later adding a "Maybe I shouldn't have posted it" apology to his piece about Bruce's comment. It was an amicable growl; we work together as a tight team around here, and we all accept the fact that each Slashdot author and editor is an individual with his own point of view. But I don't (personally) believe we should ever apologize for running legitimate news, including speculations made in public forums by Open Source celebrities. And Bruce Perens is not only a legitimate public figure in the Open Source context, but is one largely because of his own actions. Bruce is not a reticent person. He has requested Slashdot coverage of his pet projects many times, and often as not he's gotten it. This time, he got coverage when he neither requested nor desired it, and was unhappy at the kind of attention focused on him.

I called this little essay "The Spotlight is a Harsh Mistress" because (RAH reference aside) this statement sums up my main point here: that once you open a press floodgate everything passes through it, not just what you want. And the piece I wrote earlier this week about Open Source and free software developers becoming more like stage performers than reclusive poets was as much of a cautionary tale as anything else. Yes, there are adoring Open Source fans out there, but those fans are as fickle -- and demanding -- as any other kind of fans, and when you have the combination of celebrities and devout fans, paparazzi lurking in the bushes are almost inevitable.

Slashdot is not exactly in the paparazzi category (I like to think) but we are certainly a prime source not only of Open Source and free software development news, but also of community gossip. What "we" post officially is far less than 10% of the site's total content. The rest is uncensored remarks by readers. While you can choose to only read posts other readers (moderators) decide are worthwhile, you always have the option of reading Slashdot in all of its fierce, chaotic glory simply by setting your threshold to -1. (Our boss, CmdrTaco, absolutely insists on this "no censorship ever" policy and we all back him up fiercely on this one!)

Even if you are not logged in as a registered member, you can set the moderation threshold on each individual article as you read it. My personal Slashdot reading preference is a setting of -1, with comments nested instead of threaded. And, believe it or not, I read almost every comment attached to almost every Slashdot article almost every day. There are suprising gems (and some great humor) buried in the mass if you take the trouble to look for them.

Is Slashdot going downhill? Probably, in some ways. It's not the cozy little Web site I discovered several years ago, when it was new and crude and 30 comments on an article was big-time. But by that same standard both the Internet and Usenet have been going downhill almost since day one. First the original Unix heavies grumbled about letting the non-CS (but still research) people in. Then all the researchers grumbled about letting the students in, and how they polluted discussion groups with trivial conversation and dirty jokes and filled up mail servers with stupid chain letters. Then the unwashed mass of Prodigy people hit, over one million strong, and irritated everyone who was already on the Internet, and then they complained about all the "clueless AOLers" who followed them.

But newbies don't stay newbies forever, either on the Internet in general or here on Slashdot. Two or three years from now, I assure you, some of the same AC kiddies who are now going "Whoo! First Post!" will become settled members of "the community" and will grumble about the next Slashdot newbie generation's silly games, whatever they turn out to be.

And two or three years from now Bruce Perens will be a dignified Elder Statesman of the burgeoning, ever-growing Open Source and free software community, and he will be aghast at some of the things that less media-worn people say in forums they considered private but really weren't, and the whole circle will continue to grow, with new, fresh faces always coming on board -- and some of the old ones departing for one reason or another.

Perhaps, too, we'll see the advent of more "members only" forums with strict privacy restrictions, somewhat like the old private BBS operations, and those will be where "online celebrities" hang out and let down their hair with one another, just as some film celebs only feel comfortable at private parties guarded by thuglike doormen who keep out anyone who isn't on a tightly-controlled guest list.

But I would personally rather see total openness, here on Slashdot and in as many other places as possible. Sure, mistakes will be made. You'll make some, Bruce Perens will make some, and I'm sure I'll make (more than) my fair share as well. To me, this is the point of Slashdot; to level the playing field and treat all comers exactly the same, on both their good days and their bad days; to provide a well-lit, well-known "space" where both silly and serious debates can take place, opinions can be aired and debunked, and even (once in a while) a mind or two can be changed.

Hard_Code writes "Apparently it is illegal for United States citizens to make contact with aliens and their vehicles. " This is bizarre as hell. Not much in the way of proof, but its still pretty interesting. I'll definitely be giving extra terrestrials the silent treatment next time they try to abduct me. Update: 10/30 05:55 by CT : several people pointed out that this is an Urban Legend. Pretty cool.

"How do I find a woman like her?" I often get asked this question by young computer dudes who meet my lovely wife, Debbie, and wonder how an old ugly guy like me managed to get hold of such a wonderful woman while smarter, studlier young guys (like them) seem to strike out with every female they meet. These lonely youngsters all seem to think I must have a set of magic rules for attracting females. And guess what? I do. Click "Read More" and I'll share them with you.

Don't Waste Your Time on Geek Girls
Here you are, an obsessed coder and all that, spending 2/3 of your waking time online and clicking on Slashdot five times a day. Wouldn't it be nice if you could find a woman who shares your interests?

No!

A woman just like you wouldn't be there for you when you wanted a hug. She'd be obsessively coding or posting on Slashdot herself, and would brush you off when you needed her. What you really want is a woman who will be there for you when you get tired of staring at your monitor and need some loving, but will leave you alone and not demand your attention when you're busy. You don't want a Geek Girl. You want a woman who is willing and able to meet a geek's needs, which is not the same thing at all.

Men involved in activities that demand long periods of intense concentration (programmers, artists, writers, musicians, etc.) need women who will respect what they do and help them do it well, not women who compete with them.

We need what are now called "old fashioned girls" who don't mind cooking our meals, rubbing our sore shoulders, and running our bath water for us. There are plenty of these women out there. They're as eager to find you as you are to find them. The trick is sorting through the 6 billion people on this planet to find the woman who is right for you instead of wasting your time on women with whom you cannot possibly build a long-term, mutually beneficial relationship.

Forget the Girls in Playboy
The silicone-enhanced babes you see posing in skin mags and on porn Web sites aren't interested in you. Neither are the blondies you see hanging on football players' arms, and even if one of them suddenly decides you'd be a nice change after the other men she's had in her life, you'll probably be disappointed with her.

I've gone out with more than a few "hot babes" in my time (I wasn't always married) and I generally found them to be more trouble than they were worth. Women who look great aren't necessarily good in bed, and those who have learned how to use their looks as a tool to manipulate men will almost always make your life miserable in the long run. If nothing else, they're expensive. Do you have any idea how much someone like Pamela Anderson spends on clothes, makeup, and cosmetic surgery every year? Trust me: it's more than you can afford unless you're a rock star or the CEO of Oracle (Hi, Larry!), and even then it's more than she's probably worth.

When you take off their clothes and their makeup, many "hot" women are really rather plain. The trick is to find a woman who doesn't spend a lot of time and money cuting herself up, but is pleasant to hold once all the packaging is removed. She'll be more likely to want some cuddling than the vain ones, and, unlike them, will concentrate on loving you instead of worrying about getting her hair messed up.

Practical hint: ever notice how, at a dance or in a bar, 90% of the men try to glom on to 10% of the women? Be smarter than those guys! Pay attention to the women who look nice but unspectacular and are being ignored because they aren't perfectly dressed or made up. The best software usually doesn't come in the fanciest box, right? The same goes for girls.

It's Okay to be Tongue-Tied
Don't worry about other men being "smooth talkers" while you're not. Many, possibly most, of your male ancestors were even less verbal than you, but they still managed to reproduce. (See your mirror for evidence.) Women don't always choose men based on slick opening lines. Indeed, many women tend to be put off by prepared "seduction" speeches, and prefer an honest, if slightly tongue-tied, guy to one who who comes across as having practiced pickup lines for hours on end.

And your clothes don't make all that much difference to women as long as they're appropriate for the time and place. Be clean and neat. That's all you need.

A woman who is only interested in your designer outfits is not only likely to be too shallow for you, but may also be interested in seeing you only in your fancy clothes, not out of them. This is not the right woman for you!

There's More to Life Than Computing
The biggest mistake I see computer-obsessed men make when getting to know women is to talk about nothing but computer stuff all the time. My wife uses her computer all day long as a working tool, but neither knows nor cares what kind of NIC (a 3Com) or how much RAM (64 MB) it has inside. If I want to discuss PC hardware I do it with male friends, not with my wife.

The best way to handle a conversation with a woman, especially one you've just met, is to find out what interests her. Ask her questions! Not whether she likes to be tied to the bed with ribbons and have her tummy tongue-tickled (at least not on a first date) but about her hopes and dreams in life, favorite TV shows, and other general interest things like that. Work and school are usually safe conversational starting points.

You've heard this before, but body language is more important than your words. So look at the girl! I mean her eyes, not her breasts. Don't cross your arms and legs as though you're trying to protect yourself from her. If you want to touch her arm, and she's close, go ahead. Maybe she'll touch you back. If your touch wasn't overly intrusive, returning it will be a natural, almost instinctive, reaction on her part.

You're a little shy and awkward? No big deal. She may be just as shy as you are. Don't push her. If she finds you at all attractive, she'll find subtle ways to be close to you without making it look as if she's being pushy.

And if the girl finds you unattractive, she'll let you know that, too (so you can dump her before you get too serious). Paying attention is the key to picking up the signals either way. If you're having trouble understanding the lady's vibes, ask questions! All females come with HOWTOs. Verbal ones. Ask them questions like, "Does this feel good?" and they'll answer. They also like honest compliments, so if you touch the back of her hand and it makes you feel all warm inside, go ahead and say, "Touching the back of your hand makes me feel all warm inside."

That's certainly a lot classier than, "You got nice boobs," which is a statement virtually guaranteed to put off almost any woman who isn't selling her body for drug money.

In other words, you don't have to be slick with women, but being stupid or crude with them gets you nowhere. (Unless you like stupid, crude women.)

Teenagers Take Heart: It Gets Better
All teenage boys are idiots when it comes to girls. And teenage girls are idiots when it comes to boys. The girls who laugh at you in high school laugh because they're nervous and, if you're exceptionally bright, posibly because they're a little bit scared of you. Sooner or later those same girls will get over their stupid crushes on Ricky Martin (in my time it was Ringo Starr), and other unreachable figures, and decide to look seriously at guys like you. This change generally comes between the ages of 18 and 25. Meanwhile, you may have matured a bit yourself by then, so that when the ditzy girls of today turn into tomorrow's adult women, you will no longer look or act like the dork they thought you were in high school

One warning: be gracious, not obnoxious, to girls you find ugly at the age of 15 or 16. There was a girl named Jessica who had a slight crush on me in high school for some unkown reason. She had horrible acne, bad posture, braces, ugly glasses, and wore tacky, faded dresses. She was also a straight-A student -- and slightly arrogant about it. I was not nice to this girl. Hardly anyone was -- except a very ordinary, slightly geeky guy named Mike.

At 18, Jessica suddenly changed. It was like a movie makeover. She got new glasses and the braces came off. She got a better wardrobe, her acne cleared up, and she stopped being stuck-up about her academic achievements. And she grew ... breasts. She took longer than most to develop in the chest department, but the results were worth waiting for. You know the rest of the story. It was Mike all the way. I'd blown my chance by being a jerk. I still have a flat spot on my forehead from banging it against the wall over Jessica.

Women Are More Complicated than Computers
I think this is why so many guys hide their heads in their monitors instead of going out and meeting women. Understanding women is harder than figuring out the hardest computer game, harder even than setting up a secure 200-client network running *BSD. But women can offer more satisfaction than even an overclocked, dual-Celeron workstation, so learning how to deal with them is worth the extra effort.

I believe the greatest frustration about women for men who are used to dealing with Open Source software is that you cannot fix flaws you find in them. You pretty much have no choice but to take them the way they are. For example, my wife likes to redecorate frequently, which sometimes annoys me, but I've learned to shrug my shoulders and call this part of her personality a feature, not a bug, and to accept it with the same good grace with which I accept a certain respected coworker's unique approach to the English language.

But I take pride in the fact that I am just as much of a mystery to my wife as she is to me, and that she can't change my source code any more than I can change hers.

Perhaps this is the true secret of finding a woman to love: knowing that there is no such thing as a perfect female, but that a woman worth loving is worth loving in spite of her imperfections, just as you are worth loving in spite of your imperfections -- to at least one woman in this world, who is probably sitting alone right now, wishing she could find a fine, brilliant (if slightly shy) man like you to fill that big, empty spot in her life.

Bill Swingle writes "The final speaker schedule for the upcoming FreeBSDCon has been announced. Highlights include, Kirk McKusick's BSD Internals tutorial, and keynotes from both Brian Behlendorf of the Apache Project and Jeremey Allison from the Samba Project. There are all kinds of fun events planned for the conference, including a free (for attendees) beer bash. This should be one killer conference! " Read on for more. CT : This is the first article in our new BSD Section maintained by Nik. Enjoy.

There are also speakers from Apple, talking about FreeBSD's contribution to Darwin, Jonathan Bresler talking about his experiences with spam fighting as the FreeBSD Postmaster, and Jun-ichiro itojun Hagino of the KAME group, talking about IPv6 and IPSec, to name just a few more (modesty forbids me mentioning my own presentation at the conference, obviously).

Christopher Sypal writes "I just found out that MTV is going to have a special this Wednesday (10pm eastern) called 'True Life: I'm a Hacker'. Looks exactly like what you would expect from an MTV show with 'hacker' in the title." If MTV wants to put *real* (and funny) hackers on the air, they ought to send a camera crew to the (highly photogenic) Geek Compound and do a show on Cmdr Taco and Hemos. Perhaps we should all write to mtvdart@aol.com and tell them so, eh?

mikeraz told us about Microsoft's new page on Linux Myths. Designed to convince the seasoned business professional that Linux doesn't measure up to the hype. Some good points. Some not-so-good points. Care to comment? Update: 10/05 06:43 by CT : Mandrake has comments on his page.

Humility writes "EETimes, a weekly trade magzine for electrical engineers, has a story about the integration of networked computers into domestic residences and artwork. This is a little more far reaching than just wiring up your home with a bunch of MP3 players and speakers. I think it's quite interesting." Fully networked houses on display at The Museum of Modern Art. Sweet! I wonder if this guy's place qualifies? It should.

I've received notes from a few different places that Red Hat will be taking down its onsite servers for the duration of the Hurricane Floyd. The staff is leaving at 3 today and the place will be closed on Thursday. If Floyd doesn't cause any serious problems the web and ftp servers (as well as the *@redhat.com email addresses) will come back up soon by friday. Update: 09/15 01:01 by CT : FTP and WWW are mirrored offsite, and assuming DNS propogates properly service should continue without problems.

mrwiz writes "According to this article at Appleinsider, it looks like Apple may be removing the upgradability of processors even further with their next generation logicboards, codenamed "Shark", by moving the boot ROM off of the logicboard and onto their processor daughter cards. " Update: 09/07 07:56 by CT : The Happy Blues Man writes "MacOS Rumors has an update on the "trojan" firmware upgrade for Blue & White G3s. It seems that even in Apple itself, the issue was hotly contested and the proponents' reason was to stop 3rd parties from shipping G4 upgrades before Apple's G4s were shipping. Apple sources have confirmed a fix will be available. " Update: 09/07 08:54 by H :I've been told by numerous people that this is NOT true-more to follow.

So its ready for testing on The Meta Moderation Page. Essentially eligible users are presented with 10 comments the moderation done to them. They are then asked to rate the moderation as Fair, or Unfair. Click the link below to read more comments on this addition to our moderation system. There have been a few minor tweaks to the system since I last mentioned it.

The most confusing issue in M2 is context. We don't have enough of it. The comment is seen without its parent comment and its replies. Hell, we don't even see the story it was written in reply to. We don't know what the score was when the moderator moderated. All of these things are issues that I'll fiddle with resolving as I have time to tweak them around. When in doubt, feel free to leave the button alone and simply not moderate. I've found that usually its pretty easy to flag "Fair/Unfair" on half the comments, but sometimes I need more context: Then the parent link is helpful to see where the comment was coming from. When in doubt, leave it alone. I've found that only a handful of moderation is ever really unfair (maybe 2 or 3 out of my 10).

Some details on the system:

First is some limits. Certain circumstances will cause your M2 to be disregarded. This is to prevent abuses. I'm not going to release the specifics as that would defeat the purpose, but essentially, if you vote to heavily in either direction (like say if you vote that all 10 moderations were "Unfair") your M2 may be discarded.

Second is the addition of a karma bonus for meta moderating. There is a sliding scale of karma that might be "earned" for meta moderating. It won't be enough to ever earn you "the bonus point", but its something. Since you aren't eligible for M2 if you have negative karma, this can't be used to dig you out of the hole. Most of the stuff in place is designed to make abuse difficult.

Third is the finalized restrictions on M2 eligibility:

• Registered/Logged in User
• Non Negative Karma
• Hasn't M2 moderated yet today
• Account is in the older 75% of all Slashdot accounts (filters out the newbies)

These are basically the same restrictions as the normal moderator access, except that M2 is once a day, and moderation tries to pick from people who read an "Average" amount of Slashdot a day (weeding out occasional readers and obsessive overreaders)

Finally is an interesting idea that has been proposed a few times that I just wanted to throw out for discussion. As it stands, you only see the moderator controls when you have moderator points to use. What if the moderator controls were always visible, but when you submitted the form, they were only counted if you had moderator points. Oh, and you wouldn't know if you had points.

On one hand, people would burn out on moderating fairly rapidly (the randomness in the existing system means people tend to use their points) but on the other hand, only the diligent would actually be relevant. The only question is would the people obsessive enough to do it be honest moderators, or guys trying to push around their own agendas.

Side notes I've been adding a few bits to the FAQ trying to address a few of the, well, FAQs. So read the the guidelines FAQ for answers to exciting questions like "Why don't you give my points back if I post into a discussion I moderated" and "I think I should have longer than 3 days before my points expire". I've also got a few new things in the "Ideas" space that I'm currently mulling over.

Update: 09/07 04:19 by CT :Answering the old questions:

1. Simply creating dummy accounts won't work.... the accounts need to be older to be eligible anyway.
2. Duplicates are OK. You're M2ing an individual act of moderation- it just so happens that you got 2 moderations upon the same comment. (this is very likely in cases where comments are moderated in rapid succession which often happens on new/extremely bad comments.
3. I'll probably link it from the left hand menu. Else from the top of the comments. Maybe right on the homepage "You haven't MetaModerated Today". I'll worry about that later.

Occasionally comments get posted on Slashdot that hurt everyone. It doesn't happen very often, but sometimes someone with a bug up their butt decides to make a nuisance of themselves by posting floods of messages into a board. These comments are almost immediately nailed as 'offtopic' or 'flamebait' by the moderators, but at the expense of many points that could have been better used promoting good comments. Its not quite the same as an ICMP flood, but its still very much a denial of service attack. Click below to read more about the problem, and how I'm tryingt to solve it here.

So it happened again recently. You guys who read a lot probably know where but this time it was much more hurtful then usual. So I've implemented 2 changes to help prevent this from happening again.

First I added an additional scoring penalty to posts. Originally the default range of comment posting was 0 for ACs, and 1 for Registered Users. In addition, a +1 or -1 could be Registered users based on their posting history (I'm gonna use the word "Karma" to describe the sum of all moderation activity done to a given user: thanks nate). If a user has karma of +20, they get a +1 bonus to their comments. If their karm is -10, they get a -1. I've added an additional rank of -20 which ads one more -1 to the post, which will make it possible for a comment to be posted at -1.

There are only 2 accounts out of the 80,000 that are this low.

Second is a bit trickier. The code now checks for "Trolls" as part of comment validation. Essentially, when a comment is posted, a troll factor is computed for your Account and your IP. This is the sum of all moderator activity done to your account in the last 24 hours or so. If your IP or your User Account has a -5 or worse total, your comment will not be posted.

Right now there are 5 accounts in the system that should show up as trolls. 3 of them are the 3 worst offenders from the story that caused me to have to write this code.

It was hard for me to do this. I'm feeling pretty wierd because this is the first time I've ever made it impossible for anyone to post. My guess is that in the end this won't help: There is no end to the number of IPs or User Accounts a determined troll can acquire to continue pestering people trying to have a real discussion. All I can say to those of you who are offended is to try to browse at Score:1 or Score:2 because the moderation system as a whole works quite well. And to those of you who are causing the problem (and I know who you are) please grow up.

Update: 09/05 01:51 by CT : A lot of good points are being made in the comments, but let me try to justify something: I'm not trying to cause censorship, I'm trying to prevent a denial of service attack. Under this system it will be quite possible for a troll to post 5-10 comments before the system rejects him. This isn't a censorship thing: He's been given plenty of opportunity to speak, he's just screwed up. He's not trying to communicate, he's trying to drown out other speakers. This is precisely the kind of thing that we need to resolve to allow a rational discussion to continue at the scale we're dealing with here. There are most certainly loopholes here, but no system can stop all abuses. This will just make it a little trickier.

Other Ideas:

• No Anonymous Posts. You all know how I feel about this one.
• Restrict the # of comments any single IP/Account is allowed to make in a single article. This gets problematic: anyone have a good idea on how to make this fair, that will scale from 1 comment to a thousand?
• Assorted restrictions on AC posting (Allow only 1 AC per registered post? Allow only registered users to post top level comments? No AC posts after 100 comments in a story? There are dozens of ideas, but I think they all are bad)

Oh, and if enough people bitch, I'll remove the extra '-1' from new posts. I'm not convinced that its a good idea, but it *did* serve to solve the current problem.

Interesting problems, thanks for the feedback (good and bad!) I'm glad that some folks are addressing the issues instead of just swearing and screaming at each other. I'm open to any suggestions, but anything angry will simply be ignored.

bento writes "There is a new snapshot(3.9.16) of XFree86 available. It now supports nVidia, i740, 3dfx Banshee, and the Voodoo3. " You can all wipe the drool of your chins: its gonna be awhile before this morphs into XF86 v4.0, but its cool to see/touch and compile progress. Update: 08/31 10:32 by CT : here are the release notes if you crave more data.