Slashdot Mirror

tyman writes "Michael Rolig has created a Debian-based linux package for your Tablet PC. The support for various tablet features is limited by the features on the tablet Rolig owns, such as the "half-working" pen button features. One important missing feature is the screen-swivel buttons common with most tablets. However this is a good start for the development of linux for Tablet PCs."

Ant writes "The Register mentions a new Windows worm known as Rbot-GR that is currently circulating accross the net. It has the capability to spy on users using webcams. " I'm surprised that it took this long.

Ant writes "A new Doom 3 Final Video Preview/Trailer is now out. It is about 42.5 MB big, 2.5 minutes long, and in Quicktime format. Download it from here (direct link and BitTorrent link), FilePlanet (an account required), or FileShack (an account required)."

Ant writes "Wired has a story on how to improve Mozilla and Firefox web browsers with various plugins/extensions (XPI installations). It lists some of the extensions that have been rated highly by Mozilla users like BugMeNot. One of them not listed and my favorite is PrefBar."

Ant writes "MSNBC has a Newsweek article on Warren Lieberfarb, the father of DVD, transformed the movie business. And yet his reward was he was fired."

Ant writes "According to a thread on the Rage3D boards, and another on The Adventure Company's site, the copy protection system StarForce, as used in PC videogames including Toca Race Driver 2, Traitor's Gate 2 and Broken Sword 3, is installed on a user's PC without proper explanation, and doesn't get removed on many uninstalls - some users report difficulty in keeping their systems stable due to conflicts, and think they've tracked it down to the StarForce protection."

Ant writes "Brent Bozell of TownHall.com wrote an editorial about the video game nudity trend. It covers games like 'Playboy: The Mansion' and 'Singles: Flirt Up Your Life' that are due out later this year." Ultimately, Bozell seems to distrust the ESRB, citing Eidos' decision to only sell Singles in downloadable form.

Ant writes "GamesRadar.com is reporting that a Metal Gear Solid 3 demo was stolen from the E3 videogames expo by nefarious exhibition attendees, as, allegedly: 'L.A. Convention Center security staff were left flat-footed and red-faced yesterday as two unknown perps had it away with a copy of the MGS3: Snake Eater demo... The code snatchers were able to gain access to the PS2 demoing Snake's hotly anticipated jungle rumble by cracking the perspex case on one of the pods on the Sony stand."

Ant writes "The Register has an article on how crying beats iris scanners. An MP who volunteered to take part in the UK ID card trials says the iris scanner used is uncomfortable and made his eyes water... The water in his eyes actually stopped the scanner from working, and it seems long eyelashes and hard contact lenses could fox it too... So we're going to have a system that is derailed by a few tears and fluttering eyelashes?"

Ant writes "Technology Review has an article about how the more robots interact with humans, the more important their apparent gender becomes."

mcbridematt writes "Minitar sells a rebadged Edimax Linux based-802.11b Access Point in Australia (no FCC ID yet) for a relatively cheap price (under AUS $100 in places). These access points are based around the Realtek 8181 wireless-system-on-chip design, have 8MB flash rom, and run a 2.4 series Linux kernel. After requests from the community to get the kernel sources, which resulted in a incomplete sourcecode release, we finally have (allegedly) complete and GPL compliant Linux kernel sources for this fine Access Point. Special thanks to chuna, serialmonkey and screwball at Minitar for making this happen, especially after they ran into arguments with their OEM and Realtek over this." From the attached forum discussion, you can see there's disagreement about whether the source code release is as complete as it should be.

Anonymous Coward asks: "My employer has recently filed a patent application for something I invented. As compensation I am being given the statutory $1 for the assignment and a shiny brass plaque if the patent(s) is awarded. Is this typical for North American companies? I did sign a no compensation and automatic assignment type employment contract and while I was willing to accept that technically, I'm owed nothing, this strikes me as cheap, greedy, and backward thinking on my employers part. I've Google'd and read and this action seems archaic, am I wrong and just full of myself? Your thoughts please!"

paul.dunne writes "Looks like we are finally well on the way to getting a replacement for the old Linux configuration tools. Details in a thread on the linux-kernel mailing list. Basically, Linus likes it; it's written in C, so there are no "language issues"; and feedback on the mailing list so far seems positive and constructive."

speby asks: "I am a CS student at Northern Illinois University and I recently compiled a working peer-to-peer file web-based file indexing system. I refused to sign their agreement that says I violated their Acceptable Use Policy because I sincerely believe I did not violate them. My system scans a large portion of my school's network hosts looking for openly accessible, anonymous Windows File Shares, and bandwidth usage is minimal. The AUP does not mention scans and I did not 'break' or 'crack' security in any way. I agreed to shut the service down for a period of time until I can figure something else out. I do not agree with their stance on this issue and I believe I have a right to design, implement, and make available such a service. I certainly did not see anything in their terms of service that would disallow such a system. Do these other universities that allow this kind of system care? Why can this system not exist here?" I have no problem with a student being told to shut down a homebrew service if they find it offensive, but I do have a problem with them treating said students like criminals, even when they do comply with their wishes. What should students do, when they are bullied by their colleges into signing violations that are more stringent than the situation merits?

"I was contacted by the IT department after a few weeks of its public running. I did not actively promote the system. It works in ways similar to the file search engines like the ones at Iowa State University and Georgia Technical Institute. In terms of programming, this idea is so trivial anyone could do it with the help of some simple scripting and a lightweight database."

JeroenH writes: "Sept. 2, 2002, Sony announced the DSC-FX77. It's a 4 megapixel, fixed lens digital camera with a special feature: Bluetooth. When the camera takes a picture, it will be sent directly through the Bluetooth link to a nearby computer, giving you nearly unlimited space for your photos (well, at least as much as fits on your hard disk). At this stage the camera can only send photos to a computer, but in the future it should be possible to control the camera remotely. Will the wardriving of the future include scooping up pictures? Time will tell..."

Ant writes "What do a 17th-century Swedish warship, an opulent Chicago theater and a Kansas City hotel "skyway" have in common? All met catastrophic ends and they have important lessons to teach today's innovators."

fReNeTiK writes "In this amusingly controversial article over at the weekly standard's web site, we get to hear an opinion not often heard among the hordes of Star Wars fanatics out there: The rebel alliance are actually "... an unimpressive crew of anarchic royals who wreck the galaxy so that Princess Leia can have her tiara back." An entertaining read which will surely spark flame wars of epic proportions." Reader kaypro submits an MSNBC story examining the science of Star Wars. And Ant notes that the Clones DVD will be out earlier than expected.

In celebration of the release of AotC, here are a bunch of random SW stories that have fluttered through our bin: Tim Drage has made a Lego Star Wars movie, POds sent us a fan film Fan Film (quicktime. Bah). Here is a comic to share and enjoy. iamchaos noted that the next Matrix Trailer will be showing with Clones. nellardo sent in a fine tribute to darth maul. Anyone want a Star Wars Axe? Zack sent us a great collection of SW Characters you won't see as much as you might want to. wiredog sent us some spoilers, the Skywalker family tree and how Anakin becomes Vader. peter_gzowski sent in an essay by Ebert where he gives it 2 of 4 stars, and discusses the digital filming. Finally ant sent us a bizarre tale of some guys who got the brilliant idea to build a life-size Millenium Falcon. So there it is folks. I have tickets for a 12:01 showing in Ann Arbor and I'll be getting in line in just a few short hours.

LambSpam asks: "I had a nightmare week (last week) with two of our servers running Intel's U3-1L RAID controller (RAID 5). Whenever there's a power outage in our building these controllers randomly mark one or more of the drives in the array offline (even with adequate UPS support), which means I have to manually mark them online and/or rebuild. Intel acknowledged the problem, but their solution involves updating the backplane's firmware, the controller firmware (destructive upgrade!), and even the firmware on our IBM drives in the array because they 'draw too much power' in certain conditions. I've only used one other RAID 5 implementation (MegaRAID), and it NEVER had these kinds of problems, whereas if you sneeze too hard around this U3-1L card it will go offline. Is this common with most hardware RAID implementations? What RAID 5 implementations works without hassle? What should I stay away from?"

Ant writes "Link: New models of the leg muscles of Tyrannosaurus Rex suggest that a real T-Rex might not have passed the screen test for "Jurassic Park." Stanford University researchers writing in the British journal Nature this week suggest that a T-Rex could not have been able to run as fast as the one in the movie -- and might not have been able to run at all. "There is no way you could fit enough muscle into its body for that kind of locomotion," said John Hutchinson, co-author of the Nature article. "You wouldn't have enough room left over for all the other body parts.""

znu writes: "Apple announced at the QuickTime Live! conference today that there's a public preview of QuickTime 6 with full MPEG-4 support ready to ship, but the terms of the proposed MPEG-4 license are holding it back. For those who haven't been following this, MPEG wants $0.25 per encoder/decoder for MPEG-4, up to $2 million per company per year. Apple is fine with that. But MPEG also wants content distributers to pony up $0.02/hour for any content that's distributed for profit. Apple feels that determining just what is "for profit" will be problematic, and that this pricing will seriously inhibit MPEG-4 adoption. You are encouraged to complain to MPEG LA about this situation."

Ant writes: "The New Scientist has an article about a galaxy in the constellation Centaurus is puzzling astronomers by spinning in the wrong direction. NGC 4622 has bright twisting arms containing newborn stars and lies 111 million light years away."

Ant was fastest on the mouse to report that Id Software has a single-player demo and a set of linux binaries available for Return to Castle Wolfenstein. Blue's News has some more information and a mirror.

Nate LaCourse writes: "Real good one from Cringely this month. It's on building his own supercomputer, but with some twists." You'll probably also want to check out the KLAT2 homepage to learn more about their Flat Neighborhood Network. And since KLAT2 has been around for nearly a year (check out the poster on this page!), perhaps a 3rd generation is in the works?

Ant writes: "Say goodbye to Birkenstock sandals and woolly jumpers -- tomorrow's eco-warrior will like nothing better than swimming naked in defense of cleaner oceans. That, at least, is the hope of researchers in Singapore, who are developing a breed of fish capable of detecting water pollutants by changing color."

Ant writes "The collective upward human gaze yields numerous special images of space every year. Being a curious lot with a certain mastery of technology, we keep looking deeper and with greater resolution at the most remarkable features of the universe, near and far." Eye candy, desktop source material, and it'll make ya feel insignificant too!

Ant writes "Experienced photographer Jayne West wrote her degree dissertation on the historical impact of digital capture. She argues that the use of digital photography in news reporting means we could lose a valuable pictorial record of history." Much of her argument seems weak to me (precisely because digital photography allows the instant culling West talks about). The digital storage itself, though, perhaps ought to make us nervous.

Ant submitted this link to an analysis of accessibility during the Olympic games. "Abstract: The issue of disabled access to the web is examined using the case of the 2000 Olympic web site. Wider use of accessibility guidelines for small screen and wireless web devices is discussed. In August 2000 the Sydney Organising Committee for the Olympic Games was found to have engaged in unlawful conduct by providing a web site which was to a significant extent inaccessible to the blind. The Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission ordered the web site be made accessible by the start of the Sydney Olympics. The details of the case and its global implications for government policy and commercial practice on the Internet is examined by one of the expert witnesses who gave evidence to the commission. The possible benefits for wireless and TV based web access from use of accessibility guidelines is looked at."

Ant sends a link about the Geek Guard proposal that is floating around. Supposedly technology companies would form the backbone of a fast-response technology force. But Verizon was and is part of the problem with regard to communications, not part of the solution. A lot of technically-inclined people and groups like NYC Wireless did assist in lower Manhattan after Sept. 11, and they're still helping out businesses and people with no internet/phone connections and not even an ETA from Verizon on when Verizon might get around to hooking them up. If Verizon fulfilled their Geek Guard duties with all the rapidity that they, say, install DSL lines for competing DSL providers, they would have "rescheduled" their disaster response three times and we'd have an appointment for early November right now.

Ant writes: "A little over a year ago, the SANS Institute and the National Infrastructure Protection Center (NIPC) released a document summarizing the Ten Most Critical Internet Security Vulnerabilities. Thousands of organizations used that list to prioritize their efforts so they could close the most dangerous holes first. This new list, released on October 1, 2001, updates and expands the Top Ten list. With this new release, we have increased the list to the Top Twenty vulnerabilities, and we have segmented it into three categories: General Vulnerabilities, Windows Vulnerabilities, and Unix Vulnerabilities."

ipoverscsi writes: "A new Quake3 binary is out for both Linux and Windows. This is supposedly the final release of the game for all time. You can get the new version 1.3 at FilePlanet or your regular pusher. Mirrors would be good as the hour+ wait will only get worse." Ant provides a link to this thread on Blue's News (including a mirror) as well.

Ant wrote to us with the story that Maxis announced today that Simsville has been canceled. It was originally supposed to be out in 2002 - but Maxis decided that "it wasn't up to the standards of Maxis" - but did also say the team did a good job, and was being reassigned to other products like the upcoming Sims Online. The original intent was to be a cross between The Sims and SimCity. Having had to play through some real stinkers of games before, I applaud Maxis decision to kill the product, rather then try to release it on an unsuspecting public CT Cry!

dswensen writes: "Theforce.net has an in-depth review of the forthcoming Star Wars: Episode I DVD (due for release October 16th). Looking at all the great features packed into this DVD, I'm glad Lucas decided not to just toss off a cheap version a year ago. Love it or hate it, it looks like they really pulled out all the stops." Plus Ant points out that there is some teaser movie available for Star Wars Galaxies, the upcoming massively multiplayer game.

Timothy has compiled a good list of links related to this morning's terrorist attacks around America. Many photos and video clips. There's a lot of good links there and I highly recommend that you read them. And thanks to the Slashteam for keeping the servers up through this. Its not easy dealing with 3x the traffic. I apologize to readers that have been inconvenienced.

Two major news updates: the plane downed near Pittsburgh is reported not to have been shot down. A fifth plane which had been feared hijacked, this one a Korean Air jetliner, was forced down by Canadian Air Force planes over the Yukon. However, this plane is reported not to have been hijacked -- instead, its emergency beacon was triggered by a low-fuel indicator.

Importantly -- remember, blood is in demand. The Red Cross' site is mobbed, but here's the blood donation information on a the cached page at google.

More details of the attack and its aftermath: a report at at gnome.org, and a photo at indymedia.org. pajama links to NYC Police scanner traffic (winamp) streamed online, and an anonymous reader also points to another scanner feed.

Shadowwalker Delaforge writes "Hey guys: I'm submitting my web site to yours to get the word out. I've been compiling web sites, and info on the U.S. Attack. These sites are ones that work, and arent' swamped out of existence. I'm also adding new data about where people can donate money, blood, and other things dealing with this.

soccerdad writes "Due to the activities of today, the internet/networking experts at my firm have been asked by some of our clients to be on standby in case anything untoward occurs. They've been monitoring backbone activity, etc., in a "just in case" mode. They've described the activity they're seeing as somewhat strange. The backbone is, according to them, at about 80% utilization -- they've never seen it above 40% before. However, the main portal sites such as Yahoo aren't having substantively higher than normal traffic. They're working on doing some traffic analysis but haven't completed that effort yet."

A small piece of that bandwidth may be saved if you go to the link Kalak suggests: "William Shunn is collecting short notes from people in the terrorist affected areas so you can see who is OK." Look here (or post your name here if you're in an affected city) before tying up a phone connection. Alex Fabrikant submitted another personal information site at Berkeley

Thapthim writes "http://cbc.ca/ has all sorts of information, even in our own city buildings are being shutdown, all air traffic has been suspended. However Canadian Airports are taking in international flights heading into US so the air ports there are free for emergencies."

sn0wcrsh wrote to say that a "short blurb on Channel 7 Boston that the CTO of Akamai was on the fateful plane that hit the trade center" confirms the earlier reports that he was on board.

And ectrix writes: "The CFO of my company, Netegrity was on United Airlines Flight 175, which has been confirmed to us by United Airlines to have hit tower two of the WTC.

WAVY NBC - Norfolk, VA (among other local TV stations I'm sure) is reporting on the air the Threatcon levels at the area Naval, Air Force, and Army bases. They are all at Threatcon Delta. Their website currently only lists their status as of the beginning of the attacks, which was Threatcon Charlie. Norfolk, VA is the home port for the US Atlantic Fleet. Local TV stations also are showing armed (M16s, shotguns) guards patrolling the base grounds and perimeters."

There are updated photos and videos here, and CarbonFusion wrote with another good link to photos and videos.. eddiem writes: "http://www.flightexplorer.com/ will soon let you view the flight path of the planes." Explanations of airport security at How Stuff Works and Cryptome are an interesting read under the circumstances as well.

Bard, Andrew wrote with some updates as well:

"Just to let you know:

1. I heard a woman who was on the 92nd floor of the first WTC building when the plane hit it. She was able to escape and so was everyone "in her company" so it is assumed that virtually everyone from the 92nd floor down was evacuated successfully - an estimated 20,000 people of the 25,000 in the building.
2. the plane that went down in PA had a woman onboard who locked herself in the bathroom with her cellular phone - she was telling authorities about the hijacking when the plane crashed and killed her - that is the only way the authorities knew for sure what plane went down in PA so quickly, she gave her flight number
3. the Mexican border is completely closed and the Canadian border is still open - all International flights have been redirected to Northern Canada
4. the planes from Boston were presumably chosen because they were going on long flights (to LA) which would make them larger than average airliners with full tanks of gas
5. when the first WTC building crashed (which was the 2nd one to be hit), 125 firemen were down below fighting the fire on the first building to be hit... none of them have been heard from yet - 10,000 emergency personnel in NYC responded to the first WTC getting hit... it is unknown how many of those were crushed in the two collapsed buildings."

PacketMaster writes: "The USA Today is carrying an interesting commentary entitled All-but-secret battle rages over fate of airwaves. The article sheds light on some topics that many people are completely ignorant on - the fight over the broadcast spectrum. The most interesting tidbit is that the current broadcasters, who were given the new digital spectrum for applications like HDTV for free, now want to keep their old ones too and auction them off for industry profit to help pay for the transition to the new spectrum."

Kalak writes: "MozillaQuest is reporting that Mitchell Baker was laid off by Netscape back on August 23. True to form, there are also discussions on this on bug #96747." She spoke at OSCON and I was pretty impressed. She seemed legitimately committed to the mozilla project being a successful open source project. Not sure how this bodes for Moz itself, but it sure is unfortunate.

Ant wrote to us with a story on Discovery about the long term consequences of manned and "womanned" missions to Mars - lots of research about bone-weakening effects of zero G environments, with tooth loss high on the list.

LiquidPC writes: "BSDtoday.com has an article on using OpenBSD for DNS and DHCP on a network. It gives examples of doing this with dhs.org. A good read if you ask me."

znu writes: "Trolltech has announced the release of Qt/Mac Open Beta 1. The final release is expected in October. It's good to see that OS X users will soon be able to run quite a lot of graphical *nix apps without installing X11. Screenshots are here(1), here(2) and here(3)." ClaytonianG cites this MacCentral article as well, which links to a blurb on the Trolltech site about the program from which those screenshots are taken.

Ant sent us a seriously cool site that has tons of unproduced and concept star wars toys that never made it to market. These range from all over the place (coin books?) to prototype dolls with ken or barbie parts and clothing. I was just thinking a few days ago about my old star wars collection: a millenium falcon, an x-wing, a boba fett, a darth vader. Strangely all of them were broken garage sale items. But if I built a lego fortress for them to battle it was all good.

Ant wrote to us regarding coverage of the .com dead - the Net Cemetery. It's a fun piece, which gets into the problems of covering and reviewing a medium that's changing everyday. If you're into wandering through the .com wasteland, you should also check out Ghost Sites, which does a great job of "museumifing" (sounds like transmorgify) the same type of sites.

Ant writes "http://www.news.cornell.edu/Chronicle/98/2.5.98/an t.html The pheromone trail laid down by an Aphaenogaster rudis ant, to help the ant and its recruited nest mates find their way back to prey they plan to kill, contains a chemical now undergoing clinical trials as a possible Alzheimer's disease treatment, Cornell chemists report in the January 1998 issue of the German journal Naturwissenschaften. Anabaseine, whose chemical analog GTS-21 stimulates the nicotine receptor sites in the brains of Alzheimer's patients and helps reduce memory loss, is one of four components found by Cornell researchers in secretions from the poison glands of A. rudis ants, a common species in the Northeast United States."

Faithful contributor Ant sent in this piece about the role of computers in educating children. It presents arguments both pro and con; one researcher argues that computer use can reduce creativity and create anti-social kids (never met any of these, no sir) while another researcher contends that kids who use computers and the internet grow up reading, inquiring, and generally brighter.

Bushwacker writes: "Just when everyone thought IBM's OS/2 Warp Operating System was finally dying, the fabled 'licensed-out' 'Warp 5.0' is now in version 1.0.0. Called eComStation, the operating system's developer, Mensys BV promises all of the features and stability of IBM's Warp 4.0, plus many updates, enhancements, and new features, such as efficient SMP support for up to 64 processors as well as easy network integration between client and server versions. eComStation has modest system requirements and should be able to work well on most PCs or x86 based servers without much trouble. But then again there's the age old issue of OS/2 driver support (sigh)... Currently, a preview version is available, with a final release 'coming soon.' The eComStation OS is available in Standard and Pro versions from Indelible Blue." Update: 05/08 11am by C :You can get more information and screenshots from the the .com version of the website.

Ant writes: "Celera Genomics said Friday that it has completed the assembly of the mouse genome. The genetics research company, which began the sequencing process a year ago, said its map now ensures greater than 99 percent representation of the genome." From rice to mice to humans, the mapping continues.

Ant sent this link to a story about solar-powered clothes, well, solar-powering, maybe. This may be the breakthrough we've been waiting for to convince computer geeks to spend some time in the sun.

wokness writes with this bit of depressing news. "The arcade business is getting thougher and tougher -- from shoryuken.com: 'The Nikkei Telecom 21, the largest online news & information database in Japan, has reported that Capcom will discontinue sales and development of arcade games.' More info here. This sucks!" Seems like Capcom wasn't making enough money to justify themselves selling large boxes to arcades. Now, they'll go all the way (instead of just using emulation to make cross-platform games) and make games for home consoles instead.

Ant sent in this article about measurements of stress hormones on Monday mornings. "While on-the-job stress is a well known and widely felt presence, new research suggests that even thinking about Monday morning may send people's stress hormones upward." Clearly the lesson to be learned is: don't think.

Ant wrote to us with the report from eWeek concerning Guardent's find of a "potentially huge problem" in TCP. It's very similar to the hole found in some of the Cisco IOS software, concerning the ISN and the assignment of the number.

OvenMitt asks: "I've asked many people the same question and have yet to get an answer. I've RTFM over and over with no luck whatsoever. So I ask you guys: how can I get smooth mouse acceleration in XFree86 4.x? I used to remedy the situation in XFree86 3.3.x by setting the SampleRate and Resolution modifiers in the XF86Config file to some ridiculous number, but this doesn't work at all in XFree86 4.x. I'd go back to XFree86 3.3.6, but I just got a Geforce2 and my thirst for Unreal Tournament forces me to bite the bullet. I use a Kensington Expert Mouse,which is actually a very large trackball, and sometimes I feel like I'm playing marble madness when trying to get my pointer from one side of the screen to the other. Are there any alternative mouse drivers for X in development? I'd give up my Kensington Expert Mouse, but it is the absolute greatest trackball I've ever used in my life and well worth the cash IMHO."