Slashdot Mirror

Trizor asks: "Most cellular telephones these days are loaded with features: cameras, broadband quality video, Internet, etc. but there are still people who want to just make phone calls. So I ask Slashdot: Are there any World-Compatible GSM cellular telephones that don't offer much beyond calling and an address book?"

WillemdeMoor writes "Yahoo News runs a story on Jon Johansen, aka DVD Jon, cracking Google's in-browser video player. Addict3d.org has some more details, including links to Johansen's patch (Win32 executable) and Jon's blog entry at nanocrew.net."

visi writes "'Go_Open' is a 13-episode mainstream-aimed TV series about using open source software, funded by sources including South African entrepreneur and astronaut Mark Shuttleworth's foundation. It includes interviews with major open-source figures such as Richard Stallman, Lawrence Lessig, Jon 'maddog' Hall, and Bruce Perens, as well as case studies and discussions of both Shuttleworth's (Ubuntu Linux) and other South African and global projects that have successfully used open-source elements. Check out their site or download the series."

VincenzoRomano writes to point out that as of a few days ago, "Slackware Linux has its second revision of the Slackware Linux Essentials book. It is a major revision of the the reference book for Slackware users and is now an official Slackware project. Slackware Linux is the oldest and yet pretty active Linux distribution born from an idea by Patrick Volkerding and that turned 12 a few months ago. It follows the KISS(Keep it Simple, Stupid!) philosophy, which seems to be one of the reasons of its long life. The book itself has been created by David Cantrell, Logan Johnson and Chris Lumens and is available both in printed (dead-tree) form and in electronic form (HTML/DocBook/PS/PDF). Whether your are a Slackware aficionado or not, the book deserves a look at least!"

Menace writes "Every work day myself and a few other co-workers get 1 hour for lunch. We typically end up with about 20-30 minutes for some form of entertainment during our lunch hour. We are looking for some more multiplayer PC games that can give us a fun and thorough gaming experience in a 20-30 minute sitting. We currently play a few games such as Tetrinet and Warcraft 3: The Frozen Throne. Please keep in mind the systems we are able to play these on aren't geared for gaming and can hardly run WC3. What games do you play during your lunch hour, or can suggest that meet the specified criteria?"

nonlnear asks: "I'm about to finish a PhD in Mathematics and am starting to realize that I am not a big fan of my university's policy about inventions, patents, software, and the like. The gist of it is: you invent while working here => we own everything => we will patent everything. I am planning on a career in academia, but am very conflicted about this way of doing things. What Universities out there will allow me to publish (otherwise patentable) software under the GPL?"

gollum123 wrote to mention a BBC article which explains the low-hanging moon of the past few nights. From the article:"For the past few nights the moon has appeared larger than many people have seen it for almost 20 years. It is the world's largest optical illusion, and one of its most enduring mysteries. The mystery of the Moon Illusion, witnessed by millions of people this week, has puzzled great thinkers for centuries. There is still no agreed on explaination for why the moon appears bigger when it's on the horizon than when it's high in the night sky."

drtheman asks: "I have been working in the IT industry for the last 10 years, 7 of those as a UNIX system administrator. I have been noticing over the last year or two that companies are becoming very pedantic about specific skills that a UNIX sysadmin should have. Most troubling for myself is the so called multi-skilled UNIX/NT administrator. It's a given that any seasoned UNIX admin should have *some* Windows knowledge, and cross skilling is something that shouldn't be balked at. However, after coming from large enterprise environments, where the UNIX boys do the UNIX stuff and the NT guys do the Windows stuff, I just find it a little troubling that if I don't adapt with certifications in these platforms I may become unemployable. Do other enterprise admins think that this is too much for us to take on, and companies are just expecting more bang for their buck these days? I can understand that these multi-skilled people are needed in the smaller shops, but I would like to know how it would work effectively in larger ones."

loraksus asks: "We recently deployed Symantec AV Corporate version 10 across on our network and have been having nothing but problems. The new client breaks the MS Office install and causes machines to slow down significantly - some almost to the point of being completely unusable. The client (doscan.exe) also crashes very frequently (daily), and tends to take other things down with it. Symantec's 'workaround' is to drop by every workstation and insert the Office (or Wordperfect, it screws up both applications) CD, remove some office shortcuts and disable some virus scans. Since we manage clients over WAN links hundreds of miles away, this really isn't an option, nor is it an acceptable option given the number of workstations we manage. Are there any other admins dealing with this? Any advice? Solutions?" "It seems that more and more closed source companies are now rushing software out the door that not only has a couple bugs, but glaring errors that would have easily been caught in even the most basic testing. Of course, we in IT usually have no recourse against these companies other than never buying their products, again.

Do you folks have any advice when it comes to dealing vendors who release software that is unusuable and can't provide an acceptable resolution?"

Ninwa writes "According to the MIT news office the folks in their labs have really outdone themselves this time, they've created a new form of matter. The post states, 'They have become the first to create a new type of matter, a gas of atoms that shows high-temperature superfluidity.' It has been said that this could solve the mysteries in superconductivity."

TractorJector writes "Mad Penguin published a 5 page review of the Sonos Digital Music System, a wireless music distribution system built on Linux. According to the site, you can use a single remote to control up to 32 "zones" (locations throughout your house where the receivers are placed). The interface is intuitive and well done for such a compact device. According to the review, it's extremely simple to setup as well."

xyankee writes "Think Secret is reporting that developers have started taking receipt of Apple's Intel-based Mac kits. Along with some specs and photos, the site reports that Windows XP installs without a hitch on the systems and that casually trying to install Mac OS X for Intel on a Dell doesn't work... yet..."

droopus writes "Most of you have heard about the Microsoft researchers' Darknet paper a couple of years back, which shoveled dirt onto the coffin of DRM as a business model. Well, now along comes a tech journalist to marshall the arguments in that paper as the basis for a new book. I wasn't sure what to expect from a book titled Darknet (a riff on the shortcomings of digital rights management? an ode to encrypted networks?), but the subtitle was a good tipoff: 'Hollywood's war against the digital generation.'" Read on for droopus' review. Darknet: Hollywood's War Against the Digital Generation author J.D Lasica pages 301 publisher John Wiley and Sons rating 8 reviewer Droopus ISBN 0471683345 summary A well written treatise on DRM and Hollywoods war against digital media

War ain't pretty, and this book delivers the goods as a primer on how digital technologies and "personal media" (podcasts, videoblogs, digital stories, Internet television, video games) are "throwing the old rules into disarray" and "shifting the balance of power begween big media and regular people." I would have liked to have seen more about Linux and open-source software, but the author is clearly aiming for a mainstream audience.

Darknet sounds at times like it could have been written by a team of Slashdotters, ripping to shreds the entertainment cartel's claims that the locks they're putting into our digital devices are for our own good, their claims that this is a fight about theft and piracy, and other distortions that the author exposes to devastating effect. (Larry Lessig, Ian Clarke, the president of Sony's Columbia TriStar studios, DVD inventor Warren Lieberfarb and a number of digital lawbreakers are just a few of the interesting characters parading through the book.)

While big thinkers like Lessig, Doc Searls and Howard Rheingold (who wrote the foreword) have constructed the intellectual scaffolding that alerted us to Hollywood's goals of fencing in the Internet and keeping the public domain from expanding, it is left to reporters like Lasica to uncover the depressing specifics of the copyright cartel's actions.

Fascinating stories abound, like the cross-industry meetings between Hollywood lawyers, gutless wonders from the consumer electronics industry, and reps from the tech sector discussing how to divide the world into region codes like the powers at Potsdam. (one studio went so far as to propose that GPS chips be placed in all computers with a DVD player so that Hollywood could enforce region coding from the sky. It's reported here for the first time.)

Or the story of what Hollywood was after in its litigation against Sonicblue's ReplayTV. According to former CTO Andy Wolfe, the studioswere intent on decreeing how long viewers could keep a program after it was recorded on a digital video recorder. They wanted to limit how many episodes of the same show viewers could record. They wanted to ban 30-sec skip buttons and to prevent fast forward from reaching a certain speed. They wanted to cap how much programming anyone could record -- a level that Wolfe's personal laptop already exceeds.

The tech industry comes in for some bruising too, as the author demonstrates how Microsoft, HP, and a raft of other tech companies are more than willing to sell out their customers (as long as all the other big boys in the club do it too) in return for allaying the fears of paranoid Hollywood studio chieftains whose nightmares consist of piracy, piracy, piracy. Lasica says it's too early to tell whether the "trusted computing" initiative is merely a Trojan horse foisted on PC manufacturers and chip makers by the silver tongue of Jack Valenti.

Anyone with an interest in how our digital freedoms are being whittled away, how the music, movie and television landscapes are about to change forever, or how a new, empowered generation of users (mostly young people) see media differently than the older crowd, would benefit from marking up their copy of Darknet (bring two yellow markers). As the author Media will change more in the next five years than it has in the past 50 years."

Lasica has been writing about citizens' media for years, and he recently founded the grassroots media site Ourmedia.org with the help of the Internet Archive. (Remember when Slashdot brought down the site on its first day?) Last weekend I heard him interviewed on NPR's On the Media, talking about why the RIAA and MPAA don't have a clue in hell about remix culture.

But don't believe me. Decide for yourselves. Check out Darknet.com, where the author has been blogging for a couple of years. (His blog readers provided the book's subtitle and they helped edit the book.) Lots of goodies on the site: a free mini-book, including new material and chapters from the book. (Especially noteworthy are The teenage filmmakers for a look at copyright law's absurdities and The Prince of Darknet for a fascinating glimpse inside the movie underground.) Also, you'll find a backgrounder on what the hell darknetshave to do with all this (I don't know, Darknet seems like a book publisher's idea of a sexy title) ... and something I've never seen from a mainstream journalist before: tons of links to sites like doom9.net, SmartRipper, Region-Free Guide, Total Recorder, Daemon Tools, isoheaven and more.

Some of this turf is no doubt familiar to Slashdotters. And, as I said, the book could have benefited from a deeper look at the history of open source software. But it's good to see these ideas getting some serious play -- finally -- in the mainstream media, and Hollywood getting some much-needed pushback.

You can purchase Darknet: Hollywood's War Against the Digital Generation from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

ubermiester writes "The LA Times pulled down it's "beta" wikitorial after people began inserting obscene content faster than the editors could remove it. Though there is nothing on the LA Times editorial page or in the general coverage, the NY Times notes (free reg req) the fact that the bulk of the vandalism occurred after a posting about the wikitorial appeared on Slashdot and goes on to quote a member of the LA Times editorial staff as saying, "Slashdot has a tech-savvy audience that, to be kind, is mischievous and to be not so kind, is malicious". " Apparently Michael Newman thinks that all half a million daily Slashdot readers are malicious, although I personally would guess more like a 60:40 split myself *grin*.

Chromain writes "Back in 1996, the Seattle-based company Starwave created one of the first graphical MMOGs: Castle Infinity. Though it was well received by all who tried it, it quickly sank under bad marketing, extended downtime, and sloppy leadership. Now, nearly 8 years since disappearing off the map, the game has been (quite literally) rescued from a dumpster by a group of past players. It's available for free at their new website."

mramsundar writes "Here is an interesting link that shows how to convert your laptop into something called as walltop. A number of these walltops, when connected, can host a slideshow that can show digitized images."

Azazel writes "A research group, including Purdue University physicist Ephraim Fischbach, has completed an experiment which shows that gravity behaves exactly as Isaac Newton predicted, even at small scales. Unfortunately for those in search of the so-called "Theory of Everything," the finding would seem to rule out the exceptions to his time-honored theories that physicists believe might occur when objects are tiny enough."

AnKsT wrote to mention an article on NASA's site about creating and manipulating glass in space. From the article: "In microgravity...you don't need a container. In Day's initial experiments, the melt--a molten droplet about 1/4 inch in diameter--was held in place inside a hot furnace simply by the pressure of sound waves emitted by an acoustic levitator. With that acoustic levitator, explains Day, 'we could melt and cool and melt and cool a molten droplet without letting it touch anything.' As Day had hoped, containerless processing produced a better glass. To his surprise, though, the glass was of even higher quality than theory had predicted."

brs165 writes "Being a newly minted geek father as of 4 months ago, I've thought about problems I've never had reason to consider before. One issue which I'd like to hear from the ./ crowd is introducing technology to their children. What got me thinking about this was a blog post about 'Nature-Deficit Disorder', and I think it brings up some good points. I grew up playing in the local woods and creek with minimal tech until our first computer when I was 13. I hear stories from coworkers how some of their kids/grandkids hating going outside because it is boring and they'd rather stay indoors. Should I avoid introducing them to technology until absolutely neccessary, or is it a matter of achieving a balance?"

Ahkorishaan writes "We heard from an earlier report here on Slashdot that IBM(Lenovo) had filed a patent on a TabletPC, and now they have officially announced the product. Our friends at Laptop Logic have a short review."

Anonymous Coward writes "A new fan-made Star Wars production is underway from the creators of the well-known 1997 Star Wars spoof 'Troops'. I.M.P.S. - The Relentless is a documentary style feature following the crew and missions of an Imperial Star Destroyer during the height of the Galactic Empire. While slightly more serious than Troops, the first available chapter of I.M.P.S is an exceptionally well-produced (and still subtly humorous) piece of fanfilm. Worth it for the incredible CGI alone."

budgenator writes "Seems that Waldo, a robot that delivers medication from the pharmacy to the nurses stations, went on an extracurricular journey at San Francisco's UCSF Medical Center last Tuesday. Waldo entered uninvited into a radiation oncology examination room disturbing a Doctor and Patient enough that it caused them to flee the room. Is navigating a hospital full of moving humans more difficult than navigating the DARPA grand challenge, or could it be that like his sibling robort Elvis, he just wanted to leave the building?"

slummy writes " JS/UIX 'is an UNIX-like OS for standard web-browsers, written entirely in JavaScript (no plug-ins used). It comprises a virtual machine, shell, virtual file-system, process-management, and brings its own terminal with screen- and keyboard-mapping.' If only you didn't need an OS to run the web browser on."

Paul Stamatiou writes "A few students from the Georgia Institute of Technology have created the first computer modifications wiki-style website, TheModWiki.org. It includes an extensive mod words glossary, links to other great modding resources, and many pc modification How-To guides and project logs. "This website was created by a few college students at the Georgia Institute of Technology that were fed up with having to scour the internet for the pc modding information they needed to help them with their own mods." TheModWiki.org is planning on reviewing many items from PC parts manufacturers and having several monthly contests with free giveaways."

DeeryQueen asks: "I enjoy reading both regular/text novels and Japanese graphic novels (manga), but while there are a few magazines serializing manga (a few hundred pages each month, consisting of a chapter each from many different graphic novels) with which I am familiar (such as Shonen Jump and Shojo Beat), I don't know where to start looking for US magazines which serialize text novels using this formula. I read all genres. Any recommendations?"

treff89 writes "Debian GNU/Linux (Sarge) has now been released in an AMD64 variant. It has been declared stable. While updates will not be as regular as the popular x86 Debian, it's great to know that the newer processors are in the picture. Find out more here: http://distrowatch.com/2717 ; Release notes can be found here: http://amd64.debian.net/docs/release-notes/amd64/r elease-notes/"

IronicGrin writes "Even hard-core House of Mouse apologists have to admit that Disney's Feature Animation division has lost its way. After a half decade of pathetic failures (Atlantis) and epic disasters (Treasure Planet), the company shut its fabled Orlando 2D animation studios last year and announced that it was jumping on the computer animation bandwagon. A big motivation for the move to CGI was, of course, the Magic Kingdom's tenuous relationship with Pixar--the source of all of Disney's recent animated hits. But Disney is overlooking a better example of just what its toon team has been doing wrong...right under its nose. Howl's Moving Castle, which opened this weekend to rapturous critical acclaim, is the third masterpiece from Japan's Studio Ghibli that Disney has released theatrically. Today's New York Times has a feature by A.O. Scott [reg required, blah blah] calling Miyazaki the "world's greatest living animated-filmmaker"; meanwhile, last Thursday, I wrote a column for SFGate.com on why Disney animation, 3D rendered or not, is doomed to irrelevance if it fails to (re)learn some basic lessons from Miyazaki and his cohorts at Ghibli. What do you think? Is Disney destined to fade to black, or can a little Ghibli flavor (mmm....Ghibli) get it back on track?"

Costa Galanis writes "The LA Times is reporting that a poker tournament will be held where engineers will be able to pit their automatic poker-playing programs against each other in a tournament similar to the upcoming World Series of Poker main event, with a 100,000 dollar cash prize for the winning program. The article mentions how the recent rise in popularity of poker has encouraged many to try and create the poker equivalent of chess' Big Blue, the chess playing computer program that defeated the world's top chess player in a widely publicized event, and also talks about how many engineers also are trying to make bots that are good enough to play and beat human players for money in online casinos."

ThJ writes "The iRiver iFP-899 at $179.99 is a portable (8.9 x 3.6 x 2.7 cm), lightweight (75 grams w/battery) solid state music player. With a capacity of 1 GB, it can store ~170 songs at 6 MB each. The iFP-899 features MP3, WMA and OGG support, an FM tuner and a 3-way (line/mic-in, internal mic, FM tuner) MP3 recorder. After purchasing one for myself and using it for a few days, I thought it would be a good idea to give it a brief review. There are plenty of screenshots. Go ahead and enjoy!" Note: this review has some words of caution for those who'd like it to play Ogg Vorbis files, but forewarned is forearmed.

loekf writes "After the story about NTP suing Research In Motion over alleged patent infringement (do your homework, U.S. Patent Office!), there's another story on The Inquirer about a U.S. firm, Antor Media, suing a lot of companies over a 'Method and apparatus for transmitting information recorded on information storage means from a central server to subscribers via a high data rate digital telecommunications network,' see: U.S. Patent 5,734,961. When does the hurting stop!?"

astroboy writes "As graphics cards get more powerful, Los Alamos and Utah scientists have developed a package, Scout, to use those usually-languishing FLOPs to do simulations, and to visualize of them on the on the run. As an example, they have released movie of part of the evolution of a core-collapse supernovae"

Xcott Craver writes "We have just announced a new annual contest, the Underhanded C Contest, to write clear, readable, innocent-looking C code that implements malicious behavior. The object is to hide evil functionality that survives visual inspection of the source. The prize is beer."

joshdick writes "In an editorial today, the NYTimes comes out strongly in favor of a paper trail for all elections, supporting a recent lobbying effort by Common Cause and the Electronic Frontier Foundation to pass H.R. 550. 'Electronic voting has been rolled out nationwide without necessary safeguards. The machines' computers can be programmed to steal votes from one candidate and give them to another. There are also many ways hackers can break in to tamper with the count. Polls show that many Americans do not trust electronic voting in its current form; such doubts are a serious problem in a democracy.'"

docdude316 writes "CNET is running a story about Microsoft's new photo editing software, Acrylic. The new program is based on Expression, which Microsoft purchased in 2003. From the article: 'Microsoft describes the software--currently available as a 77MB free download--as bringing together pixel-based painting and vector graphics features. These capabilities will put the product squarely in the market currently dominated by software maker Adobe Systems with its pixel-focused Photoshop and vector-driven Illustrator products. Acrylic appears to support opening and exporting to Photoshop and Illustrator file formats, as well as other standard graphics formats. In addition, the application appears to be able to export to Adobe's Portable Document Format, or PDF.'

mikey writes "There's an online documentary called Planet of the Doctor about the influence of Doctor Who. It's put out by the CBC and it's got some decent interviews with original producers, writers, and cast as well as fans and others. So far, it's been very entertaining and informative. They've got four episodes out with another couple to come. If you're a Doctor Who fan (or even a generic Sci-Fi fan) it's worth checking out."

ninjee writes "The New York Stock Exchange is re-examining its network after it was forced to close four minutes early at 3:56pm on Wednesday (1 June) because of a communications glitch. Trading opened on time (09:30 EDT) the following morning but the outage irked traders and raised questions about the reliability of a network described as 'ultra reliable' following improvements made in the wake the September 11 terrorist attacks. The outage stemmed from a fault in a system designed to distribute market data and operate computer trading systems. NYSE Chief Executive John Thain said that both the main system and its backup were swamped with error messages, Reuters reports. He added that the exchange would carry out remedial work designed to prevent any repetition of the problem."

ninjee writes "Microsoft reiterated plans to launch its own Windows-based 'hypervisor' software for running multiple operating systems. Bob Muglia, senior vice president in the Windows Server Division, said on Tuesday that the software will be 'built directly in Windows and will allow companies to virtualize multiple operating systems.' "

acreman writes "Monty Python's SPAMalot, a musical lovingly ripped off from the movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail, won 3 of the 14 Tony Awards it was nominated for. The 3 awards given out were for Best Performance by a Featured Actress in a Musical (Sara Ramirez), Best Direction of a Musical (Mike Nichols), and Best Musical. "

J.P. Duke asks: "There is an excellent research article published by the Mayo Clinic in the J Ortho Sci that compares two common software-based approaches in analyzing scanned protein gels. Among other conclusions, they found that the two most popular applications for this research had different tendencies in quantifying proteins -- and that differences in AI algorithms show clearly different results for proteins that are less-separated on gels. This implies that much major scientific research that depends on these tools might be suspect to flaws very early in analysis. Being a cancer researcher at a large research institution, much of my work depends on software being able to accurately analyze scanned images of protein gels in which proteins are simply displayed as spots on the gel. Among other things, the software needs to be able to precisely calculate the density of protein in a spot as well as the number of actual proteins contained in a spot. What we choose to investigate further as potential biomarkers for cancer depends heavily on the ability of the AI built into these applications." Exactly how far has image-based AI improved in the last several years? Might some of those improvements help someone in J.P.'s situation? "My questions for Slashdot are as follows:

• Overall, how good has research image software AI become in recent years? Have there been any key software or mathematical breakthroughs that have substantially increased the 'intelligence' of software? How far along is this technology?
  
  
• Based on your knowledge of software, what are some things researchers can do to help the software better do its job? For example, using a high quality scanner at higher resolutions generally helps results. What other things can be done to promote better results?
  
  
• Finally, all applications that I know of in this area are expensive commercial solutions. As the companies that produce the applications are for-profit, the algorithms and technology used are completely closed and proprietary. Thus it is hard to understand what the software is really doing. Does anybody know of any open source (or at least 'open algorithm') solutions? Even if they are inferior at this point in time, being able to clearly understand what the AI is doing makes us better off in several ways.

Thank you all for your help, it is greatly appreciated."

Ninwa writes "Google has launched Google Sitemaps. It seems to be a service that allows webmasters to define how often their sites' content is going to change, to give Google a better idea of what to index. It uses some basic XML as the method of submitting a sitemap. More information on the protocol is available in an FAQ. What's most interesting is that Google is licensing the idea under the Attribution/Share Alike Creative Commons license. According to the Google Blog, this is being done '...so that other search engines can do a better job as well. Eventually we hope this will be supported natively in webservers (e.g. Apache, Lotus Notes, IIS).' They even offer an open source client in Python."

Ben Ostrowsky writes "On the heels of the possibility of requiring fingerprinting to use library resources, librarians don't like hoarding personally identifiable information; many are keenly aware of privacy concerns. Now it appears that anonymous library cards may be a possibility on the horizon. Tell your librarian you want to be anonymous!" From the article: " You've seen anonymous cash cards already; you may even have received them before. They're better known as gift cards. Using the same principle, libraries can issue a borrower card that uses cash, rather than personal ID information, as collateral. Here's an example: If a privacy-minded user deposits $20 to get an anonymous library card, she can check out The Terror State without identifying herself. Her account balance is temporarily reduced by $15, and when the library checks the CD back in (in good condition), her balance is restored to its original value."

ninjee writes "Historians working in Germany and the US claim to have found a 60-year-old diagram showing a Nazi nuclear bomb. It is the only known drawing of a "nuke" made by Nazi experts and appears in a report held by a private archive. The researchers who brought it to light say the drawing is a rough schematic and does not imply the Nazis built, or were close to building, an atomic bomb. But a detail in the report hints some Nazi scientists may have been closer to that goal than was previously believed. The report containing the diagram is undated, but the researchers claim the evidence points to it being produced immediately after the end of the war in Europe. It deals with the work of German nuclear scientists during the war and lacks a title page, so there is no evidence of who composed it. One historian behind the discovery, Rainer Karlsch, caused a storm of controversy earlier this year when he claimed to have uncovered evidence the Nazis successfully tested a primitive nuclear device in the last days of WWII. A number of historians rejected the claim. The drawing is published in an article written for Physics World magazine by Karlsch and Mark Walker, professor of history at Union College in Schenectady, US."

magic_user writes "Now that Mattel's JuiceBox can be had for $12 (Target, WalMart), this seems like a perfect toy for hackers. I've found a picture frame hack but what I'm really looking for is a way to play my own videos on it. It runs uclinux so this shouldn't be too hard, right? "

Cros13 writes "Google has released a beta of it's Google Earth software to subscribers of the existing Keyhole service. New features include 3D models of buildings in selected cities, input from your gps receiver and a better search system. I have posted screenshots here and here." This product is in competition with Microsoft's Virtual Earth, as we reported earlier.

JJ Budion writes "If you've signed up for an account on Wikipedia.org, you may want to check this page to make sure you're not on there. It seems certain users with identical password hashes can find other user names with the same password, and Wikipedia (despite being alerted) has done nothing about the problem for the last year. A good (although slightly inflammatory) description of the problem can be found here. This is probably a good occasion to remember to use strong passwords (apparently only users with common passwords, like dictionary words, are affected)."

Jon_Aquino writes "For programmers like me with wrist pain (the dreaded Emacs Pinky syndrome), I have made a simple keyboard modification that lets you press the Ctrl, Alt, and Shift keys with your thumbs. Just like those expensive $240 Kinesis keyboards, but made using a $30 K'nex building toy. (K'nex is like Lego but uses rods instead of bricks)."

Sabah Arif writes "Netscape was there at the beginning of the internet boom. In 1996, the company controlled 90 percent of the browser market, but now its usershare is in the single digits. The spawn of Netscape, Firefox, has never been more popular, and is poised to beat Microsoft in the browser market. Read the history of Netscape and Mozilla at MLAgazine."

DigitalRaptor asks: "I live in a small city with about 4 or 5 computer stores, most of whom I know personally. None of these stores offer Open Source software on the computers they sell (Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice, etc), and none of them have anything in place to educate their customers about spyware and viruses. I'd like to approach them with all of the relevant information in a presentable format. I think this would be a great way to spread OSS and to help the average consumer at the same time. Is there a project out there for this purpose that local advocates could use to approach computer stores in their town?"

tfsm writes "Andy Singleton wrote a short, interesting article about the looming death of traditionally licensed, proprietary, enterprise software over at The IT Manager's Journal. In it, he talks about the declining revenues of software giants such as Siebel. There are several causes, but one, he suggests, is erosion from Open Source offerings."

gollum123 writes "Time magazine on Monday published its list of 100 all-time favorite movies ranging from Charlie Chaplin's "City Lights" (1931) to Steven Spielberg's "Schindler's List" (1993) and 2003 computer-animated hit "Finding Nemo." But critics Richard Schickel and Richard Corliss snubbed several classics such as 1939's "Gone with the Wind". Almost half of the films were made outside the United States. Here is the full list."