Slashdot Mirror

If you're bored, there's a ton of strange links on the next page, selected by the warped minds of my slashdot co-authors ;-).

tom writes various stuffed Tux's (including a 1m high one), BSD Daemons and a TeX Lion at link (under "Un*x fan shop" and "ZU DEN ARTIKELN" - unfortunately the site's in German, but they speak English). Excellent quality, IMHO.

Robert Ennals writes A writer for the guardian/observer has a mention of one of their articles being linked from slashdot and considers this honour to be the "nearest I'll get to a Nobel prize" link

Kam writes Furniture Porn. Not much else to say... link

Louis Bertrand writes The December issue of DaemonNews, the monthly ezine devoted to the three open-source BSD operating systems (FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD) is available at link

SpaceDust writes No URL on this one, and not sure if it is really a /. thing. A friend who works at EA, tells me they are currently in Beta for Sim City 3000. Supported platforms will be Windows (mid Jan) and MacOS (in 6 months) I guess Linux gets squat (though, the /. effect may convince them otherwise) It's not too much different than "SC2k" except for a couple of new buildings, an improved interface, and now you have to manage garbage as well. They're in late Beta now, it's pretty stable and most of the major problems have been resolved but it still needs some tuning.

Josh Mast writes According to ,"> link A new opensource DOOM port has been started. "The Open Gaming Resource Engine project has been launched. This is a manifestation of the "Merger" project among members of leading DOOM source code projects, and will be an open source project. Looks nifty, maybe we'll finally have a decent port of DOOM for Linux now.

che guevara writes You bet it!!! I was surfing around on Camneerg- and saw this site that has an iMac that was hacked for a disk drive. You can get some info here, but don't try this if you don't want to void your warranty! Peace.

Brent Dearth writes ever since i got their demo tape at an underworld site, i've been searching for Market's webpage. well, i found it, and they have a couple mp3's full length for download. not really news, but i recall Hemos having good taste in music. link (sorry didn't paste)

Ben Smith writes The Onion has a silly little iMac joke in their new issue. In the left side column they have a neon blue stapler, and the caption says " New Stapler Makes All Other Staplers Look Like Worthless Shit". Good for a midday laugh.

Anonymous Coward writes Steven Hawking will appear on the Simpsons. Go figure. link

Anonymous Coward writes Kinda slow site.. (geocities) but well worth it :))))) link

Anonymous Coward writes More GNOME screenshots are available on the GNOME web site.

CodeRed writes " Here is a poll at Interplay's feedback site asking whether Carmageddon 2 should be ported to Linux. In a previous thread an Interplay employee said he would talk to the coders on a Linux port. I figured why not let the Slashdot effect help their choice? " Obviously you should only respond if you would buy this game.

Greg Gulrajani d writes "A trip down memory lane.. specs, photos and adds from the first personal computer wave that made us what we are!" I feel left out- my first was a TRS-80.

Adam Balevic sent us a link to an interesting response to the Halloween documents on CNN. This one talks specifically about comments in the documents relating to the comments in the docs about patents and lawsuits. Its worth a read unless your aready sick of the Halloween Hoopla. You also might be interested in a link sent in by R.C. Pavlicek to Microsoft's Official Response to the Halloween Documents.

Nirvani writes "check here. Some other mirror have it to, ie: wcarchive. Have fun! " Ok, are we sure that this is the real one? I see files at least *grin*.

Pathway asks "I am in the modem market, and I want a v.90 modem. I also would like to save a few bucks. Are there any good modems out there that work well with linux? Any that I should avoid? Thankx." On a similar note, James Dietrich wrote in to ask this question: "I installed Debian Linux on a computer with a Diamond SupraMax 56i Voice PCI modem, and was unable to get the modem to be recognized. A search of the Debian mailing-list archives seems to reveal a disagreement as to whether this one will work or not. Can anyone tell me if this modem is usable with Linux, and if so, how they were successful in setting it up? Sounds like several of you are having problems with 56k support in Linux. Anyone out there with some suggestions?

James Renken wrote in to tell us about a humorous ZD articles revolving around the destruction of those annoying office assistants. Death to Clippy! Brett Taylor wrote in to say that the October issue of Daemon News, a BSD based ezine, is now out. Bill Kilgallon sent in a link to what is unquestionably the Ultimate PalmPilot Case. And lastly, several folks wrote in to tell us that ZD now has something they call "the ultimate linux resource". Hit the link to read some notes about moderation as well as comments about future direction of Slashdot content) Ok lately, a huge number of purely Linux news items have been popping up. Slashdot can't run them all, but many of them deserve reporting. Is it worth creating another section on Slashdot which is purely Linux news? It wouldn't have any real effect on Slashdot, but it would provide a forum for the Linux news that doesn't make it on Slashdot. It also would be nice for those folks who don't care about geek humor, or the latest web CGI that slangifies a URL...

We can actually create a few of these systems, and many have been suggested lately. Several people asked for a section simply on Open Source Advocacy. We're already running Ask Slashdot in a seperate section now, is it worth doing a few more of these?

The way I see it, Slashdot will still feature the same content, but it can select it from these other sections as appropriate. Then I can make the BSD crowd happy as well as the Linux crowd. Eventually filters will be available for you to select your own mix of content. That'll be pretty excellent.

As for moderation, well, I wrote most of the moderation code yesterday. I'll start testing it with a small group of moderators some time next week. Don't email and ask for the job! The system is pretty cool. I think it's an excellent compromise of ideas that will prevent Moderator Abuse, won't take anyone a lot of time, and will allow everyone to determine how much they want to read. So if you don't want moderation, you'll just set your threshold really low, and you'll see everything just as you do now. I've got a general description of the system if you're interested in abit more details. Hopefully in the next week or 2 it'll be fully live.

I still haven't released Slash v0.3. I had some technical difficulties, so I wrote the moderation code while waiting for a test server to be usable. Still hasn't happened, so maybe I'll write some more Slash customization stuff next week :) Or maybe start planning for ALS.

Random Personal Aside #1:I installed and went through Gnome 0.3 lately. I find the panel stuff combined with Window Maker to be a quite nice combo. I just wish the .deb's for balsa, eeyes and the help stuff weren't randomly crashing. I also wish I had infinite bandwidth so I could just download the source. Oh, and infinite CPU and diskspace so I could compile and run these beasts. Gnome needs a better looking battery monitor, and my ePlus days are calling out to me.

Random Personal Aside #2: I saw Antz & Pi today. If people want a review of Antz, email and if there is some demand I'll write it. I also have to shoot a lot of film, finish a project for my design class, as well as write some code for an epoc32 this weekend for a class though, so it may fall off the bottom of the TODO.

THotze writes "After visiting Digital's recently Compaq-ized web page, I noticed the word 'Apache' VAGUELY written in one of the graphics. I click, and it got me here. It seems that shipping with Free Software's becoming a trend. Nice to know that they haven't brainwashed EVERY DEC employee with MS-ism yet." Ed Free Internet software ?= Free Software.

Jaime Cruz writes "OS/2 Netlabs has completed porting everyone's favorite graphics manipulation program to OS/2! As far as I know, this is the first port of Gimp to a non-Unix based operating system. For the full details, check here! " Also, Craig Setera wrote in to tell us that he has released binaries of his win32 port of the Gimp. This one still needs an X-Server and stuff, but its a good start.

incite wrote in to send us a link to an article on msnbc about Diamond's new MP3 Portable. The article is largely a 'what the heck is an mp3' sorta bit, but I'm happy to see another MP3 player coming around. It's only a matter of time before these things get cheap enough and powerful enough to be golden (200 megs of storage maybe?) Media is outdated. Everything should be online anyway.

We have a batch of strange stuff tonight kids. First Patrik Grip-Jansson wrote in to send us this story where you can read about frozen dog poop being used for DNA testing. Hell. It's friday. bluGill sent us a link to this page full of jpegs of messy equipment. I'm not sure why I'm posting it, except that its much more interesting than the Next story: Ed wrote in to send us a nice quick mirror of the Starr Report. Every site on the net has this as front page news, I guess the least I can do is post it as a quickie :) Finally rise wrote in to send us an entertaing cartoon featuring penguins.

Jason Coposky writes " This is a link to a new storage device from IBM. This will origionally be targeted at digital cameras, but will probably filter into other markets, such as laptops etc. "

Soh Kam Yung writes "IEEE Software has put out a call for articles on Linux to be published in the January issue of IEEE Software magazine. See the call for articles (at linux resources) for more information on what kind of materials they want. "

b.bum writes " This link leads to a site devoted to a programming contest where folks implement some particular thing in the fewest number of bytes. The current contest involves implementing the game of Pong. A number of submissions have done so in 142 to 150 bytes."

Tsk writes "A BeOS advocates has set up a page to send apple a petition for them to publicly release the specs of their Powerful G3 computers and of HFS+ their new file system. " With Steve at the helm over at apple, all I can say is Not Likely. But it would be cool.

Quite possibly, Good Omens or, as the subtitle reads The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch, is the funniest book I have ever read. The creation of the funniest British men since the spawning of Cleese and Palin, Neil Gaiman and Terry Prachett both make you laugh even that you forget to breath. But then again, how else should the world end? I tell you true, the Horsemen will come on Harleys... Click belong to read the full review. Both of these guys have long histories in the creative fields: Neil Gaiman has written other books, but is best known for his creation of one of the best comic book series ever written (er) The Sandman. The creative genius he evidences in that series is in full force in this as well.

Terry Prachett, the creator of the "Discworld" novels, writes in much the same vein. His ability to tell extremely dry jokes is often used in Egyptian mummification rituals.

So, the plot of the book is something along these lines: The End of the World is coming, but it is almost nothing like what you imagined it to be. Beyond that, it is almost impossible to quantify the story. But I think this text alone should convince you to buy the book:
"God does not play dice with the universe: he plays an ineffable game of his own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players, to being involved in an obscure and complex version of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a dealer who won't tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time."

You must buy this over at Amazon.

Quite possibly, Good Omens or, as the subtitle reads The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch, is the funniest book I have ever read. The creation of the funniest British men since the spawning of Cleese and Palin, Neil Gaiman and Terry Prachett both make you laugh even that you forget to breath. But then again, how else should the world end? I tell you true, the Horsemen will come on Harleys... Click belong to read the full review. Both of these guys have long histories in the creative fields: Neil Gaiman has written other books, but is best known for his creation of one of the best comic book series ever written (er) The Sandman. The creative genius he evidences in that series is in full force in this as well.

Terry Prachett, the creator of the "Discworld" novels, writes in much the same vein. His ability to tell extremely dry jokes is often used in Egyptian mummification rituals.

So, the plot of the book is something along these lines: The End of the World is coming, but it is almost nothing like what you imagined it to be. Beyond that, it is almost impossible to quantify the story. But I think this text alone should convince you to buy the book:
"God does not play dice with the universe: he plays an ineffable game of his own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players, to being involved in an obscure and complex version of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a dealer who won't tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time."

You must buy this over at Amazon.

maskatron writes "There's a new Scott Hacker article on BeOS & how they are positioning it as a niche OS for media related stuff. " I really dig Be. And I dig that its targetted towards the artsy folks, but that it still has quality under the hood for the more hardcore user. The OS of the future needs to have power for the hardcore, as well as appeal for the less-than-hardcore. That's why NeXT was cool. That's why Gnome or KDE could make Linux Cooler.

Amos Shapira wrote in to send us a link to OS Wars to cure Cystic Fibrosis. Put a few bucks behind the OS of your choice, make it look good, and do something good besides blowing it on Pizza and Beer *grin*. MacOS is leading with Linux a distant second.

Both TurboLinux and Stampede have announced new versions. Proof positive that Linux is growing and thriving. If the 'Big 3' don't do it for ya, give one of these a shot. Thanks to maskatron and Ola Hakansson for the links.

I've had several people send me this link to BeDope. It's a pretty funny site written from a primarily Be perspective. This week they have a comical article about Peta suing Apple for abusing the Snail in their G3 commercials. Well written and truly funny. Definately a rarity on the net. Thanks to Gordon Delp for sending this in.