Slashdot Mirror

onco_p53 writes "Australian scientists have invented a T-shirt that allows air guitarists to play actual music as they strum the air. The shirt has sensors in each elbow and sleeves to detect and interpret the air guitarist's arm movements — one arm chooses chords and the other strums imaginary strings. The gestures are then connected wirelessly to guitar audio samples to generate the music. Check out the video!"

automandc writes "The October dead-tree issue of Popular Science is reporting that the new BMW M3 contains what they are calling the "first automotive easter egg" in its transmission control software. Apparently, the proper combination of commands to the electronically controlled manual transmission will cause the car to rev up to 4000rpm and drop the clutch (premitting burnout, which is normally impossible). According to the article, use of the feature more than 15 times voids the warranty in Eurpoe. Other limitations of the "acceleration-assist" feature are discussed in this Car and Driver article. According to popsci, U.S. laws won't allow the warranty limitation, so the U.S. version of the software only revs to 1500rpm, but dealers will install the european software if you ask. The only other mention I could find on the web is here."

spam-it-to-me-baby writes: "Welcome to Australia. Over the course of a few months, Aussies now can't gamble online locally, you soon may not be able to serve p0rn from a website, we have what could be the world's greatest luddite for an IT minister, but now we find there's nothing wrong legally with spreading a bit of bestiality via e-mail. Is something upside down Down Under?"

biscuit nipple writes: "According to this article, our government snuck a little copyright law in under our noses. It just seems like a big moshpit of crap. Incidental copies of data, ie from an ISP, for transmission are ok, but deliberate copies (including proxy caches) are not." Also, "Libraries will have exemptions similar to the ones they already hold for distributing information but they will not be able to build up searchable collections, or provide material in competition with commercial providers." (Imagine if they applied that standard to books, too!)

dustpuppy writes: "This article talks about how volunteer students took over the administration and operation of the IT facilities at a University of Melbourne residential college. I thought the article worthwhile in that it should remind us that very few other industries have the opportunity where young people can step in and make a very real difference. We really are very lucky to live in the age that we do!" The article feels a little "gee-whiz!" and I hope student-run IT systems aren't are rare as this implies, but a positive case study is great to see. Seems like a lot of academic networks become embroiled in exercise-of-authority games instead of cooperation. Anyone with academic-net experiences, please speak up.

SirFlakey writes: "It appears Moore's law has been proven right yet again. According to a report in Fairfax's IT section, Intel has managed to create the world's smallest transistor(s). This, according to the article would allow them to create CPU's with 10 times (420 million) the P4's transistor count. The transistors are only 3 Atoms thick(!). They say they have come close to the limit of modern technology but also still have plenty of innovation left for the future. This annoucement comes only a few days after it released an earnings warning for this quarter."

Last week I came out in favor of electronic voting. Over the weekend, it turned out that its opponents' worst fears came true. Not only was some computer software buggy, but it actually threw a state election the wrong way. And though not very likely, it's even possible that this state will determine our next president! Have I changed my mind about electronic voting?

No, because the punchline is: New Mexico still uses dead trees. The bug was in the software that counts paper ballots.

New Mexico was given to Gore on election night by 6,800 votes because of buggy computer software. That software "failed to read" straight-party votes (oops!), and worse, it "also chose at least one candidate from another party."

If computer flaws had thrown an electronic-vote election, you'd be reading about it on the front page of every newspaper across the country, and pundits would be telling us (sometimes in ways very funny) how foolish we were to trust our votes to those nasty computers.

How many presidential elections does our 19th-century technology have to nearly destroy before the alternatives get serious consideration?

A friend in Sweden tells me that the U.S.A. is now being referred to as the B.R.A., the Banana Republic of America. Maybe by the 21st century we can have 20th-century voting machines installed at our polling places, what do you think?

(New Mexico could decide the election if Florida's votes are thrown out, Oregon goes to Bush, and one or two more improbabilities occur.)

Voting, right here in River(side) County Riverside County, California, used touch-screen voting in this last election. This is very different from internet voting since there was no network to the outside world. I think this is an important step and certainly should be done first.

ABC News's report describes Riverside's system and shows a photo. Randall Gardner points out that the local paper has a great story with an overview of the system and reactions from voters -- glitches, yes; late tally, yes; but all in all it sounded like a positive experience.

With a capital V and that rhymes with C and that stands for Canberra Dracophile points out an article from the Fairfax IT News website, which:

reports that voters in the Australian Capital Territory (in which our nation's capital, Canberra, lies) "could be the first in the nation to trial electronic voting at next year's territory election", according to the territory's Chief Minister, Gary Humphries. They're hoping to pass legislation next month to bring this about. Sounds cool, but the article goes on to quote Humphries as saying, "You might as well be doing it from your own home." Is it just me, or does this raise the possibility of voters being coerced into a particular vote where this sort of thing can't be seen? I'd prefer to see electronic voting available only from polling booths.

No grunge typefaces please User-interface wonks should enjoy this pure-and-simple design contest. Web Memes, Inc. is asking you to design a ballot, preferably one as unconfusing as possible while still using (spit) paper. You also get to make up your own candidates and issues.

(If the competition were digital, instead of paper, it would be a tough call between Amazon.com's new user interface and AmIPresidentOrNot.)

Busily coding your next election... ...is Jason Kitcat, who says "I'm working really hard on the next release and haven't given it the PR time it deserves." Allow me.

FREE is "Free Referenda & Elections Electronically," "the first open source system for conducting electronic votes." We're now jumping from mere electronic tallying of votes in polling places to actual internet voting, so please keep your hands inside the browser at all times.

Originally an academic thesis, FREE is now GPL'd, written in Java, and its design background is available in whitepapers. I haven't tried running it. Someone let us know if the project could be useful.

See also thebell.net, which comments:

...the majority of paper punching systems used in the U.S. do not produce repeatable results when ballots are tallied more than once, which means that election officials lack the means to objectively distinguish between fraud and error under these circumstances. ...we should in fact be looking to Internet voting systems in order to try to reduce those faults and thus provide for more security than what is available today -- not less security.

The seriously skeptical view Let's end on a sobering note. Scoffing at The Bell's claim to have tackled the subject a mere six months ago, Rebecca Mercuri points out (on Dave Farber's IP list) that others have been thinking about internet voting for over a decade. She writes:

Internet systems indeed DO promise FAR LESS in the way of auditability (recounts) and anonymity (privacy) than do the paper and other manual systems presently in place. To promote the belief that Internet voting, in any way provides a SAFE VOTE, is wholly erroneous.

She has an intimidating collection of links to (mostly) academic papers on the subject on her Electronic Voting page.

And in conclusion The only viable form of government is perl-based: we need a bicamel legislature with an eclectoral college. Thank you and good night!

And now for something completely the same! A note from timothy: The next piece in our continuing Hellmouth Revisited series is online. Feel free to go read it.

dmsmith writes: "Scheduled for Oct. 20-22 in Melbourne, Australia, is the Alternative Computer Expo 2000 (ACE2K), the computer expo with no Windows. You can read a bit about it here at the Fairfax IT news site. Also you can go to their site www.ace2k.net." Rather than pushing zealotry on behalf of any particular operating system, these guys have a cool idea: provide a forum that proves there are different ways to do anything. Wish there was an American equivalent -- or is there? How about elsewhere?

Both Brendan Quinn and msim were curious about the ability to send gzip-encoded Web pages. Brendan asks: "It's possible to make Apache detect the "Accept-encoding: gzip" field sent by NS 4.7+, IE 4+ and Lynx, and send a gzip-encoded page, thus saving lots of bandwidth all over the place. So why don't people do it? Here is a module written by the Mozilla guys a couple of years ago that -almost- does what I want, and I could change it pretty easily... but I thought someone else would have done it by now? eXcite do it, does anyone know of any other large-scale sites that use gzip encoding?"

"If you have LWP installed, you can check with:

GET -p '<my proxy>' -H 'Accept-encoding: gzip' -e http://www.site.com/ | less

Try that with 'www.excite.com' and you'll get binary (gzipped) data. That's what I want to do."

Imagine a novelist, trapped in a nightmarish world of credit cards and micropayments, facing devilish odds and the belligerent stares of publishers everywhere ... picture a team of hackers brazen enough to break into dozens of secure government sites without incurring a single lawsuit ... scream in terror at the thought of mutant penguin-kangaroo hybrids swimming deviously onto our shores ...

Revenge of the naysayers' naysayers: Just yesterday, jamie sallied forth with the theory that Stephen King was setting himself up for disappointment by expecting enough paying customers for his new online book to justify the experiment.

jheinen writes, though, "According to MSNBC, of the 41,000 downloads for the first installment so far, 32,000 (~78%) have already paid via credit card. Kinda shoots to hell the theory that people won't pay."

[Jamie adds: I stand by my prediction that "Stephen King is never going to have to publish the end of his novel." I'd love to see him succeed, but I just don't think so this time around. We'll see in September!]

Red Five, I'm going in. You may recall the story a little while ago about a distributed anti-cracking bot at Sandia National Laboratory. Rest assured, those clever folks don't confine themselves to practicing only one side of the ol' thrust-and-feint.

In fact, leb writes: "Over the past two years, a group at Sandia National Laboratories known informally as the Red Team has, at customer invitation, either successfully invaded or devised successful mock attacks on 35 out of 35 information systems at various sites, along with their associated security technologies. Their work - challenged only by a new style of defense, also developed at Sandia, called an "intelligent agent" - demonstrates that competent outsiders can hack into almost all networked computers as presently conformed no matter how well guarded, say spokespeople for the group, formally known as the Information Design Assurance Red Team or IDART. Check out their site here."

Stir, leave plot overnight to thicken. vjlen writes: "Now it sounds like corinthians.com is just another cybersquatting case. From an article in USA Today: 'But the case is not as black-and-white as it seems, says Dave Fogelson, a spokesman for the team, which recently put up its own site in Brazil. Fogelson says the arbitrator had to consider several factors, including the fact that Sallen did not use the site for Bible quotes until after he contacted the team to talk about selling the name, which suggests his main motive was profit.'"

Or ... or ... or ... we'll strike! stattouk writes "The BBC has a story on a court case currently happening in France over whether Yahoo France can be held responsible for people being able to access auctions of Nazi memorabilia. The courts say that even though fr.yahoo.com has blocked access, the fact that www.yahoo.com can still be used to get them amounts to no action by Yahoo." Asking Yahoo! to block Internet auctions in the first place seemed rather stretchy; now it seems that Yahoo! is supposed to police the entire world.

Penguins do come from that hemisphere, after all ... Tsujigiri writes "To follow up a previous story on Slashdot about the Australian InstallFest 2000, Fairfax IT is running this story about the recently held (well, July the 15th) Adelaide InstallFest 2000 and its "unexpected surge in interest". Quite successfull all round. Congratulations to all involved, and good luck to the rest of the Australian Install Season. (For anyone who'd like to see some pictures, go here)"

If there's an "install season" down there, one questions leaps to mind: Is there a limit on those things?

RalfM writes: "D. W. Davies,landmark scientist, has passed away. He coined the term 'packet switching' and did lots of research on the whole gamut of networking and data transmission. Read about it here." Not many people can claim "I conceived the use of a purpose-designed network employing packet switching in which the stream of bits is broken up into short messages, or 'packets', that find their way individually to the destination, where they are reassembled into the original stream."

kolestrol asks: "A while back I built a Web site using mysql and Java servlets to track Kosova refugees. That experience had taught me a lot. I had severely underestimated the job. I was wondering if anyone has any similar experiences, i.e. maintaining highly data-driven interactive Web sites with a high volume, and how they have managed to handle the load. Furthermore, how have they managed to handle content (site redesigns, etc.). The reason I ask is that ever since the above-mentioned project, I have been doing a lot more research, trying to find a free Linux solution. The only thing I found was at The Linux Virtual Server Project." I don't know how the larger Web sites do it, but I assume they evolved in stages to add their current features. What kind of design decisions are made when designing such sites?" (Read more.)

"Apart from this I have been talking to commercial vendors like BEA (I was very impressed) who provided application servers with load-balancing, replication, etc., starting at $20,000 (Australian) -- they run sites like Amazon.com, Qwest, Wells-Fargo etc.

There is an issue here (is there? I don't have any experience to really know hence am asking you) ... I can build a custom solution with load balancing written at the application level. But how does this affect my maintainability (for example Amazon.com moving from just books to all sorts of other stuff .. how long did it take to redesign the site etc.)?

The site I first built could potentially hold information about a million refugees, and allowed searching on most fields regarding information on a person (wildcard queries). Unfortunately, on doing some stress testing (with around 700,000 records) I found that at most 15 hits could be handled every ten seconds. I optimized the code, switched JDBC drivers to a faster driver, wrote a simple load balancer (and I mean very simple) and limited searching of fields to a few fields as well as preventing bad wildcard queries (e.g., a wildcard at the start would make little if any use of the index). Consequently, I managed to get the system to handle slightly more load (200 hits at 5 seconds) (Hardware was Dual Pentium II 450Mhz I think, 512MB RAM, 2x8G Ultra-wide SCSI hard drives, and running Linux of course). BTW, The Kosova refugees articles has a lot of misinformation, e.g. encrypted databases, and the time to actually build it was actually one week (and two weeks of overcoming red tape, etc.)."

Michael Woodhams writes, "Fairfax I.T. reports that two major Australian music retail chains will no longer stock recordings from publisher Festival Mushroom Group in retaliation for the latter granting sanity.com.au exclusive rights to electronic sales and distribution of their songs. For a change, it appears that it is the exclusivity rather than electronic distribution that is causing the problem."

Michael Woodhams writes, "Fairfax I.T. reports that two major Australian music retail chains will no longer stock recordings from publisher Festival Mushroom Group in retaliation for the latter granting sanity.com.au exclusive rights to electronic sales and distribution of their songs. For a change, it appears that it is the exclusivity rather than electronic distribution that is causing the problem."

Anonymous Coward writes "Australian Cable Internet users suffered another major drawback yesterday, with simple services such as E-mail and Newsgroups being charged on a per megabyte basis. This practise is ludicrous as a client can now be charged for spam. Previously, traffic from one cable modem to another was free, yet Telstra have amended their terms and conditions without user consent to include cable modem traffic. In fact, any traffic will be now charged on a per megabyte basis. So angry is the cable community, that it has made headines in Australian news. "

Mintslice writes "Dave McAllister, SGI's Directory of Technical Strategy has been touring Australia recently. The Age is running this story about comments he made at at local LUG (LUV). It runs over SGI's intentions for Linux, what they're doing to help development, what this means for marketing at SGI, and a treasure trove of bits and pieces including Chilli Recipes. Something for everyone. "

Enoch Root writes "There's been a lot of talk in the past about the possibility of a "cyberwar" complementing a real war. Well, now it's a reality. India and Pakistan engaged in a cyberwar earlier this year." Quote from the story: "Several top Indian and Pakistani computer professionals in America and Europe are 'helping' their respective governments by supplying information on the best way to harm the enemy's computer systems."

Dark Fiber writes "The AGE newspaper has a big article (great big 3 page spread) on Linux that is very interesting. Lotta questions, Lotta answers." One of the better mainstream articles- it gets distributions right, covers the GNU/Linux connection, and more.

Tor Slettnes sent us a link to a fairfax article that talks about the sticky situation Apple seems to have gotten itself into regarding Open Source. Touches on the Open Source Trademark issue, as well as the ever Popular Perens vs. ESR vs. RMS issues. It actually covers the bases pretty well. Worth a read.

Anoop Sarkar writes "Interesting article in Gaming news about how Sony and Toshiba are likely to compete with Wintel in the near future (not just for the gaming market). I heard about it first on the Marketplace morning report on NPR. The actual release is sometime today so more news should be on its way. We need a Linux port to Playstation 2!" In related news, Intel is working on Pentium III only sites which will not only use KNI, but also that... cough! Serial Number.

Henry Griggs sent us an interesting interview and article with Andrew Tridgell, aka the Samba Master. He talks about working with, and against Microsoft. I found it interesting that some groups would help, and other wouldn't-although now Samba is a recognized threat. How many of you folks use Samba, at work and such?

SmilieZ writes "A new generation of niche Web portals is driving unprecedented amounts of traffic to sites of interest says Fairfax news " Another butt kissing article. Watch as my already hyper inflated ego prevents me from leaving my chair. This is probably the most flattering article we've had so far. Neato.

An anonymous reader sent us a link to a fairfax article where you can read an Interview with Corel's Michael Cowpland. Talks about Open Source, the Netwinder division's sale to HCC, WINE, and Corel's commitment to putting their Suite on Linux by Dec. 99.

Henry Griggs sent an interesting interview with crypto-mage Phil Zimmerman. Phil, as always, remains confident that strong encryption bans will soon fade away. *sigh* Here's to hoping.

Roxus sent us a nice little article in the Melbourne Age extolling the Virtues of OSS. It's a nice little article. Nothing remarkably insightful or new, but further proof of what we already know.

ensor sent us a link to a ZD article about Microsoft's Response to all the recent Windows Refund Hoopla. It's not taking is seriously. They consider it a PR stunt. Update: 01/22 02:14 by S : Apparently Microsoft has removed the refund clause from the EULA for Windows 98... which sounds like I can't use Win98 if I don't agree to its EULA, but I must still pay for it if I want a particular notebook? Anybody know what the new EULA is? LWN is claiming the clause removal in Win98 is untrue, any Australian readers care to comment? Update: 01/22 06:42 by S : Dell will not pay a refund because their systems are only quality assured with Windows. Seems like the perfect loop-hole: it is not Microsoft that is requiring Windows on the computer, but the hardware manufacturers... but the tactic could back-fire, since it casts doubts on the PC-compatability of their hardware.

An anonymous reader sent us a link to an article over at FairFax where you can read that Dell is Supporting Linux. It will supposedly be an "Entry Level Server" and will be available in the next few months.

Roxus wrote in to send us a nifty article about Raster and Enlightenment. It's a cool little piece, although I suspect he was fibbing about his fashion sense. Anyway check it out, and drool with the rest of us waiting for DR15 (/me wipes spittle off chin)

Alta Ergo wrote in to send us a link to a story about a 20 year old programmer who has been gagged from talking about the events surrounding him and a company that apparently now controls his code. I guess as always, the moral is trust no one.

Craig Sanders sent us a link to an article about (surprise!) Linux called The People's Revolution, which is a front page story from the IT pages in The Age, Melbourne's biggest newspaper. Mike_Miller wrote in to say that Rob Kennedy (of linux-howto.com fame) is starting a monthly magazine called Ext2 about (surprise) Linux. Josh Baugher wrote in to say 32 Bits Online is now changing their focus to be a (surprise) Linux oriented site. And lastly, mholve has written a nice bit on Advocacy for (surprise!) Linux.