Slashdot Mirror

AT writes "The Brittan School District in Sutter County, California, is requiring students to carry RFID-tagged identity badges on them at all times. Readers are currently installed at the doors to all classrooms. Readers were removed from bathrooms when parents protested. The school district is meeting next week to consider parents objections to the system." Relatedly (but not), Leilah writes "The University of California is considering using RFID tags or bar codes to help track their collection of bodies and parts. They are attempting to reopen their body donation program which has been on hold since spring 2004 due to disappearing parts - they've previously had legal trouble over improper disposal as well."

purple asks: "I'm looking to find a way to connect my new XBox to a computer monitor. I understand that the XBox has HDTV out, with up to 1900 lines of resolution. Since I have a standard television, but a large high quality monitor, I wanted to figure out how to do this. There were "VGA Adapters" for the Dreamcast, but as I understand it, they were only available because the Dreamcast had explicit internal support to output VGA; the adapter itself had very little electronics in it. My question is, 1, can the XBox itself output a VGA signal? and 2, is there a standard HDTV->VGA adapter that I can purchase, perhaps from an AV store."

Gleb sent us an IETF draft for electricity over IP (yeah it's old, but it's funny). dbcooper noticed that New Scientist mentioned a kit spaceship for $500k. Oh, and here's some (warning! Over 18 and over!) Odd Javascript that I can't even begin to describe, but it's so odd that I just had to share it. l@ps@n pointed out some Star Wars Origami that is actually pretty sweet. Mr. Fusion urges us to fry that Voodoo3 with two neon sign transformers and watch the fireworks. Phrogman noted that SpaceRef has posted some amazing time-lapse movies assembled from the Hubble space telescope showing stars blowing gas (insert joke here). zenray notd that this month's SC Magazine does a market survey about tools needed to do a forensics-quality copy of disk drives. Basically the requirement is to be an exact byte-for-byte copy; 'dd' gets their BEST BUY award. Congrats! mommydearest wrote in to plug that Ultimate Chaos is hosting the Ultimate AOL CD Invention contest here (grand prize is an IDE RAID controller!). Best I ever came up with was wallpaper (during my cubist period I filled up a wall). An anonymous reader found the x10-men which ain't exactly X10, and it ain't exactly X-Men, but it is truly frightening. And finally, what with election coming up and all, it's a good thing that LafinJack wrote in to let us know that Joe Leiberman and Dick Cheney have joined the ranks of political quake 3 skins available. Taunt and kill them before doing so becomes treason!

timster asks: "Okay, we've talked about functional programming languages (see Haskell for an example) here before, and I got to wondering. A procedural program is a set of statements of things to *do*, and so has an obvious "machine" aspect to it. A purely functional program, however, can be viewed as a single mathematical *expression*, which accomplishes its "purpose" through the mechanism of being evaluated. My question is: if DeCSS were written functionally, would its First Amendment protections be stronger?"

FreezerJam writes: "Now, THIS could be cool. Sharp apparently has software -- zxLinux -- that lets you run Linux apps on some of the PDAs in the their Zaurus line. Here's the wire story and the Sharp page is here. But someone will have to translate from the Asian language involved [Japanese], 'cause the fish can't do this." One advantage that Sharp seems to have here is that its products already exist, unlike some other companies' shadow-ware ...

Serge Wroclawski writes: "The LUGs in the DC area are protesting the Digital Millennium Copyright Act on Tuesday. The press release concerning the protest can be found online as well as an actual copy of the DMCA (with commentary availible)." If you're in driving distance of Washington D.C., consider showing up to respectfully make your opinion known to the lawmakers. Slashdot's timothy (yours truly) will be there as well, so look for a followup on later on Tuesday.

Mat Kovach is trying to organize a LUG Adventure to Ceder Point next september. For those who don't know, its an awesome roller coaster/ride park in the midwest. I wouldn't mind going actually. overcode noted that the patches to Civilization: Call To Power for Linux from Loki Hack now available. Nuke Lawyer causes is a wonder that causes all lawyers to explode as a nuclear bomb. Great stuff. otterboy found an auction that has old printings of Neal Stephenson books with The Big U weighing in at $400. For a book! (Note:I Finally finished Diamond Age. Wow) Mo B. Dick pointed us to a 486 overclocked to 247 mhz combining freezers and booze. El Clip sent us an awesome mrtg parody of a geeks life. escher sent us Microsith which is definitely among the most amusing MS parodies that I've seen. dustpuppy2000 pointed us to Homepage's at Superiosity which is a promising looking new comic strip.

Rei asks: "The recent article by Jane's left me contemplative. The recent commercial trend seems to be to put everything online - from cellular phones to refrigerators to toasters. These devices have their software typically non-upgradable. An increased number of systems in a particular location, with increasingly diverse operating systems, with real-world effects, places an increased danger from crackers in the future. Imagine the effects of a script kiddie finding a way to extinguish a pilot light in a heater, or to cause a fire in a device like a toaster or coffee maker. And do sysadmins really have the time to do a firmware upgrade in all the air conditioners or elevators in a building, let alone virtually every mechanical device which industry sees fit to give an IP? Before the greatest physical damage that could be done was to flash a BIOS so the machine wouldn't boot. But now we have oncoming the capacity for much, much more. How will the world deal with it?" This has worried me for a while. More often than not, the drive to commercialize a new tecnology always comes before we've accurately predicted how it will effect us. So how will millions of potential network security holes affect us in future when everything is networked?

Gon writes "According to this Techweb story, the emulation side has legal precedent on their side. This might explain why the SF court rejected SONY's request for a restraining order against Connectix." Kristian Dorland sent us this email from the authors of UltraHLE who claim they have not been contacted by Nintendo and that they know nothing about the security device Nintendo claims they circumvented in the N64." Interesting Ultra HLE Tech doc posted by an AC below.

Steen Suder wants some answers to this interesting question: "A couple of friends and I are talking about starting a LUG. Now we're discussing what to do and what's important. Mailing lists, homepage, facilities, budget, locations, meetings, etc. What are the important things to remember when starting a Linux User's Group?" I figure quite a few answers to this question will be useful for any type of User's Group. While, specific answers dealing with LINUX User's Groups will be appreciated, let's try to keep responses as generic as we can. I'm sure users of other platforms interested in starting their own User's Groups will appreciate this as well.

Moredhel sent us a link to an an article by Scott McNealy sends a quick description: "Why Java, HTML and ASCII (yes, really) is good and proprietary is bad. Why Sun should be less worried about selling Sun hardware. Why Intellectual Property is like a banana. Very U.S.-centric (W is *not* always next to "Q") and not as technically correct as one would like, but still a good read. And very topical now he has control of Netscape (though not Mozilla)... "

A whole bunch of you have written in about multiple monitor (multi-headed) support in Linux. Is it possible? What's involved? Who supports it? These are all interesting questions, and one person made a point of noting that Windows could do it, and couldn't find out how to do it on Linux. There's also a nifty project in the works involving Linux and a "video wall"! Click below for more... Christopher Danz had this nifty project he's working on:

"My name is Christopher Danz and I'm part of a team in Washington State University that is building what we affectionatly refer to as a picture wall. It's bank of nine monitors placed in a three by three grid, each controlled by a corresponding 486 processor. Each "computer" consists of a mother board, CPU, video card, ethernet card, and our own homemade boot card (emmulates the boot disk). These nine computers must then in turn by controlled via the ethernet cards by a tenth computer. We've decided to use linux as the operating system on the tenth computer (as well as the nine slaves). The problem is we're having difficulty finding video controlling functions. Each screen is supposed to have the ability to fade, scroll, etc, as well as work together as a whole. Do you know of any locations on the Web we could look for such programming functions?" taliesen had this question to ask about basic multi-monitor support: "I'm looking into putting together a multiple monitor multiple video card system under Linux. The official word for XFree86 is that none of the current X servers support this. I was wondering if there are any patches or maybe even a commercial X server that would support two or three video cards/monitors. Preferably one AGP and one or two PCI, but all PCI would be better than nothing. Any information would be greatly appreciated."

Frag-A-Muffin asked something similar, but he mentions Xi Graphics' AccelX servers. He also thought that XFree86 did support multi-headed displays, but that you had to have two of the same card to do it.

and Aaron W. was looking for a HOWTO, and couldn't find one on this subject...(any volunteers?)

Will the folks with some answers for these please step forward? (grin!)

David Murphy writes "The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is setting up a new campus in the Republic of Ireland - initially a multimedia lab, but planned to expand to the same size over 10 years. The Sunday Times has the story. "

Several people have written in with an idea that has merit. And Jason Skomorowski has written a fine article explaining some of the ideas behind using Linux as a video game OS. The thought is that Linux is provided with new games, and you could boot Linux from the CD to play games. Sound brilliant? Lame? Read on and see what you think. The following is a feature by Slashdot Reader Jason Skomorowski Linux: GamesOS?

I've seen much talk of petitioning game developers to port various things to Linux. However, it would appear that the game developers only want to appeal to the masses and most of them seem not to pay attention to our little niche.

What Quake 2 has demonstrated (at least on my system) is that games run a whole lot faster under Linux. Thus, if a group of companies (possibly lead by Id) were to develop a Linux distribution targeted at gamers, they could possibly be able to convince a large number of people to use Linux in order to increase the speed of their games without spending money on upgrading their "$2000 games consoles".

This distribution would have to install in a fashion that would be easily understood by the Windows '95 using majority of people who do not wish to do things like read manuals. Thus, you would need a checkbox in a '95 install program to select "Normal Win '95 version" or "Linux accelerated" and that would be the extent of user interaction. Of course, a Linux install program would also exist for those of us who happen to already have Linux on our systems.

I have been informed that there is a way to start Linux from Dos on a FAT partition. This could make the transition to Linux transparent, it would exit '95 upon being clicked on and then proceed to boot Linux and the game. However this may be too transparent to sufficiently convey the fact that they are in fact running a different operating system. Thus, a partition splitting/resizing thingy like Partition Magic may need to be coded into the install to enable '95 users to install Linux on a separate partition to distinguish it from the Microsoft stuff and also provide them with a nicer file system. In either case, a boot logo may help identify Linux as a separate (and better) operating system.

Another possibility would be for each developer to have their games boot directly from the CD into their own, customized, Linux. Then the computer really would be a glorified console system, insert CD and hit the reset, just like a Playstation. However, if Linux is being used because a machine would otherwise be unable to run a game at a playable speed, that machine may be too old to have BIOS support for booting from CD-ROM. In that case, the first little bit of the boot may need to be done from a floppy which would transfer control over to the CD. This again is likely too transparent a process without a boot logo. However, it would make it easier for developers if they only had to develop a Linux version and not bother porting it to Win32. Also, if people are informed that they could use Linux as their main OS and not have to reboot every time they wanted to play a game, they may well do just that.

Assuming some developers adopt this, they could advertise that their product runs 50% faster than others in its genre. A lot of people with low end Pentium/Cyrix type things are starting to get left behind by stuff like Unreal and would create quite a market for Linux ports. This would give those developers with an interest in Linux a chance to make some money off of it since most game companies are commercial enterprises require the potential of profit before they do things like port games to Linux.

This would be even better for Linux. The game companies would support their own users, so we wouldn't need to provide them with tech support for silly questions like "Where's the Start button?" and such. OpenGL would be used more often, giving it a chance against DirectX. It would encourage some much needed hardware support under Linux, then we could all buy things like Matrox G200s and such and be able to use them. If the game companies have this vested interest in Linux, they may pay their programmers to develop the system further, which would benefit us all via the GPL.

An area that would need some attention if such a thing were ever to happen is licensing. We would need to be sure that the version of Linux used by game companies would be compatible with the standard, otherwise we may end up with game that only run under some odd, proprietary system. Also, we need to ensure that the game companies make it clear to their users that Linux is a full fledged OS that can be used for anything, not just games. There may need to be some special contract between the Linux community and the game developers ensuring that the interests of all parties are met. I don't know much about the way these things are done, maybe the GPL already covers all of this?

Would any of this be possible, even slightly? Could Linux actually become a dominant gaming platform? Would that be A Good Thing?

Several people have written in with an idea that has merit. And Jason Skomorowski has written a fine article explaining some of the ideas behind using Linux as a video game OS. The thought is that Linux is provided with new games, and you could boot Linux from the CD to play games. Sound brilliant? Lame? Read on and see what you think. The following is a feature by Slashdot Reader Jason Skomorowski Linux: GamesOS?

I've seen much talk of petitioning game developers to port various things to Linux. However, it would appear that the game developers only want to appeal to the masses and most of them seem not to pay attention to our little niche.

What Quake 2 has demonstrated (at least on my system) is that games run a whole lot faster under Linux. Thus, if a group of companies (possibly lead by Id) were to develop a Linux distribution targeted at gamers, they could possibly be able to convince a large number of people to use Linux in order to increase the speed of their games without spending money on upgrading their "$2000 games consoles".

This distribution would have to install in a fashion that would be easily understood by the Windows '95 using majority of people who do not wish to do things like read manuals. Thus, you would need a checkbox in a '95 install program to select "Normal Win '95 version" or "Linux accelerated" and that would be the extent of user interaction. Of course, a Linux install program would also exist for those of us who happen to already have Linux on our systems.

I have been informed that there is a way to start Linux from Dos on a FAT partition. This could make the transition to Linux transparent, it would exit '95 upon being clicked on and then proceed to boot Linux and the game. However this may be too transparent to sufficiently convey the fact that they are in fact running a different operating system. Thus, a partition splitting/resizing thingy like Partition Magic may need to be coded into the install to enable '95 users to install Linux on a separate partition to distinguish it from the Microsoft stuff and also provide them with a nicer file system. In either case, a boot logo may help identify Linux as a separate (and better) operating system.

Another possibility would be for each developer to have their games boot directly from the CD into their own, customized, Linux. Then the computer really would be a glorified console system, insert CD and hit the reset, just like a Playstation. However, if Linux is being used because a machine would otherwise be unable to run a game at a playable speed, that machine may be too old to have BIOS support for booting from CD-ROM. In that case, the first little bit of the boot may need to be done from a floppy which would transfer control over to the CD. This again is likely too transparent a process without a boot logo. However, it would make it easier for developers if they only had to develop a Linux version and not bother porting it to Win32. Also, if people are informed that they could use Linux as their main OS and not have to reboot every time they wanted to play a game, they may well do just that.

Assuming some developers adopt this, they could advertise that their product runs 50% faster than others in its genre. A lot of people with low end Pentium/Cyrix type things are starting to get left behind by stuff like Unreal and would create quite a market for Linux ports. This would give those developers with an interest in Linux a chance to make some money off of it since most game companies are commercial enterprises require the potential of profit before they do things like port games to Linux.

This would be even better for Linux. The game companies would support their own users, so we wouldn't need to provide them with tech support for silly questions like "Where's the Start button?" and such. OpenGL would be used more often, giving it a chance against DirectX. It would encourage some much needed hardware support under Linux, then we could all buy things like Matrox G200s and such and be able to use them. If the game companies have this vested interest in Linux, they may pay their programmers to develop the system further, which would benefit us all via the GPL.

An area that would need some attention if such a thing were ever to happen is licensing. We would need to be sure that the version of Linux used by game companies would be compatible with the standard, otherwise we may end up with game that only run under some odd, proprietary system. Also, we need to ensure that the game companies make it clear to their users that Linux is a full fledged OS that can be used for anything, not just games. There may need to be some special contract between the Linux community and the game developers ensuring that the interests of all parties are met. I don't know much about the way these things are done, maybe the GPL already covers all of this?

Would any of this be possible, even slightly? Could Linux actually become a dominant gaming platform? Would that be A Good Thing?

Lee Kindness writes "50 years ago this month the first stored-program electronic digital computer was built at Manchester University It was known as Baby. Celebrations being today for 50 years of computing link"

Mark R. Bowyer sent us a link to ZDNet UKs Linux History. It's all part of ZDNet UKs Linux Focus week. Its pretty cool that we've gotten this far guys.

Allright, Gonna go See Terry Gilliam's new movie (Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas). I love TG- Brazil, 12 Monkees, Time Bandits, Python, uber cool. So anyway, before I go, I wanna quick post a bunch of stuff. First, Jauder Ho his looking for help to write a new DNS Management Tool. Edward Carter is looking for help creating a GL/GTK modeller. Next we have some fun stuff (and after the day I've had, I need some fun!). Check out what Ben Lewis sent: Live Deformed Frog Cam! That's so cool! And finally, Juhapekka Tolvanen sent us a link to Cool Linux Penguin Stickers. Proudly adhese to a flat clean surface!

Well it was bound to happen sooner or later. Check out this story sent to us by wangi. The nickel summary is that italian scientists are using VR to restore the sex drive of men, with an 84% success rate! I have no witty comment that could possibly do justice to this amazing story.

Cesar Cardoso sent us this story over at wired where you can read about AOL and its vulnerability to cracking.