Slashdot Mirror

"When visiting a series of eight primary school class rooms recently, CS professor Judy Robertson talked to children aged 5-12 about how computers work and discussed pictures they drew of what they thought is inside a computer," writes Slashdot reader theodp:
"In my view," Robertson writes, "computational thinking has abstracted us too far away from the heart of computation — the machine. The world would be a tedious place if we had to do all out computational thinking ourselves; that's why we invented computers in the first place. Yet, the new school curricula across the world have lost focus on hardware and how code executes on it."

She notes, "What the pictures, and subsequent classroom discussions told me is that the children know names of components within a computer, and possibly some isolated facts about them. None of the pictures showed accurately how the components work together to perform computation, although the children were ready and willing to reason about this with their classmates. Although some of the children had programmed in the visual programming language, none of them knew how the commands they wrote in Scratch would be executed in the hardware inside a computer. One boy, who had been learning about variables in Scratch the previous day wanted to know whether if he looked in his computer he would really see apps with boxes full of variables in them."

Time to get the Walk-Through Computer (1990 video) out of mothballs?
"Many of the children knew the names of the components within a computer: a chip, memory, a disc, and they were often insistent that there should be a fan in there. They knew that there would be wires inside, and that it would need a battery to make it work...."

But one student confessed that while they knew that a computer was full of both devices and code, "I am not sure what it looked like so I just scribbled."

BarbaraHudson writes Researchers figured out how to label and keep track of new pieces of DNA, and learned to follow the enzyme responsible for copying those pieces. Their research focused on enzymes called polymerases. These enzymes create small regions in DNA that act as scaffolds for the copied DNA. Scientists assumed that the body deletes the scaffolds containing errors, or mutations, and the standard computer models supported this theory. However, the actual research showed that about 1.5 percent of those erroneous scaffolds are left over, trapped within the DNA. After running models, scientists now believe they can track how DNA replicates and find the most likely areas where these scaffolds with errors turn up. The erroneous scaffolds usually appear close to genetic switches, those regions that turn on when genes activate. The mutations damage the switch, which results in genetic disease, as well as increasing the likelihood of cancer.

damn_registrars writes "Scientists from Edinburgh, Scotland have recently published a study based on 1,000 years of climate data. They have compared the effects of differing factors including volcanic activity, solar activity, and greenhouse gases to find which has the most profound effect on climate. They have concluded that the driving factor since 1900 has been greenhouse gases."

The 2013 Nobel season is underway. Reader rtoz writes "Francois Englert and Peter W. Higgs won the 2013 Nobel Prize For Physics. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences cited the two scientists for the 'theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles.'" Update: 10/08 13:18 GMT by T : More Nobel news: The New York Times reports that "Three Americans won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine on Monday for discovering the machinery that regulates how cells transport major molecules in a cargo system that delivers them to the right place at the right time." The three are James E. Rothman, Randy W. Schekman; and Dr. Thomas C. Südhof, of Yale, UC Berkeley, and Stanford, respectively.

Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Michael Harper reports that researchers at the Bielefeld University in Germany are working to develop a robotic bartender, and their most difficult challenge so far is to identify the body language that is most commonly used by customers and interpreted as someone wanting to buy a drink. A bartending robot has to be able to distinguish between customers intending to order, chatting with friends or just passing by [abstract] — and do so in a very noisy environment. The researchers examined the behavior of customers in nightclubs to see which behaviors were most successful at indicating to the barman the customer was ready to be served. 'Effectively, the customers identify themselves as ordering and non-ordering people through their behavior,' says Dr Sebastian Loth, lead author of the study. The researchers analyzed 105 attempts to order drinks at nightclubs in Bielefeld and Herford in Germany and Edinburgh in Scotland and assessed the behavior of customers 35 seconds before they were served. They found the most successful tactic, which occurred in 95% of orders, was standing squarely towards the bar with head facing forward. Looking at money saw just seven per cent of customers being served within the 35 second time frame. The findings are used to produce an update to the robotic bartender's programming to allow it to ask customers if they would like a drink when they display the right body language. What the research team has learned is being programmed into a robotic bartender called James, or Joint Action in Multimodal Embodied Systems. The researchers have been working on James since early 2011 and hope to have the project completed in January 2014."

RemyBR writes "Can computers tell a good joke? Is comedy just a matter of statistics or is there something only a human can bring to creating a joke? A joke generator created at the University of Edinburgh (PDF) suggests that AI can be funny. Some AI generated jokes: 'I like my relationships like I like my source, open,' 'I like my coffee like I like my war, cold,' 'I like my boys like I like my sectors, bad.'"

The Bad Astronomer writes "Astronomers have used two big telescopes to create an infrared survey of the Milky Way that is the largest of its kind: the resulting image has an incredible 150,000 megapixels containing over a billion stars. Something that large is difficult to use, so they also made a pan-and-zoom version online which should keep you occupied for quite some time. These data will be used to better understand star formation in our Milky Way, and how far more distant galaxies and quasars behave." The interactive image is powered by IIPImage which happens to be Free Software and is cool in its own right (right click the image to get help — it has a full set of keybindings for navigation).

jmf writes "The BBC is running a story about French designer Milka Budumir, who has been ordered by a judge to give up milka.fr to Kraft Foods. You can read her side of the story (in French) at her site which also points to Kraft's side of the story. Kraft make very good chocolate, but they seem to be colour-blind: claiming that this website's colour is similar to this one's."

jg21 writes "This article on "Penguin-Driven" JVMs takes a look the performance of Java GUI applications based on the JFC/Swing API, and contends that the JIT-powered JVMs can't match a JVM with an ahead-of-time compiler ported to the Linux/x86 platform. With AOT compilation, says the CTO who has written this piece, real-world Swing applications performed perceivably faster. One is left wondering, will we now see the 'microbenchmark war' carried into the Linux camp?"

Hugh "Nomad" Hancock writes "Machinima.com have just released the DVD version of Killer Robot, award-winning filmmaker Peter Rasmussen's buddy movie about two mining robots who set out to protect their "meat-sack" masters from a master mining robot gone insane. The twist here is not only that it's Machinima, made in 3D Game Studio, but that even the actor's voices are computer-generated using programs like Festival, making this possibly the world's first all-artificial movie."

ninthwave writes "The Guardian is running an article on research into the visible effects of entropy in the Universe. Alan Heavens of The University of Edinburgh did the research also posted at The Royal Astronomical Society with this article" I dunno - expansion, heat death - it all reminds me of a teacher who said "I'm not a premillenialist, postmillenialist - I'm a pan-millenialist, as in it's all going to pan out in the end." Update: 08/18 16:36 GMT by S : Headline fixed.

fieldmethods asks: "One area where Open Source and Free Software doesn't seem to have really taken off is Natural Language Processing (using computers to deal with human languages). There are a few projects that are open source, such as Festival (a speech synth system, now ported to Java), NLTK, a general-purpose NLP system in Python, and the Linguana project, a Perl implementation of a semantic network not unlike Wordnet (but better). Generally, though, there doesn't seem to be a lot of Open Source momentum behind the field as a whole. It's a challenging, difficult field that would benefit from collaboration, especially given the potential of replacing static corpora with on-the-fly corpora developed by search engines. Is anybody else interested in this?"

Gnulix asks: "Are there any, preferably either open source products available that produce realistic speech from an arbitrary (English) text? Projects such as Festival doesn't sound all that much better than SAM (Software Automatic Mouth) did on a Commodore 64 back in 1979, nor does SoftVoice's or IBM's new products sound very good. I mean we all know that Stephen Hawking is a fun loving guy, but I bet you that he didn't choose his unrealistic, robotic voice just for the heck of it. With all the amazing advances we have seen in real-time graphics, shouldn't speech synthesis have come much, much further than what is, seemingly, available today?" Ask Slashdot last handled the Voice-To-Text issue in January of this year.

Markel writes "According this this story in the Sydney Morning Herald, Microsoft is very concerned about a man having been acquitted after allegedly selling [mod chips for a PlayStation]. So concerned in fact, that they are saying: change the law, or they will have to reconsider selling the Xbox in Australia. Not selling the Xbox is well within their rights, but putting it in a (I paraphrase slightly) "change the law or we'll .." context seems assuming a bit too much. I guess well see how many of our MPs are XBox gameheads."

Okay, here are answers from Paul Jones, director of ibiblio.org. You asked, and he responded -- and not always as seriously as you'd expect from someone who can ask us to call him "Professor Jones" or "Doctor Jones." But he's really "Just Paul," he says, "even in class." We hope a whole lot of you have a chance to meet Paul in person one day, because he's not only a warm and friendly guy, but one who has done a whole lot of good for Linux -- and for the Internet in general.

Paul:
Let me start out with a little overview of sunsite.unc.edu/metalab.unc.edu. Or better yet to point you to our annotated timeline. Then say that ibiblio.org began and has continued to be a way for the University of North Carolina (the original and still the best) to explore information sharing in the context of our missions of education, research and outreach. You folks using and contributing are the outreach part. In particular, we "acquire, discover, preserve, synthesize, and transmit knowledge" with all of your help.

We are a joint project of the School of Information and Library Science (there we are involved in digital archives and digital libraries), The School of Journalism and Mass Communication (there we are involved in electronic publishing and multimedia sharing), and the Vice Chancellor for Information Technology.

Except for one and occasionally two full time employees, our entire staff consists of students or in my case part time (as I have faculty responsibilities). So be nice to all of us, we're always learning. No matter what Robin said in the article introducing me, none of this would have happened without some very good people on staff and contributing content.

But that brings us to:

Question of Money
by too_bad
One of the things that people frequently ask about sites like ibiblio.org is "They are great. But how long will they be around?" Do you see this as a concern (esp. after the LWN announcement) and do you have any comments regarding this. Are there any good approaches you suggest (like augmenting free usership with voluntary subscriptions, etc) for such free sites in general?

Paul:
We have been very lucky, since our beginning, to have generous and understanding support from The University of North Carolina and from sponsors large and small including Sun, IBM, Red Hat, VA Linux^h^h^h^h^hSoftware, Mandrake, Cisco and others.

We also do get some research contracts and grants, but most importantly for us in the past two years has been a large gift from the founders of Red Hat and the Center for the Public Domain.

We have some top secret international funding sources as well. At the moment, we actually have a small endowment that if spent wisely should last several years. It is my hope that we will never have to charge the patrons of our digital archives.

BUT this brings me to my favorite question, which only got a rating of 4:

Donations?
by Anonymous Coward
Where do I send the cheque?

Paul:
Send your or your organization's tax-deductible contributions to:

Ibiblio.org
Campus Box 3456
University of North Carolina
Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3456

Moving on to:

Typical Questions
by suwain_2
I've downloaded my share of things, and find that the 3 Mbps cap on my cable modem is almost always my bottleneck. So my question is fairly simple (albeit broad) -- can you describe your setup a bit, in terms of bandwidth (both what you have for an Internet connection, and how much traffic you actually use), servers, storage (I'd venture to guess it's to the tune of several terabytes?), etc.

Paul:
We're on UNC's network. Our connections to the commodity and Internet2 networks are served by UNC's OC-48 network connection. We maintain a constant throughput of network traffic outbound in the 160-180Mbits/sec range.

Our current main servers were donated by IBM and serve content from a central fileserver with 2TB of disk attached. In our racks, we have approximately 5TB of space (with system disks, Sourceforge and an Internet2/Distributed Storage Initiative node). We do some load balancing between streaming services, web services, and large downloads like distros. On a typical day, we move over 1.5 terabytes of data off our servers. (Thanks to Fred Stutzman for much of this info.)

Backups
by Chris Pimlott
What's your backup strategy? I imagine it's hard to deal with both so much data as well as being under constant bombardment from clients around the world. How often is data archived? Have you had any major data loss incidents and, if so, how well were you able to deal with them?

Paul:
Like everyone else we rely on Archive.org, but seriously... (Fred answers this since he did the restore).

We run managed backups on UNC's enterprise storage facilities. We run them every night and have incremental backups for three months. UNC uses StorageTek machines and Tivoli Distributed Storage Manager for enterprise backups. We have had major data loss incidents, in which a raid card failed and lost the array's configuration. One of the disks in the array died simultaneously, we were unable to re-import the configuration to the new card, so we had to restore from backup, which took a number of days.

I, Paul, can only say that in the past things were much worse and we did have one famous meltdown in 1995 that was not pretty. Since then the UNC enterprise backup has been our friend - and for the most part disks and RAID arrays have been increasingly more reliable.

What's your biggest area?
by Otter
I know ibiblio (I still think of it as SunSite) as a) a repository of Unix software, especially useful for pre-Freshmeat apps and b) a mirror provider. "Free online publisher" wouldn't have made the list, but looking at your main page I see all sorts of things I didn't realize you hosted. Which ones get the most traffic?

Paul:
For sheer bytes, ISOs rule. But then it doesn't take too many downloads to get a lot of bytes for an ISO. Source-based distros like Gentoo have seen a lot of activity lately.

One of our most visited sites is also one of our oldest, Nicholas Pioch's WebMuseum (originally WebLouvre). An amusing reason may be that, as Nicolas writes:

"I've just found out that Microsoft Encarta Deluxe 2001 (the copy I just happened to find out and install) has direct links ('Web Links') from each artist's article to the webmuseum (on metalab.unc.edu at the time) and that's actually the only weblink provided in that 2001 edition."

Among other favorites are:

• The Linux Documention Project, which began on sunsite
• Documenting the American South
• Hong Kong Picture Archive
• Henriette's Herbal Homepage
• Hyperwar A hypertext history of the Second World War

What about content producers?
by Fluid Donkey
In general how supportive have you found the producers of such content to be of your services? Do many if any really believe that something like this will cause them to starve to death?

Paul:
First, they are all with us voluntarily and can leave any time, taking their stuff with them. That alone pretty much says that they believe in what we are helping them do.

I should say also that not all material is copyleft. But all of it is free to view, listen to and to reference. We are working with Creative Commons, which we also host, to develop a small but viable set of licenses for folks including our contributors who want to share their work on various terms (attribution, home or personal use, educational use, etc).

One important contributor, Roger McGuinn, has been making one folk song a month available for download since November 1995 on his Folk Den. He also sells CDs and performs concerts. He seems to be doing pretty well. Many contributors are scholars or students who understand the importance of sharing information.

Dave Farley, who does the wonderful Dr Fun, has a book contract with Plan 9, and we're looking forward to seeing what we've seen in electrons in print.

Relative importance of different material?
by kafka93
What is the center's view on the publishing of material that might be considered "offensive" or "dangerous", and does the center make subjective judgements upon the importance of one piece of intellectual property over another on the basis of 'artistic worth', 'decency', etc.? With only limited resources available to promote the archiving of data, is there the risk that important fringe documents may be left by the wayside, or ignored due to political/social concerns?

Paul:
Like non-digital archives and libraries, we have a Collection Policy. You'll note that we do not explicitly ban materials for content nor do we plan to. We do not maintain materials that are illegal, slanderous, libelous, or otherwise prohibited by law. Ultimately the contributors are responsible for their content and we do not review the content once a project is taken on.

Most rejections of content come about because the content is too commercial, just personal, or relies on advertising.

Metadata and easy searching
by RyanMuldoon
iBiblio stands out as an excellent repository for a wide range of culturally valuable resources. As it and other sites grow in size, the importance of good searching and indexing becomes extremely relevant. Have you given any thought to how you might want to cope with this? Specifically, are there any metadata schemata that you are considering using? I would love to see iBiblio be used more like a content feed to research/cross-referencing applications.

Paul:
Interesting that you asked about this as this is an area that we've been working in for the past couple of years. Actually we go way back to pre-Web metadata to the Internet Anonymous FTP Archive (IAFA) files which were the model for the Linux Software Map (LSM). Thanks to Jonathan Magid for this innovation and for suggesting that we host Linux in the very beginning.

When we designed our contributor-maintained Collection Index, we designed it to create and display metadata that could be shared via the Open Archives Initiative (OAI). Please note that this metadata is at the collection level - not at the item level. Item level metadata is for future work. Also since you asked: Miles Efron and I will be presenting a paper at the Digital Resource in the Humanities conference in September on the Problem of Access in Contributor-Run Digital Libraries. Serena Fenton is co-author to this paper.

On the Linux Documentation Project front, we worked with several others to create the Open Source Metadata Framework (OMF).

The OMF aims to collect data about Open Source documentation, or metadata, that will be used to describe the documentation. The idea is that the OMF will act as a sophisticated card catalog type of system for the numerous Open Source documentation projects that exist. The OMF offers a number of advantages over standard card catalog type systems, however. Chief among these is the fact that the OMF has been designed from the ground up to be completely open, standards based, and sharable. We will accomplish this by using pre-defined standards (XML and the Dublin Core description for metadata) and allowing all metadata generated to be accessed by anyone that wants it. Because the metadata itself is to be stored in XML files, anyone should be able to use it.

OMF support is included in the Scrollkeeper project. Note that none of these metadata designs are overly complex. That is by design. The idea is to keep the metadata simple enough to be understood by the creator of the digital item or collection that it describes. If I could make one strong point about metadata design it is that simplicity is the key - and the hardest thing to pull off.

Trust metric and online publishing
by Creosote
I heard you talk at the Southern Presses conference last year about the use of trust metrics (like Slashdot's karma and Advogato's peer certification) as a possible alternative to the "top-down" means of filtering that scholarly and commercial publishers use, namely formal peer review and mass marketing, respectively. Are you more or less optimistic about the long-term viability of this model then you were then? (Especially in light of the powerful efforts to keep control of the gates we're seeing these days from Hollywood, the recording industry, and their political allies...)

Paul:
Beginning here I am speaking personally and not on behalf of ibiblio.org or any of its sponsors or supporters including but not limited to the University of North Carolina.

The Blog is one example of creator-empowerment that has gotten more attention since that talk and I think there will be plenty more examples to come. I still believe that people in constant communications will result in "Smart Mobs" (thank you, Howard Rheingold, for naming and noticing and writing on this). This is not just about music or movies or about one country or even one age group. While I don't think that we will completely replace our reliance, however reluctant, on Mickey Mouse, I do think that we are entering a time in which there are new opportunities for us to share information and to work together. The slew of misguided efforts by media and information cartels, especially the RIAA, which demonize their customers and clients, will make things tough but they also are signs that the old solutions are not working well and that newer, and I hope more inclusive and more open, solutions are on the horizon.

GeekPAC and "When Congress Attacks"
by lunenburg
I noticed that you are one of the founders of the American Open Technology Consortium and/or GeekPAC - the lobbying group that got a bit of fanfare a few months back when it was formed, but has been pretty quiet since then. With Congress launching seemingly daily attacks on our technological freedom in order to support the revenue models of a few huge businesses, the need for a voice in Washington is growing urgent. Is the AOTC/GeekPAC working to get our voices heard? Is there a need for an umbrella group to tie together various groups like GeekPAC, Public Knowledge, Digital Consumer, etc.?

Paul:
Yes, (again speaking only as Paul) I am an officer of the American Open Technology Consortium (AOTC). But for various complex reasons, I am not a member of GeekPAC. As you might have guessed, getting these projects going has been no simple matter. Jeff Gerhard has been doing a wonderful job of making sure the legal and procedural steps are properly taken. So far, what you are seeing is some very motivated but very busy people learning how to work together to get the projects off the ground. The good news is that folks like Jeff, Doc Searles and others on the boards are smart, dedicated and experienced people who can and will play well with others (including Public Knowledge and Digital Consumer and EFF). We hope to represent slightly different voices than those already represented. If you are reading this, you know who you are and we need your help.

About the umbrella group, I think that a summit conference (or at least a summit listserv) would make more sense. This kind of looser structure, often called an Action Committee or Organizing Committee, has been very successfully used by both ends of the political spectrum in the past half century.

Two words...
by Anonymous Coward
DRM? Palladium?

What's your take on these two technologies?

Are you afraid they'll ultimately destroy what you have been working for, for the past 10 years? If not, why?

Optional question: What about the copyright extension we have seen?

Another optional question: Linux... or BSD? =)

Paul:
Not Linux vs BSD, but Digital Rights Management and Microsoft's Palladium. DMR is the general term for the groups of solutions to the need for creators to be compensated for their work while allowing their audience to easily access those works. Or at least that would be ideally what DRM should do.

When DRM goes wrong, it tramples on the rights of the citizens to have access to information that they have legally purchased, want to criticize, parody, legally reuse or share.

When DRM goes wrong, it creates barriers to innovation and creativity. It biases access and reproduction of information to only certain technologies.

When DRM goes wrong, it creates and perpetrates closed markets and monopolies.

When DRM goes wrong, everyone suffers. It takes us back to the Stationers Guild, a response to the printing press. "The Stationers Guild obtained monopoly rights in the printing and probably distribution of all books, a monopoly codified by the Tudors in a licensing system aimed at censoring religious dissent" which lasted until the early 1700s.

When DRM goes wrong, it is called Palladium.

The good news is that Palladium is vaporware - so far.

What is your greatest success/failure?
by burgburgburg
Simple enough question in two parts:

Looking back on 10 years of doing this, what would classify as your greatest success, and your greatest failure?

Paul:
The simplest question is the hardest, of course. Luckily, you've narrowed the success/failure question to deal only with sunsite/metalab/ibiblio and not the past 10 years of my life.

One mark of great success is that we are still here hosting some of the original collections of information to be shared on the Net including the first 7/24 radio simulcast on the net, WXYC. We've been a part of many innovations and I, personally, have been able to work with some brilliant folks who often surprised themselves with what they had accomplished. We're also funded and we enjoy support from some wonderful and diverse faculties at UNC.

There is no question in my mind that the most significant decision that I made in those ten years was to listen to Jonathan Magid when he suggested that we become the US site for an operating system that didn't even work yet - Linux. If you are reading this far and are happy, you owe Jonathan. If you are unhappy, blame me.

In research, there is no such thing as failure. As I was explaining to our Interim Vice Chancellor, we are supposed to make mistakes. As Ms. Frizzle says, "Take chances, get messy and EXPLORE! Wahoo!".

Still, I do wish that we had found a way to use WAIS or another distributed search engine in a way that is still useful. There still seems to me to be something unfinished in that area. Killing gopher. That was more fun than Wack-a-mole.

And one final answer:

Slack.
by dsb3
You host a slew of subgenius content, so it must be asked ... do you have slack?

Paul:
While I do not profess to completely comprehend slack, I have been assured by members of the Church that I do have it.

Mubarmij asks: "A lot of people, including the ex-Vice President, think that Terrain Visualization and the Georeferencing of all kinds of data is the next big thing. Given the broad applications (sims, education, games, GIS, virtual tourism, etc) that can be derived from such technology, I would tend to agree that if this is not actually the NBG(tm), then at least it is very close. Like the internet, this technology has taken its time in obtaining it's current level of sophistication. However, there is huge potential here that has yet to be tapped, despite the fact that it currently fills a huge niche market. I had once read that NASA spends more than 70% of its resources on space imaging and visualization-related activities (unfortunately I link to the article that mentions this, but one should remember that the major goal of all space satellites is to take multihued pictures of Earth and other planets, and you will see that this is not an exaggeration), which is quite a lot of money." Open Source has provided several frameworks for GIS from which a "killer app" may spring from. Read more on the various Open Source projects on GIS, and feel free to share your thoughts on where this technology may head in the future.

"There are quite a few web sites, commercial and non commercial that tend to this technology. However, it seems like the early nineties, where people are just starting to get aware of the internet, but are still awaiting for the killer app to make this thing fly.

There are two open source projects I am aware of that deal with this area. The first, VTP, is a real open source project attempting to create a real terrain visualizer. The second, OpenSkies, is not really open source yet (despite its claim)... but it is interesting in that it allows networked people to fly or drive through virtual worlds that are reality based.

Here are a few other questions:

• Do you think that this technology will remain a niche market (albeit a big one)? If so, is this likely to occur?
• Are you aware of any open source projects other than the two mentioned above that deal with this area?"

Interested readers will also want to check out Drawmap and the longstanding Open Source GIS, GRASS.

Slashback, the semi-regular attempt to bring some new light to old stories, continues briskly tonight with just a few items: clarification about words from RMS, early vacation plan reminders for anyone up for a little Wanderungenmitpenguinenborkborkbierdrinkinundsoweiter, and more on Deja. Deja.

Which way to America, please? After word of Microsoft Honcho Jim Allchin's (somewhat bizarre) words on Free software (later "clarified" by MS), we linked to a (preliminary) response to Allchin from RMS. Now RMS has himself issued a final version of his statement, here for your edification, passed on by Dan Gillmore, technology columnist for the San Jose Mercury News.

Very eloquent.Thanks, Dan.

And if you're not yet out of sparklers, pie, bunting or RAM, matthew writes: "Bradley M. Kuhn, the new Vice President of the Free Software Foundation, has an essay published here. It's a more personal answer to Microsoft's attack against the GPL."

Start flossing that stein and pressing those Lederhosen! Jetzt! Alex writes: "I'm proud to announce that we finally got it managed. The date is fixed. The Linuxbierwanderung 2001 (1) will take place from 25th of August to the 1st of September in Bouillon (2), Belgium. As the hall we get the upper floor of the Archeoscope (3), a museum direct in town. It's warm, dry, nice, with enough electricity and has up to some 20 ISDN-lines. To get things easier for you we added a lot of phonenumbers and addresses of camping sites and hotels on the webpage. See (4) to look for your favorite place. So, now it's time to register ! To register yourself, your family, your pets, your computers and your lectures see (5). Thank you for your attention, Cheers, Alex.

(1) The Linuxbierwanderung 2001
(2) Bouillon on the Net
(3) The Archeoscope
(4) Hotel Overview
(5) Join the Linuxbierwanderung and register !"

I wish this didn't sound suspiciously close to LinuxWorld (San Francisco) 2001, because a lot of people would probably like to go to both. Lucky Europeans;) How about one of these in the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee? I'll bring the fireworks, you bring the moonshine ...

I would have stopped at Pizza-Nizza afterward ... Google bought Deja. RallyDriver sends a report from the coolest six-letter city on I-35 between Dallas and San Antonio (gulp -- covered my bases?).

"On Thursday at the Omni hotel here in Austin ^[?] , we had the now familiar wake: the auction. While the public was overbidding on everything from furniture to laptops, dual P3 VA FullOn servers were going for as low as $275 a piece.

The show, however, goes on. Rumors of unemployment levels in Austin are greatly exaggerated, and it seems like most of the Deja people are already moving on to new opportunities. If you work in high tech, Austin is a small town of 1 million people.

Most of the server equipment (they still had the previous generation of equipment and the one before that) was picked up by junk dealers and resellers according to its vintage, but ironically a number of the rackmount boxes will be going right back where they came from -- Exodus Austin, where Deja was hosting, is also our co-lo provider."

cd-w writes "According to this link, Saddam Hussein is stockpiling PS2 consoles with the view to using them in weapon technology." Honestly I don't know if this is a joke or not, but its really funny no matter how many ways I look at it. If I was Sony, I would have leaked this story just for the advertising.

The Dakota Kidd writes "Just saw this on Linuxgames today - Creative has released the drivers for their dxr2 DVD decoder card. It isn't listed yet on Creative's Open Source page but it is in the CVS repository. " Kinda lost in the excitment of their open sourcing the drivers for SB Live!, but yet more good news on the hardware support front.Credit where it's due: Andrew deQuincey and Lucien Murray-Pitts actually wrote the code - it's nice to be able to get it now.

cd-w writes "Alan Cox has written a column for osOpinion regarding the risks of using closed source computing. A sample quote: 'No company now would commit to a closed hardware strategy. It would cost them more than using commodity components. Just as importantly, it would commit them to a single source for support and parts. Why then do they commit to a single software supplier? A closed source strategy exposes the company to serious business risk. As many telephony companies have discovered, your OS supplier might suddenly decide to be your competitor.' " As always, Alan writes well and explains why the commodization of information has critical bearing on the success of the open source movement.

RallyDriver asks: "Does anyone else remember the fiendish British puzzle game 'Xor' (pronounced 'Zor')? The game pieces were (among other things) theatrical masks, chickens, fish, dollies and two types of bombs. Was developed on the BBC micro and later ported to the ZX Spectrum and possibly Amiga, Atari ST and MS-DOS. It was produced by a little distributor above a pub in Gwdywr St, Cambridge, England, whose name escapes me." Darn. And they say that the US has all of the interesting games!

"It would be a great shame if this unqiue gem (think - Lemmings) were to be lost forever, so I was thinking of doing a C / X11 rewrite of the game engine (very easy and very portable) but I thought I'd ask to see if it had already been done. Also, does anyone know what the legal situation would be regarding distibution of the original game levels (concept, not exact binary data) with it? A RAM snapshot of the Spectrum version appeared a few years ago on one of these emulator download sites, but it was in Slovenia..."

np-complete writes "The UK Guardian has an article here giving details of the governments proposed new crypto laws. The draft bill includes provision for decryption notices to be served on companies, and also allows for a prison sentence of up to two years for tipping people off that their comunications are being monitored. (Site may need free registration if their guest login doesn't work). " Gosh, perhaps the Brits and the FBI have been talking. *sigh*

slim writes "Someone's written an OpenGL version of Mame for Linux/MESA. See Details and screenshots . Fun things that can be done include mapping Pac Man onto a rotating plane, mapping the game onto a 3D cabinet, bilinear filtering the game, and of course vectors rendered and antialiased in hardware. " Very cool, and very demented.