Slashdot Mirror

Max_W writes: Every year we hear about people dying in plane crashes. This does not have to continue as there is a new revolutionary pod plane design [in the works via the Clip-Air project]. A passenger pod is not heavy because it does not contain fuel, engines, avionics, etc., so in case of an accident it can be ejected and land on parachutes. The obstacle to this new invention is that the whole obsolete airport and airline infrastructure must be rebuilt. So what? Shall we continue to get killed because it is easier to produce aircraft with a design from 1950s? The Clip-Air project is created by Switzerland's Federal Polytechnic Institute and consists of the flying component, which includes airframe, cockpit and engines, and the capsules, which are a number of detachable pods that can act as cabin or cargo hold, depending on the chosen configuration. What's particularly noteworthy about them is that they can allow passengers to board capsules well before a flight, and at a location besides an airport, such as a local bus station. As with any concept, many years of research and tests will be needed to validate the concept and turn it into a reality. Claudio Leonardi, manager of the Clip-Air project, and his team are preparing to build a small-scale Clip-Air prototype. They have already initiated some contacts with the aerospace industry.

Zothecula writes: Dennis Aabo Sorensen may be missing a hand, but he nonetheless recently felt rough and smooth textures using a fingertip on that arm. The fingertip was electronic, and was surgically hard-wired to nerves in his upper arm. He is reportedly the first person in the world to recognize texture using a bionic fingertip connected to electrodes that were surgically implanted above his stump. The device was created by scientists from the Ecole polytechnique federale de Lausanne in Switzerland, and Italy's Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna research institute. While it was wired to Sorensen, a machine moved it across rough and smooth plastic surfaces. Sensors in the fingertip generated electrical signals as they deformed in response to the topography of those surfaces, and transmitted those signals to the nerves in a series of electrical spikes -- this was reportedly an imitation of the "language of the nervous system." He was able to differentiate between the two surfaces with an accuracy of 96 percent.

Zothecula writes: Working with Geneva's University of Applied Science and Signal Processing 5 Laboratory, Swiss research institute EPFL has announced details of a plan to capture its tiny SwissCube satellites by using a new spacecraft outfitted with a conical net. Called "CleanSpace One" the team hopes that their "Pac-Man" solution will capture the old satellite. Gizmag reports: "...SwissCube's spinning action will make it more difficult to image, as its surfaces will alternately be brilliantly sunlit or hidden in shadow. That's why CleanSpace One's computer vision system will be running algorithms that account for variables such as the angle of the sun, the dimensions of the target, the speed at which that target is moving, and the rate at which CleanSpace One itself is spinning. High dynamic range cameras will also allow it to simultaneously expose for both bright and dark surfaces."

mpicpp sends word that scientists have succeeded in capturing the first-ever snapshot of the dual behavior of light. "It's one of those enduring Zen koans of science that we've all grown up with: Light behaves as both a particle and a wave—at the same time. Einstein taught us that, so we're all generally on board, but to actually understand what it means would require several Ph.D.s and a thorough understanding of quantum physics. What's more, scientists have never been able to devise an experiment that documents light behaving as both a wave and a particle simultaneously. Until now. That's the contention of a team of Swiss and American researchers, who say they've succeeded in capturing the first-ever snapshot of light's dual behavior. Using an advanced electron microscope – one of only two on the planet – at the EPFL labs in Switzerland, the team has generated a kind of quantum photograph of light behaving as both a particle and a wave. The experiment involves firing laser light at a microscopic metallic nanowire, causing light to travel — as a wave — back and forth along the wire. When waves traveling in opposite directions meet, they form a "standing wave" that emits light itself — as particles. By shooting a stream of electrons close to the nanowire, the researchers were able to capture an image that simultaneously demonstrates both the wave-nature and particle-nature of light. 'This experiment demonstrates that, for the first time ever, we can film quantum mechanics — and its paradoxical nature — directly,' says lead researcher Fabrizio Carbone of EPFL, on the lab's project page. The study is to be officially published this week in the journal Nature Communications."

sarahnaomi writes Unveiled at this week's AAAS meeting/conference in San Jose, the telescopic contact lenses are the creation of optics engineers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, with a bit of help from designs developed at DARPA. The technology involves a bit more than just the contacts. The system is based on the interaction between a pair of normal-looking eyeglasses and the lenses, which are embedded with what are really just a pair of supertiny aluminum telescopes. The contacts are still only about 1.5 millimeters thick, and feature 1 mm-wide channels or pores that allow the required breathability-maintaining airflow. This last part proved to be one of the biggest challenges, requiring years of experimentation.

rfernand79 writes Infoworld has an interview with Martin Odersky, designer of Scala, in which they discuss the future of this popular language. Three versions are discussed as being part of the Scala roadmap: The first one (2.12) focuses on better integration with Java 8, and making use of the latest improvements in the JVM. The second one (Aida) focuses on cleaning up the Scala libraries. But the third one (Don Giovani) is about a fundamental rethink of Scala, with a strong focus on simplicity.

Sabine Hauert writes "GimBall is a new flying robot that can collide with objects seamlessly. Generally, flying robots are programmed to avoid obstacles, which is far from easy in cluttered environments. Instead, researchers from the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems at EPFL believe that flying robots should be able to physically interact with their surroundings. Take insects: they often collide with obstacles and continue flying afterwards. Their robot uses a passively rotating spherical cage to remain stable even after taking hits from all sides. This approach enables GimBall to fly in the most difficult places without complex sensors."

DeviceGuru writes "Researchers at the Biorob lab at Switzerland's École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), have announced a cat-like robot that is claimed to be the fastest quadruped robot under 30 kilograms. The Cheetah-cub Robot, which runs real-time Xenomai Linux on an x86-based RoBoard robot control board, mimics the biomechanics of a cat to increase the speed and stability of it quadroped legs, helping it achieve speeds of 1.42m/s. The goal of the still-early-stage project is to encourage research in biomechanics, with an aim toward building faster robots for search and rescue, or ground exploration. More info is available on EPFL's Cheetah page."

cylonlover writes "Air travel today is a nightmare of long drives to crowded airports, long queues that move at a snail's pace, and long, boring waits in identical lobbies drinking overpriced coffee. It would be so much easier and less frustrating if catching a plane were like catching a train. If Switzerland's École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) has its way, its Clip-Air project will one day produce modular aircraft that will allow you to board a plane at a London railway station and disembark in the middle of Rome without ever setting foot in an air terminal."

garyebickford writes "As The ETH Lausanne says: 'The proliferation of debris orbiting the Earth – primarily jettisoned rocket and satellite components – is an increasingly pressing problem for spacecraft, and it can generate huge costs. To combat this scourge, the Swiss Space Center at EPFL is announcing today the launch of CleanSpace One, a project to develop and build the first installment of a family of satellites specially designed to clean up space debris.' This looks like a reasonable method, although I think that at some future point it might be useful to just put at least the smaller stuff in a higher 'parking orbit' for later destruction or recycling. This way you wouldn't lose one vacuum cleaner for each satellite retrieved. And much later down the road, it might be useful to collect bigger units — expended boosters, for example — as raw materials and/or containers. The cost of getting the mass into space has already been spent. I optimistically foresee a future where much of the stuff sent into orbital space has a recycling function built into the design."

An anonymous reader writes "A Swiss team may have found an alternative to silicon microchips which could result in smaller, more flexible and less energy hungry processors. The Swiss team's chip does not use silicon, but molybdenite (MoS2) a dark-colored, naturally occurring mineral that is able to be used in much thinner layers (paywall)."

First time accepted submitter mcswell writes "Daniël Noordermeer and Denis Duboule, two researchers at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne and the University of Geneva claim to have discovered how vertebrae get built in sequence in embryos (and by extension, how ribs, arms and so forth wind up in the right place). The story is that the DNA strands contain a linear series of HOX genes, and that the strands slowly unwind over a period of two days, successively exposing each HOX gene, thereby allowing it to be transcribed to form the segments of the vertebra. Snakes, it seems, have a defect that causes the system not to shut down; eventually it 'runs out of steam.' The same process is said to apply in many invertebrates, including worms (presumably segmented worms) and insects."

sciencehabit writes with a writeup of a French research paper in Science. From the article: "They're not quite psychic yet, but machines are getting better at reading your mind. Researchers have invented a new, noninvasive method for recording patterns of brain activity and using them to steer a robot. Scientists hope the technology will give 'locked in' patients ... the ability to interact with others and even give the illusion of being physically present ... with friends and family." The really interesting thing here is that people who had not used their limbs in years were able to learn how to control the robot (as well as the control group did) after being trained only an hour a week for six weeks.

deian writes "Cryptography researchers Joppe W. Bos, Marcelo E. Kaihara, Thorsten Kleinjung, Arjen K. Lenstra and Peter L. Montgomery have just announced that they have set a new record for the elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem (ECDLP) by solving it over a 112-bit finite field. The previous record was for a 109-bit prime field and dates back from October 2002. Their calculation was done on the EPFL cluster of more than 200 PS3s (same one used to create the Rogue CA certificates and demonstrate a reproducible attack on MD5 algorithms). On the PS3, the effort is equivalent to about 14 full 56-bit DES key searches!"

deian writes "Cryptography researchers Joppe W. Bos, Marcelo E. Kaihara, Thorsten Kleinjung, Arjen K. Lenstra and Peter L. Montgomery have just announced that they have set a new record for the elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem (ECDLP) by solving it over a 112-bit finite field. The previous record was for a 109-bit prime field and dates back from October 2002. Their calculation was done on the EPFL cluster of more than 200 PS3s (same one used to create the Rogue CA certificates and demonstrate a reproducible attack on MD5 algorithms). On the PS3, the effort is equivalent to about 14 full 56-bit DES key searches!"

Al writes "European researchers have taken a step towards replicating the functioning of the brain in silicon, creating new custom chip with the equivalent of 200,000 neurons linked up by 50 million synaptic connections. The aim of the Fast Analog Computing with Emergent Transient States (FACETS) project is to better understand how to construct massively parallel computer systems modeled on a biological brain. Unlike IBM's Blue Brain project, which involves modeling a brain in software, this approach makes it much easier to create a truly parallel computing system. The set-up also features a distributed algorithm that introduces an element of plasticity, allowing the circuit to learn and adapt. The researchers plan to connect thousands of chips to create a circuit with a billion neurons and 10^13 synapses (about a tenth of the complexity of the human brain)."

stefanparvu14 writes "Physicists in Switzerland and California have developed a new type of camera capable of imaging quantum correlations between pairs of photons. The details are presented in the current issue of the open-access publication New Journal of Physics. Unlike a conventional camera with a CCD imager, this camera is composed of Single Photon Avalanche Diode (SPAD) pixels implemented on a high-performance CMOS chip. One of the authors has provided more background for the non-physicist. Apparently, it could be used to verify the existence of Bose-Einstein condensates that are now starting to be produced in new ways."

Flavien writes "A team from the Security and Cryptography Laboratory (LASEC) in Lausanne, Switzerland, found 4 different ways to fully or partially recover keystrokes from wired keyboards at a distance up to 20 meters, even through walls. They tested 11 different wired keyboard models bought between 2001 and 2008 (PS/2, USB and laptop). They are all vulnerable to at least one of the 4 attacks. While more information on these attacks will be published soon, a short description with 2 videos is available."

Flavien writes "A team from the Security and Cryptography Laboratory (LASEC) in Lausanne, Switzerland, found 4 different ways to fully or partially recover keystrokes from wired keyboards at a distance up to 20 meters, even through walls. They tested 11 different wired keyboard models bought between 2001 and 2008 (PS/2, USB and laptop). They are all vulnerable to at least one of the 4 attacks. While more information on these attacks will be published soon, a short description with 2 videos is available."

slick_shoes passes on an article in the Guardian about the Blue Brain project in Switzerland that has developed a computer simulation of the neocortical column — the basic building block of the neocortex, the higher functioning part of our brains — of a two-week-old rat. (Here is the project site.) The model, running on an IBM Blue Gene/L supercomputer, simulates 10,000 neurons and all their interconnections. It behaves exactly like its biological counterpart. Thousands of such NCCs make up a rat's neocortex, and millions a human's. "Project director Henry Markram believes that with the state of technology today, it is possible to build an entire rat's neocortex. From there, it's cats, then monkeys and finally, a human brain."

space_in_your_face writes "An international team has broken a long-standing record in an impressive feat of calculation. On March 6, computer clusters from three institutions (the EPFL, the University of Bonn, and NTT in Japan) reached the end of eleven months of strenuous calculation, churning out the prime factors of a well-known, hard-to-factor number — 2^1039 - 1 — that is 307 digits long." The lead researcher believes "the writing is on the wall" for 1024-bit encryption. "Last time, it took nine years for us to generalize from a special to a non-special hard-to factor number (155 digits). I won't make predictions, but let's just say it might be a good idea to stay tuned."

pershino writes "Augmented reality is gaining real world application to take us backwards. The BBC has a story about a European Union-funded project providing tourists with computer-augmented versions of archaeological attractions like Pompeii."

Bueller_007 writes "CNET is carrying an article about a new (albeit simplistic) method used to hack alphanumeric Windows passwords in a matter of seconds, rather than minutes. To blame is a 'weakness in Microsoft's method of encoding passwords.' According to the authors, the same method, when used on Mac OS X, Unix and Linux boxes, however, could require either 4,096 times more memory or 4,096 times longer." A few more details: Mister.de writes "As an example we have implemented an attack on MS-Windows password hashes. Using 1.4GB of data (two CD-ROMs) we can crack 99.9% of all alphanumerical passwords hashes (2 37 ) in 13.6 seconds whereas it takes 101 seconds with the current approach using distinguished points. We show that the gain could be even much higher depending on the parameters used. This was found at the Cryptography and Security Laboratory of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL)."

Bueller_007 writes "CNET is carrying an article about a new (albeit simplistic) method used to hack alphanumeric Windows passwords in a matter of seconds, rather than minutes. To blame is a 'weakness in Microsoft's method of encoding passwords.' According to the authors, the same method, when used on Mac OS X, Unix and Linux boxes, however, could require either 4,096 times more memory or 4,096 times longer." A few more details: Mister.de writes "As an example we have implemented an attack on MS-Windows password hashes. Using 1.4GB of data (two CD-ROMs) we can crack 99.9% of all alphanumerical passwords hashes (2 37 ) in 13.6 seconds whereas it takes 101 seconds with the current approach using distinguished points. We show that the gain could be even much higher depending on the parameters used. This was found at the Cryptography and Security Laboratory of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL)."

Bueller_007 writes "CNET is carrying an article about a new (albeit simplistic) method used to hack alphanumeric Windows passwords in a matter of seconds, rather than minutes. To blame is a 'weakness in Microsoft's method of encoding passwords.' According to the authors, the same method, when used on Mac OS X, Unix and Linux boxes, however, could require either 4,096 times more memory or 4,096 times longer." A few more details: Mister.de writes "As an example we have implemented an attack on MS-Windows password hashes. Using 1.4GB of data (two CD-ROMs) we can crack 99.9% of all alphanumerical passwords hashes (2 37 ) in 13.6 seconds whereas it takes 101 seconds with the current approach using distinguished points. We show that the gain could be even much higher depending on the parameters used. This was found at the Cryptography and Security Laboratory of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL)."

Slashback tonight has followups and clarifications on glitch-delayed Pentium IV shipments, Free software for chainware operating systems, the real distinction between 3G and 2.5G phone systems and more -- read on below for the details.

More RAM than I can afford. RyanT5000 writes "The article referenced in "Getting Rid of the Disks" incorrectly states that the maximum RAM for a 32-bit Intel compatible system is 4 GB. This was true up to and including the original Pentium processor, and it makes a lot of sense (after all, 2^32 = 4 294 967 296). However, with the Pentium Pro, Intel added 4 pins to the address bus, expanding the maximum physical address space to 64 GB (using paging, since it still uses 32 bit addressing). I would assume AMD has a similar feature. If you're on Windows, you'll need a server version to get above 4 GB, but most major Linux/BSD/etc. OSes support it. This would probably be cheaper (and definitely faster) than SCSI SSDs. If you need more than 64 GB of solid state storage, you probably shouldn't be running on an Intel."

"Free" always makes people suspicious. imevil writes "A while ago slashdotters asked some questions to the GNUWin II team. Well, here are the answers. In the meantime, more people joined the team, and more languages were added (this one looks pretty cool)." There's also a short article about GNUWin running at NewsForge.

On a related note, cos(0) writes "According to this(1), this(2), and other stories, many people are interested in running open source, high-quality software on MS Windows. The author of this site provides an up-to-date CD image of the latest versions of numerous high-quality OSS applications (complete list on the site), updated monthly, downloadable via BitTorrent. (The same site also offers a web-based Code Beautifier.)"

Cool distribution method! (And if you're on dialup, $5 seems like a great bargain -- Are you listening, Cheapbytes?)

Toys are so tempting to the wallet ... OrenWolf writes "Ars Technica Has a review up of BroadQ's QCast Tuner software. Unlike the earlier /. review, this article goes into great detail about the technical capabilities of the software. A must read for PS2 owners looking for a PC-PVR-esque solution."

Yeah, but does this review include any original software? ;) And david_adams writes "Slashdot linked to an article I wrote last month about my experience with a CDMA2000 1x wireless network from SprintPCS. It sparked quite a bit of controversy, but not for the reasons I expected. Because I called Sprint's service 3G in the title, but admitted it was 2.5G in the first paragraph, I heard from people on both sides, chiding me on the one hand for calling it 3G, and on the other for calling it 2.5G. I decided to research and write a new article to get to the bottom of it. What is truly 3G? Where is the line between 2.5G and 3G?"

The time to wait is now! ThunderDawg writes "Intel resumed Canterwood Pentium 4 3 GHz 800FSB shipments yesterday. TAFKAEFKAF (The Anomaly Formerly Known as Errata Formerly Known as Flaw) was corrected with a software patch.

Intel is again shipping its new 3GHz Pentium 4 processor, a week after it halted shipments due to the discovery of an "anomaly," an Intel spokesman said Monday. PC makers that use the chip in their systems have been supplied with a software update to fix the issue, George Alfs, an Intel spokesman said. Vendors including Hewlett-Packard, Dell Computer, and Gateway introduced desktop systems based on the chip when it was released on Monday last week. The issue with the 3GHz Pentium 4 with support for an 800MHz system bus occurs only in rare circumstances and users are unlikely to be affected, according to Alfs."

I'd take google and a strong AI any day. hondo77 writes "A bit of a followup to this article from back in February, LexisNexis has been named the publisher of official reports by the California Supreme Court, according to this press release. "The public will have free access to the official text of the opinions at a Web site hosted by LexisNexis linked to the court's Web site." IANAL but it doesn't sound ominous to me."

Slashback tonight has followups and clarifications on glitch-delayed Pentium IV shipments, Free software for chainware operating systems, the real distinction between 3G and 2.5G phone systems and more -- read on below for the details.

More RAM than I can afford. RyanT5000 writes "The article referenced in "Getting Rid of the Disks" incorrectly states that the maximum RAM for a 32-bit Intel compatible system is 4 GB. This was true up to and including the original Pentium processor, and it makes a lot of sense (after all, 2^32 = 4 294 967 296). However, with the Pentium Pro, Intel added 4 pins to the address bus, expanding the maximum physical address space to 64 GB (using paging, since it still uses 32 bit addressing). I would assume AMD has a similar feature. If you're on Windows, you'll need a server version to get above 4 GB, but most major Linux/BSD/etc. OSes support it. This would probably be cheaper (and definitely faster) than SCSI SSDs. If you need more than 64 GB of solid state storage, you probably shouldn't be running on an Intel."

"Free" always makes people suspicious. imevil writes "A while ago slashdotters asked some questions to the GNUWin II team. Well, here are the answers. In the meantime, more people joined the team, and more languages were added (this one looks pretty cool)." There's also a short article about GNUWin running at NewsForge.

On a related note, cos(0) writes "According to this(1), this(2), and other stories, many people are interested in running open source, high-quality software on MS Windows. The author of this site provides an up-to-date CD image of the latest versions of numerous high-quality OSS applications (complete list on the site), updated monthly, downloadable via BitTorrent. (The same site also offers a web-based Code Beautifier.)"

Cool distribution method! (And if you're on dialup, $5 seems like a great bargain -- Are you listening, Cheapbytes?)

Toys are so tempting to the wallet ... OrenWolf writes "Ars Technica Has a review up of BroadQ's QCast Tuner software. Unlike the earlier /. review, this article goes into great detail about the technical capabilities of the software. A must read for PS2 owners looking for a PC-PVR-esque solution."

Yeah, but does this review include any original software? ;) And david_adams writes "Slashdot linked to an article I wrote last month about my experience with a CDMA2000 1x wireless network from SprintPCS. It sparked quite a bit of controversy, but not for the reasons I expected. Because I called Sprint's service 3G in the title, but admitted it was 2.5G in the first paragraph, I heard from people on both sides, chiding me on the one hand for calling it 3G, and on the other for calling it 2.5G. I decided to research and write a new article to get to the bottom of it. What is truly 3G? Where is the line between 2.5G and 3G?"

The time to wait is now! ThunderDawg writes "Intel resumed Canterwood Pentium 4 3 GHz 800FSB shipments yesterday. TAFKAEFKAF (The Anomaly Formerly Known as Errata Formerly Known as Flaw) was corrected with a software patch.

Intel is again shipping its new 3GHz Pentium 4 processor, a week after it halted shipments due to the discovery of an "anomaly," an Intel spokesman said Monday. PC makers that use the chip in their systems have been supplied with a software update to fix the issue, George Alfs, an Intel spokesman said. Vendors including Hewlett-Packard, Dell Computer, and Gateway introduced desktop systems based on the chip when it was released on Monday last week. The issue with the 3GHz Pentium 4 with support for an 800MHz system bus occurs only in rare circumstances and users are unlikely to be affected, according to Alfs."

I'd take google and a strong AI any day. hondo77 writes "A bit of a followup to this article from back in February, LexisNexis has been named the publisher of official reports by the California Supreme Court, according to this press release. "The public will have free access to the official text of the opinions at a Web site hosted by LexisNexis linked to the court's Web site." IANAL but it doesn't sound ominous to me."

Slashback tonight has followups and clarifications on glitch-delayed Pentium IV shipments, Free software for chainware operating systems, the real distinction between 3G and 2.5G phone systems and more -- read on below for the details.

More RAM than I can afford. RyanT5000 writes "The article referenced in "Getting Rid of the Disks" incorrectly states that the maximum RAM for a 32-bit Intel compatible system is 4 GB. This was true up to and including the original Pentium processor, and it makes a lot of sense (after all, 2^32 = 4 294 967 296). However, with the Pentium Pro, Intel added 4 pins to the address bus, expanding the maximum physical address space to 64 GB (using paging, since it still uses 32 bit addressing). I would assume AMD has a similar feature. If you're on Windows, you'll need a server version to get above 4 GB, but most major Linux/BSD/etc. OSes support it. This would probably be cheaper (and definitely faster) than SCSI SSDs. If you need more than 64 GB of solid state storage, you probably shouldn't be running on an Intel."

"Free" always makes people suspicious. imevil writes "A while ago slashdotters asked some questions to the GNUWin II team. Well, here are the answers. In the meantime, more people joined the team, and more languages were added (this one looks pretty cool)." There's also a short article about GNUWin running at NewsForge.

On a related note, cos(0) writes "According to this(1), this(2), and other stories, many people are interested in running open source, high-quality software on MS Windows. The author of this site provides an up-to-date CD image of the latest versions of numerous high-quality OSS applications (complete list on the site), updated monthly, downloadable via BitTorrent. (The same site also offers a web-based Code Beautifier.)"

Cool distribution method! (And if you're on dialup, $5 seems like a great bargain -- Are you listening, Cheapbytes?)

Toys are so tempting to the wallet ... OrenWolf writes "Ars Technica Has a review up of BroadQ's QCast Tuner software. Unlike the earlier /. review, this article goes into great detail about the technical capabilities of the software. A must read for PS2 owners looking for a PC-PVR-esque solution."

Yeah, but does this review include any original software? ;) And david_adams writes "Slashdot linked to an article I wrote last month about my experience with a CDMA2000 1x wireless network from SprintPCS. It sparked quite a bit of controversy, but not for the reasons I expected. Because I called Sprint's service 3G in the title, but admitted it was 2.5G in the first paragraph, I heard from people on both sides, chiding me on the one hand for calling it 3G, and on the other for calling it 2.5G. I decided to research and write a new article to get to the bottom of it. What is truly 3G? Where is the line between 2.5G and 3G?"

The time to wait is now! ThunderDawg writes "Intel resumed Canterwood Pentium 4 3 GHz 800FSB shipments yesterday. TAFKAEFKAF (The Anomaly Formerly Known as Errata Formerly Known as Flaw) was corrected with a software patch.

Intel is again shipping its new 3GHz Pentium 4 processor, a week after it halted shipments due to the discovery of an "anomaly," an Intel spokesman said Monday. PC makers that use the chip in their systems have been supplied with a software update to fix the issue, George Alfs, an Intel spokesman said. Vendors including Hewlett-Packard, Dell Computer, and Gateway introduced desktop systems based on the chip when it was released on Monday last week. The issue with the 3GHz Pentium 4 with support for an 800MHz system bus occurs only in rare circumstances and users are unlikely to be affected, according to Alfs."

I'd take google and a strong AI any day. hondo77 writes "A bit of a followup to this article from back in February, LexisNexis has been named the publisher of official reports by the California Supreme Court, according to this press release. "The public will have free access to the official text of the opinions at a Web site hosted by LexisNexis linked to the court's Web site." IANAL but it doesn't sound ominous to me."

Slashback tonight has followups and clarifications on glitch-delayed Pentium IV shipments, Free software for chainware operating systems, the real distinction between 3G and 2.5G phone systems and more -- read on below for the details.

More RAM than I can afford. RyanT5000 writes "The article referenced in "Getting Rid of the Disks" incorrectly states that the maximum RAM for a 32-bit Intel compatible system is 4 GB. This was true up to and including the original Pentium processor, and it makes a lot of sense (after all, 2^32 = 4 294 967 296). However, with the Pentium Pro, Intel added 4 pins to the address bus, expanding the maximum physical address space to 64 GB (using paging, since it still uses 32 bit addressing). I would assume AMD has a similar feature. If you're on Windows, you'll need a server version to get above 4 GB, but most major Linux/BSD/etc. OSes support it. This would probably be cheaper (and definitely faster) than SCSI SSDs. If you need more than 64 GB of solid state storage, you probably shouldn't be running on an Intel."

"Free" always makes people suspicious. imevil writes "A while ago slashdotters asked some questions to the GNUWin II team. Well, here are the answers. In the meantime, more people joined the team, and more languages were added (this one looks pretty cool)." There's also a short article about GNUWin running at NewsForge.

On a related note, cos(0) writes "According to this(1), this(2), and other stories, many people are interested in running open source, high-quality software on MS Windows. The author of this site provides an up-to-date CD image of the latest versions of numerous high-quality OSS applications (complete list on the site), updated monthly, downloadable via BitTorrent. (The same site also offers a web-based Code Beautifier.)"

Cool distribution method! (And if you're on dialup, $5 seems like a great bargain -- Are you listening, Cheapbytes?)

Toys are so tempting to the wallet ... OrenWolf writes "Ars Technica Has a review up of BroadQ's QCast Tuner software. Unlike the earlier /. review, this article goes into great detail about the technical capabilities of the software. A must read for PS2 owners looking for a PC-PVR-esque solution."

Yeah, but does this review include any original software? ;) And david_adams writes "Slashdot linked to an article I wrote last month about my experience with a CDMA2000 1x wireless network from SprintPCS. It sparked quite a bit of controversy, but not for the reasons I expected. Because I called Sprint's service 3G in the title, but admitted it was 2.5G in the first paragraph, I heard from people on both sides, chiding me on the one hand for calling it 3G, and on the other for calling it 2.5G. I decided to research and write a new article to get to the bottom of it. What is truly 3G? Where is the line between 2.5G and 3G?"

The time to wait is now! ThunderDawg writes "Intel resumed Canterwood Pentium 4 3 GHz 800FSB shipments yesterday. TAFKAEFKAF (The Anomaly Formerly Known as Errata Formerly Known as Flaw) was corrected with a software patch.

Intel is again shipping its new 3GHz Pentium 4 processor, a week after it halted shipments due to the discovery of an "anomaly," an Intel spokesman said Monday. PC makers that use the chip in their systems have been supplied with a software update to fix the issue, George Alfs, an Intel spokesman said. Vendors including Hewlett-Packard, Dell Computer, and Gateway introduced desktop systems based on the chip when it was released on Monday last week. The issue with the 3GHz Pentium 4 with support for an 800MHz system bus occurs only in rare circumstances and users are unlikely to be affected, according to Alfs."

I'd take google and a strong AI any day. hondo77 writes "A bit of a followup to this article from back in February, LexisNexis has been named the publisher of official reports by the California Supreme Court, according to this press release. "The public will have free access to the official text of the opinions at a Web site hosted by LexisNexis linked to the court's Web site." IANAL but it doesn't sound ominous to me."

in4mation writes "The folks at LASEC have found a flaw in the SSL protocol. Quoting Professor Serge Vaudenay from a BBC article the security problem is in 'the SSL protocol itself and not in how we use it or how we implement it.' Apparently the flow only affects webmail and not banking or credit card payments and took less than an hour (160 attempts) to crack." Update: 02/20 20:52 GMT by T : Kurt Seifried writes to say that this is almost exactly wrong: "The flaw is in IMPLEMENTATION, NOT THE PROTOCOL. Due to the way error checks are handled an attacker can find out which error condition occurred by measuring the response. The solution is trivial, a path that forces OpenSSL to do the second check even if the first one fails, thus denying the remote attacker any information as to which exact error condition occurred." He includes a link to the security advisory at openssl.org. Update: 02/20 21:49 GMT by T : Read on below for some more information from SSL 3.0 designer Paul Kocher.

Kocher, President & Chief Scientist of Cryptography Research, Inc., writes:

The referenced paper (http://lasecwww.epfl.ch/memo_ssl.shtml) describes how timing variations in SSL/TLS implementations can be used in certain situations to slowly gather information about encrypted data. If the certain conditions are met, the attacker can decrypt some information from the message (e.g., a password). Strictly speaking, the fact that implementations reveal sensitive information in timing channels is an implementation issue, not a flaw in the underlying cryptographic protocol. This doesn't make the issue unimportant, however, and timing attacks are big deal for implementers because they are easy to introduce, notoriously tricky to detect, and often difficult to eliminate.

Answers to general questions:

1. Is it still okay to send my credit card number over SSL? Yes. This attack is not applicable to web shopping and there are much easier ways that fraudsters steal credit card information (e.g., breaking into merchants' web sites -- a problem that SSL can't solve). In any case, the bank is generally responsible if someone steals your card info.

2. Is the paper "real" or another bogus "I broke SSL" claim? The paper is legit. The Slashdot announcement suggests that SSL itself is broken, however, which is a bit misleading.

2. Is this a practical attack to exploit? Cryptographers need to be paranoid about unexpected situations. As a result, attacks can be important even if they are not practical to exploit under real- world conditions. The attack described in this paper is similar; while there are quite a few preconditions for mounting the attack, this does not make the research unimportant or mean that people should ignore the work. Specific requirements to mount the attack include:

• The session has to use CBC mode. The vast majority of SSL connections use RC4, for which the attack is not applicable. Because of the algorithm negotiation used in SSL/TLS is secured in the initial handshake, man-in-the- middle attackers should not be able affect the outcome of the algorithm selection process.

• The attacker has to act as an active man-in-the-middle attacker. Passive eavesdropping is not sufficient.
• The server's SSL implementation has to be vulnerable (see #3 below). The protocol also has to be oblivious to repeated failures.

• The target protocol also has to have some very specific characteristics that allow the adversary to form the right kinds of messages. For most uses of SSL (e.g., normal web browsing), this type of attack does not generally apply.

3. Can affected implementations be fixed? Yes. OpenSSL has been updated (http://www.openssl.org/news/secadv_20030219.txt). For more information, also see http://www.openssl.org/~bodo/tls-cbc.txt. I don't know what other vendors/projects are doing.

4. Is this an issue for the client or the server? Normally, this would only be an issue for the "server" (i.e., the party that receives the connection request), since normal SSL clients don't automatically large numbers of connections.

A couple of final comments:

I'm constantly amazed by the number of ways that it's possible to screw up security. Overall, SSL 3.0 seems to have aged well, but I wish I'd done a better job of handling errors in the design. In particular, error handling was involved in both of the attacks against SSL that I consider non-obvious, notably Bleichenbacher's attack and CBC-padding attacks such as this one. While these types of attacks weren't known when I was designing SSL 3.0, I generally wish I'd provided less information in error messages.

Finally, I also want to give thanks everyone who has helped to study SSL's security, contributed to implementations, and helped shepherd it through the standards processes."

in4mation writes "The folks at LASEC have found a flaw in the SSL protocol. Quoting Professor Serge Vaudenay from a BBC article the security problem is in 'the SSL protocol itself and not in how we use it or how we implement it.' Apparently the flow only affects webmail and not banking or credit card payments and took less than an hour (160 attempts) to crack." Update: 02/20 20:52 GMT by T : Kurt Seifried writes to say that this is almost exactly wrong: "The flaw is in IMPLEMENTATION, NOT THE PROTOCOL. Due to the way error checks are handled an attacker can find out which error condition occurred by measuring the response. The solution is trivial, a path that forces OpenSSL to do the second check even if the first one fails, thus denying the remote attacker any information as to which exact error condition occurred." He includes a link to the security advisory at openssl.org. Update: 02/20 21:49 GMT by T : Read on below for some more information from SSL 3.0 designer Paul Kocher.

Kocher, President & Chief Scientist of Cryptography Research, Inc., writes:

The referenced paper (http://lasecwww.epfl.ch/memo_ssl.shtml) describes how timing variations in SSL/TLS implementations can be used in certain situations to slowly gather information about encrypted data. If the certain conditions are met, the attacker can decrypt some information from the message (e.g., a password). Strictly speaking, the fact that implementations reveal sensitive information in timing channels is an implementation issue, not a flaw in the underlying cryptographic protocol. This doesn't make the issue unimportant, however, and timing attacks are big deal for implementers because they are easy to introduce, notoriously tricky to detect, and often difficult to eliminate.

Answers to general questions:

1. Is it still okay to send my credit card number over SSL? Yes. This attack is not applicable to web shopping and there are much easier ways that fraudsters steal credit card information (e.g., breaking into merchants' web sites -- a problem that SSL can't solve). In any case, the bank is generally responsible if someone steals your card info.

2. Is the paper "real" or another bogus "I broke SSL" claim? The paper is legit. The Slashdot announcement suggests that SSL itself is broken, however, which is a bit misleading.

2. Is this a practical attack to exploit? Cryptographers need to be paranoid about unexpected situations. As a result, attacks can be important even if they are not practical to exploit under real- world conditions. The attack described in this paper is similar; while there are quite a few preconditions for mounting the attack, this does not make the research unimportant or mean that people should ignore the work. Specific requirements to mount the attack include:

• The session has to use CBC mode. The vast majority of SSL connections use RC4, for which the attack is not applicable. Because of the algorithm negotiation used in SSL/TLS is secured in the initial handshake, man-in-the- middle attackers should not be able affect the outcome of the algorithm selection process.

• The attacker has to act as an active man-in-the-middle attacker. Passive eavesdropping is not sufficient.
• The server's SSL implementation has to be vulnerable (see #3 below). The protocol also has to be oblivious to repeated failures.

• The target protocol also has to have some very specific characteristics that allow the adversary to form the right kinds of messages. For most uses of SSL (e.g., normal web browsing), this type of attack does not generally apply.

3. Can affected implementations be fixed? Yes. OpenSSL has been updated (http://www.openssl.org/news/secadv_20030219.txt). For more information, also see http://www.openssl.org/~bodo/tls-cbc.txt. I don't know what other vendors/projects are doing.

4. Is this an issue for the client or the server? Normally, this would only be an issue for the "server" (i.e., the party that receives the connection request), since normal SSL clients don't automatically large numbers of connections.

A couple of final comments:

I'm constantly amazed by the number of ways that it's possible to screw up security. Overall, SSL 3.0 seems to have aged well, but I wish I'd done a better job of handling errors in the design. In particular, error handling was involved in both of the attacks against SSL that I consider non-obvious, notably Bleichenbacher's attack and CBC-padding attacks such as this one. While these types of attacks weren't known when I was designing SSL 3.0, I generally wish I'd provided less information in error messages.

Finally, I also want to give thanks everyone who has helped to study SSL's security, contributed to implementations, and helped shepherd it through the standards processes."

imevil writes "GNUWin II is a collection of Free Software for Windows, and it also includes articles about Free Software and explanation pages. It is multilingual (it was born as a Swiss product). You can browse the CD online or download the ISO from one of our mirrors. The GNUWin II team is ready to answer to your questions, about GNUWin II, and also about GNU Generation, the student association at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology of Lausanne who gave birth to the GNUWin project."

imevil writes "GNUWin II is a collection of Free Software for Windows, and it also includes articles about Free Software and explanation pages. It is multilingual (it was born as a Swiss product). You can browse the CD online or download the ISO from one of our mirrors. The GNUWin II team is ready to answer to your questions, about GNUWin II, and also about GNU Generation, the student association at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology of Lausanne who gave birth to the GNUWin project."

imevil writes "GNUWin II is a collection of Free Software for Windows, and it also includes articles about Free Software and explanation pages. It is multilingual (it was born as a Swiss product). You can browse the CD online or download the ISO from one of our mirrors. The GNUWin II team is ready to answer to your questions, about GNUWin II, and also about GNU Generation, the student association at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology of Lausanne who gave birth to the GNUWin project."

imevil writes "GNUWin II is a collection of Free Software for Windows, and it also includes articles about Free Software and explanation pages. It is multilingual (it was born as a Swiss product). You can browse the CD online or download the ISO from one of our mirrors. The GNUWin II team is ready to answer to your questions, about GNUWin II, and also about GNU Generation, the student association at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology of Lausanne who gave birth to the GNUWin project."

Slashback brings you more on Solaris, the not-quite-dead OS/2, and free software you can sneak onto your Windows-running computer. Also, Home Depot turns to the dark side, and Hughes winds down its two-way Internet-by-satellite service. Read on below for the details. Update: 12/18 00:30 GMT by T : The Home Depot item got chopped by accident; it's been restored below. Update: 12/18 00:38 GMT by T : Sigh. And -- my fault for misreading -- Hughes is shutting down their DSL business; satellite service continues at least for now.

Honest, I'm not dead. Again. silvaran writes "A clarification on CNet News indicates that IBM will not stop supporting or selling OS/2 as mentioned previously. Says IBM spokesman Steve Eisenstadt, 'As long as our customers want OS/2, we will support them... We don't have plans to withdraw OS/2.' The withdrawal notice lists several hundred components or software packages that will no longer be available, but OS/2 itself will still be offered."

Like Marshall MacLuhan in Annie Hall. tree writes "The Boston Globe has a really interesting interview with Stanislaw Lem, author of the 1961 novel "Solaris": he is a bit baffled about the latest movie adaptation. In any event, it's a great read for fans of Lem."

They win, GNU Win, we all win. Shwag writes "Last week I downloaded TheOpenCD after it was on Slashdot. I learned about all kinds of great free (as in speech) software. I then searched for more and found out about GNU Win which is a win32 free software cd but it has way more software! Yay! This is a really great way to show people the benefits of free software and get them ready for transitioning to linux."

A platform built from an Acorn. An anonymous reader writes "The (London) Guardian's Online section reports today on the new Ionix PC earlier Slashdotted for being the first desktop to run Intel's XScale processor. The Guardian concentrates on how the new machine may revive the fading fortunes of the once-pioneering Risc OS, but also makes mention of the fact it is ditching old proprietary Acorn subsystems."

Woe to the boonie dwellers, until enough balloons are in place. Avenger writes "Another DSL provider is getting out of the market. Hughes Electronics has announced that they will no longer be providing high-speed Internet services. Over 160,000 users will be affected. As it stands right now, they still will be providing connectivity via DirecPC."

But it seemed like such a great do-it-yourself idea! adagioforstrings writes "You may recall last year Home Depot announced they were deploying Linux at 90,000 point-of-sale terminals across the nation. Well, time went by and no more was heard about it...until now, when Home Depot announced they would be upgrading their POS systems with technology from NCR Corp., and 360 Commerce Inc. and ... Microsoft Corp."

Slashback brings you more on Solaris, the not-quite-dead OS/2, and free software you can sneak onto your Windows-running computer. Also, Home Depot turns to the dark side, and Hughes winds down its two-way Internet-by-satellite service. Read on below for the details. Update: 12/18 00:30 GMT by T : The Home Depot item got chopped by accident; it's been restored below. Update: 12/18 00:38 GMT by T : Sigh. And -- my fault for misreading -- Hughes is shutting down their DSL business; satellite service continues at least for now.

Honest, I'm not dead. Again. silvaran writes "A clarification on CNet News indicates that IBM will not stop supporting or selling OS/2 as mentioned previously. Says IBM spokesman Steve Eisenstadt, 'As long as our customers want OS/2, we will support them... We don't have plans to withdraw OS/2.' The withdrawal notice lists several hundred components or software packages that will no longer be available, but OS/2 itself will still be offered."

Like Marshall MacLuhan in Annie Hall. tree writes "The Boston Globe has a really interesting interview with Stanislaw Lem, author of the 1961 novel "Solaris": he is a bit baffled about the latest movie adaptation. In any event, it's a great read for fans of Lem."

They win, GNU Win, we all win. Shwag writes "Last week I downloaded TheOpenCD after it was on Slashdot. I learned about all kinds of great free (as in speech) software. I then searched for more and found out about GNU Win which is a win32 free software cd but it has way more software! Yay! This is a really great way to show people the benefits of free software and get them ready for transitioning to linux."

A platform built from an Acorn. An anonymous reader writes "The (London) Guardian's Online section reports today on the new Ionix PC earlier Slashdotted for being the first desktop to run Intel's XScale processor. The Guardian concentrates on how the new machine may revive the fading fortunes of the once-pioneering Risc OS, but also makes mention of the fact it is ditching old proprietary Acorn subsystems."

Woe to the boonie dwellers, until enough balloons are in place. Avenger writes "Another DSL provider is getting out of the market. Hughes Electronics has announced that they will no longer be providing high-speed Internet services. Over 160,000 users will be affected. As it stands right now, they still will be providing connectivity via DirecPC."

But it seemed like such a great do-it-yourself idea! adagioforstrings writes "You may recall last year Home Depot announced they were deploying Linux at 90,000 point-of-sale terminals across the nation. Well, time went by and no more was heard about it...until now, when Home Depot announced they would be upgrading their POS systems with technology from NCR Corp., and 360 Commerce Inc. and ... Microsoft Corp."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tim Finin writes: "Anthill is a framework being developed at University of Bologna to support the design, implementation and evaluation of P2P applications, viewing them as instances of Complex Adaptive Systems, typically found in biological and social sciences. In Anthill, desired properties such as resilience, adaptation and self-organization correspond to the "emergent behavior" of the underlying CA system. An Anthill system consists of a dynamic network of peer nodes; societies of adaptive agents (ants) travel through this network, interacting with nodes and cooperating with other agents in order to solve complex problems. The source code for Anthill v1.0 is available for downloading. MORE on this is at ebiquity.org."

SEWilco writes "Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory scientists described Tuesday producing fusion with a mere million-dollar machine. It was described at this APS Centennial session. Bursts of neutrons are detected, the hallmark of fusion that `cold fusion' was missing" Update: 03/27 02:27 by S : In somewhat related news, muggs wrote in about a new laser-based method for watching atoms bond. It relies on using X-ray diffraction patterns to locate the moving atoms.

In more Windows CE emulation news, a GameBoy emulator for WindowsCE has been released. The speed of this emulator is not known, other than on one or two WinCE boxes(?). The author encourages people to try it on theirs. I think this is an indictator the PalmPilot needs better hardware- just about the only thing it could emulate now is CP/M on a Z-80. The German magazine, Heise Verlag has areport on just such a thing