Slashdot Mirror

Toren Altair writes "NASA has assigned the crew for the last scheduled space shuttle mission, targeted to launch in September 2010. The flight to the International Space Station will carry a pressurized logistics module to the station. Veteran shuttle commander and retired Air Force Col. Steven W. Lindsey will command the eight-day mission, designated STS-133. Air Force Col. Eric A. Boe will serve as the pilot; it will be his second flight as a shuttle pilot. Mission Specialists are shuttle mission veteran Air Force Col. Benjamin Alvin Drew, Jr., and long-duration spaceflight veterans Michael R. Barratt, Army Col. Timothy L. Kopra and Nicole P. Stott." Reader Al points out other NASA news that the space agency's engineers have been testing a sleek new lunar rover that will be part of their eventual return to the moon. A video of the rover in action has been posted as well.

Dr. Hok writes "As more and more renewable energy enters the grid, it gets increasingly difficult to match supply and demand 24/7. The answer of German power company Lichtblick and Volkswagen is a swarm of 100,000 flexible base-load generators. These fridge-sized CHP (Combined Heat and Power) generators that will be installed in people's basements in Hamburg starting early next year will feed electricity into the grid and the waste heat into their home's water/heating. The "ZuhauseKraftwerk" (HomePowerPlant) features a vanilla VW Golf natural-gas engine that generates 20kW electrical and 34 kW heat with an efficiency of 92%. The units are remotely controlled via a mobile network or DSL; they can ramp up in a minute if needed. A water tank ensures that heat is continuously available, while electricity is produced on demand. The swarm will replace two nuclear plants, they say. And your old oil heating needed replacement anyway."

schlangemann writes "Check out the paper Towards the Simulation of E-commerce by Herbert Schlangemann, which is available in the IEEEXplor database (full article available only to IEEE members). This generated paper has been accepted with review by the 2008 International Conference on Computer Science and Software Engineering (CSSE). According to the organizers, 'CSSE is one of the important conferences sponsored by IEEE Computer Society, which serves as a forum for scientists and engineers in the latest development of artificial intelligence, grid computing, computer graphics, database technology, and software engineering.' Even better, fake author Herbert Schlangemann has been selected as session chair (PDF) for that conference. (The name Schlangemann was chosen based on the short film Der Schlangemann by Andreas Hansson and Björn Renberg.)"

CWmike writes "Confirming recent comments by Microsoft's Steve Ballmer, an independent report released Friday found that OpenOffice.org's free office suite is five times more popular than Google Docs. This was according to a survey of 2,400 adult Internet users conducted between May and November. Microsoft's share was 10 times that of OpenOffice.org. Microsoft hopes to cement that lead with its upcoming Office Web, as well as online versions of its Exchange and SharePoint products to be announced on Monday. OpenOffice.org may provide some resistance, however. The latest version, OpenOffice.org 3.0, had a strong first week in October, with more than 3 million downloads. After one month, OpenOffice.org 3.0 had been downloaded 10 million times." And reader Peter Toi informs us of the open source release of yet another office suite, Softmaker Office. Its claimed advantages are its compactness and speed (making it suitable for netbooks), its excellent MS Office filters, and the fact that it can be installed to USB flash drives.

Toren Altair sends us this excerpt: "Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX) conducted the first nine engine firing of its Falcon 9 launch vehicle at its Texas Test Facility outside McGregor on July 31st. A second firing on August 1st completed a major NASA Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) milestone almost two months early. At full power, the nine engines consumed 3,200 lbs of fuel and liquid oxygen per second, and generated almost 850,000 pounds of force — four times the maximum thrust of a 747 aircraft. This marks the first firing of a Falcon 9 first stage with its full complement of nine Merlin 1C engines. Once a near term Merlin 1C fuel pump upgrade is complete, the sea level thrust will increase to 950,000 lbf, making Falcon 9 the most powerful single core vehicle in the United States. The Falcon 9 will launch SpaceX's spaceship Dragon with up to 7 humans from 2009 on." We discussed SpaceX when it won the NASA competition to provide low cost commercial transport to the ISS, and also when it launched an earlier design. Basic specs for Falcon 9 are available, as well as a more technical paper (PDF).

gmueckl writes "Since Blender was released as open source in 2002, it has basically owned the open source 3D modeling scene. Its development has seen a massive push by both the community and supporting organizations. However, the program has been showing its age all along and efforts to improve on it have either been blocked or have failed in the past (note the dates). Authors of new modules are forced to jump through hoops to get their work glued onto the basic core, which still dates from the early 90s and has gone almost unchanged since. There are many other active projects out there like Art of illusion, K-3D, and Moonlight|3D. Each of them offers a modern, much saner, more coherent, and more powerful basic architecture and could match Blender in a couple of months' time with some extra manpower. So how come these projects don't get the level of support they deserve? How come developers are still willing to put up with such an arcane code base?"

Agh writes "German company SerNet (founded amongst others by Samba-Team member Volker Lendecke) has a portal for precompiled packages for Suse's and RedHat's Enterprise Distributions (x86 32 and 64bit, s390, and zSeries) as well as Debian sarge and woody: http://www.enterprisesamba.com/ (Heise story here: http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/57389) Offered is always the newest stable version of Samba (currently 3.0.11)."

UlfJack wonders: "I've been thinking about donating money, especially to organizations like Plan USA, who are doing what they can to help people in Third World countries. However I found it very difficult to check the authenticity of these organizations, so I'm trying to cross-check multiple independent sources. Has anyone figured out an easy way to do this?"

McWizard asks: "We've recently had a code split at a project I'm leading. (No name given, as this is a question, not an advertisement campaign). While both projects have done some major design decisions in opposing directions, we've been keeping a close eye on the changelog of the spinoff for small changes that could be used. So, whenever we've found an interesting piece of code (mostly GUI stuff, nothing longer than 20 lines of code), we transferred it to our project and gave credit to the spinoff team in the changelog. What does Slashdot say on that matter? Is this unethical or are such things fair game?" "Yesterday, I was contacted by the leader of the spinoff project who told me that he's quiet angry at us for doing that and that it's considered unethical and rude to copy code from the spinoff. As both projects are under the GPL, we have an opposing opinion on that matter and we've more than once invited him to copy code from our project. Nevertheless he's thinking about obfuscating his changelog and only open the source as packages when he's doing a release, which is, as he says, his right under the GPL."

Simone Klassen writes "The Hardened-PHP Project has announced several serious and according to them, easy-to-exploit vulnerabilities within PHP. A flaw within the function unserialize() is rated as very critical for millions of PHP servers, because it is exposed to remote attackers through lots of very popular webapplications. The list includes forum software like phpBB2, WBB2, Invision Board and vBulletin. It is time to upgrade now."

wyrfel asks: "I'm going to build a router & switch based on LRP on the software side and on a FIC PA-2005 with Pentium 200 on the hardware side. Having read some discussions and wanting to make the system as quiet as possible I've remove everything except the floppy (which will be removed once the system is up an running), CPU and RAM from the board, lowered the boards speed from 66MHz to 50MHz which brought down CPU speed to 150MHz, did cut of the power supplys fan and lowered voltage of the CPU fan to 5V instead of 12V. So far everything seems to work fine. The power supply gets a bit warm on the top but it seems to be ok. I didn't add any PCI / ISA cards yet, so I wonder if doing so would bring problems through higher power consumption. What I really worry about is the heatsink that is placed directly beneath the CPU heatsink and that gets a bit hot when running the CPU fan with 5V. With 12V it's fine because of the extra airflow that comes from the fan located near that heatsink. BTW it is attached to some tiny piece labelled 'LINFINITY LX8382A'. Can someone tell me if I have to worry about it becoming too hot and if so what means 'too hot'? Any hints or further suggestions?"

skagin asks: "Yahoo has instituted a new set of anti-spam policies which are causing havoc for our customers (we're a small ISP). List mail with non-existant, over-quota, or recently cancelled recipients is being bounced whole, and much of the one-to-one mail we send is bouncing. Yahoo tells us that our mailserver is being treated as suspicious because of the number of bad recipients being sent to, but most of those are bounces from yahoo spam sent to non-existant addresses on our network. Our customers are going nuts. Is anyone else out there having this problem with Yahoo?"

Jugalator writes: "AMD announces it has built a CMOS transistor with the highest switching speed in the semiconductor history. The transistors are manufactured with .015 micron technology and allows a twenty-fold increase in transistors per chip with a ten-fold increase in performance when compared to the transistors in use today. So far, AMD has only produced a prototype and a larger scale production is not planned for until 2009 at earliest. AMD will announce further information regarding their research in the semiconductor field at the 2001 International Electron Devices Meeting today, December 4." schongo sent in a note about IBM's double-gate transistor. This and the Intel announcement recently are all related to the International Electron Devices Meeting.

As a bit of a follow-up to our previous discussion on wireless broadband options, Linxx asks: "I work for a company in Yuma, Arizona that offers Wireless Internet access. We cover a large area that extends into Southern California as well as Mexico. We currently use 2.4ghz equipment to do this. We are looking into using 5.7ghz equipment to feed our access points and the rebroadcast at at 2.4ghz. We hope to releive some interferance issues. What I want to know is if anyone has actually compared the two, and if so what kind of results were produced."

seletz writes: "According to this article on The Register, Apple will ship its next-generation PowerMacs with USB 2.0 and double FireWire. USB 2.0 boosts data transfer up to 480Mbps, FireWire 1394b goes up to 3.2Gbps." It may seem a minor point, but the more and faster connections are built in, the less frequently the upgrade gremlins have to strike. 3.2Gbps!

JournalistGuy writes: "The Independent wrote today about firms moving their hardware underground into a cold war nuclear bunker. Apparently they're worried about theft by criminals and attacks from anarchists." I wonder what's now become of the U.S.'s Y2K command center -- wish that would go on Ebay. One of those abandoned missile silos would make a nice hosting site, too.

Hanul asks this decent question: "I tried NEXTSTEP (3.3/PA-RISC) for the first time a few days ago. I think it still looks great compared to other GUIs and configuration is very easy. While I was surfing the Web with a 4-year old browser, OmniWeb 2.7, I experienced something unsatisfying: No Java, no JavaScript, no Plugins, nothing a surfer needs today. There are a lot of sites which state plainly: no access, your browser is too old. I wonder why the OS where the WWW was invented on by Tim Berners-Lee has no current browser. I know NeXT doesn't exist anymore and there is no (official) support for NEXTSTEP from Apple. But there a lot of obscure OS with decent browsers (AmigaOS, RISCOS) and it seems that every UNIX flavor in the world has one port of Mozilla except for NEXTSTEP. Of course it has no X (natively) and no current Java available, but I expected more geeks out there (with some respect to history) who are willing to give NEXTSTEP an up-to-date browser."

Thanks to all of the fine folks who contributed these updates, you are in for another illuminating, invigorating, inspiring round of fruity nuggets picked from the tree of wisdom, irradiated, waxed, polished, chilled, packaged and shipped (metaphorically) to your browser. Swallow two of these a week, call if symptoms recur.

Who needs an atmosphere? Xibalba writes "As a follow up story to the orbiting Web server, NASA already has an ftp server installed on UoSat-12 and has been sucessfully transferring images for the past week." Soon there should be no shortage of IP-addressable tin cans floating around space.

World domination, increment 00000003707391: xaniamud writes "NVidia have released version 0.93 of their OpenGL XFree86 drivers, check it out." Hopefully, nVidia is interested enough in selling video cards to the faithful to wipe it's nose clean of GPL violations, too.

This time, let's help DivX succeed ... Mike Hicks writes "An update to a previous story. FlashingYellow has combined with OpenCodex, and they now have a $10,000 prize along with an iMac DV for the first individual or group to produce an open source DivX ;-) plugin for Quicktime." Added to which, I will supply the second individual or group with a letterboxed DVD of Carlito's Way, Heat or The Godfather.

You may already be a winner! You may recall that Dr. Günter Bechly recently offered a $3000 incentive to the developers of KDE if the license under which KDE is released were amended such that it could be distributed with Debian's main (free) distribution.

Dr. Bechly has now withdrawn the offer, for the reasons he outlines below. He writes:

"Hello, I just wanted to let everybody know that KDE did not bother to send an official answer to my offer of a donation of $3000 in case that they fix their licence problems that currently prohibits an inclusion of KDE in Debian GNU/Linux. Just two people of the KDE camp answered at all, and both basically said that the licence change is impossible to do since there is too much code of third parties (including those who sent patches) involved who can hardly be traced. This is quite interesting, since in the past most KDE representatives claimed that the licence issue is moot since the requested exception clause in the licence is implicitly given due to the fact that the KDE programmers coded KDE-software for the QT-toolkit. Now they admit that they use a lot of GPL'ed code of non-KDE programmers which have never given such an implicit permission to link their GPL'ed code to QPL'ed libraries.

Just as a reminder: The issue is not how to use KDE with Debian (e.g. by adding the link site to apt-sources), but how to legally include KDE as free software in Debian main. The issue is also neither that KDE is indeed free software nor that QT is indeed free software, but the issue is that the two involved free licences (GPL versus QPL) are mutually incompatible, which makes any distribution of binaries of GPL'ed software that is linked to QT simply illegal! The KDE project obviously does not care at all that it violates the GPL licence of other peoples code. This is not only rude behaviour but simply unacceptable. I hoped that my offer would help to solve the problem, but the reaction or rather the non-reaction of KDE shows that this attempt failed, just like any other attempts to solve this issue before. Apparently KDE and the distributions that include KDE are relying on the mean consideration that private authors of free software will not take the finacial risk to sue them for their licence violation. Maybe the only hope for the final solution of the problem could be that one of these authors proves this consideration to be ill-founded!

Allegations that Debian is just using the licence issue as camouflage for their general dislike of KDE are absolutely unwarranted, since I got only very positive responses from the Debian camp including the Debian leadership. There is no doubt that Debian would happily include KDE as soon as the licence problems are solved. Anyway, it does not look like that is ever going to happen. KDE unfortunately has a long tradition in violating the free software spirit:

1.) It was founded by Matthias Ettrich who developed the very fine program Lyx, but then used the non-free toolkit xforms for its GUI, instead of e.g. using a free alternative like TCL/TK.

2.) When the KDE project was started, it was built on a non-free toolkit, too, since QT1.x was not under QPL or any other free (open source) licence. KDE attempted from the very beginning to become the standard desktop of Linux by using a non-free toolkit. They could not know that QT would later be forced by the outcry in free software community and the attempt to develop a free replacement (Harmony) to release QT2.x under an open source licence (which unfortunately is still not compatabile with GPL).

3.) When the free QT replacement Harmony was still in development (it achieved a rather advanced state!) the KDE project refused to agree to switch to this toolkit in the future and they even announced that they will incorporate any useful new features of future versions of QT, which made it impossible for Harmony to ever reach compatability.

4.) KDE had no problems in the change of the licence of kisdn, which was developed under GPL, and as soon as it was accomplished was transformed into shareware. I am quite certain that they did not ask all people who sent patches for their permission for this licence change!

5.) Finally, KDE is blatantly ignoring their constant violation of the GPL of other peoples software that is used in KDE (e.g. in kflopppy). To sum up: There is no other volunteer project in the Linux world that has shown so much disrespect and ignorance of the free software movement than KDE (just for the record: this is said by someone who used KDE since beta4 and once in a flamewar with Bruce Perens even strongly defended the KDE-project; sorry Bruce, I did you wrong!). Therefore, even though KDE is very nice and usable software, I will say goodbye to all KDE stuff and will now only use Gnome which is rapidly evolving into a comparably mature desktop environment (current Helix-Gnome is certainly as good as KDE 1.1, and forthcoming Gnome 2.0 with Nautilus will be on a level with KDE2 and konqueror). Even koffice will soon be made superflous by The Gimp, Sketch, Sodipodi, Gnumeric, Abiword, gcalender, etc. I hope that many will follow this migration from KDE to Gnome.

My offer of 3000,- $ will not be lost for free software and will now be given to Debian for an improvement of the Debian installer. Further details will be discussed with the Debian project.

With kind regards,
Dr. Günter Bechly

Dontcha love it when life imitates pundits? styopa writes "It seems that TurboLinux and Compaq Computing have announced an Alliance. Compaq will support TurboLinux on all of their platforms. Could this be the beginning of the end of TRU64?" Of course, this was carefully arranged to follow the recent story on Linux mergers, which now seems a bit more relevant. Of course, ZDNet had Compaq pegged for a date with Mandrake, but close enough.

Günter Bechly sent in an interesting open letter to the KDE project regarding KDE, and its current exclusion from Debian (this is of course due to the licensing issues over which wars have been waged, lives lost, and kittens strangled). The letter is attached... he offers a $3k "Bonus" or "Reward" or "Bribe" depending on how you look at it, if KDE will be included with future versions of the distribution. Its an interesting one because the license issues are fuzzy to begin with, but it also shows that there is a strong demand for the software. Then again, I wonder if just hosting the debs and a line for a sources.list might suffice ... or just inclusion in non-free? The following was written by Slashdot Reader Günter Bechly OPEN LETTER TO THE KDE PROJECT Dear KDE team,

in the recent edition of Linux Weekly News of 1st June 2000 the old debate of the potential inclusion of KDE2 to the Debian GNU/Linux distribution is discussed again. Even though KDE2 and QT2 are free software according to all standards (incl. DFSG), KDE2 is not planned to be included in the forthcoming Debian releases 2.2 (aka Potato) and 2.3 (aka Woody), because the QPL licence of QT2 is not compatible with the GPL licence of most of the KDE2 code. An elaboration of Debian's stance on KDE and QT licencing can be found here and here Debian does have a very strict position on such licensing issues, and even if some people may think that their position is somewhat nittygritty, it is a clear point of view that distinguishes Debian from commercial distributions (e.g. Redhat or SuSE).

The sad thing is that many people who like KDE very much, also prefer the Debian distribution because of their very commitment to the free software spirit, because of their high quality standards, because of their superior package management system, and because of their vast number of available packages (about 4500 in Potato). Therefore, it would be highly desirable for KDE AND Debian to solve the mentioned licence problems with the release of KDE2. Many discussions in the past have lead to nothing but frustration on both sides, because none of the involved parties was able to agree on a compromise.

It is possible that the licence issue could be partly resolved by Debian by the simple assumption that all KDE authors who have released their code under GPL have implicitly agreed to link their GPLed code to the QPLed Qt toolkit. However, Debian will not make this assumption, since it would weaken their stance on licence issues, and since it would also not resolve the conflict with third party GPLed code that was used by the KDE project.

Thus, there is only one realistic solution to the problem: All GPLed code in KDE2 has to include a licence that amends the GPL with the following exception clause: "This program is distributed under the GNU GPL v2, with the additional permission that it may be linked against all versions of Troll Tech's Qt library that are distributed under the QPL, and is distributed without the GPL applying to Qt". Of course changing all licences accordingly and contacting all referring authors of the code involves a lot of boring work that is not very attractive for dedicated coders, which might be the reason that the KDE project did not perform this rather simple solution yet. Therefore, I would like to stipulate the appropriate actions by offering a private donation of 3.000,- US-$ to the KDE project, in case (and only in case) that the licence of the official release of KDE2 (all official packages incl. koffice) will be modified in the mentioned way, so that KDE2 can be included in Debian-Woody at last.

The Debian project has already stated in the past that they would of course include KDE as soon as the licence conflicts are resolved. Since the Debian maintainer Ivan E. Moore II has already made inofficial Debian packages of KDE1.x and KDE2beta for the KDE Packaging Project he could likely become the maintainer of the future official packages.

I hope that my offer could contribute to a prospering common future of KDE and Debian for the benefit of the Linux community. It would be nice if I could receive something like an "official" answer by the KDE project concerning my offer. If KDE should agree, I will send a signed contract that guarantees that my donation will be immediately made as soon as KDE2 is released with the Debian compatible licence changes. It is up to the KDE project how my donation would be used; it could be used for any purpose of the KDE project, or even as a personal reward ("salary") for the referring KDE persons that will make the work of the licence changes.

With kind regards,
Guenter Bechly

P.S. Please note that I only speak on behalf of myself and that I am not representing any involved party. I am just an dedicated Linux user who happens to like Debian and KDE (and Gnome too btw ;-). Copies of this letter have been posted to Mosfet, KDE.com, TDYC, Debian, LWN, LinuxToday, and Slashdot.

--
Dr. Guenter Bechly
Staatliches Museum fuer Naturkunde Stuttgart
Abt. Palaeontologie - Sekt. Bernstein
Email (office): bechly@gmx.de Email (private): GBechly@gmx.de

Günter Bechly sent in an interesting open letter to the KDE project regarding KDE, and its current exclusion from Debian (this is of course due to the licensing issues over which wars have been waged, lives lost, and kittens strangled). The letter is attached... he offers a $3k "Bonus" or "Reward" or "Bribe" depending on how you look at it, if KDE will be included with future versions of the distribution. Its an interesting one because the license issues are fuzzy to begin with, but it also shows that there is a strong demand for the software. Then again, I wonder if just hosting the debs and a line for a sources.list might suffice ... or just inclusion in non-free? The following was written by Slashdot Reader Günter Bechly OPEN LETTER TO THE KDE PROJECT Dear KDE team,

in the recent edition of Linux Weekly News of 1st June 2000 the old debate of the potential inclusion of KDE2 to the Debian GNU/Linux distribution is discussed again. Even though KDE2 and QT2 are free software according to all standards (incl. DFSG), KDE2 is not planned to be included in the forthcoming Debian releases 2.2 (aka Potato) and 2.3 (aka Woody), because the QPL licence of QT2 is not compatible with the GPL licence of most of the KDE2 code. An elaboration of Debian's stance on KDE and QT licencing can be found here and here Debian does have a very strict position on such licensing issues, and even if some people may think that their position is somewhat nittygritty, it is a clear point of view that distinguishes Debian from commercial distributions (e.g. Redhat or SuSE).

The sad thing is that many people who like KDE very much, also prefer the Debian distribution because of their very commitment to the free software spirit, because of their high quality standards, because of their superior package management system, and because of their vast number of available packages (about 4500 in Potato). Therefore, it would be highly desirable for KDE AND Debian to solve the mentioned licence problems with the release of KDE2. Many discussions in the past have lead to nothing but frustration on both sides, because none of the involved parties was able to agree on a compromise.

It is possible that the licence issue could be partly resolved by Debian by the simple assumption that all KDE authors who have released their code under GPL have implicitly agreed to link their GPLed code to the QPLed Qt toolkit. However, Debian will not make this assumption, since it would weaken their stance on licence issues, and since it would also not resolve the conflict with third party GPLed code that was used by the KDE project.

Thus, there is only one realistic solution to the problem: All GPLed code in KDE2 has to include a licence that amends the GPL with the following exception clause: "This program is distributed under the GNU GPL v2, with the additional permission that it may be linked against all versions of Troll Tech's Qt library that are distributed under the QPL, and is distributed without the GPL applying to Qt". Of course changing all licences accordingly and contacting all referring authors of the code involves a lot of boring work that is not very attractive for dedicated coders, which might be the reason that the KDE project did not perform this rather simple solution yet. Therefore, I would like to stipulate the appropriate actions by offering a private donation of 3.000,- US-$ to the KDE project, in case (and only in case) that the licence of the official release of KDE2 (all official packages incl. koffice) will be modified in the mentioned way, so that KDE2 can be included in Debian-Woody at last.

The Debian project has already stated in the past that they would of course include KDE as soon as the licence conflicts are resolved. Since the Debian maintainer Ivan E. Moore II has already made inofficial Debian packages of KDE1.x and KDE2beta for the KDE Packaging Project he could likely become the maintainer of the future official packages.

I hope that my offer could contribute to a prospering common future of KDE and Debian for the benefit of the Linux community. It would be nice if I could receive something like an "official" answer by the KDE project concerning my offer. If KDE should agree, I will send a signed contract that guarantees that my donation will be immediately made as soon as KDE2 is released with the Debian compatible licence changes. It is up to the KDE project how my donation would be used; it could be used for any purpose of the KDE project, or even as a personal reward ("salary") for the referring KDE persons that will make the work of the licence changes.

With kind regards,
Guenter Bechly

P.S. Please note that I only speak on behalf of myself and that I am not representing any involved party. I am just an dedicated Linux user who happens to like Debian and KDE (and Gnome too btw ;-). Copies of this letter have been posted to Mosfet, KDE.com, TDYC, Debian, LWN, LinuxToday, and Slashdot.

--
Dr. Guenter Bechly
Staatliches Museum fuer Naturkunde Stuttgart
Abt. Palaeontologie - Sekt. Bernstein
Email (office): bechly@gmx.de Email (private): GBechly@gmx.de

PCB writes "I found the following on www.heise.de: BMG-Entertainment started selling audio-CDs using the Cactus Data Shield, a copy-protection system developed by Midbar and Sonopress which makes it impossible to grab the music from the CD and to listen to it using "an old CD-Player" or a CD-ROM-drive. It is used on the albums "Razorblade Romance" by Him and "My Private War" by Philip Boa & The Voodoo Club. What's worse: the copy-protection is not even mentioned on the outside of the CD-case, and as these CDs are not really RedBook-compliant, they actually don't contain CD Digital Audio. " You'll need use the Fish of Many Languages to translate into your appropriate native tongue.

Markee writes "Wouldn't it be great if any program you write could be executed automatically in a parallel, heterogenious environment? The TSIA model (Task System and Architecture) suggests a way of programming in which any given program is divided into so-called tasks. An underlying operating system extension (similar to a scheduler) could dispatch these tasks across processors and systems, providing for inherently parallel, fail-safe execution in a heterogenious environment. Actually, the TSIA model is a generaliziation of what is already done in existing distributed computing environments like SETI@home. An implementation of this model would need only minor syntax extensions to given programming languages and a relatively modest OS extension for scheduling and dispatching. The TSIA web site looks primitive and features too many buzzwords, but nevertheless the documents are worth taking a look at. "

Kodi wrote in to tell us that MozillaZine is holding a vote for the new Mozilla throbber (free membership required). Also the LinuxWorld Expo call for papers deadline is July 6. They're also doing a $25k award for a community program at the show. hzo wrote in to note that you can now hack furby with your Palm V. cpfeifer has noted a Yoda Got Milk parody. rhet sent us a web based jar-jar-gonizer if you aren't overloaded with the wretched beast. Kurt Weinschenker wrote in to tell us that the 99 Darwin Awards nominees are online. S|ack noted that you can now get adminspotting t-shirts. Scorpeye sent us an article about Bachelors in the Silicon Valley and comments about eligible bachelorettes in NY and LA... hmmm... Finally, some articles about the Andover.Net acquisition of Slashdot: Here's Upside, wired (thanks Evro) Salon (thanks Super_Oogie). There were a few more too, but after I've read two I realize I say pretty much the same stuff each time anyway, so its hardly interesting ;)