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Amazing how trolls world-wide come up with the same lame joke.

As I have posted before, a simliar net is up for testing in Germany. Here's my posting:

Hi,

your news reporter from Germany back again ;-)

Heise had a story about a wireless self organzing net that's up for testing in the city of Ratingen, Germany.

The main facts: 2,4 GHz like WLAN, max. 1 km distance between the antennas, 44 mbit bandwidth per node - 33 mbit for relaying with the other nodes (normally 3 * 11 mbit) and the rest for the user of the node.

The links:

Heise Story in German [heise.de] or google translated [google.com].

Link to the technology provider DIRC [dirc.net] (click on FAQ to get the main points).

Bye

egghat.

current scores:

• first round: Fritz/AMD vs. Shreder/Intel
  Fritz/AMD wins 20, draws 29 and loses 22 games
• second round: Shredder/AMD vs. Fritz/Intel
  Shredder/AMD wins 26, draws 22 and loses 23 games
• third round: Fritz/Intel vs. Fritz/AMD
  Fritz/Intel wins 27, draws 42 and loses 18 games

There is also a flash version available.

In any case, the about 400 games to be played should suffice to find the true chess champion among both dual-processor setups.

At least RAM and Mainboard configuration is here (German).

I don't think anyone'd need The Fish for tech details. ;-)

Short answer: RAM is 1GB on both boards, timings are slightly different.

The contest is already running for more than a day, it was not started today:

According to the contest's page the contest was started on June 25th, 5pm local time.

More or less just nitpicking. :-) But the programs have already played several dozend matches. (and scored nearly exactly 1:1 the last time I had a look - 29 won by Athlon, 29 won by Xeon, for example.)

The reason that the counters are at "0" at the moment is that they are being reset at about this time of day everyday.

Note that both programs learn from game to game within each match, but are reset after the match. In the first match, Shredder started very weak and had a steeper learning curve against Fritz. Since in the second match Shredder/AMD already started strong, a landslide victory for this combination appears likely.

There are media claims that Germany's secretary of state, Otto Schily, was talking about government-sponsored DOS attacks on Nazi sites - which would mean the German government, for example, trying to take down all of those U.S. sites that violate Germany's anti-right-wing censorship laws. There was some discussion, however, just what was proposed by whom, as Schily's spokesperson later denied anything of the sort. Check Heise here for more information (in German).

For a bunch of technophiles we sure are afraid of new technologies...

These technologies are dangerous to us whether they work or they fail.

We are afraid of being attacked by uniformed thugs at airports and soon, bus stations and shopping malls because the biometric system came up with yet another false positive. Like to be mistaken for bin Laden and have your shopping trip be interrupted by a SWAT team?

We are concerned about our privacy being invaded (ever been stalked?) for personal or political reasons. America is now a land where the government can take anyone, declare that person a "terrorist", and detain that person indefinitely without a trial or even an attorney. Should we want that government to know where we are at all times?

We are concerned because we know that this stuff is NOT ready for prime time but is being sold to PHB types who can easily be scammed and to journalists who don't have the tech skills or knowledge to be know when they're being snowed as a "solution" to protect us from terrorists and criminals. The biometrics companies aren't doing this out of interest in public safety, they are doing this in hopes of an IPO and a quick cash-out..

Which category do you fall into? PHB? Tech-illiterate journalist? Or are you a shill for a biometrics company?

Easy ways to defeat biometrics

Face/iris scanner failures.

Obwohl wir natürlich das Problem haben, dass die Amerikaner eine ganz andere Auffassung von Freiheit haben

Hi,

your news reporter from Germany back again ;-)

Heise had a story about a wireless self organzing net that's up for testing in the city of Ratingen, Germany.

The main facts: 2,4 GHz like WLAN, max. 1 km distance between the antennas, 44 mbit bandwidth per node - 33 mbit for relaying with the other nodes (normally 3 * 11 mbit) and the rest for the user of the node.

The links:

Heise Story in German or google translated.

Link to the technology provider DIRC (click on FAQ to get the main points).

Bye

egghat.

From the article:

One of Microsoft's flagship government customers, the Federal Ministry of the Interior in Austria, is the first government body in Europe to become a member of Microsoft's Shared Source Initiative.

Wasn't Austria the first government in Europe to become a member of another initiative by someone interested in total control?

OTOH, it's interesting to see Germany high on the open-source list. From my personal experience, Germans are the most anti-Microsoft of all computer users. And their biggest computer magazine (c't magazine) is one of the few that isn't afraid to risk their ad revenue by giving MS products negative reviews. Perhaps the Germans understand the dangers of putting too much power in one person's hands.

See the update at Heise (google translated). Or use the original in German.

Have a nice weekend.

Bye egghat.

it's even in english: http://www.heise.de/english/newsticker/data/jk-31. 05.02-005/

linux pda.

Rumors are that maybe even the network will be shut down within the following days as it costs abour a million dollars per day to keep it running. But that's just a small part of the picture.

KPNQwest also operates a couple of data centres - and one of them is providing all technical facilities for hosting about a third of germany's web sites for Strato.

Strato is considering to either buy the affected data centre or to plan an alliance with Cisco, IBM, Microsoft and Cable&Wireless to provide new technical facilities for their hosting business.

Strato received quite some bad press when one of their storage units unexpectedly shut down last year and it took almost a week to have their websites up and running (breaking their 99% uptime guarantee) - so right now, competitors are ligning up to take their customers as it isn't clear if KPNQwest's network will be working over the weekend and what plans have been made to ensure the availability of the Strato-websites.

Rumors are that maybe even the network will be shut down within the following days as it costs abour a million dollars per day to keep it running. But that's just a small part of the picture.

KPNQwest also operates a couple of data centres - and one of them is providing all technical facilities for hosting about a third of germany's web sites for Strato.

Strato is considering to either buy the affected data centre or to plan an alliance with Cisco, IBM, Microsoft and Cable&Wireless to provide new technical facilities for their hosting business.

Strato received quite some bad press when one of their storage units unexpectedly shut down last year and it took almost a week to have their websites up and running (breaking their 99% uptime guarantee) - so right now, competitors are ligning up to take their customers as it isn't clear if KPNQwest's network will be working over the weekend and what plans have been made to ensure the availability of the Strato-websites.

Heise's summary in english.

According to media reports the carriers AT&T, Cable & Wireless and the Spanish company Telefonica are interested in taking over the net. Allegedly, AT&T has already made an offer of 200 million US dollars.

Where did you get that quote from about them not planning to switch it off? Here's a quote from the press release:

The Company is working with its customers to facilitate the implementation of contingency plans, should the current situation result in instablility or a total shut-down of the KPNQwest EuroRings network.

Since this is from their own press release, of course they don't just write "we'll stop operating," but that's pretty much what the above quote says they're expecting to happen.

If you look for some more neutral information than their own press release, you might be interested in this heise online article (yes, it's an English article).

There's an in-depth article available in English from the German Heise.de newsticker. Read it here.
There's also a brief article on The Register available here.

Just thought I'd add a few tidbits since the news post doesn't actually link to any objective press coverage, company press releases are usually not the best way to inform oneself.

There's an in-depth article available in English from the German Heise.de newsticker. Read it here.
There's also a brief article on The Register available here.

Just thought I'd add a few tidbits since the news post doesn't actually link to any objective press coverage, company press releases are usually not the best way to inform oneself.

It's pretty funny to read that life isn't that common although other scientists claimed the opposite a couple of weeks ago. Here is another bit with some comments (sorry, german, use the fish).
Alex.

---

Steffi may not take MSN user off

Eddi likes Steffi . And Eddi knows well Photoshop. Thus it produced center this yearly falsified Porno pictures of the German tennis icon Stefanie count and made it available under its MSN.de Community side of the world. The predominantly male part of the spectators had a first-class locker photo little hand vibrating to however not also be content, but could over the function "my photo center" additionally to buy.

A glowing Verehrer of the former tennis queen sent after benefit of such pictures a obszoene Mail to his Idol. This awkward kind of the affection stating encountered however little approval: Steffi.Graf switched its lawyer and within fewer hours was Eddis "Fakes OF of star" history -- at least with MSN. the Microsoft managers threw all found star Pornographen out, refused however the delivery of an omission explanation. Thus those wanted to prevent count by a punishment of 500.000 Marks also in the future that its face on different bodies is abused with MSN.

The regional court Cologne decided now to favour of Steffi.Graf (Az: 28 O 346/01). Since MSN in its general trading conditions the rights to use leaves itself to stopped contents of transfers on from the Usern and Community contents by Frames and Logos to look, as if are ms slopes of offers, must the Microsoft GmbH ensure that itself no naked Steffis more in the Microsoft network raekeln. The Unterschleissheimer daughter of the software company from the USA tried everything, from Rezitationen of its AGBs and referring to non-liability up to the deportation of all debt to the company nut/mother in talking moon or on the InterNet altogether. But the court remained hard, gave Mrs. count Recht and took up the "concrete unlawful act to the prohibition tenor" for the provisional order. Even Microsofts reference that Mrs. count could not make a repetition danger convincing, did not let the court apply. The company already affirmed the repetition danger by its contradiction against the original omission explanation. ( cgl /c't)

Ok. The linked article lacks relevant information. Here's a slightly longer version. You might want to translate it from German, using the fish.

The written reasoning of this judgement will only be released in two days. But when those images were posted, the old version of the MSN EULA was active. It stated that the copyright of any material posted via MSN would be transferred to MS.

If MS has the copyright on the material, they are IMO partly responsible for whether or where it is published. The same is not true for a normal ISP. MS can't have it both ways. (Although I kind of wonder whether an EULA like that is really enforceable in Germany.)

The real reason why Microsoft lost this case is simply their greediness.

The judge actually said this: "In their EULA for the (German) MSN service they grant themselfes all the rights for the contents of their users. Also the user pages are embedded into frames of MSN and look like geniue MSN content. This is why Microsoft Germany is responible for this content." (my translation).

The original Text can be found here: href="http://www.heise.de/newsticker/result.xhtml? url=/newsticker/data/cgl-07.12.01-000/default.shtm l&words=Steffi

So this means it's still safe for ISPs to host their users content as long as you don't want to have all rights to your users content.

It's simply Microsofts fault and their greediness which dug their own grave.

--
Andre

From the hax0rz at German c't magazine:

The c't S.V.P - the Sound and Video Platform [Article in German, use the Fish]. Plays music CDs, MP3 and other compressed formats, VCD, DivX:-), DVD (5.1 sound), is a digital VCR, CD burner/copier, surf terminal and E-Mail client (built-in LCD), remote-controllable and practically noiseless. This is the *AAs nightmare, cool :-)

The only drawback I can see is the price - it's basically a full-featured PC with a TFT display, which is still quite expensive.

The S.V.P is windows-only for now, but c't is working on a Linux version. It would be cool if this could be made into a community project with translated documentation; it deserves to get better recognition worldwide.

Hi,

my wife is a teacher of a german primary school and there she is a representative for new technologies. So I get all the info-material the school gets from our government for consulting issues ;-)

And, i'm impressed of the OpenSource-activities they do for german schools. For example they support the opensource school-server project of the (IMHO best) german computer magazine c't and have a detailed brochure about the use of open-source software.

darkcookie

Hi,

my wife is a teacher of a german primary school and there she is a representative for new technologies. So I get all the info-material the school gets from our government for consulting issues ;-)

And, i'm impressed of the OpenSource-activities they do for german schools. For example they support the opensource school-server project of the (IMHO best) german computer magazine c't and have a detailed brochure about the use of open-source software.

darkcookie

The options used for compiling were: [...] icc -O3 -axK -ipo .

If you ask me, this is starting a very dangerous trend. Scapegoating and populistic politics are attractive to politicians that want to sooth angered citizens, so we can only expect this to go on until the possesion of anything not absolutely necessary is forbidden (...and don't tell me that won't happen.). Hopefully, this insanity will stay in Germany, but unfortunately I doubt it.

Again a word of warning: the Intel compilers can yield incorrect programs, if the more agressive optimizations (inter procedural optimization / -ipo) are used. At least this was the case for Version 5.5 (article in German).

easy to get along with and eager to help

You're kidding, right?

From my experience, and from the experiences of many of my colleagues, Open Source developers are some of the most difficult people on earth. Trying to get help from them is like drawing blood from a stone. It doesn't matter WHAT you ask, it's always "read the fucking manual" or "fuck off, n00b". None of them seem to realize that there is a learning curve that all users must overcome...and their poorly-contructed, text-only, flowchart-lacking HOW-TO's just don't cut it when it comes to supporting a product. I know that free software is free software, but christ...if you don't want to be bothered by the public seeking help, then don't release the fucking software to the public.

And USB2.0 is going to be widely accepted since it's forward and backward compatible.

Now take a look at some real benchmarks that entire industry measures against - SPEC

P3 1Ghz performs alot better then top of the line G4 800.

Sometimes DoS can be a not-really-fine but very effective method of self-defense. In Germany we have a quite big problem with spam advertising dialers - little programs which redirect a w1nd0z3 box's internet dialup connection to an extremely expensive special number which is normally used for phone sex or premium services. One short connection can cost up to 900 € (that's no joke, there's no limit), and as some dialers hide well while replacing the default connection, some people got a phone bill of more than 10000 € at the end of the month.

During the second halfth of March, I got about five of these dialer spams each day. Other people got even more. The web hoster - a company selling these dialers - didn't act against any incidence of spam, the download accounts remained open for weeks regardless of any complaints. Their uplink... well, UUnet. As the discussion on the Usenet forum "de.admin.net-abuse.mail" went on, even the web hoster's boss himself joined and couldn't understand to be responsible for knowingly tolerating his customers abusing his service - of course he made a lot of money even by spamvertised dialers.

About a week ago, some spam victims were completely fed up. As the legal methods didn't work at all, the dialer should be made unavailable by distributed mass-downloading. The threat escalated in a clear message to the site maintainer - either go against your spamming customers or see your dialer being downloaded until the server blows the whistle.

The story appeared on Heise News which has a quite large reader base in Germany, to be read by lots of angry people whose inboxes were full of dialer spam. The "Heise effect" was enough for the site maintainer to become really scared - lots of DSL and broadband users started to download the dialer not only once but as often as they could. The web server became too busy to serve dialers even to people who would want it. The company selling these dialers didn't have any choice - either stop supporting spammers or have their dialer server slashdotted until it blows the whistle. Only a day later the company's boss agreed on getting rid of and seeking legal action against spamming customers.

A few days later, another spam went around, advertising a dialer hosted on an Eastern-European web server. Same game: the spam victims squeezed the dialer out of the web server as many times as possible. The site got hosed so badly that even a few hours after the spam incident, the dialer was no longer available.

As a result, if you really want to hit a spammer, DoS^H^H^H/.ing his web site - especially large files or CGI scripts - has finally proved as much more effective than blacklisting, LARTing or anything else (which still remains useful, though). Even big providers will notice a gigabyte-large traffic peak towards only one target.

http://www.heise.de/ct/ftp/projekte/flasher/ -- Hardware, Layout, Software, everything you need for flash EEPROMs up to 4 MBit. It's an old project based on an ISA card with DOS software, but no one stops you writing a linux device driver for it.

At least post as a user next time asshole, so I know who I'm about to make a fool of.

Cinema Tools $999
iMovie 2 $999
iDVD $999
Final Cut Pro $999

Do you think they all have identical developement costs and therefore are all priced the same or do you think Apple might be ripping you off?

Apple recomended additional software:

Adobe After Effects $1999

They are certainly ripping you off with their hardware cost:

At least $2500 for a slow G4. At least wait for this to get some decent hardware at a fair price.

And what can you use this for? Home movies, low budget porn and local commercials. You see, you can only burn an hour of video using iDVD. Apple is trying to make you think you are shooting video just like the pros, just like they are trying to make you think that that pricey toy you have is a real computer. And they have you fooled. To the tune of $10,000.

A fool and his money are soon parted. By the way, to me $10,000 is a Beowulf cluster with 50 CPUs, just like Pixar uses, Steve Jobs' other company.

Go pout or LOG IN to respond you bitch assed coward.

This is why I say "properly encoded," because half the work is using the right encoder with the right settings. If you use Xing, the MP3s will sound like crap no matter what settings you use. :) The short version is, use new versions of LAME with the --r3mix alias. :)

Nathan

In it Mayor says (my translation) "In 1995 the chances of finding an exoplanet were very small." And still he did. There is no guarantee to find an earth-sized exoplanet ever, but it is quite possible to find one within a year of being able to - or less.

And no, it is absolutely not "shooting in the dark" to say that we'll soon have the ability to detect earth size planets. If these devices work, we can find them if they are there. Just like we were able to find exoplanets in the mid-90's after developing the tools to do so, and just like we actually did.

They have found out sooner... on Heise Online Newsticker (German only) this got posted about six hours before Slashdot did. That's why I read this story with KDE/Konqueror 3.0.0 ;-)

You don't know of enough tech sites to claim that "almost every tech site" banded together on something. No one does.

Similar Machine:

Duron 1 Ghz (the G4,PIII and Duron Perform the same clock for clock)
Abit NV7m GeForce 2 graphics, everything built in. Micro ATX for small footprint like the iMac.
128mb DDR ram, better memory but cheaper than crippled 100fsb SDRAM
40mb hard drive.
24x disk burner.
micro ATX case.
Keyboard, optical mouse.
Firewire Card.
$401 for a pc computer, as fast if not faster than the iMac.
$300 for a 15 inch TFT active-matrix liquid crystal display

EXACTLY HALF THE PRICE.

Now, with the $1400 budget:

XP 1800, about as fast as a 1.5 Ghz G4 (HA!)
ASUS A7V333 Motherboard.
1 GB DDR333 ram
TWO 160 GB drives mirrored or striped depending on your pleasure (does the mac support drive sizes this large? ;)
GeForce 3
DVD drive
40x burner
Case, Wireless Keyboard, Wireless Optical Mouse
Firewire Card, Gigabit Ethernet.
19" perfect flat usb monitor

Certainly a system comparable with a high end G4

For the Price of a dual 1 Ghz G4 "Ultimate":

Dual AMD MP 2000+ @ 1666mhz each
Asus A7M266D AMD 760MPX
1.5 GB DDR ram
1/2 TERABYTE OF DRIVE SPACE.
Geforce 4 Ti 4600/128MB ram
DVD Burner
40x CD burner
Firewire Card
8 channel IDE raid (hardware not software)
22" perfect flat usb monitor.

Plain and simple. Apple hardware is inferior and over priced.

To hell with Dell, Gateway, etc. They don't get my dollars either.

Alpha-Techie, my ass. You better get with the program, I'd never hire you with the emotional bias you place on hardware. Computers are Tools. I want the best tools at the best price. I do not want some Mac zealot who will break my budget on shiny glossy pretty slow boxes.

That's like putting pom-poms and rhinestones on a Hole-Hawg... actually macs are more like 3.3v cordless drils in comparison so maybe pop-poms are the right idea.

Actually I just Googled the answer to my own question, and as usual, the American Press is as Winston Churchill said, "Vulgar and Without Substance."

The following article in German from Heise.de explains that the reason for ejecting Playstations from the show was that CeBIT is a tradeshow for "Business and Professional" exhibits. You cannot display consumer electronics or games. That is why Microsoft shows the Xbox only behind glass, and Sony showing 27 PS-2 boxes to play with was against the rules.

Yes, Microsoft's whining is pretty sad, but killing the PS-2 display had little to do with hands-on vs. suits showing off.

Citing the the ZDNET article: "On Sunday morning Sony started packing up its 27 PS2s. The show, in Hannover, Germany, officially finishes on Wednesday." This is very misleading if you read it sloppy. Sony did not leave the show. They removed the PS2s, no more no less. The entire Sony booth is 2000 square meters, only 100 square meters where dedicated to the PS2. The rest is still there. This article by German magazine c't explains the situation in much more detail. Use the fish translation if you don't understand German.

Sony packed up and left.

They didn't. ZDNET doesn't say that either, if you read closely. They removed the PS2s, but the rest of their much bigger exhibition is still there. A much more detailed report about what happened is delivered by Heise. Use the fish if you have trouble reading this article.

• I already mentioned the Casio Exilim mini digicam in an earlier post.
  
• The Spectronic smartphone with an innovative user interface
  
• An electronic notepad by Hexaglot
  
• A new PDA from Sony
  
• A 2 GB Flash USB keychain module for a grand
  
• The Invair Firewalker PDA for one-handed operation (please refrain from making jokes about hairy palms and the like, thank you :)
  
• The Elitegroup i-Buddie laptop - look Ma, no batteries! (hint: lower price, at least in theory)
  
• A stick-me-on-a-CF-module digicam
  
• A Zaurus based Linux Smartphone
  
• DVD-R and DVD-RAM based camcorders
  
• The Origami Smartphone which was first introduced at Comdex last year, (picture is here)
  
  ... and lots of other cool stuff, like the new nForce 615-D and 620-D chipsets, IP (as in address) enabled cars, server blades, ...

• I already mentioned the Casio Exilim mini digicam in an earlier post.
  
• The Spectronic smartphone with an innovative user interface
  
• An electronic notepad by Hexaglot
  
• A new PDA from Sony
  
• A 2 GB Flash USB keychain module for a grand
  
• The Invair Firewalker PDA for one-handed operation (please refrain from making jokes about hairy palms and the like, thank you :)
  
• The Elitegroup i-Buddie laptop - look Ma, no batteries! (hint: lower price, at least in theory)
  
• A stick-me-on-a-CF-module digicam
  
• A Zaurus based Linux Smartphone
  
• DVD-R and DVD-RAM based camcorders
  
• The Origami Smartphone which was first introduced at Comdex last year, (picture is here)
  
  ... and lots of other cool stuff, like the new nForce 615-D and 620-D chipsets, IP (as in address) enabled cars, server blades, ...

• I already mentioned the Casio Exilim mini digicam in an earlier post.
  
• The Spectronic smartphone with an innovative user interface
  
• An electronic notepad by Hexaglot
  
• A new PDA from Sony
  
• A 2 GB Flash USB keychain module for a grand
  
• The Invair Firewalker PDA for one-handed operation (please refrain from making jokes about hairy palms and the like, thank you :)
  
• The Elitegroup i-Buddie laptop - look Ma, no batteries! (hint: lower price, at least in theory)
  
• A stick-me-on-a-CF-module digicam
  
• A Zaurus based Linux Smartphone
  
• DVD-R and DVD-RAM based camcorders
  
• The Origami Smartphone which was first introduced at Comdex last year, (picture is here)
  
  ... and lots of other cool stuff, like the new nForce 615-D and 620-D chipsets, IP (as in address) enabled cars, server blades, ...

• I already mentioned the Casio Exilim mini digicam in an earlier post.
  
• The Spectronic smartphone with an innovative user interface
  
• An electronic notepad by Hexaglot
  
• A new PDA from Sony
  
• A 2 GB Flash USB keychain module for a grand
  
• The Invair Firewalker PDA for one-handed operation (please refrain from making jokes about hairy palms and the like, thank you :)
  
• The Elitegroup i-Buddie laptop - look Ma, no batteries! (hint: lower price, at least in theory)
  
• A stick-me-on-a-CF-module digicam
  
• A Zaurus based Linux Smartphone
  
• DVD-R and DVD-RAM based camcorders
  
• The Origami Smartphone which was first introduced at Comdex last year, (picture is here)
  
  ... and lots of other cool stuff, like the new nForce 615-D and 620-D chipsets, IP (as in address) enabled cars, server blades, ...