Slashdot Mirror

symbolic asks: "I just finished watching a small segment of World Business Review on PBS, where the topic of discussion the use of biometrics by employers to not only provide confirmation of identity, but as something to drive other parts of the operation - like tracking employee time. Briefly mentioned were face and iris scans, but as I was watching a picture of someone's iris, I realized that once an employer has captured a scan of your iris (or any biometric data), who has control over it? Does it become part of the cesspool of information trading that occurs between business and government entities? Will trading of someone's biometric information become as ubiquitous as their address or phone number. Is there any reason we should be concerned about this? I'd like to hear what others think about this." Ask Slashdot has previously approached the Biometrics topic for technical issues, but the privacy issue of such data has yet to be addressed. How do you feel about biometric data (or any data derived from your physical makeup, like your genome) being used as another commodity (like your address) in the corporate data exchange?

BrianWCarver writes: "The NYTimes is reporting that two guys in their garage have designed a low-cost wireless broadband solution that can transmit up to 20 miles. (A previous story described a 7km achievement in Australia.) Their company is called Etherlinx and they use the Wi-Fi 802.11b standard in a repeater antenna that people can attach to the outside of their homes. The technology, which apparently costs under $100, has been operating in a small for-pay trial in Oakland, CA for a year. Is this a solution to the 'last-mile' problem, hope for rural areas, and the death of cable/DSL? Read and be the judge."

BrianWCarver writes: "The NY Times (free registration blah blah...) is reporting that a libel suit may establish a precedent of allowing online publishers to be sued not in the jurisdiction where their servers reside, but in the jurisdiction of the complaintant. A warden at a Virginia jail didn't like the way he was portrayed by several Connecticut-based online news outlets so he sued in his home state of Virginia. "If the district court decision stands, online publishers could be sued for defamation in any state or country that an online article is read." The article goes on to worry that this will cause publishers to self-censor their online publishing to avoid offending anyone in any jurisdiction, whatsoever, which if carried to its logical conclusion, means online publishing would simply cease." This may remind you of an earlier case in which an Australian businessman sued Dow Jones for libel. Update: 05/27 15:12 GMT by J : Jamie Love points out elsewhere that 60 countries, including the USA, are negotiating a treaty regarding Internet jurisdiction for libel and defamation.

erichj writes "Reuters is reporting that Cyan Worlds announced that they will be releasing an online version of the popular adventure game Myst for internet play in 2003. Users will pay a fee for the privilege of unraveling the mystery online." The article mentions some multiplayer functionality, but I can't really tell if the online version will be new puzzles or not.

Halster writes "And it could take our planet with it. Reported in the New Scientist. Harvard student Karin Sandstrom discovered the star while researching a paper. It's named HR 8210, and is a white dwarf about 150 light years from our planet, that's 10 light years short of the 160 to 200 theoretical light years thought to be a safe distance from a SuperNova. Left alone it won't turn SuperNova, but it's parked next to another Sun that will "Very soon" turn into a red giant star and expand lending mass to the HR 8210 which will then push HR 8210 over the edge and go SuperNova on us. Course "Very soon" to an astronomer is hundreds of millions of years. And by that time the two stars will likely have moved away from the earth. So don't jump into your escape pod yet." Update: 05/23 20:16 GMT by M : Heh. It seems New Scientist didn't get the story quite right. :) Read the correction below.

Rich Carlson writes "The Indie Game Jam is a yearly game design and programming event designed to encourage experimentation and innovation in the game industry."

Crowbraid writes: "Well-written column by Margie Boule from the Portland Oregonian about an individual who got tired of getting spam, sued the company for $25 an email, and won." See also Bennett Haselton's anti-spam page, where he has details on "pursuing the anti-spam lawsuits on four separate fronts." (Those lawsuits were mentioned a few months back.)

michael_cain writes: "Multichannel News is reporting that the FCC has ruled that cable companies providing high-speed data service do not need to provide access to competing ISPs. Depending on whom you believe, this should lead to either (a) more rapid rollout of cable modem service since the cable companies don't have to share the revenues or (b) cable companies limiting the content and services you can reach over their IP infrastructure." And an Anonymous Coward writes: "Excite is running an article indicating that the FCC has exempted cable internet companies from having to share their lines to competition. Unlike telephone companies, cable companies are required only to share their lines when specifically told to by the government. As a condition of the AOL Time Warner merger, that company was forced to offer its consumers a choice of Internet service providers on its high-speed lines. Thursday's vote, classifying cable Internet as an "information service" rather than a telecommunications service that is subject to the open-access provision, makes sure that cable companies won't have to share anytime soon."

An Anonymous Coward writes: "CNN is running what amounts to a two part article about the nine states who are continuing their case against Microsoft in which Jim Allchins admits Microsoft violated the law. The first part of the article deals with Jim Allchins assertion that there is no way for Microsoft to remove Internet Explorer from Windows without crippling the OS. However, he admits that the demonstration in court which showed this crippling was in fact rigged and that they have not done studies to se if it would be possible to produce an OS without the browser imbedded in it. The second part of the story involves Allchin admitting that Microsoft has violated the law but refused to specify the violations. 'I don't think that I can summarize those,' Allchin said. 'I'm not an attorney.'"

Saint Aardvark writes: "Something interesting from the SecurityFocus Honeypot mailing list: a couple of honeypots for spammers. This message has a link to a how-to page for setting up a Sendmail honeypot to trap spammers, and the status page for a honeypot in Moscow that's trapped spam meant for >1.7 million recipients. The author mentions using a honeypot in conjunction with the Distributed Checksum Clearinghouse -- this seems like a great way identify both spammers and their messages."

And C-Moan writes: "Wireless spam volume is likely to increase in the coming years. But smart use of spam-fighting measures can go a long way toward eliminating the problem. This article provides info about the latest crop of e-mail filters and enhanced mail client options, as well as two roll-your-own programming platforms that could help keep your in-boxes spam free."

polymath69 asks: "Living on the edge of Debian unstable means that updates sometimes break stuff, occasionally to an extent that is difficult to recover from. This got me thinking about treating the entire set of mounted filesystems as a transactional database. Mark state, try something which might be dangerous, test, and approve (commit) or panic (rollback). Obviously some filesystem support would be required, but with ext3 and reiserfs available, maybe the potential is already there. And such a system would need lots of disk space, but these days that's a demand easily granted. There's lots out there on process-level checkpointing, and even some stuff about system-level checkpointing, but all I've found on that was in the context of saving and restoring processes for a system freeze and restore. But I couldn't find anything on Google or SourceForge about doing this sort of temporary branching in the filesystem. Is this idea feasible? Is anyone working on it?"

An Anonymous Coward writes: "Excite is running an article about how New York is suing McAfee over what it considers a restriction of free speech because McAfee does not allow customers from publishing reviews without prior approval from McAfee. From the article: 'In one instance, Network Associates demanded a retraction of an unfavorable review published in the online and print magazine Network World, citing a clause on its Web site that prohibits product reviews without permission, the lawsuit alleged.'"

A submitter writes: "MSNBC is running this article about a free speech lawyer who will be doling out sites with the word 'suck' in it for free. He and others are afraid that too many of these gripe sites have been taken away from their owners and given to the target companies and is willing to fight in court for these people." We posted about the VivendiUniversalSucks decision earlier.

KillerBluj writes "CNN says "The largest planet in the solar system will be directly overhead at midnight on New Year's Eve, according to astronomer Jack Horkheimer. The ringed planet Saturn also will be visible, and both will be joined in the sky by the almost full moon. When the sun sets on Monday, Jupiter will rise in the northeast and will slowly climb in the sky until it reaches its highest point at midnight. The almost full moon will trail Jupiter to the east, "bathing the landscape in brilliant cosmic light," Horkheimer said. "--- This should be really interesting to see both planets and the full moon. Wonder what's going to happen tonight?!"

Ursus Maximus writes "Python City, formerly known as the Python Liberation Front, is an attempt to further Guido van Rossum's dream of making computer programming accessible to any intelligent person. Featuring more than 20 detailed reviews of programming books,presented from a newbie's point of view, as well as links to 14 tutorials for learning Python, the site is a good starting point for folks interested in scripting. In addition, you will find an online interactive script for Choosing Your Own Programming Language, based on one's own preferences, expectations, and priorities, While the script is written in JavaScript, there are no apologies for any perceived bias towards Python ;-)))). You will also find several interesting and fun GPL'ed scripts such as askMerlin, an online, artificially intellgent Oracle; DecisionAnalysis, to help you make up your mind; and myGale, a webcrawler to routinely collect all online articles about Python. Add in a dash of Monty Python humor and newbies will find learning Python to be not only painless but indeed, fun!"

Anonymous Coward writes "For those anti-corporate tech-heads out there, Excite is running an article about how companies are taking over the net through the use of the courts, trademarks and deep pockets. From the article, 'Big corporations have a significant and growing presence on the Internet. In March, just 14 companies controlled 60 percent of users' online time, down from 110 companies two years earlier, Jupiter Media Metrix found.' A final thought from the article, 'This is the last remaining communications medium that allows the small person to participate,' said Barbara Simons, past president of the Association for Computing Machinery. 'To lose that would be a great tragedy.'"

tottydoc asks: "I have a few thousand cassette tape recorded lectures (monoaural) that I wanted to convert to MP3. Are there any high speed dubbing decks to use in combination with some software to do this quickly?" Might there be some quality concerns when recording audio to disk and then slowing it down to the intended speed?

rkischuk writes: "As an alternative to cable modem and DSL, Earthlink is launching "High Speed Internet Fixed Wireless Access". You lock a 14" square dish onto your home, and all that comes inside is the network cable that connects directly to your NIC. The connection is transmitted over radio waves, probably to transmitters mounted on local towers. Service seems comparable to DSL in both price ($42.95 / month) and speed (1.5 Mbps downstream, 128 Kbps upstream). No idea on the latency. Service is currently only available for pre-order in the Atlanta area. This seems to finally get the behemoth cable and phone companies from trying to monopolize such services, but brings the wireless providers into the mix (it's probably their cell-phone towers)."

Anonymous Coward writes: "CNN has an article in their Science and Technology section detailing how the European telecommunication ministers have agreed that unsolicited e-mail and wireless text messages should be prohibited under a new data protection law. They also are agreeing to allow leeway for law enforcement to access logs of e-mail and telephone traffic.

WinkyN writes: "A story on Yahoo! is claiming Apple might release a flat-panel iMac for release in early 2002. Analysts for Morgan Stanley who cover Apple say the computer manufacturer has placed orders for component parts to build such a machine (in fact, build about 100,000 of them a month). Perhaps Steve Jobs will announce this at Macworld Expo in January?"

alen asks: "I'm in the market for an MP3 player. I've been looking at various models and they all seem to be SDMI ready or compliant. Looking at customer reviews on Amazon confirms this as you'll find at least one person saying you can't transfer the music from the MP3 player to your PC. At least on the newer players you do." I've been resisting the urge to get an MP3 player for precisely this reason, opting to use my laptop and a cassette adaptor for those long driving trips, but this is hardly affordable or efficient. Handhelds might work, but memory is a problem here. Are there any players out there that haven't forgotten the "fair" part in "fair-use"?

"So far I have narrowed my search to 3 choices. I want it to sound very good and be able to play music encoded at 128kb or higher.

The Rio Volt 250 is a CD based player so the SDMI thing doesn't really apply. The Creative Labs Nomad II" proudly displays this as a feature. The Samsung Yepp doesn't use SDMI, but something called SecuMax as stated in the Nomad II technical specs on Amazon. And this little tid bit on the Samsung Yepp homepage confirms that SecuMax is just like SDMI.

Now I'm not looking to download any illegal music from the Internet. I simply want to listen to my CD collection on the train to work or while working out. And there is freely downloadable music out there. If I were to download a song at work or a friend's house, put it in my MP3 player I then wouldn't be able to transfer it back to my PC at home to add to my collection. Where is 'fair use' when the artist is giving away their music for free? And I don't have the link, but what of the recent surges in so called 'secure' CD's that one can't rip into MP3's? Where is the 'fair use' there? Or are we supposed to purchase multiple copies of the same music in different formats?"

alen asks: "The recent IIS security incidents got me thinking. Code Red and Nimda hit servers that weren't patched by their sys admins. If you get infected, you patch your server and end of story. But what if you're running Windows 2000 Datacenter Server? It's a customized solution that you can't change. All your service packs are customized by your vendor. What happens if you have a web or database server that needs to be patched immediately? Are you left out in the cold running unsecure software that you can't patch while you wait in line for your vendor to issue you a service pack or hotfix?" In a situation like this, the whole ball-o-wax resides with the vendor. If you have a good vendor who actually cares about customer satisfaction, these hotfixes will be available quickly. Would anyone out there actually recommend Datacenter for corporate environments?

"My company is currently looking to cluster our SQL 7 servers. We're considering Win2000 advanced server or datacenter. Around a month ago I sat in a meeting with our VP of IT, and the rest of the network admins I work with. Compaq tried to pitch their Windows 2000 Datacenter or Advanced Server solution. Here is the way the compaq people explained it:

You get datacenter only from an OEM. They look at the apps you're running and customize a solution for you in their lab. Every datacenter implementation is different, and every datacenter CD is different. Since we would be using an EMC SAN as our clustered storage system they said our implementation would take special customization. They would have to contact EMC engineers and work together. Once you deploy it, the OEM monitors it. And you can't install any service packs or anything without getting an OK from your OEM. Any service packs are customized for your enviroment. The SLA guarantees a 99.999% uptime or your money back. Part of your money at least. Datacenter isn't an OS, but a program in their words.

Now here is the problem. With Code Red and Nimda, how do you patch IIS running on datacenter in a timely manner? The reason IIS servers became infected was because the admins didn't patch them in the first place. So say a new worm comes out in a few months and it takes a few days for MS to create a hotfix. Datacenter admins can't install it until they get their customized copy from their OEM. And almost every 2000 server runs IIS for terminal server. It can take a few days and in the meantime your servers could be down. And I don't see the SLA covering a situation like this. Meanwhile you're explaining to your CEO how this $500K supposedly guaranteed solution is sitting dead in the water and you can't do a thing about.

Is there something I'm missing, or did Microsoft look over something like this? Especially when they are trying to push Datacenter as 'Big Iron'."

Graymalkn writes "According to this story on the BBC, DoCoMo has finally launched the world's first 3G cellular service in Japan. Phones start at $560 and can go as high as $800 for one which can double as a video camera." Eventually they'll be able to watch movies on the new phones, but for now service for the phones is limited to a 20 mile radius around the center of Tokyo. I haven't found an exact number of bandwidth, but I believe it's like 384k downlink. To your phone. Once again, my jealousy runs rampant.

schnippy writes: "New Scientist reports on new study from the University of Michigan that argues that steganography (the science of obfuscating communications) is not in wide use, or at least not on the 2 million images they scanned on eBay. Earlier this year, USA Today reported that Bin Laden was using steganography to disguise his communications. Full study is available here. Wonder how long before someone sets up a distributed computing client to help search for Bin Laden's secret communications? :p" Niels Provos' research was mentioned in Slashback not long ago, and this article is based on the same research.

alen writes "I've been working with NT for a year now, and I'm getting really tired of it. So I finally decided to learn Linux, after a year of putting it off. I've got an old P2 266 that I'm going to use. Now the next question is what distro do I get? What's a good starter version? I'm just looking to get the feel of it and to play around a little. " This question gets asked periodically - it's always good to hear have a lively discussion about it - I love my Debian but have heard that Mandrake is a good starter distro.

Greg Lee writes "Pioneer Entertainment has re-released Akira! Originally released in 1988, this film is still cutting edge 13 years later. Two versions of the film have been re-released on DVD: One is a regular version, and the other is a special edition in a metal case with a second DVD filled with goodies. (Mine also came with a free animation cell from the movie!) Pioneer's website has not yet been updated to reflect the release." The deluxe DVD looks great - THX certed, Dolby 5.1, remastering script.

You may recall that when AOL and Time-Warner were permitted to merge, a few conditions were placed by the FTC. One of them is that AOL must permit a few other ISPs to offer service over all of the cable modems owned by Time-Warner. AOL lied to the regulators and said that "technical difficulties" prevented them from permitting open competition among any ISP that wanted to offer service; instead AOL will carefully choose a grand total of three other ISPs to offer service. Well, they've put in the paperwork - Earthlink, Juno, and High Speed Access Corporation. AOL is of course the nation's largest ISP; Earthlink is second; Juno is third; HSA is another huge cable modem company. AOL has financial dealings with all three - that is, they're already in bed together, partners, not competitors. You can guess that they're going to be competing *wink*wink* fiercely *wink*wink* to offer you the best price {snicker}.

Jill Morgan writes "Hi I think your readers will enjoy finding out that The Mad Scientists' Club by Bertrand Brinley is coming back in print this September. I saw a reader mention it on your book page at one of the reviews. This book was first printed in 1965, featuring six junior genuises whose pranks turn the town of Mammoth Falls upside down! You can read more about our new edition (which features text restored from the original manuscript) at from Purple House Press " I remember reading these as a kid.

pmbarth asks: "This week, the large company I work at is having a 'Crisis Week', where we simulate different types of problems, and have training on how to deal with them. Beyond the normal fire drills or chemical spills, a new addition was 'Attack on IT Infrastructure'. I was wondering how many other companies out there are actually training their non-IT employees on how to be aware of, and perhaps even counteract these types of issues?" It's an interesting idea, and one can't tell when an extra skill one learns on the job may come in use in a critical situation. Do other companies have something similar? Do you think such drills are particularly effective?

descubes writes: "It's been a long time since Java, the last major change in programming languages. Could the next one be designed "the Open Source Way"? For a few years, I have been working on a programming language called LX, which is part of a larger system called Mozart. I need some feedback. Could Slashdot readers comment on which programming language features they would like?"

W88 writes "I am very familiar with the 3-D rendering packages available including Blender and POVRay, but I am looking for something a little different. I am writing a paper that could benefit significantly from some three dimensional projected views of a fairly complex apparatus. I can easily model the apparatus, but do not want rendered bitmaps in the paper (I am using pdflatex). I would prefer edges with hidden lines removed rendered to a vector format like EPS or PDF (or even FIG). Has anyone seen anything like that? A web search turned up something called hlp that appears to be public domain from NASA but it is only available on a $300US CDROM from Public Domain Aeronautical Software." Note that any software created by the U.S. Government can be obtained with a Freedom of Information Act request, probably for less than the PDAS guys are charging.

innertruth writes "Cnet has an article about FTC dropping its probe into DoubleClick privacy practices. Without the FCC looking over their sholder now we have to wonder what they really will do with all the information they've collected online and that offline database they now have." The FTC's letter ending their investigation has more information. Keep in mind that the FTC has a very narrow mandate: "Is Doubleclick doing something different than what they say?" So as long as Doubleclick states their practices accurately - whether they are or are not linking the household information from Abacus with the click information from Doubleclick's network - then the FTC's role is ended.

markbark writes: "Stan J. Liebowitz, a prof at the U of Texas Management School, has released a screed saying that the world economy could take a $300 billion dollar bite in the ass if Microsoft is broken up. Tales of $2000 computers with Windows costing an additional $1000. The whole 39-page PDF file can be found here . The whole thing was bankrolled by M$ apologists extraordinaire the Association for Competitive Technology and should be taken with an extremely large grain of salt." (More below.)

If you're interested in the anti-breakup point of view, even as devil's advocate, this is a useful place to start. I don't buy all of Liebowitz's assumptions or conclusions, but it's much more informative than most flamewars, and does bring up some nagging ideas about market behavior and legal remedies.

I found interesting, too, his assertion that "[a]t the current time, there appear to be virtually no major desktop applications that have been ported to Linux, including those from such market leaders as Intuit, Symantec, Lotus, Adobe, or Quark." Fewer than I'd like, certainly, but "virtually none" is hard to buy.

It's not unreasonable to suggest that the price of Windows would rise if it was made by a newly-formed separate division of Microsoft, but if the marketplace is truly dynamic, it seems like that change could as well be in the opposite direction. (How much would Liebowitz have predicted Netscape's browser to cost today, given the information available in 1993?)

And for some devil's advocacy the other direction, you might find this Motley Fool article (suggested by sjbe and others) an interesting take on an MS breakup as well.

nbruinooge asks: "I just reread Neal Stephenson's profile In the Kingdom of Mao Bell in Wired, Feb. 1994. In it Stephenson speculates about what will become of Hong Kong in '97, and predicts a Chinese backlash against Western technology in the next couple of decades. Hong Kong shifting hands is old news now, and it occurs to me that other Slashdot readers must know more than I do about how things have been going there, from a technological perspective. Is Hong Kong transforming China, or is it the other way around? Was Stephenson his good ol' prescient self when he wrote this article, or have things taken unexpected turns? And how does that China-Linux announcement from a while back play into it?"

spiel writes "There's a piece in today's NYT which points out the flaws in the arguments for increasing the number of H-1B visas. As one of those "older workers", this puts facts and figures behind what I have long believed." It's an interesing dicussion, although I suspect like most of things, the answer lies somewhere in the middle.

narratorDan writes "Cure your child with videogames! This is an interesting story about how video games and bio feedback can help children with attention deficit disorder (ADD). The academics at the Langley Research Centre in Virginia say the treatment helps the children train their brains to concentrate more and focus their attention." Don't look at me, I have a hard time concentrating on anything longer then a one paragraph Slashdot story *grin*.

trinitishwar writes "House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-Tex.) has a site where you can vote to express your opinion on Carnivore: http://www.freedom.gov/vote/vote4.asp. Just let him know how you feel." The poorly-worded poll is for political purposes (TexasCowboy23 points out the House putting pressure on Reno at this exact moment) but it doesn't hurt to vote anyway. What I want to know is, where in RFC 2146 does it say a politician can own FREEDOM.GOV?! Complete with 468x60 banner ads promoting Deep Thoughts by Dick Armey ("Cloning is the way amoebas reproduce") and his other site FLATTAX.GOV. I guess this started when nobody made serious complaints about GOP.GOV (see Jim Warren's comments and an Armey staffer's response back in December) ... did someone change the rules when I wasn't looking?

sonofpan writes: "About 18 months ago I heard about a few guys at MIT who developed a process for creating a (near) perfect mirror that could reflect many different frequencies at any angle with almost no loss of strength (something that was said to be theoretically impossible). Apparently, they have finally gotten their patents and used the technology to create a dielectric coaxial cable that can transmit light across vast distances and around tight turns with virtually no loss of signal. Read about it at: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/ nr/2000/waveguide.html and the company they started at: http://www.omni-guide.com. And the original link that described the process and the huge possibilities for its uses is a very interesting read as well: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffi ce/tt/1998/dec09/mirror.html."

David Hume writes: "Upside Today has an article entitled Penguin Payola which also does a good job of surrounding the recent complaining by Tucows and ZD-Net that Linux reviews are bought instead of earned. Upside Today reaches the same concusion as Penguinista regarding Reality On The "Purchased" Linux Reviews."

David Hume writes: "Following up on a Tucows article asserting Linux Reviews Are Bought Rather Than Earned, ZDNET asserts writers fire off glowing reviews for free software and asks Are Linux Reviews Fixed? Is this a real problem? Are reviewers induced to write good reviews by the implied promise of future free software? If so, what do we do about it? Who do we trust? Do we trust Slashdot? :)" I don't think my family even trusts me. Course the only software I've bought in the last 6 months was Diablo2 (Which I beat thank you ;).

M-2 sent us a Wired story about (surprise) the RIAA's latest lawsuit. This one is against an MP3 site that links to pirated MP3s: and in some cases, it does so quite blatantly... but they aren't technically serving any copyrighted content themselves. The RIAA wants to shut the site down, but also get a ruling on if linking constitutes copyright infringement. The future of the Web pretty much hangs on the freedom to link, so it'll be interesting to see where this one goes.

Spoing dropped this bit of informative info into the bin: "Last week, a friend of mine griped that he didn't know of an easy way -- short of getting Adobe Capture and paying per-use licence fees -- of creating searchable PDFs. I scoffed, and told him I've done it many times, and it was free -- as in beer and speech. Dumbfounded, he pushed me to show him how, and I did; print to a Postscript file, and run ps2pdf on it...done! Since every document could be output as Postscript, his problem was solved. If he wanted to batch process the documents, he could set up a few scripts to simplify the task. While he was impressed, he ended up asking what seemed like an easy question; 'Can you do the same with a scanned image?'" And therein lies the question...

"After a week of on/off searching, I did find some good references as well as nearly all the parts necessary for the job, including open source OCR engines, PDF and Postscript tools, search engines, and the like.

Unfortunately, I came up with only two solutions -- neither of them Open Source, and most quite costly (premium beer); Adobe Capture or dedicated "PDF scanners" like this one.

My question to the Slashdot crowd is this:

1. Is there a cost-effective way of moving existing dead-tree documents into either HTML, PDF, or other searchable mixed text and graphics format?

We all deal with a mix of electronic and printed documents -- and you're like me you've paid for some of them in both formats.

If you're like me, you buy new documents in electronic, searchable, format when you can. How many of us have O'Reilly's Networking Bookshelf, or some other CD texts ready to search on our notebooks and networks?

Yet, I have a four foot wide stack of technical documents and books that just isn't going to come with me on each plane trip. I'm not going to get rid of them -- they are still valuable -- but I can't figure out how to make them useful more often.

The available tools for capturing paper and converting it into searchable PDFs is costly, and is geared toward corporations that can justify the costs by the number of users. To me, a per-use licence of Adobe's Capture --

1. Adobe Capture - Prices

   Adobe Capture - Features

-- is just not cost effective.

If the document is already a text document -- even if it's in some word processor I don't use -- generating PDF files is easy and cheap;

Print a document to a Postscript file, or create one. For example a simple text document is trivial;

1. enscript file.txt -p file.ps

Convert the resulting Postscript file to PDF;

1. ps2pdf file.ps file.pdf

Converting a paper document to PDF is also easy. Just scan the image and use tiff2ps or jpeg2ps to create the Post script file. The only problem is that the resulting PDF is a bitmap image and isn't searchable.

Interestingly enough, TIFF -- a format used extensively for scanned documents -- does support TIFF+Text, but usually as an extention to TIFF and isn't really an optimal format; The Unofficial TIFF Home Page.

So, if you want to search the documents and keep the formatting and diagrams, you're back to paying Adobe for Capture or some other nearly as expensive method. "

Vandermar writes: "IBM's new production method uses an advanced insulation material -- a low-k dielectric -- that protects the millions of individual copper circuits on a chip." Apparently it works at sizes down to 0.13 micron and the insulation itself is primarily silk. IBM says it will be using this technology for its Power 4 processor, but with their technology sharing with Transmeta and AMD can we expect to see this enhancement in their chips?"

Magorak asks: "Ok. We all know there's all kinds of video cards out there on the market. Well, I've been trying like mad to find a video card that will give me everything. Literally. I want to have awesome 3D graphics, but I'm also big on multimedia so I want something that does video capture, has a TV tuner, and does DVD. Voodoo's got the V3-3500 but I've heard bad things about the tuner/capture; ATI's got their All In Wonder series but I can't find actual pictures of the 3D graphics and the AIW I have now sucks when it comes to 3D. Is there a real combo card that will give me all of the wicked 3D, plus awesome multimedia options? Ideally, something like a hybrid between Voodoo3 & ATI. Is there a real solution? "

Rockhead writes: "Just saw this over at MacWeek. It looks like Deneba will be porting Canvas, their graphics, layout and kitchen-sink program, to Linux. The free beta is expected on the Deneba Web site early next month. Whoopee!" Let's hope that the release of free-beer proprietary vector programs spurs, rather than impedes, progress on KIllustrator and Sketch, both of which look great but incomplete at this point, but hold great promise in expanding Linux's meager selection of vector-drawing tools. Canvas also has some page-layout abilities -- looks like Deneba is seeing Adobe's free FrameMaker download for Linux, and raising.

Magorak asks: "Like myself, I know there's a lot of people out there who have built their own PC from the ground up. But, I also have friends who just went out and bought a boxed package that came with everything. I've always said that if you build your own PC, with exactly what you want, you'll have the best machine. But PC packages from Dell, Gateway and others are pretty promising so I'm not so sure anymore. I'm curious what Slashdotters think? " A while ago, I would have always suggested the custom solution, but this might not be so true anymore. Are there still places where the custom PC builder can still get a better deal than through Dell, Gateway and others of the sort?

idiotsavant asks: "Seeing all these stories about governments imposing censorship laws, restrictions on crypto, etc. (specifically the US, Australia and Britain), makes me wonder: Are there any countries where the gov't doesn't do stuff like this? I live in the US, and I'm looking for information about countries with free speech, no boneheaded restrictions on crypto or the like, and a good standard of living with a decent selection of tech-related jobs available (at least in the major cities). I want to know what my options are if my government gets tyrannical. So, does anyone know of a real "land of the free"? " I'd be interested to see if people recommend any non-superpowers. It would be nice to see such a country (be it an existing one, or a new entity) that would set laws that are appropriate for the new millenium.

mind21_98 writes "A new machine-translator designed for language translation has offically opened for public testing. GPLTrans is a translator similiar to Babelfish. Pre-alpha testing has shown that it is the most accurate of the major Web-based machine translators. More information can be found here. "

Sebbo, lately of our review of The Big U is taking a crack at five of Daniel Pinkwater's books which have been gathered together in one. The stories are: Alan Mendelsohn, the Boy from Mars; Slaves of Spiegel; The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death; The Last Guru; and Young Adult Novel. Pinkwater is a great author - click below to learn more; or if you have read any of them, contribute to the discussion! Five Novels author Daniel Pinkwater pages 656 publisher Farrar Straus Giroux, 09/1997 rating 8/10 reviewer Sebbo ISBN 0374423296 summary Three works of classic subversive and hilarious writing (and two so-so stories) in one convenient volume Preamble Let's say you're in high school. Worse yet, let's say you're in junior high school. The other kids mostly ignore you, and occasionally pick on you. The teachers are about the same. The schoolwork is tedious, and Gym is a nightmare. There seems to have been some sort of terrible mixup; you're the only human in a school full of Martians, or perhaps the other way around.

But you have a secret--a message in a bottle, a communique from your fellow aliens outside your prison. There's hope--there are others; weirdos like you. You've discovered the novels of Daniel Pinkwater.

Who? Pinkwater's a prolific writer and occasional illustrator, and has cranked out dozens of children's books, a couple dozen Young Adult novels, numerous books-on-tape, a couple essay collections, a dog-training guide, an adult novel, and at least one comic strip collection in the last 30 years. 5 Novels is a collection of his work from the early '80s. How they were picked I have no idea. The works in question are: Alan Mendelsohn, the Boy from Mars; Slaves of Spiegel; The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death; The Last Guru; and Young Adult Novel. There's not much to say about the collection itself: it's a decently bound trade paperback. The foreword by Jules Feiffer is charming, but not particularly insightful, and not quite two pages long. The variation in fonts among the books suggests that very little alteration was done from the original printings before sending the collection to press.

The books are aimed at teenagers, but that's certainly not their only audience. I read Young Adult Novel to a group of 20 30-ish Boston geeks earlier this month, and they loved it and clamored for more. If the portrait at the beginning of this piece is familiar from any point in your life, I think you'll get something out of Pinkwater now.

Themes The most evident thing about Pinkwater's writing is the goofy sense of humor, as one can guess from a glance at the titles. Much of his humor derives from a childlike delight in inherently absurd objects, such as avocados. Bizzarre place names or background characters, like the town of Hogboro or the McTavish's Pickleburgers fast food chain often will reoccur from book to book. The Hoboken Chicken Emergencyclopedia is an attempt by a fan to to catalogue these references, along with everything else mentioned in Pinkwater's book.

Another source of humor is absurd justapositions of the fantastic and mundane, such as the marauding space pirates who invariably wear plaid sportscoats and white plastic shoes. A third vein is the puncturing of authority.

Adults in Pinkwater's world are--at best--pretentious buffoons. In Alan Mendelsohn, for example, first the occult bookseller Samuel Klugarsh, then the Venusian motorcyclist Clarence Yojimbo, and then the astral traveller Lance Hergeschleimer are first admired by the story's heroes, but soon prove less clever, honest, and resourceful than themselves. Teachers are overbearing petty tyrants, bored clock-punchers, or raving lunatics. Parents pursue their own petty obsessions in blithe ignorance of their children's lives. They appear in these books as inert and mostly useless creatures, like enormous ambulatory vegetables endowed with the authority to set bedtimes, but lacking the wit to effectively enforce them.

The ideal Pinkwater novel would go like this: short, fat kid of above-average but not exceptional intelligence is lonely, picked-on, and bored at high school. He makes friends with a somewhat more flamboyant and self-confident peer, and together they have adventures that discover a more strange, beautiful and exciting world than had previously been revealed to them. This is a composite picture, and most of his books don't have all those exact elements, but these are recurring themes.

Girls are generally conspicuously absent from this picture, with Rat, the James Dean-obsessed punk rocker of the Snarkout books (who our heroes find immensely intimidating) a notable exception. The important relationships are male friendships.

Dangers in Pinkwater's world come from the familiar, not the strange. Characters may be beaten-up or humiliated by their classmates, but the threats of the outside world are always mild by comparison. The master criminal in The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death immerses his enemies in vats of warm egg fu yung or forces them to watch old German comedy reels. The interdimensional tyrants Mannie, Moe, and Jack in Alan Mendelsohn, the Boy from Mars administer kicks in the tush to those who oppose them. The teenage protaganists prowl the streets of the city's seedier districts late at night sometimes with a little nervousness, but never any real sense of danger.

Virtually all Pinkwater characters have their distinctive obsessions, which they carry to the point of mania: collecting comic books, building model ships, making home movies, macrobiotic cooking, fleegix appreciation (fleegix is kinda like hot chocolate, and immensely popular on the planet of Waka-Waka), or snarking out (sneaking out to attend the midnight double bill at the Snark theater).

Place is very important to Pinkwater, and his Chicago upbringing suffuses the way he writes about it. Just as his characters are in conflict with the blowdried, athletic and suntanned culture around them, so they seek out landscapes that offer escape from the strip mall and housing development architecture that reflects that culture. They find them in the older, grittier city of brick buildings and narrow, twisting streets that lies beneath and surrounded by the shinier metropolis that sprung up around it. In Alan Mendelsohn, the Boy from Mars, the narrator, Leonard Neeble, describes a return to his old neighborhood in Hogboro after having moved out to the suburb of West Kangaroo Park.

We stopped and looked in the window of the fish store. All the fish were lying dead on the crushed ice, except some crabs who were feebly waving their claws around. It smelled good. It was a good fish store. Everything was fresh. There was seaweed packed between some of the fish. People in West Kangaroo Park must think that fish came out of the sea frozen and packed in little square boxes.

The stories can be read as fables about the liberating power of fantasy. The characters excape from a world of deadening tedium and threat into one of excitement where they are included and admired, which eventually allows them to cope better with the mundane world

I wouldn't go too far with that, though. Pinkwater shows a laudable aversion for anything smacking of preachiness or "relevance." Here's the raciest passage from the book: "Rat was pretty outspoken. She had a lot of things to say about James Dean and the things she would have been willing to do with him and with no one else, if only he had not died. Winston and I got the impression that Rat knew a lot more about sex than we did, so we kept off the subject in order not to appear ignorant."

The Books Alan Mendelsohn, the Boy from Mars An excellent introduction to Pinkwater's work. Leonard Neeble's parents move from their city apartment to a ranch house in the suburbs, and Neeble finds himself at Bat Masterson Jurnior High School, where "'all you have to do is not look like everybody else, and you're instant garbage.'" He falls in with Alan Mendelsohn, an abrasive and geeky boy from the Bronx, with the odd habit of telling random people that he's actually a Martian. After a visit to an occult bookstore, they learn the secrets of mind control, but after a day of giving teachers uncontrollable cigarette joneses and making classmates trip over their own feet, they soon get bored and move on to interdimensional travel. The inhabitants of the first other dimension they visit turn out to be superstitious and cowardly, and Leonard and Alan able to rescue them from the dominion of the dread bandits Manny, Moe, and Jack (why this isn't trademark infringement, I have no idea). Slaves of Spiegel A short epistolary novel, featuring the dread Speigellian space pirates of Fat Men from Space, who roam the galaxy in search of junkfood. This book depends entirely on humor, with no memorable characters or emotional weight, and seems aimed at rather younger readers than the other four. Not actually painful to read, but not recommended. The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death Walter Gant and Winston Bongo spend their nights sneaking out of their houses to go to the Snark theater double-bill, in an attempt to escape the crushing tedium of Genghis Kahn High School, keeping scrupulous tally of successful Snarkouts, both joint and solo. One night they meet Bentley Saunders Harrison Matthews ("You can call me Rat."), a student at nearby George Armstrong Custer High School who has also independently invented the sport, and are drawn into the mystery of her kidnapped uncle, the mad scientist Flipping Hades Terwilliger, who appears to have been kidnapped by the archcriminal Wallace Nussbaum. Sherlock Holmes fans will enjoy the large number of Holmes references. Funny and evocative. The Last Guru Another fairly weak one. Harold Platz, a 13-year-old boy, becomes, through a series of improbable stock market investments, one of the richest people in the world, and is discovered to be the reincarnated founder ot the Silly Hat Sect, which appears to be loosely based on Tibetan Buddhism. The primary purpose of the book seems to make fun of the American New Age movement, which was still a fish in a barrel last time I checked. Young Adult Novel The Wild Dada Ducks--Charlie the Cat, Captain Colossal, Igor, the Indiana Zephyr, and the Honorable Venustiano Carranza (President of Mexico)--are a group of students who attempt to resurrect the Dada art movement at Himmler High school. Young Adult Novel has a very different feel to it than Pinkwater's other High School novels. There are no elements of fantasy or science fiction--the story takes place entirely on or near the Himmler campus. Rather than trying to escape the High School experience, the Wild Dada Ducks attempt to transform it through will and creativity. Their success in doing so is...limited, but the endeavor is one of the funniest damn things I've ever read. Final Notes Avocado of Death has a sequel: The Snarkout Boys and the Baconburg Horror, which is very good. Pinkwater denies rumors of a third volume, I Snarked with a Zombie.

Young Adult Novel had a sequel called Dead End Dada. The two were also published together, along with an excerpt from the proposed third volume, The Dada Boys in Collich, under the title Young Adults. Both books are extremely out of print. Any leads on obtaining them would be vastly appreciated.

Pinkwater has a semi-official web site, and is a remarkably prompt correspondent.

As a small child, I was often read The Blue Moose by my parents. Many years later, I realized that it was also by Pinkwater. I recommend it highly. Also recommended is Lizard Music.

Purchase this collection at fatbrain.

Study Questions:

1. Is Osgood Sigerson actually Walter Galt's father?
2. Would it be appropriate to call Pinkwater's books "subversive?" Why or why not?
3. Discuss the role of food in Pinkwater's books. Special emphasis may be payed to the roles of raisin toast and kosher salami. In what light is vegetarianism presented?
4. Discuss the role of Judaism in Pinkwater's books.
5. Authenticity is often a concern of Pinkwater's characters, as in the fish store scene quoted above. What constitutes authenticity for them?
6. Compare and contrast Pinkwater's approach to humor with that of Woody Allen, Douglas Adams, and Stanislaw Lem.

dwh wrote to us about The Boston Globe reporting on Iowa's first steps towards Internet voting. It's tenative, with just putting computers by the boothes, but it's a first step. The article does a good job of addressing the pros and cons while talking about the first states, WA and VA which have tried it already. What do you folks think? Good or bad?