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area wrote in to send us a link to a new wearable linux box. This one looks pretty good. It's called the Mobile Assistant IV and its from Xybernaut. It's the first one that doesn't look underpowered, and it has quite a few display options, as well as voice input. No price tag yet. I'd definately take one, but I probably say that about every piece of linux capable hardware ;)

Chris Rogers writes "There is another pro-linux article on CNN talking about how Linux is up and comming to the desktop market. Check it out Here " Swingman wrote in to say that CNNs Headline News did a spot on the air of Linux as well.

Alex Prestin writes "CNN.com did an interesting comparison to see whether Steve Jobs' claim of the G3 in the iMac being faster than any PII held any water. Their tests prove it did not. The iMac finished last, even versus a Celeron..."

Adam Balevic sent us a link to an interesting response to the Halloween documents on CNN. This one talks specifically about comments in the documents relating to the comments in the docs about patents and lawsuits. Its worth a read unless your aready sick of the Halloween Hoopla. You also might be interested in a link sent in by R.C. Pavlicek to Microsoft's Official Response to the Halloween Documents.

As most of you probably already know, the number of H1-B visas has been increased for the next three years. This will be associated with a program to produce more American IT workers. Even today many more students are enrolling for computer science majors. Apparently however, they're not natural born hackers.

CMiYC writes "NASA Launched Deep Space I on saturday. This is a $150 million spacecraft that will validate over 12 new technologies. The best one is the ion propulsion system. (Hence the relationship to star trek)... I'd still like to see a transporter... perferably one that can devlier my dinner to my desk ... :)

William Hood writes " I wanted to submit this story from CNN about the tendency for IT workers to wind up putting in 60 hour work weeks, that are paid as only 40. This article was enough for me to wonder if it's time to finally bring unions into the tech industry. It is well known that most of the people who work at Microsoft essentially have no life outside of work. I heard a rumor that Bill Gates and friends once called a large meeting on Easter Sunday. While it is true that some techies may put in an entire month of 16 hour days to put some video game on the web to show their friends (I did this once), it is unreasonable that employers expect this of us all the time. We don't need the divorce rate amoung IT professionals to keep going up." S: I notice that my productivity falls and my bug-rate goes up if I overwork. I end up spending even more time trying to fix the bugs I've just introduced -- a nasty vicious cycle. What about you? Also do you think unions would improve matters?

Over 30 of you wrote in to tell us that Jon Postel, died of complications after heart surgery at the age of 55. For those who don't know who Postel, he's the DNS admin (as head of the IANA), controlling the root name server setup and being a guiding force in the current government domain name wrangling. He was the voice of reason against many of the government's less-than-intelligent proposals for restructuring DNS. He was also editor of most of the 2500 RFCs. His PhD thesis adviser and his friend Vint Cerf sum up the feelings of the Internet community in this DejaNews post. The New York Times' obituary is here. You can also find an interview with Jon Postel from July. His homepage is simple and to the point.

I'd like to thank Idcmp, Claude Johnson, and Jeff Garzik whose material was used to compile this report.

Microsoft has announced it is finally killing that damn paperclip in Office 97! They are doing it by giving (one line of) code to developers, and implied a patch would be available on the Microsoft web site. I don't use Office (or Windows at all, for that matter), but I'm sure this may be one of Microsoft's smarter moves =)

Dave Bechtel sent us a story running on CNN about open source/free ware, where to get it. One of the best quotes is: "In short, the quality of free software is likely at least as good as its commercial counterpart.". The article uses some of Sun's tools as an example of some of the availible programs. Glad to see more recognition being given by the mainstream press.

Mike Hicks sent us a link to a CNN article where you can read about an executive order signed by the fearless US presidentant declaring war on software piracy. My machine is legal. How 'bout yours?

After reading a lot of stories about RH/I/N (including Chuck Milam's submission from CNN) I decided to write up my opinions on the whole deal and dump them online. Hit the link below to read it if you care. Ok, here are my opinions on the deal:

1. Successful Linux = Less Microsoft. This is good for Intel who constantly has to suffer under MSs iron will. I have no problem with things reducing Microsoft Control.
2. Intel supporting Linux makes x86 'better' under Linux. We all talk about using Alpha and PPC for Linux, but if Intel puts the R&D money into this thing, Merced (and whatever comes next) will fly with linux. This sets Intel up nicely. Will IBM and Compaq react by supporting Linux on their chips as well? Wouldn't that be great! Suddenly all these platforms have corporations helping finance kernel optimizations for their platforms. Yum yum.
3. With Transmeta's Mystery Chip rumored, Intel is gonna want to get their name in lights or risk missing the boat. They've got the market share and don't want to lose it to this startup.
4. But why Red Hat? Because Red Hat is a good name. A lot of people see this as a problem- endorsing one Linux or another isn't a problem tho. Red Hat develops under the GPL. They contribute to Gnome. You can run their stuff on any distribution. So any benefits to Red Hat also benefits us all. And Red Hat makes some money, and hires more hackers. More hackers who will write more GPLd software. How can you not love this? More folks to help support linux will be hired. Tech support is one of the major shortcomings. IRC and Email are fine for many people, but some folks want phone support. Besides, support guys are better at support than software developers who are A. Busy and B. Not always as good as supporting users as they are at writing code.
5. UDI felt strange to me. But no more. Intel will support more drivers. Could this weight open up I2O? Wouldn't that be wonderful? How about USB? All those wacky 3d chipsets intel sells? Intel will want to support drivers. Other companies will follow.
6. But Best Of All Linux has Intel behind it. We've got IBM, Sun, Intel, all the major players are endorsing us. It'll be a lot easier to tell you boss you want to use Linux when Intel backs it up. Your boss trusts intel. He's been using Intel CPUs since the 8086. If Intel endorses it, he'll let you run it. That'll make a lot of closet Linux Lovers much happier in NT dominated work environments.

It has been a grey, rainy day over here, and I needed a little sci-tech to brighten my day up. So, in a bow to people working in the other cool technology, I figured this would be an interesting subject. A group of scientists have breed hybrid poplar trees that essentially suck heavy metals and other such goodies out of the earth, using phytoremediation. The poplar stores the pollutants in the cellular strucute, metabolizes it to something less toxic, and releases it into the air. The gene to handle all of this was originally taken from a strain of bacteria. Mmm...gene splicing.

John Goerzen writes "CNN has a story about Linux that is very positive. They talk about the pending announcement of a "major database company" to distribute Caldera OpenLinux, and gives an interesting and funny list of things to do while waiting for 100% Java support in IE. This is probably the best mainstream story on Linux I've seen yet. "

BOredAtWork writes "CDA II passed the House subcommittee. I can't help but notice that these are the same reps who happily posted the Monica and the Cigar saga all over the web. Can we say "hypocritical" boys and girls? " True enough-and for those who have not contacted your legislators, do so now.

Gary Franczyk writes "A hacker at US West got caught when he decided to use the extra computing power in the systems to try to find extremely large prime numbers. Fortunately, they have not pressed charges yet. "

Well, the first of the commercially availible satellite systems has been completed. Iridium's last birds in space went up late Tuesday on a Delta II rocket. The satellites have been confirmed and the whole operation will go online on Sept. 23. This is really cool stuff-now if someone would just loan me one of the phones-3500$USD-and while they are at, maybe some service as well. I could be a great beta tester. Honest.

Well, it was really only a matter of time, but the ever ubiqitous "researchers" have found a way to help manipulate the sex of the child for a couple. The technique is not yet perfect, but they are reporting rates of 85% X sorting, and 65% Y sorting. For the manipulation, sperm sorting is done, coupled with artifical insemination.

Currently, CNN is carrying a good overview on the school-computer growth. I remember computers in schools-the joys of programming in GWBasic. Ah, yes, those pre-DOS 5 days.

Currently, CNN is carrying a good overview on the school-computer growth. I remember computers in schools-the joys of programming in GWBasic. Ah, yes, those pre-DOS 5 days.

Kevin writes "On cnn.com, they have a story concering the O'Rielly Open Source Developer Day. There was a debate from the "Free software" people vs. the "Open Source" people. "I'm not an open source developer; I'm a free software developer." Richard Stallman then went on to criticize John Ousterhout's Scriptics Corp. It is a very good article about the debate between the two "camps". "

Well, I'm sure this is going to be all over the wires today, but it appears that a massive operation was undertaken against about 200 suspected pedophiles in 14 different countries. Details are still sparse, but it appears that the operations took place in the US, and much of Northern Europe. The distribution network was the Internet, so I'm sure we can all look forward to more articles about how the Internet is evil incarnate.

Chris Howard wrote to tell us about a new chamber to trap antimatter. Eventually antimatter may prove a cheap energy source for interplanetary exploration (as in Star Trek). moonboy contributed this link to a new plasma engine NASA is developing. Finally in related news, Tom Rothamel informed us of a setback for the Delta III rocket (i.e. a successful test, since those are the ones that find bugs): "Well, the new Delta III rocket's first test flight just exploded. I saw it on RealVideo from Boeing."

Eric Harlow writes "The story is listed about a "NT 5.0 reality check" story. You know it's getting mainstream when CNN writes about it." Forbes. CNN. PBS. The Wall Street Journal. Excellent.

Jeff Evarts writes "How not to phrase this as a commercial pitch? Well, I'm in no way affiliated with Samsung, but WOW the price/performance here seems truely newsworthy. (CNN thought so... it's on the front page)" Yeah this does look like a commercial, but this is a pretty good price. When we can get LCD 21" screens for that price, we finally will have arrived.

hRothGar writes "It seems like a litte while back you had posted a plan via which everyone in the US gets an email address from the postal office. At the time, it was an internal suggestion. Well, now the Clinton Administration is looking at making it official." Hmmm..based on the sheer amount of mail that Rob and I get that isn't even addressed to the right people, I'll stick with my own plan. Thanks. Really.

Chris MacLeod writes "Seem Software has released a software package (sadly only available for 95/98) that will allow you to detect if someone is lying to you over the phone. For only $149.99 you can have your own lie detector. Here's the link." So what do you think? Fact or fiction?

In a continuing stream of articles that really press home the need for personal privacy, Visa is teaming up with folks to produce a super smart card, one that you will supposdly be able to put money into from home. They hope to replace the smart card. Now, I'm not paranoid but credit cards already give me the chills. This just seems one step worse. Thanks to John Heemstra for this link.

Nate writes "Ed Di Cristofaro of HardWire has announced he will extend his hardware testing to Linux along with the usual Windows testing. "It's quickly spreading in popularity and has the potential to fall right behind Windows and into the #2 spot for desktop operating system users." Click below to read on.

Martin Hepworth writes "Looks like SUN are bowing the M$'s 'user-friendly' installation with a deal with Install Shield Software. "

Johan Walles writes "I dunno whether "scoop" is the correct term for this, but anyway: slashdot.org is on tenth place of the site rankings for the "Computers/Internet" category on Sixdegrees link Forty more votes would put Slashdot on third place (before www.linux.org), and 170 votes would put it first (above www.icq.com and www.cnet.com). So if all sixdegrees users reading /. would go "slashdot-effect" the poll, a whole bunch of new readers might very well see the light and come to /. for their daily updates :-)."

James S. Baughn writes "Seeing as how there aren't any good Linux humor sites, I've created Humorix: "All Linux Humor. All Copied Mottos. All the Time."

Exile57 writes "The music industry is trying to end the proliferation of the pirate music scene. Apparently, bootleg CD's are a booming market in other countries. On top of the CD's being pressed illegally, the industry is also a bit miffed at the amount of pirate MP3 sites on the Internet. Here's the story as told by CNN."

Andrew Dalke writes "Python 1.0 was just released It is an implementation of Python (my favorite language :) for the Java virtual machine. With it you get the full power of a very high level dynamic language able to access all of the Java classes, including awt, java beans, swing, jdbc and corba. It includes a binary version of OROMatcher to implement perl5 style regular expressions. I worked with the most recent beta version and didn't come across any bugs. The only problem I had was the startup time, which was about two seconds on my Indigo2 compared to the fraction of a second for the C implementation, but much of that was the JVM starting up. We also needed to sidegrade to Netscape's 4.05 AWT 1.1 Preview release to develop applets. The biggest advantage was the interactive nature of the implementation where I could test new code or examine the behaviour of different Java classes without recompiling. Overall I estimate that it took me about a quarter of the time to implement my project in JPython instead of straight Java. *advocacy on* I can predict people will comment on two things about Python as a language, so let me preemptively address them here: 1) Python isn't as flexible as Perl -- sure, but it is a lot cleaner in general and easier to do OO programming. I rarely notice the lack of the more baroque Perl control features since Python's exception handling and ease of creating helper classes simplify tasks like finalizing resource handling during error conditions. Python's real flexibility is integrating new functionality like Java classes, COM objects or database support in a straight-forward, modular fashion. More to the point of this announcement, you can't get a Perl applet running on top of the JVM. 2) Python uses indentation and newlines for scoping and statement end instead of {} and ; -- most people find it enjoyable once they get used to it (and when using an editor like emacs that understands the language syntax). It is a suprisingly nice feeling to be several blocks in at the end of a function definition and only having to press 'enter' to finish instead of ';enter}enter}enter}' to fulfil the requirements of the parser. *advocacy off* "

Robert Macaulay writes "There is a new CScene up: Issue 5"

Microsoft is hitting back at critics with subpoenas of its own. Among those affected is Caldera. Microsoft is trying to back up its claim that all other OS's include Internet support, so they should too. I wonder though whether Caldera was chosen for OpenLinux or OpenDOS. Thanks to Joe Merlino for alerting us. Here's some historical background

The simulations run this weekend by the SIA showed that at least the markets won't crash on 1/1/00. The report said that the only demonstrated problems were related to infrastructure and routing, which still sounds fairly signifigant. However, the concern of the market suddenly losing billions of dollars of "worth" is no longer an issue.

Skyshadow writes "CNN is reporting that Acer bowed to MS pressure to use their product over a competitor's, according to an ex-employee. CNN has a detailed article."
I hate to keep harping on Microsoft, but with Senator Orrin Hatch's call for a broader investigation in to MS's business practices, I think that testimony is going to become even more important.

Good press for Linux is always nice to read, and it was nice to read the CNN article about Linux users and the OS in general.

Good press for Linux is always nice to read, and it was nice to read the CNN article about Linux users and the OS in general.

Whyte Tygre sent us a link to an article at CNN that talks about the FTC and the fact that it noticed that whole Junk Spam Problem. It'll be interesting to see what they do about it... the article talks about possible solutions. I'm liking the public 800 number server idea still myself. I've decided to post my complaints about spammers here, maybe I should add the phone numbers so everyone can complain :) Oh yeah, that's probably illegal. Nevermind.

Gambit32 writes " CNN did a piece on smart card security. Quite interesting. " Definately worth a read. I especially like the part where they tell us that this would be bad if it falls into the wrong hand. Maybe if encryption wasn't regarded as evil in the eyes of the US govt we could use good algorithms?

Phillip brown writes "Found yet another story on the Avalon beowulf system making top 500 supercomputers list," while ML wrote to us saying "CNN shows the Avalon Supercomputer in pretty purple light, gives credit to Linux, and throws in a nice dig at Microsoft. " Mmmm...I love to start my morning with good publicity.

Well, probably most of us graduated with some sort of degree in the science area, but a recent poll indicates that many of the people in IT, if they had to do it all again, would have majored in the liberal arts. Of course, the vice versa is true as well. What do you folks think about this? Keep your major or not?

BOredAtWork sent us a linke to an article about computers that can sense emotions. My favorite part of the article is when they describe using a this technology to detect boredom, and to automatically fast forward to more "exciting" parts of the movie. If they make it change channels when TV gets boring, we'll all start having seizures.

BOredAtWork writes "CNN has a very interesting piece on a day in the life of a spammer. This guy claims to be totally on the "up and up" and is looking to take spam to "the next level." It's good to hear the other point of view once in a while - even if just for the humor. " I consider spam a necessary evil honestly- as long as spammers use appropriate headers (so I can procmail it out of my box) I don't really care. But then again, I have at least 10 email addresses, many of which are very public, so spam is a several-times-a-day thing. Perhaps we need a petition "I will not buy something if sent bulk spam advertising it". I bet if we could get 100,000 names, people would notice... then again, I could just post the 800 numbers here every time I get spam. Then if each Slashdot reader called them, we'd put 'em out of business *grin*.

Will Johnston sent us a link to an article where you can read about a new 4Gig DRAM from Samsung. It's gonna be a few years before it's practical. The article also comments that they are going to be slowing production to stabilize RAM prices (and I was really enjoying cheap RAM prices too)

Laurent writes "CNN runs a story about wearable computers, and more generally about the possibilities opened up by 'enhancing' the human body with computer technology. According to your level of geekiness, you could be enthusiastic or scared after reading this article. Then again, you might ascribe all this to bad journalism. I don't quite know what to think."" I do think that this sorta stuff is in our future, but it is definately a spooky concept. Mind you I'll be right up there in the front row for augmentation. Then I won't need to carry around all these other little computers...

Pete Pawlowski wrote in to tell us that the FTC is suing intel for allegedly forcing competitors to divulge their trade secrets. They're looking at the relationship intel has with HP, Digital, Acer etc. My guess is if they dig, they might just find some dirt.

Matthew Crosby wrote in to tell us that "there will be an informal little celebration thing on irc.gimp.org port 6666, channel #party. Paul Hart gave me a link to The Worm Farm. It's just weird. Robert Jones wrote in to send us a link to an excellent Linux Help site. Richard Brown sent us a link to a A weather site running Linux. Brian Moore wrote in to send us a link to a story about Communicator 5.0 And finally, Rasmus Lerdorf wrote in to announce that the PHP3 has hit the wire. For those in the dark, PHP is another excellent web page scripting language.

Kristian Köhntopp writes "The Rensselaer Drop Squad was famous for dropping things from great height for pure fun value. Seems that the russians have a similar hobby, only bigger toys: "Crashing Mir down to Earth" is the title of a CNN story describing how the russion space station is going to splash into the North Pacific (hopefully!) in December 1999. Happy New Millenium, everybody! These guys surely know how to party! " I'm excited for the day that I can watch an mpeg of this over and over again...

Justin Cave writes "CNN's running an editorial on the use of 'hacker' when they mean 'cracker'. Kinda cool. link"

Some of you may remember the past article in the rescue mission of the strayed Hughes satellite. Now, the good people in charge of it have actually sent another around the Moon, and will be sending it around to move it into a better position. It's cool stuff like this that make me smile.

Dan Hollis writes "Looks like Galaxy 4, a satellite which provides paging services for most of the U.S. has had a major failure. Read more about it here. "

The talks between Microsoft and the US government have broken down this afternoon. It appears now that a full-scale legal battle will be brewing starting on Monday. Gettin' ready to ruuummbbllee!

"BOredAtWork" writes "CNN seems to think that m$ has the support of the internet community... is this amazing or what? " Wow. That's all I can say.