Slashdot Mirror

Tell me again why my motherboard needs it own OS? Goatbert writes: "Penguin Hardware has posted an interview with John Tsai, head of ABIT's Gentus department. He goes into ABIT's future open source plans and what they plan to do about accusations of GPL violations."

Lifestyles of the young and precocious. PerlDiver writes: "The 'Programming for Kids' thread reminded me of this, and I thought it was worth a story of its own. Former Xerox PARC researcher Ken Kahn has created an amazing tool for teaching kids how to program. Even very young children (old enough to know their letters and numbers) can be started on object-oriented programming with ToonTalk, an animated programming kit that introduces such advanced concepts as recursion, object methods, and functions in a fully visual, direct-manipulation, non-notation-based way. Kids learn by playing with an on-screen toolbox, robots (methods), birds (message passing channels), and bombs (memory deallocation :-). I saw Ken give a ToonTalk demo a few years ago and I was blown away by it. It looks great... sort of PeeWee's Playhouse meets Lego."

Mirror, mirror on the wall -- damn, where was I? Warrior writes "GameSpy was able to get some in-depth information on the closing of Looking Glass Studios by talking to LGS game designer Tim Stellmach. He gave us some good explanations of what happened and who owns what."

Oh, as long as you say it, I guess it's OK! Remember the trouble between CyberPatrol and Network Associates' 'ultra-secure' Gauntlet firewall? The ever-prolific Anonymous Coward wrote us with an interesting bit to sprinkle in that wound: "Peacefire tricked several "parental control" software vendors into revealing their double standards through an amusing gambit: they took anti-gay quotes from several large, well-funded organizations (e.g. Focus on the Family) and put them on "bait" pages on various free Web hosting systems. Then they submitted those pages to the censorware companies as objectionable hate speech which ought to be filtered, and the companies obligingly added them to the blacklists. Next, they submitted the home pages from which they got the quotes. But apparently it's not hate speech if it's on the home page of a political organization with a large legal department ..."

The wheels of government creak ever slowly. teddyfu writes "I found this link regarding the EU's decision to oepn up crypto exports. It seems that decision has only been *postponed*; hopefully the decision will still be made, just at a later date."

Who dares provide House Atriedes with ADSL? Craig E. Engler writes "The first trailer for the SciFi Channel's upcoming miniseries Frank Herbert's Dune has been posted online. ... The site also has the latest news about the miniseries (which has wrapped principal photography and is now in post-production) as well as photos, notes from the director's assistant, and more."