Slashdot Mirror

Slashback with more on ridiculously equipped PCs, Telstra's ambivalent stance on equipping its thousands of desktops, California's state-sponsored Oracle oversell, and more -- read on for the details.

Your school or mine? Francis Esmonde-White writes "Dr. Joe Schwarcz (aka 'Dr. Joe' on the discovery channel & Montreal radio station CJAD), Dr. Ariel Fenster, and Dr. David Harpp at McGill have been running the OCS (Office for Chemistry and Society) for some time now. Their view is that it is academia's responsibility to communicate science to the public. One such facet of this has been to put up a series of lectures available freely through the internet.

I thought this may be interesting in light of MIT's OpenCourseWare, and that there are other major online university education projects around... even if they aren't on the same scale. In any case, here is your chance to learn about all the neat stuff you were interested in, but never learned in your introductory chem class. My first class (world of chemistry) with 'Dr. Joe' included topics like medications, plastics, explosives and pollution, so it isn't the boring chemistry you may have been tortured with in high school!"

Put this in your drive and smoke it. Linuxfr.org says (translated from French):

' GNU Generation, a student association at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology of Lausanne, proudly announces the release of GNUWin-II, a collection of free and open source software for Windows, which luckily contains most of the software that was proposed some days ago on slashdot.'

It comes on a CD with more than 50 applications, articles, and a four-language (yes it's Swiss) html based interface to help newcomers discover Free Software. The complete GNUWin-II can be browsed online. The ISO image of the CD can be downloaded here or better on Swiss SunSITE mirror ftp or http.

But who can fit the most soundcards in one machine? An anonymous reader writes "As a follow up to the 37 operating systems, 1 PC you should check out this site http://fileserver.coleskingdom.com 24 hard drives in one PC. And he managed it under Windows 95."

Maybe it was the Zip factor. generic-man writes "Dataplay, a company built around creating a new miniature optical disc format, has announced that all employees have been put on leave as the company tries to come up with the $50 million it needs to stay afloat. The future of Dataplay is still up in the air."

Recursive trailers. A lot of readers were disappointed in the viewing options for the Two Towers trailer posted yesterday anakin876 writes "The TTT Hi-Res trailer is out, but still semi-hidden. The Apple Quicktime Page doesn't have the trailer listed (yet) but it does exist."

Harm, foul. Boone^ writes "You'll remember when California signed a huge deal with state consultant and Oracle reseller Logicon Inc. only to have it blow up in their face [1,2,3]. Gov. Gray Davis finally signed legislation ending the exemption for the state's information technology purchases from California's conflict-of-interest laws. Similar bills have come across the Governor's desk, but Pete Wilson and Davis both vetoed them in the past. Apparently the policy of 'no harm, no foul' reigns out west, since it takes a fiasco to produce change."

That many licenses must be worth some jetlag. In August, we mentioned the possibility (floated by Telstra itself) that the Australian phone company was considering rolling out Linux on as many as 45,000 desktops; an anonymous reader notes that Microsoft is not sitting by for that, and has dispatched Steve Ballmer to convince Telstra otherwise.

Tsar writes: "MTV Networks is putting their imprimatur on a line of entertainment-oriented PC's to be available early this year. Targeting the college-age crowd, they'll have TV &amp radio tuners, DVD players, remote controls, and 'MTV-specific content.' CNN has this article on CNN's SCI-TECH page, but the original story was posted last Thursday on IDG.net. There's also news of MTV's impending digital music player, which uses DataPlay's 500MB matchbook-sized discs with built-in digital rights denial^H^H^H^H^H^Hmanagement."

theancient1 asks: "Coming soon to MP3 players, PDAs, and digital cameras: DataPlay: a $10 coin-sized disc that holds 500 MB of data. The catch? The discs have content control implemented as part of the file system. If a file has the 'protected' bit set, you'll need a key to access it. Keys can expire after a given interval, and although you can transfer files to your friends, they'll need their own key. This proprietary, SDMI-ready device is the RIAA's dream -- if all music were distributed this way, services like Napster wouldn't exist." And the war over digitally control content escalates. Will this system be cracked as easily as SDMI, or might this be something to worry about?

"On CNNfn, the CMO says it's great for record companies that want to re-sell their old music in a new format. In their press FAQ, they essentially claim to have invented the CD-R. (Patents pending.) All new hardware technologies seem to come with content control strings attatched. Is CD-R the last truly open storage medium? Is DataPlay the next big thing, or something to avoid?"

theancient1 asks: "Coming soon to MP3 players, PDAs, and digital cameras: DataPlay: a $10 coin-sized disc that holds 500 MB of data. The catch? The discs have content control implemented as part of the file system. If a file has the 'protected' bit set, you'll need a key to access it. Keys can expire after a given interval, and although you can transfer files to your friends, they'll need their own key. This proprietary, SDMI-ready device is the RIAA's dream -- if all music were distributed this way, services like Napster wouldn't exist." And the war over digitally control content escalates. Will this system be cracked as easily as SDMI, or might this be something to worry about?

"On CNNfn, the CMO says it's great for record companies that want to re-sell their old music in a new format. In their press FAQ, they essentially claim to have invented the CD-R. (Patents pending.) All new hardware technologies seem to come with content control strings attatched. Is CD-R the last truly open storage medium? Is DataPlay the next big thing, or something to avoid?"

theancient1 asks: "Coming soon to MP3 players, PDAs, and digital cameras: DataPlay: a $10 coin-sized disc that holds 500 MB of data. The catch? The discs have content control implemented as part of the file system. If a file has the 'protected' bit set, you'll need a key to access it. Keys can expire after a given interval, and although you can transfer files to your friends, they'll need their own key. This proprietary, SDMI-ready device is the RIAA's dream -- if all music were distributed this way, services like Napster wouldn't exist." And the war over digitally control content escalates. Will this system be cracked as easily as SDMI, or might this be something to worry about?

"On CNNfn, the CMO says it's great for record companies that want to re-sell their old music in a new format. In their press FAQ, they essentially claim to have invented the CD-R. (Patents pending.) All new hardware technologies seem to come with content control strings attatched. Is CD-R the last truly open storage medium? Is DataPlay the next big thing, or something to avoid?"

theancient1 asks: "Coming soon to MP3 players, PDAs, and digital cameras: DataPlay: a $10 coin-sized disc that holds 500 MB of data. The catch? The discs have content control implemented as part of the file system. If a file has the 'protected' bit set, you'll need a key to access it. Keys can expire after a given interval, and although you can transfer files to your friends, they'll need their own key. This proprietary, SDMI-ready device is the RIAA's dream -- if all music were distributed this way, services like Napster wouldn't exist." And the war over digitally control content escalates. Will this system be cracked as easily as SDMI, or might this be something to worry about?

"On CNNfn, the CMO says it's great for record companies that want to re-sell their old music in a new format. In their press FAQ, they essentially claim to have invented the CD-R. (Patents pending.) All new hardware technologies seem to come with content control strings attatched. Is CD-R the last truly open storage medium? Is DataPlay the next big thing, or something to avoid?"