Slashdot Mirror

Warrior points out Peter Seebach's look into his Series 2 TiVo, writing "There are a lot of sites about 'hacking' the TiVo, to do this to it and that to it (and there's always the other thing too). After all, half the fun of owning something that runs Linux is to make it do something more (or different) than it was intended to do. But most of us only need so many Web servers (off the top of my head, I think I have 10 or 15 Web servers in my house already, including the embedded systems)."

Anonymous Coward writes "The WineConf conference has opened up. Everyone is welcome at the second semi regular conference of Wine enthusiasts. Come and gather with fellow Wine hackers to: * Discuss the future of Wine * Work on nasty glibc bugs * Attack installers in an install-o-thon * Relax in the beautiful winter weather of Minnesota, enjoying the St. Paul Winter Carnival (complete with Ice Palace!). * Marvel at how the weather promotes an amazing amount of hacking time. * Hoist a real glass of Wine with your compadres at the Mall of America. The conference is in the early stages of planning, so full details are not yet available. However, here are the details that are firm: Date Saturday, January 31st and Sunday, February 1st, 2004."

Jonathan Lennox writes: "Grenville Armitage has published an analysis of ping times of clients connecting to his Quake III Arena server. His conclusion is that 150 milliseconds is the limit that people find tolerable, and says this may have interesting implications for Internet Quality of Service research."

Jonathan Lennox writes: "Grenville Armitage has published an analysis of ping times of clients connecting to his Quake III Arena server. His conclusion is that 150 milliseconds is the limit that people find tolerable, and says this may have interesting implications for Internet Quality of Service research."

DeeezNutz writes "Here is the startings of a company that wants to see clear pc cases! They have pictures. " It's pretty impressive looking - the cases that is. The hot-rodding of computers continues, I guess.

Slashback items tonight on India's satellite launch, a bi-coastal EFF-organized protest (yes, will involve leaving your cubicle, basement, silo, remote farm, etc.), Apple not falling far from the tree, and the death of Indrema. Read on below :)

Show your truuuuueee colors ... h0mee writes: "Howdy! This has already been posted on slashdot, but we still need more volunteers showing up at the protests. This protest is being organized by the EFF against federally mandated censorware in schools and libraries. The protests are occuring on this friday in the SF Bay Area and the NYC areas. I'd like to remind slashdot readers on the completely cynical side that even small groups of protestors showing up will have big impacts, as the FCC will be caught completely off guard by hordes of angry geeks showing up- this protest can make a difference! Please check out the EFF's protest page on this for more info for coordination and ridesharing, or this rant on craigslist for SF bay locals. Show your geek pride, and help us distribute Clue to the FCC!"

Hey, stop looking at me! And no feeling, either! In response to CmdrTaco's recent post about Apple moving yet again to block the makers of Apple-reminscent themes, WillAdams writes:h "The response, and the original letter are up at http://www.macthemes.org.

They'd like a lawyer..."

Sounds fair. Soon lawyers defending Open Source will take over as the heros of the software world. "Didn't there used to be programmers, too, dad?"

Up in the air, Junior Birdman w00ly_mammoth writes: "After an aborted attempt, India has launched a satellite rocket. Signals from it were picked up in Canada. The Geo-synchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle, or GSLV-D1, is capable of giving the nation communication and military capabilities, according to western analysts. The US has been concerned about this development for a while. This could also rattle the aerospace industry, since it marks an entry into the lucrative satellite launch market."

(Invent your own aphorism involving ashes, phoenixes and plant life.) impaler writes: "Games Mania has a story with three people's views on the death of indrema. They interview Mark Collins (author of Linux Game Programming), Clinton Ebadi (me / that lamer that does nothing useful), and Steve Baker (of TuxKart fame). All three offer different opinions on why indrema went down."

Speaking of games, ryants writes: "OpenGL.org is reporting that NVidia's GeForce3 meets or beats the functionality available in DX8 via OpenGL extensions. This bodes well for Linux gaming." Take your grains of salt, head out back, and play some TuxKart;)

ryants writes: "The transcript of an interesting panel discussion with Larry Lessig, Tim O'Reilly, John Barlow and others about digital freedoms is available here over at Dr Dobb's TechNetCast."

NeoCode writes: "Tomorrow, India will launch its first GSLV satellite using the Russian launchers. Its an amazing feat since they have built the satellite from scratch. If the launch is successful, India will become the sixth nation (US, Russia, China, Japan and the European Space Agency being the others) to build and launch a GSLV class satellite. Rediff.com has complete coverage on the story behind the making of this satellite. More details can found here @CNN, @TribundIndia.com and @Space.com."

rts writes "A well written article about how copyrights and patents are anti-free market is running in the Canadian paper "The National Post"." The backdrop to the story is, perhaps inevitably, the Napster case - but it's much better written then most of the other bazillion Napster editorials. Update: 01/28 04:48 PM by S :The article refered to this paper by Stephan Kinsella.

Lets start this off with some eyecandy from Mdog. Hi res pics of coronal loops meet Rob's First Rule of Art. Wow. Not enough eye candy? tradica noted that Pixar's new movie 'Monsters Inc.' now has trailers available even the the movie won't be out for a year. Course since Jobs is @ pixar, no surprise that I can't watch the clip. Instead of food for your retinas, Nerf97A4 sent in recipes that will never be used on Iron Chef since they all involve cooking with twinkies in some form or another. Deep fried Twinkies? Makes me shudder... maybe instead you should look at jedigeek fouund an online store called CyberCandy which allows you to buy candy from around the world. funferal noticed that a OECD have publshed their Privacy Statement Generator. Ant noted one wizard that that probably doesn't exist in Word. alecto sent us a fun link where you can read 99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall which has code snippets to generate the song in languages from APL to zsh. PhadeRunner sent us Mr. T vs. The Matrix. and FlameSnyper sent The Matrix and Ghost in The Shell. One is slightly more serious then the other. An anonymous reader documented filling a cubicle with packing peanuts in case your boss is out of time and you need some help. Speaking of bosses, Need a weapon? WD_40 aims you at a site where you can learn how to create your own spud gun. Course you could do it the old fashioned way: pimp showed us a site dedicated to electrocuting common household stuff. Like, for example, a furby. While on the subject of electricity, loose_change sent in several links about Power meters and how they aren't exactly the best in user interface. A competition followed to try to make a better on. The winner is definitely less hostile ;) CresentCityRon sent in something you don't want to electrocute: apparently MIT students are working on Geek Porn which is pretty much what is sounds like. School officials aren't so happy about it.

Step right up ladies and gentlemen and behold, quickies so amazing, that you may not want to stare directly at them. First up, a trio of Microsoft bits: Ethan sent us an RFC for writing RFCs in Word. Russ pointed us to a great entry contained within the microsoft knowledge base. and an anonymous reader noted that boardwatch is selling BillGatus of Borg posters again. You may need a soundtrack for this one: chisox sent a bit about Jem Finer composing a thousand year song (and a machine to play it). If generative music ain't your thing, Jason noted that MC (Stephen) Hawking has made some of his R&B and Rap cuts available in MP3 format. And while it isn't exactly music, Several folks showed us the way to best learn about Semi Conductors: have Britney Spears teach it. wishus's submission is much less educational: he's kissing up to me by telling us that Sarcasta's latest update is in depth study on Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. If you need some images to enlighten and amuse, B.D.Mills noted that stinky meat is back if you didn't get enough the first time, Ant sent us the correct use for the new mac cubes, and danfairs sent us a picture of... well, a fire extinguisher. table and chair pointed us to Political Arena, a Quake 3 modwhere you blow up the political candidates (is this treason once one of them gets elected?) If blowing up Bush isn't enough stress reduction for you, einstein has shown us how best to customize your case and void your warrenty in one swing. Of an axe. Kartoffel wrote a CueCat interface for BeOS as well as a Mr T vs. CueCat Comic Strip. Even more offensive then another Mr T vs. episode is a comic featuring Admiral Ackbar debating Napster sent in by georgeha. Last of all, if you didn't know, Spinal Tap is back out in limited release. God what a great flick. Just figured I'd mention it ...

wishus writes: "The Compaq iPAQ is Compaq's PocketPC offering, with a 206 MHz Intel StrongARM. Microsoft beware, though, because there are now 2 different ways to put Linux on it - Compaq's own is at handhelds.org and the second, announced yesterday, is from Century Software. They are actually two very different means to the same end - Linux and X running on the iPAQ, complete with handwriting recognition." If only it had 802.11 wireless support, I'd be there.

Accipiter asks: "I've configured an internal network to use a Linux box as a gateway using IP Masquerading, and it works beautifully -- except for some off-the-wall things. Recently, I installed Total Annihilation on a Windows box behind the firewall, and I found that it can't connect to other games on the boneyards server (Total Annihilation's Multiplayer setup). How does one configure networked games (specifically TA) on the INSIDE of a network to use servers out on the net?" Most of this is handled in the IP Masquerading HOWTO in particular section 7.22 and the section, appropriately titled, Game Clients. (Read More)

The main problem with Linux IP Masquerading is that, for a few games, you must forward specific ports to a single game machine. This is contrary to programs like Wingate, which implements Internet sharing for Windows for the whole internal network.

Is anyone working for some kind of redirection protocol for Linux that would remove this restriction and allow all masqueraded machines to play games without the need to redirect to a single machine?

You might also want to check out the Masq Apps page, which lists a cornucopia of games and how to get them working with IP Masquerading.

Accipiter asks: "I've configured an internal network to use a Linux box as a gateway using IP Masquerading, and it works beautifully -- except for some off-the-wall things. Recently, I installed Total Annihilation on a Windows box behind the firewall, and I found that it can't connect to other games on the boneyards server (Total Annihilation's Multiplayer setup). How does one configure networked games (specifically TA) on the INSIDE of a network to use servers out on the net?" Most of this is handled in the IP Masquerading HOWTO in particular section 7.22 and the section, appropriately titled, Game Clients. (Read More)

The main problem with Linux IP Masquerading is that, for a few games, you must forward specific ports to a single game machine. This is contrary to programs like Wingate, which implements Internet sharing for Windows for the whole internal network.

Is anyone working for some kind of redirection protocol for Linux that would remove this restriction and allow all masqueraded machines to play games without the need to redirect to a single machine?

You might also want to check out the Masq Apps page, which lists a cornucopia of games and how to get them working with IP Masquerading.

Accipiter asks: "I've configured an internal network to use a Linux box as a gateway using IP Masquerading, and it works beautifully -- except for some off-the-wall things. Recently, I installed Total Annihilation on a Windows box behind the firewall, and I found that it can't connect to other games on the boneyards server (Total Annihilation's Multiplayer setup). How does one configure networked games (specifically TA) on the INSIDE of a network to use servers out on the net?" Most of this is handled in the IP Masquerading HOWTO in particular section 7.22 and the section, appropriately titled, Game Clients. (Read More)

The main problem with Linux IP Masquerading is that, for a few games, you must forward specific ports to a single game machine. This is contrary to programs like Wingate, which implements Internet sharing for Windows for the whole internal network.

Is anyone working for some kind of redirection protocol for Linux that would remove this restriction and allow all masqueraded machines to play games without the need to redirect to a single machine?

You might also want to check out the Masq Apps page, which lists a cornucopia of games and how to get them working with IP Masquerading.

Lawrence Brown writes: "Michael Saylor, CEO of MicroStrategy, has donated $100 million towards creation of an on-line university which he says will offer an 'Ivy-League quality' education to anyone for free." Same idea as the Cooper Union. Okay, that's one billionaire putting his money to good use. What about the rest?

Hari writes " Here's a story I got linked to from the RISKS forum. Don't just fear "Big Government", fear the "Big Stupid Corporation" too. "Yes, apparently just having cable modem service, and not cable is not something America is ready to handle-maybe the absence of consumption confuses them? Mmm...I love starting my Monday morning with a big dollop of stupidity-it's like Bailey's in the coffee!

Hap Nesbitt writes "Microsoft has a nine year old boy named Rupert working 13 hour days to develop their next breakthrough OS interface -- thought recognition " Apparently Microsoft already has some competition (thanks to pluteus_larva for this one). BTW: read the small print.