Slashdot Mirror

philgross writes "Foul-mouthed ultraviolence is now available for the Linux community with the port of Kingpin." Grab the rpm or the tarball of the file. Almost as much fun as Grand Theft Auto.

Mike Schiraldi writes "2600 published some letters they have acquired which were originally sent to the FBI by companies whose systems Kevin Mitnick had compromised. In a nutshell, the FBI asks, "How much damage did he do?" and they say, "Well, it cost us $10,000,000 to develop this application, and he got a copy of the source code, so he did $10,000,000 worth of damage." Now the government is furious, and is trying to hold Mitnick's lawyer in contempt of court! But the information that was leaked is supposedly public information. " Yeah-compare contrast the two letters. OK-maybe government intelligence is a misnomer.

Laura Colban writes "Eben Moglen's article "Anarchism Triumphant" covers everything from Raymond's gift culture theory (which Moglen rejects) to IP rights in digital technology and numbers. In addition to being a former IBM programmer and a quite distinquished legal scholar (Columbia law professor), Moglen is also general counsel for the Free Software Foundation. He is probably the most important legal mind supportive of the open source community." Its a long piece, but from what I've read it looks like its worth it.

Laura Colban writes "Eben Moglen's article "Anarchism Triumphant" covers everything from Raymond's gift culture theory (which Moglen rejects) to IP rights in digital technology and numbers. In addition to being a former IBM programmer and a quite distinquished legal scholar (Columbia law professor), Moglen is also general counsel for the Free Software Foundation. He is probably the most important legal mind supportive of the open source community." Its a long piece, but from what I've read it looks like its worth it.

the-empty-string writes "A Danish physicyst and her team managed to slow down a beam of light to an astonishing speed of only 38 miles per hour. It's on the front page of the New York Times." Update: 02/18 12:20 by H :One of our more scientifically inclined readers sent in a better explanation-click below to read it. Mike Schiraldi writes "There has been so much misinformation and confusion on /. regarding slowing down the speed of light.. So many comments are along the lines of "Wow, i thought the speed of light was constant. I can get a car with slow headlights and drive faster than the beams!"

You can't let so many people be misinformed. Please let them know:

The speed of light IN A VACUUM is the constant c.

Science has been able to slow light down for centuries by making it travel through a different medium. The speed of light in air is less than c. The speed of light in water or glass or plastic is less than c. This is what makes lenses work. (check your encyclopedia for more information)

The reason this is a breakthrough is simply because they've been able to slow light down to a much lower speed than anyone else has ever been able to do. They have not changed c, the speed of light in a vacuum. The beam of light is only slowed down when it's in the condensate. Once it leaves the condensate and is travelling through air again, it returns to a speed of 186,000 miles per second. This does not contradict any law of physics. "

Phil Gross writes "InfoWorld's Robert X. Cringely is reporting that the US Air Force is considering adding Linux to the list of potential standard military operating systems. It seems the U.S. Air Force has recognized the significance of the momentum behind Linux, according to one reader. Apparently it is asking developers and users if they would be interested in a Defense Information Infrastructure-Common Open Environment (DII COE) segment for Linux. If there is enough interest, Linux would become an "official" operating system for military computers.' I'd love to get more details on this. "
In related news, Wired is reporting the Navy is reconsidering its use of NT: " the Navy said that while Windows NT was specified in the Statement of Work as the operating system for the workstations in question, other components of a coming upgrade will primarily utilize Unix-based systems. The source said. "I don't think that Unix or NT were ever really evaluated -- it was just somebody thinking this was good, with no knowledge"". Thanks to brentbent

karl ward writes "A Columbia student has written a very clear and insightful piece on the role of open source in 1) subverting the microsoft monopoly, and 2) bringing the downfall of global industrial capitalism. Check it out here. "

Over the course of the last month or so, I've been collecting Laptop questions and have been holding onto them trying to figure out the best way to post them. I've now decided that the way to do this that would be the most effective would be to ask a real generic question and then post the individual problems separately in the article proper. The topic this time is: "Linux on Laptop's" If you've had problems installing Linux on Laptops, or weird Linux problems on laptops, then this one's for you! Click below. ...continued...

Alright! There are some specific questions below but any questions and answers on laptops are welcome here!

Kyri Sarantakos asks "I'm looking to buy a laptop and I want to know if any fellow ./'s have any suggestions as what brands work well with linux out of the box. Is there anyting I should know? or avoid?"

s.blood wants similar information, but also wished to know this: "I'm in need of a laptop to run Linux and I was wondering what kind of experience other users have had. Is it best to put more money into CPU performance, RAM, or the display?"


and this one from David Wagle with a NEC 330T problem: "I got a brand new NEC 330T on the basis that previous Versa laptops have worked great with Linux cardservices. Unfortunately, that isn't the case here. Upon inserting the card - I get the approporiate "loading eth0" message and the card initializes. Then, however, the card simply drops. This happens intermittently, and I can not correlate it to anything in particular. The ethernet pcmcia card is a 3com 3CXE589DT, and this SAME card works fine in a toshiba in the cube down the hall. I am using RH5.1, with the 3.0 pcmcia package. The controller chipset is a 02 Micro 02 6832/6833 controller."

Ilya Gaysinskiy sent us this story at yahoo where you can read about a phone survey that Fortune magazine did, and the interesting statistics that random people think about computing issues. Percentages revealed on things like the Microsoft Monopoly, and which browser is better. Interesting to get the pulse of the people.

Ilya Gaysinskiy sent me this story where you can read about the war between Microsoft, TCI and Sun over which company will create the operating system for the set top web browser of tomorrow.