Slashdot Mirror

Victor Tramp writes "Apparently the fabled Linux based YOPY handheld has been put on the market after all! Not only do they look like cool PDA versions of a Gameboy Advance SP (they fold), they look like they give the Zaurus a real run for the money, featurewise. Though the fastest processor is 206MHz, they include CompactFlash and MMC slots on the 3700 model. Apparently you can download their Linupy distro, too. And finally, they don't seem to be vaporware!"

chronicon writes "Knoppix is the ultimate live CD. No geek-kit should be without it. Now Wim Vandersmissen has taken it a step futher by adding openMosix functionality. Drop the clusterKnoppix CD in your "server", boot up... boot up some networked clients... Knoppix built in LTSP magic kicks in and ta-da--instant cluster!"

JoeRobe writes "Researchers at UCSC have simulated a possible outcome of an impact by asteroid 1950DA when it passes near us in the year 2880. Note that there is a 0.3% chance of impact during that encounter. In the event that it impacts in the Atlantic, they predict that the '60,000 megaton blast' would create 400 foot waves along the east coast. In addition to an assessment of the danger, their studies point out the resulting geologic features that we should be looking for now, which would indicate where and when such impacts have occured in the past."

Shutup Now writes "Spring cleaning for your hardrive. This article talks about some extremes for keeping your computer running well. You decide whether this stuff is necessary." More than once a year is a good idea, too.

Adam Kiger asks: "I have written two programs with patents on both. The first program captures the keypress and keyup events per letter of a typed password in milliseconds and returns a numeric value per letter. I am also capturing the keypress of the first letter and the keyup of the next and returning a numeric value in milliseconds. My second program takes these values and runs an analysis of the values after 20 entries of your password to determine what I call a 'keyprint'. 91% of the time you enter the password my values captured matched each letter entry and the time between letters entered. I also can show the results of these tests in 2D graphical representaion. I used my wife as a test subject, gave her my password and she couldn't login to either Windows or my website! I have wrapped these programs around Windows Login and a Website's login control, and it works fine so far. The only problem I have found and not researched are the user using different keyboards. So I've come to ask Slashdot: Is this a viable security function?"

millertime3250 writes "Tom's Hardware is running an interesting article on cheating in multiplayer games. In an issues that has gained increasing notority, it is a great read for those Counter-Strike players and others alike. It defines the different types of cheats like Client Hook, OpenGL Hack, and Hard-Coded Hack, and cheating's effect on gaming."

shpoffo writes "This article at BetterHumans.com talks about harvesting energy from grapes - enough to power small microchips that could be implanted in/attached to plants for monitoring/etc. Seems like it's just a piece of the larger picture emerging..."

darknight17 writes "The unofficial Final Fantasy Online site has just finally finished its Top 25 Squaresoft games by featuring the Top 5 titles. Here are the other picks - 25 to 21, 20 to 16, 15 to 11, and 10 to 6, as chosen by fans in the Final Fantasy and RPG community." There's also a 'hidden gems' section in each part of the countdown, highlighting overlooked titles like Einhänder and Bahamut Lagoon - neat.

Xs writes "For those of you wondering how much it will cost to play online when your year of free Xbox Live runs out, listen up. Microsoft has just unveiled their pricing plan for Xbox Live. Pretty cheap, too! You will be given two options: one is to pay for a full year of service, that will cost you $49.99. Second option is to pay by the month, that will set you back $5.99 a month. The Xbox Live starter kit is also getting a new price of $69.99. Plus, MS will also start selling the voice communicators by themselves - they'll retail for $29.99." Sounds like a pretty good deal.

WWWWolf writes "The fine folks at Bioware have opened a new For Developers section, aimed for people who make external tools for the game. At the moment they have a forum and description of one of the crucial file formats, used for packaging data in the game, with more coming." This looks pretty cool. It's been several months since I loaded up the Aurora Toolset. I might have to get back into it again. In related news, Apostata writes "It seems there's even more steam under the lid of the NWN Linux community now: the Linux client won't be shipping with any ability to play the narrative cutaway movies between chapters, due to licensing/porting problems with Bink. Many are outraged, as this obviously makes for an incomprehensible game." Apostata also notes that the Aurora toolset also won't be ported.

EpsCylonB writes "The IMDB is reporting that the London Daily mirror has the first review of the Matrix Reloaded. Sounds like the Wachowski borthers have gone for an all out action movie which is a shame if true. What I liked most about the original was the way it blended stunning action with a subtle philosphical theme about how we percieve reality." I'll hold judgement until the closing credits myself.

Ric writes "From the article lead paragraph: 'If you hate pop-up ads, you might blame Brian Shuster. A long-time figure in the Internet pornography world, Shuster recently received a patent for the ad format and is now looking to make some money off the sites that use it. And that's just the beginning - Shuster has a long list of pending patents, including one for pop-up audio ads that cannot be turned off.'"

Xs writes "Remember that survey Microsoft had a while back about cool colors for the Xbox controller? Well, the results are in! Green and blue are the two winning colors. They look pretty cool. They will sell for $29.99 each and hit the shelves in October." They do look better than I'd imagined. Makes me glad I waited on buying enough controllers for 4 player games.

TellarHK writes "Today, Apple's eMac line got a nice upgrade with all models getting a 32M Radeon 7500 video chipset, display capable of 1280x960 resolution on a 17" flat CRT, and price cuts across the board. $799 will get you a base model with 40GB of drive, 128M of RAM (continuing the rather odd stinginess on RAM configurations), and an 800Mhz G4. $999 will get you an extra 20GB of drive and a 1Ghz processor, while $1299 lands you a whopping (ahem) 256M of memory, 80G, and a SuperDrive at 4x."

Xs writes "A story over at Gamerfeed.com states that a gamer from Berkeley, California, Henru Wang, has completed Metroid Prime in 1 hour and 46 minutes! Here's the interview with Mr. Wang from Twin Galaxies." Speed records are a slightly bizarre but rather cool corner of gaming nowadays, it seems.

Xs writes "As if the first Xbox Live Starter Kit wasn't selling well enough, Microsoft has released a new Starter Kit. This time the kit includes demos of MechAssault and MotoGP. Plus, a complete online version of Tetris Worlds. To make things even better, they are no longer bundling in Whacked! I hope to be picking one of these up soon. Full stories at Xbox IGN and GamerFeed.com."

Xs writes "GameSpot.com has confirmed the new Metal Gear Solid title for GameCube titled, Metal Gear Solid: Twin Snakes. The game sports the original MGS plot, but with totally revamped graphics. Plus, the game is being supervised by both Hideo Kojima and Shigeru Miyamoto! Sounds pretty awesome - hopefully they will add more than just the upgraded graphics." This was one of the best games around back when the Playstation was all the rage. With the resources of the GameCube thrown at this game, it could be gorgeous to behold.

Arcane writes "This interview with id lead designer Tim Willits at Gamespot goes into more detail about Doom 3 than the usual 'mind blowing graphics' or 'changes the future of gaming' phrases." It's nice to see some new screenshots, mention of multiplayer modes, and most of all, Tim's descriptions of actually playing the game. New trailer debuts at E3, apparently.

Victum_ writes "Over at Gaming Horizon they have posted some new Counter-Strike Xbox screens. These are supposedly the very first screenshots that have been released of the Xbox version. They look pretty much identical to CS:CZ screens, save the lower resolution." Anyone else feel like innovation in the FPS genre has stagnated since the introduction of Counter-Strike? I played this mod in college and loved it, and while I don't play it much anymore, I can't find another game that gives a better FPS experience.

Xs writes "SPOnG.com has an article on two new pieces of hardware coming out of Nintendo today. One of which is a new e-Reader, the e-Reader Plus, that can store data while the GBA is off. And the other is a Gamecube memory card that can read Panasonic SD generic media storage cards. Not only does this increase the maximum storage capacity per Gamecube slot, but this also opens up the ability to trade save game files online via a PC!" I've yet to buy an e-Reader, and this makes me think I should hold off for a while longer.

ebusinessmedia1 writes "An fascinating article that has Venter reflecting on the work yet to be done in genomics, and his strong sense that biology will drive developments in computing in the near future."

c4tp's friend asks: "Recently my Mother informed me that my grandmother's 80th birthday is approaching. She suffers from glaucoma and it is rather hard to read small text for her. The consensus with our family is to buy her a video magnification device, but the ones I found online were at the minimum of $500 (US), a bit steep for me (and my family). So what I am asking basically, is there a way to build/assemble the parts these retail devices use for a cheaper price?"

Iman Habib writes "Sanos is a minimalistic 32-bit x86 OS kernel for jbox appliances. A jbox is a JavaOS server appliance running on standard PC hardware. This enables you to run Java server applications without the need to install a traditional host operating system like Windows or Linux. Only a standard Java HotSpot VM and the sanos kernel are needed. The kernel was developed as part of an experiment on investigating the feasibility of running Java server applications without a traditional operating system only using a simple kernel. The kernel implements basic operating system services like booting, memory management, thread scheduling, local and remote file systems, TCP/IP networking and DLL loading and linking. A thin win32 wrapper allows the Windows version of the standard HotSpot JVM to run under Sanos, essentially providing a JavaOS platform for server applications. This enables you to run java based server applications, like Tomcat and Jboss, under Sanos. Sanos is open source under a BSD-style license."

zymano writes "The JVC GR-HD1 will be introduced in May, it's the world's first consumer camcorder to offer 750 line resolution progressive video at 30 frames per second, recording MPEG2 video to MiniDV tape. The price will start around $2500-$3500 . Some more info here with pictures. Also check out the pro version. With digital cameras at regular stores with resolution over 5 megapixel it makes you wonder why it took so long to produce."

zymano writes "CNET article here says cable modems are 50 percent faster on average than DSL connections which I think most have suspected . There are some connection rates that i found interesting like Cablevision reportedly having the fastest connections, averaging 800kbps, or 13kbps above the industry average. Mentions other cable company speeds. TimeWarner cable was not tested."

dvd_rent_test writes "Netflix uses the number of movies you have previously rented to determine your priority in getting movies. The more movies you rented during your last billing cycle, the less chance you have of receiving a movie versus an individual who has rented fewer movies. This is why new users have great success getting their movies and older or heavy users have a difficult time getting some movies."

Ldyandrea asks: "I'm a stained glass artist, and also a bit of a computer nut....but I'd like to build an actual stained glass computer case, and don't know enough about hardware design to build something like this from scratch. I have seen the acrylic cases, and this would be one of the best things to base a design upon, but wondering if there is simply (rather than a case with cutouts) a "skeleton" that has the metal framework and whatnot that I can build around? I realize that cooling is a big issue for this idea, and would want to have a few different fans involved. Can anyone point me in the right direction of either a supplier of such a framework, or some general good ideas I should keep in mind when constructing this case?" This is such an interesting idea, I had to post it. When you think about it, it shouldn't be too hard to do, even if you can't get such a case "skeleton". How hard would it really be to take an ordinary case to a metal worker to get it cut to specs? I just hope Ldyandrea sends us back some pictures of the finished product whenever it is finished.

SemiBarbaricPrincess asks: "I'm currently in the middle of starting a 'Women In Computer Science' group at my college, and I'm wondering what other groups are out there, and what they do to help boost the number of women in CS." Slashdot last touched on this subject in this article from January. For the women readers in our audience: what do you think would be helpful in attracting more women to the world of computing?

bltfast32 writes "I don't know how many people have been following this, but this is definitely worth keeping an eye on. Whil Hentzen, prominent FoxPro and Linux advocate, has received some heat lately for publishing a HOWTO in the March 2003 FoxTalk issue for running Visual FoxPro 8.0 on Linux with WINE. Of course, the aforementioned heat, is coming from Redmond. Here is a link to a nice summary of the interactions by Whil." That summary mentions the Register article online here. bltfast32 also points to another article which requires registration.

malloci writes "CNet has this article describing Nokia's new wireless camera. Unlike other webcams though, it is designed to communicate via a GSM network, sendings photos to the user's cell phone."

Lazyhound writes "The BBC reports that scientists at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas are running clinical trials on a new drug (similar to those used to treat HIV patients) that can dramatically reduce levels of the virus in only days."

thenovacrisis writes "Game Girl Advance has an interesting article about the various female characters in videogames. She talks about the important balance between alienation and identification, the Aesthetics of Sexy Girls, and various MMORPGs. An interesting read for all." A lot of games are compared, and issues raised. Good food for thought for character design.

GreyPoopon writes "Computerworld has an article referring to SCO's announcement of Enterprise Linux for the Itanium 2. Base installation starts at $999 for up to four CPUs. My favorite quote: "With its new system, SCO is a little late to the Linux on Itanium 2 market." I would think being late would be the least of their worries right now. I personally consider this to be my daily dose of comedy. Newsfactor has a better article."

Migraineman writes "These folks have built a small robot designed to walk around on your back. The website includes a short video of the machine roaming around. There's another that's suspended from the ceiling and performs 3-D solid mapping of the person beneath. Warning - the website contains 'artsy' stuff, and doesn't include technical tidbits. Dang."

WatkinsDore writes "The Executive's Guide to Information Technology is a book focused on the 'business' pieces of managing IT, such tasks as IT organization design, vendor selection and management, communicating with business users, IT human resource management, establishing IT steering committees and managing the overall demand within the IT department." Read on below for more of WatkinsDore's review. The Executives Guide to Information Technology author Baschab / Piot pages 500 publisher John Wiley & Sons rating 9 reviewer Quentin Watkins ISBN 0471266094 summary A guide to the business aspects of managing IT with a focus on senior executives and IT managers

This book is interesting because it fills a well-known gap between current book offerings that address vocational issues, such as "how to program in java" and academic research such as the most effective data access algorithms.

In fact, it addresses some of the questions that have been asked by slashdotters in the previous few months for books on the general management of IT, principally in these Ask Slashdot questions: Books on IT (not Project) Management?,Best Computer Books For The Smart?, and General IT Books?

The Executive's Guide to Information Technology is targeted at IT managers, and also senior executives who want to better understand how IT can be effectively managed.

Interestingly, it starts by analyzing the question "Why have an IT department at all?" and answers the question with productivity statistics and other anecdotal evidence of the importance of IT. The premise of the book then emerges, asking "If IT is important, then why does it seem to fail so often, and cause so much trouble for companies?"

The answer, predictably, is that IT is often a poorly managed function within a company. IT managers seldom receive the appropriate business training to manage a large, mission-critical function and budget, and non-technical executives get lost in the maze The authors show that many of the symptoms of poor IT departments (overspending, overstaffing, project budget overruns and failure to complete) are caused by, or at least are related to poor management within IT.

The remainder of the book covers the key topics that, according to the authors, are the key components to the effective management of IT departments. (The table of contents for the book appears below.)

Review:

Overall the book does a good job making the case that the key principles it outlines are the best predictors of a successful IT department. The book is replete with real-life, and often-humorous anecdotes from the authors' experiences in turning around distressed IT departments. IT managers will quickly recognize many of the symptoms of an IT department in trouble. The book is written in a easily readable, conversational tone, and there are charts and graphics throughout to further explain key points.

At just over 500 pages, the book is lengthy compared to competing offerings; however, it is written in a way that lets the reader pick and choose specific chapter topics, without losing much of the context. At $75, it at first seems a bit pricey for a general management book, but low for a textbook. Compared to other books on a price-per-page basis, the book seems more reasonable based on the large volume of content and page count (over 500 pages).

The book also has a CD-ROM with documents, spreadsheets and links to the underlying research that went into the book.

Slashdot even gets a mention in a couple of chapters as a good source of "unbiased customer experience information" although the authors say that for many blogs "it can take some effort to separate fact from opinion on the blogs, and the signal-to-noise ratio on a given topic can sometimes be low."

In all, the book is a relatively easy read, thought provoking, and a great reference for IT managers (or aspiring managers) who want to learn to think like senior executives and ensure that their IT departments are firing on all cylinders. Based on previous threads on Slashdot, the book fills a clearly needed niche on the general management of IT.

The book also has a supporting website that has information on the book - www.exec-guide.com.

Table of contents:

1. The Effective IT Organization
   1. The IT Dilemma
   2. Sources and Causes of IT Ineffectiveness
   3. Information Technology Costs
2. Managing the IT Department
   1. The IT Organization
   2. The IT Director
   3. IT Direction and Standard Setting
   4. IT Operations
   5. Application Management
   6. IT Human Resource Practices
   7. Vendor Selection
   8. Vendor Management
3. Senior Executive IT Management
   1. Working with the Business
   2. IT Budgeting and Cost Management
   3. Effective Decision Making and Risk Management
   4. IT Demand Management and Project Prioritization
   5. IT Performance Measurement
   6. IT Steering Committee

Highlights:

Opening chapters on "why MIS departments matter" and the symptoms of under-performing IT departments.

Vendor selection and vendor management chapters.

IT steering committee chapter - why have one, what it can help IT accomplish.

IT budgeting chapter - shows key components of IT budget, how-to's and benchmarking information.

Nice forward by Professor Lynda M. Applegate from Harvard Business school.

Lowlights:

Portion of chapters on IT organization describing in painstaking detail the exact roles and responsibilities for every position on the IT team. This stuff needs to be there to make the book comprehensive, but not new news for experienced IT professionals.

You can purchase The Executive's Guide to Information Technology from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Amad writes "A Canadian Genetics Research Lab in BC, Canada has used a Linux Beowulf cluster to help sequence the genetic code of the virus linked to SARS. This lab is the first to crack it, and has posted the data to the public. You can read an article about the discovery, or check out the lab."

Subaiku asks: "Next semester my girlfriend will be traveling to Japan to continue with her studies. As a going away gift I plan on buying her a laptop of some sort. I've been thinking about going with a PowerBook, or maybe a Dell, but I really need advice as to which brand/configuration/platform would be best in terms of ease of use/connectivity in foreign places (namely Japan). Any suggestions?"

Uosdwis writes "The New York Times (FRYYY) has an article about SIRTF, the fourth and last 'Great Observatory'. It is a Space based Infra Red Telescope Facility which will extend the work of The Hubble telescope, The Compton Gamma Ray telescope and The Chandra X-Ray telescope. SIRTF is quite an amazing project using new ideas such as an Earth Trailing starting from an L1 orbit, and cooling only the intruments. Saved tax payers over $1 billion in redesigns. Check it out!"

Anonymous Coward writes "iPodlounge is reporting that Burton/Apple will soon be introducing an Amp Pack backpack featuring the very cool SoftSwitch Technology to control your iPod via internal cabling. Like the Amp Jacket introduced at Macworld SF 2003, there is a pocket for iPod and it's controlled using a built in remote control. Here's the kicker, it will cost $200! Yikes."

lilgerry writes "Alan Greenspan is asking some tough questions about the correct balance between rewarding innovators and inhibiting follow-on innovators. There's not many answers here, but there's a hint that there could be some clear economic thinking coming to be added to the discussion. Several good questions raised, and in very precise terms that should get papers published on these topics for years to come."

Build6 writes "Ars Technica opens today with another one of their deeply-thought-out articles relating to MacOS X issues, pointing out another thing which the old MacOS had and the current one doesn't."

matty_x points to coverage at NewsForge of the Free Software Foundation's new 'Shared Source' program. Cynics might call this selling out, but it actually makes a lot of sense for the FSF to listen to customers about what they really would like and benefit from, rather than only to developers and freeloading users. Bravo!

Mad Dog Kenrod asks: "A recent ad campaign for a digital camera had the slogan (something like) 'imagine being able to take a picture from your head and show it to people' - it was basically showcasing how small the camera was. This got me thinking: most people simply want to 'snap what they see'. Given that the human eye already has a very workable lens, and a retina which (I assume) is similar in technology to a digital camera, how feasible would it be to 'tap into' the optic nerve (not the brain, because by then the 'image' is probably something else entirely) and turn the signals from all those rods and cones into pixels?"

"Given we can do C.A.T. scans, would it even be feasible to do this from outside the head (say, with sufficient miniaturization, from the arm of your glasses)?

Of course, you would lack other things like zooms and filters and even an ability to 'frame' the picture (and there'd be problems for people with eye disease), but I propose that, for the majority of us who just want to quickly 'snap what we see' this would make for the smallest, lightest camera possible.

I know nothing about what would be involved in making this happen, so would be interested in people's thoughts."

The Llama King writes "The Houston Chronicle has an interesting story about a debate in the Texas Legislature over whether programmers are really engineers. A quote: " 'It's one of the silliest issues we're having to deal with this session, but it's also one of the most important,' said Steven Kester, legislative director of the American Electronics Association, an organization of computer companies." Are you really an engineer? Or just a code-monkey?"

EyesWideOpen writes "Determined to break the current altitude record of 34,747 metres (114,000 ft) Colin Prescot and Andy Elson will try again this year to take a giant envelope to a height in excess of 40,000 metres (130,000 feet). The balloonists have made previous attempts at the record and are hoping to use what has been learned so far, as well as a wider zone in which their QinetiQ 1 balloon can fly off southwest England, to be successful this year. To perform radiation and micrometeoroid experiments Prescot will try to fly a solar-powered propeller-driven plane (with a mounted camera) in the stratosphere. June to September is the proposed launch window."

Anonymous Mexican Coward writes "The mexican congress is considering a revision of the copyright law. Among other changes the law will extend the term of copyright from life-plus-70 to life-plus-100, and at the end of that term, the mexican government has the right to charge royalties for works in the "public domain." Go Mexico! Check it out"

Thargok333 writes "Apple calls out Adobe on the 'PC is Faster' article linked from the Adobe website. They state that it is an After Effects bug, which they are working close to Adobe to fix. With Adobe's idea of G4 optimization, I am not impressed that a 'single 1.25 GHz G3' gets beat by a P4 3 GHz."

Anonymous Coward writes "C|net has an article on a new bill being proposed in the Senate that requires all software, music and movies that employ copy-protection schemes must be prominently labeled with consumer warnings, which is being sponsored by Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Oregon."

sander writes "OpenOffice.org, everybody's favourite non-Microsoft office suite has just released a beta of its next version, OpenOffice.org 1.1. It's up for downloading , but unfortunately there doesn't seem to be any cool screen shots anywhere???? The new release comes with a large variety of new features, from real goodies like Flash export for the slide shows , support for WYSIWYG DocBook/XML and mySQL databases to pretty boring ones like better footnotes (whatever that means)." And wahgnube writes "Here are the slides from Michael Meeks' presentation at the Open Office conference in Germany which give us details regarding the changes made by Ximian. Can't wait for the next major Ximian GNOME Desktop release."

thirty-seven writes "The ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest world finals are being held today, at 8:30am local time in Beverly Hills. But before the "real" contest started, the teams got to have some fun competing in the Java Challenge, where the teams write Java programs that directly compete against each other in a simulated environment. Although it was a big secret ahead of time, a pdf on the site now reveals that this year's Challenge was writing a program to drive a race car in a simulated demolition derby. No official results have been released yet, but according to their coach, the University of Waterloo team came in third overall after a slow start."