Slashdot Mirror

HalAshton writes "In a move that should make it easier to launder money on the internet. A Swiss bank is going online with initial deposits only $5000." U.S. regulators and the IRS are worried. Next thing you know, they'll want back doors into all crypto so that Internet-using tax evaders have a harder time hiding from them.

technotron writes " The latest from Bob Cringley is out on the Web. This time around, he talks about people who start start-ups with their money, and have reached the point of having so much money, they just keep starting more, but also mostly about the people in the tech industry, and the quality of life. "

Alex T-B writes "A 17-year old Swede has been sued by the IFPI for having links to MP3s from his homepage. The tracks weren't actually located on his system. How does this bode for future suing practices - can anybody get sued for just linking to stuff someone somewhere considers to be 'bad'? Der Artikel ist auf Deutsch - use babelfish. " MP3s or not, lawsuits over links scare me.

duder writes "It appears that both sides in the Microsoft anti-trust suit are filing the closing arguments according to the Washington Post. " It doesn't look any surprises-CNNfn has an additional update as well. The DOJ and MS have filed sharply contrasting legal briefs-Microsoft claims there's competition, citing Sun and Red Hat, the government claims they have a monopoly. And give the US justice system, I'm sure we'll see the end to this case sometime shortly after Rob actually finishes reading Cryptonomicon.

I've been so busy on the code frenzy that I've been behind on the quickies! Tragic! First lets get the serious quickies out of the way: chris sent us the Atlanta Linux Showcase Tutorial and Conference program for the 3rd Annual ALS, comming up October 12-16, 1999, in Atlanta Georgia. Registration is open. Bl0w0ff noted that The dockapp warehouse has been upgraded and redesigned. k-rist sent us SimShatner. Here is a site selling a video history of Atari with interviews with the guys that did Pac-Man and all that early stuff. Someone sent us a link to another place you don't want to see a BSOD. Want some Blair Witch Parodies? irishmikev sent is a Southpark Parody and stairs sent The Blair Family Circus Project. How about a pair of strange places to put a server? Gareth Walwyn sent us one in a potted plant and GFD noted thatLinux Today has a story about a box that runs in a real Pizza Hut Box. If strange Linux boxes ain't your bag, someone submitted Apple Fritter which contains strange cases for Apples (Legos, Radios, and more) Jade wrote in with how to apply for the position of Sith Apprentice. and rjh pointed us to the iMaul (seems like a lot of stuff is coming in pairs today) Evan Vetere noticed that despair.com has new de-motivators. Matthew McCabe sent us tuxtiles which is taking votes on designs for "Linux Blankets". Since we're mentioning merchandise, I gotta plug Think Geek which is the first place I've seen with good stuff. They mailed us a box of freebies, but I actually woulda bought most of the stuff they sent me (mugs with #include <beer.h> and some sweet perl shirts and other cool stuff). Most of the "Geek" sites just sell crap but most of this was actually clever. We probably should also note that Copyleft finally has the new Slashdot shirts from our contest winners, they look great. ralphb was the first to say that Time Digital has an article on Slashdot.

saurus asks: "A fellow *nix person says I probably get scanned everyday. I say, "No way -- I'd know!" Uhm, actually, if I sat on my box all day running sniffit+netstat+iptraf I might. Could you share a low maintenance monitoring [Open Source] solution ? How would it fare against stealth probes? "

Chasuk wrote to us with the word from the Sunday Times that apparently Steven Spielberg will be directing what would have been Kubrick's next project - AI. The story is "the tale of a young 'robot' boy that he likened to the story of Pinocchio." The two had talked extensively before the latter's death, and were good friends. The movie is based on the short stoy Supertoys Last All Summer Long, by Brian Aldiss.

John B. Random writes "I see that Science Fiction Crowsnest has got it's hands on the leaked details of the new Star Trek show set to replace Voyager, Star Trek Excellent." Stupid name but the plot did actually read interesting.

mikecheng writes "The Internet Industry Association in Australia has decided how it will implement the new censorship laws in this country - mandatory cliet-side filtering. Read here how you must use net-filtering software (NetNanny and the like) and you must supply to your ISP a "a guarantee [you] are using client-side filtering". Of course you have to be using one of the "approved" filtering programs, or else the ISP charges you $5 and filters for you. (Now all I need is an approved open source filter!) "

Why2K writes "This article provides some interesting comments on the differences between FreeBSD and Linux, and the reasons why Linux is more popular. " Its sorta an outsider fluff piece, but its a nice summary. Talks broadly about the technical differences in the code, the sociologies, and of course, the fact that BSD has a cooler mascot ;)

The Conkman writes "In a press release released today, Japan-based companies Toshiba and Matsushita announced their partnership with California-based Sandisk in the manufacturing of a new flash memory chip for portable mp3 players. The release states that the flash memory chip ( approx. the size of a postage stamp ) is anticipated to have an initial size of 32MB to 64MB and a data throughput of 2Mbs per second working towards a goal of a 256MB chip with a data throughput of 10Mbs per second. The mass production of the chip ( and the player I assume ) is scheduled to begin in the second quarter of next year. "

Phexro writes "Looks like Nick Petreley, IDG and the LinuxWorld gang have a neat idea- Open Books. They are soliciting the Linux community to help write "The Essential Linux", which will be written and edited completely(?) by the members of the Linux community. The finished work will be distributed under the terms of the IDG Books Open Content License." I'll probably volunteer; I'm already in the Open Source Writers Group. But will enough others participate to make it a viable project? (More below)

The reason I wonder if this project (which I think is an excellent idea) will draw enough support is that it's facing stiff competition from commercial publishers. The market for Linux books is so hot right now that one New York literary agent I know, Lisa Swayne, is literally begging for Linux authors.

While much Linux software is free, books about it cost plenty. An awful lot of people, including me, have noticed this and are not happy about it. Writing is not that much different from coding. In many ways. the two tasks are different applications of the same talents, and the way writers and coders work is quite similar, especially the fact that people who are good (or want to get good) at either task often become so obsessed with their work that they give up almost everything else in their lives. Given this similarity, why should people who write about free software almost invariably get paid, while people who write free software are expected to "contribute to the community" without getting any money in return?

Personally, I believe it is the duty of any writer or editor who uses free software to donate his or her skills to the community, just as programmers who use free software often contribute bugfixes and patches even if they aren't heavily involved in kernel or applications development. We each can and should contribute in our own way.

But now Linux is going big-time, and publishers move in packs just as surely as Wall Street investors, so suddenly there's competition for anyone who can write competently about Linux. I believe this is going to lead to a lot of bad books, just as the explosion of science fiction's popularity in the 1970s led to the publication of many SF novels that never should have been printed.

I believe Open Source books have the potential to be better and more useful manuals than those written under commercial pressure. Editing is the writer's equivalent of debugging. Just as good programmers often spend more time debugging than actually writing code, good writers often spend more time editing their work than typing their first drafts.

If you are a programmer who can write, or a writer who understands programming, I urge you to donate at least a little of your precious time to either of the two Open Source writing projects mentioned above, or to one of the many other worthwhile ones that have sprung up elsewhere.

Sure, there's lots of pressure to spend every waking moment making money coding or writing, but doing the same work without deadline pressure, for love instead of money, at least a few hours every week, will not only make you feel better about yourself, but may also help you improve your skills in ways you cannot when you're cranking out copy or code against a commercial deadline.

Note: this story was posted briefly earlier, then pulled when we discovered that LinuxWorld's servers weren't responding. Now, at 1:13 EDT, LinuxWorld is back up, so the links all work. - ed

joshv writes "Virtual Addiction.com has an online Internet addiction quiz to determine if you yourself are addicted. The survey is kept over here. It appears that it does not give immediate results, your answers will only be included in their research. But from the questions that are asked you can get a good idea of what the researches think is addictive behavior writ the Internet. " I love being a case study. *grin*

saurus wrote in to tell us that an announcement has appearedon E*trade proclaiming that the IPO share price for Red Hat will now be $12-$14. Everyone's getting really anxious to see what happens. Brace yourself. Update: 08/11 12:32 by H : It looks like the info was pulled-anyone have more details? Post below.

Tefkay writes "An Upside feature on how linux can be/is being used in the military." As you'd expect, it's much the same situation as the rest of the world-champions within the organization, tyring to get people to understand how useful it would be. The author does make some interesting points about how/why Open Source developers do what they do, however.

Winston Smith writes "Stan Lee, creator of Spider Man and numerous other superheroes, will be releasing a web comic called The Seventh Portal, coming as soon as September. More info can be found at The Orange County Register. "

DigDug wrote in with a scary article about how closely AOL cooperates with law enforcement agencies. In the article, a local (Loudoun County, VA) Sheriff's Deputy is quoted as saying, "AOL is extremely law-enforcement friendly ... they don't hold anything back." While I'm sure we all want criminals brought to justice, there are some serious privacy concerns here. If you send e-mail to someone with an AOL account, apparently you'd better be v-e-r-y careful about what you say.

nemoest writes "Intel is planning on slashing the price on Pentium III's by as much as 15% on Sunday. After which, they also plan to also cut the prices on the Xeon, Pentium II and III, and Celron on August 22nd. It looks like they want to try to run AMD even further into the ground with convenient price slashing just as they gear up to release the Athlon. You can read the complete story here on Cnet's news.com. "

chris wrote in to tell us that Registration for the 3^rd Annual Atlanta Linux Showcase is open. First 100 registrations get an OS-Wars T-Shirt (I have one, they rock) brazilian brain sent us an English Translation of an Interview with Alfredo Kojima of WindowMaker fame. Scott wrote in to tell us that the July issue of Daemon News is online and Jim wrote in to tell us that the July issue of The FreeBSD 'zine is out too. geophile wrote in to tell us that Propoganda 10 is out. More excellent background images to consume your free RAM. Very yum. erios23 notified us of a new toy on jwz's webpage. BluBall sent us a Slashdot reference in Salon's Silicon Funnies. Spoofs Linux and Slashdot and even me a bit I guess (well, my name anyway). And finally chrisd (who may be biased on this one) wrote in to say that VA is one of the 10 best companies to work for (According to ZD) ranking amongst Replay, Nokia and Novell. I suspect that Nerf has something to do with it.

blowdart sent us a news.com story that talks about changes in the super computer export laws to developing nations. Numbers are all over the place, but at least they are up from 2,000 MTOPS (which rendered a dual P3 and the new Playstations as unexportable!)

TeknoDragon writes "In the July Scientific American there's an article on how conductive metals can be made into optical sieves. Two applications of this technology pursued by NEC are color LCD screens up to six times as bright and photolithography techniques that would help plants upgrade to a smaller fab. "

Code-Fu writes "NetWare is nowhere. That's the word from Lotus Development." You can read the rest of the story here. This involves Lotus bringing Domino to Linux, and will probably mean Linux being used in more business settings. I like it.

CrackBot writes "The bugtraq security mailing list, along with the geek-girl archives of it, have moved to securityfocus.com . There's also a vulnerabilities database, products and services listings, and other mailing lists and forums. Seems to be a good resource for the security-minded... "

Anachronomous Chowder writes " The Economist has a smashing issue devoted to E-Business. Andy Grove: In five year's time all companies will be Internet companies or they won't be companies at all. "

CrtxReavr writes "American Computer Company: "Described as a "Poker Chip Sized" solid state disk drive, the new semiconductor could be seen in service by the end of 1999 or early in the year 2000. The device can store over 90 billion characters of information..." This sounds like it's too good to be true and the article excludes a lot of important information that would be necessary for verification purposes, for what they claim is security reasons. It prolly is worth scrutinizing though. " Want some scrutiny? Conor Walsh sent us a good list of problems:

1. They can't spell 'terahertz' properly.
2. They did a really bad job with paintbrush. I have personally done better jobs. (I have a picture of Bill Clinton getting off AF-1 with an earring... I laughed my ass off when a worse one appeared in a tabloid two weeks after I made it.)
3. If it operates with almost no heat/power dissipation at 12 THz, why not raise it to 20 or so?
4. Wait... a hard drive doesn't have a frequency!
5. '...semiconducting microswitches...replacing transistors...', except that's what transistors are!
6. 'Low Power TCAPS Technology drains only 1 ma/hr during operation.' Thoroughly impossible... the ampere is not something that can be measured over time... it's an instantaneous thing. It could draw a current of one mA for an hour of operation, but it would also draw the same for a minute or a year. The term for electricity over time, in this case, would be the Couloumb. (Amps*seconds)

BlackICE writes "NSI and ICANN are fighting, still. NSI is questioning what authority ICANN really has over them. The agreement with the Commerce Department gives ICANN power over registrars, however 'Amendment 11 is not entirely clear, and that NSI could have jockeyed for language that would put it in a different category from new registrars.' Now it might end up in a long legal battle. "

BlackICE writes "Ding dong the witch is dead-The trial portion of the case is over, and now both sides will have about a month to prepare closing statements. Expert opinion seems to be that the government will win, but what the final outcome will be in terms of reforms or injunctions is still up in the air. " Reports have also been hinting at settlement talks as well - maybe that will get everything over with sooner. Of course, following this comes the appeals, so my kids should be somewhere in grad school by the time this really finishes.

Sir-Techlot writes "AMDs wed site has a page saying that the Athlon will be shipping today (6/23/99). Tells a bit of info we already know also. "

akey writes "CPlant98, a Linux cluster composed of 400 Digital Personal Workstation 500as, achieved 125.2 GFLOPS, which would place it at #53 on the Top 500 list. And this was only a 350-node run... " I'm hearing rumors of 1000+ Linux Clusters. I'm itchin' for it to come out of the closet so we can see some real benchmarks.

Red Leader asks: "Hi. I'm writing in the hope that some electrical people will be able to help me out with the nitty gritty aspects of shielding a computer case. You see, I'm building myself a computer case out of wood. I have already built one, but it was merely a wood case (replacing the plastic) which overlayed a standard metal chassis. Well, that was too heavy, and I also want to use my own layout for the 'guts' of the box. So aside from heat, noise and grounding (which i've pretty much figured out) - I'm worried about the electromagnetic interference aspect of this new machine. It's most likely going to be a dual Celeron based Ultra-Wide SCSI2 system - which I think (!?!) will generate quite a large electromagnetic field. I've been thinking of shielding the case by lining it with this with copper fabric or something similar - but don't know how it sizes up to a solid metal case. Any help would be greatly appreciated - and I'll be sure to post pics of the case (well it's actually more than that) in progress and when completed.

Loki writes "A few goverment reports on encryption. Mostly talking about the fears of letting the public have high grade encryption, and how that is a hindrance for law enforcment. " Somewhat older documents, and in .pdf format, but I guess that this is the FBIs justification. I'm so glad its all being challanged.

juniorboy sent us JP Mogenthal's latest piece from Internetwork, this timing cautioning people about Linux and along the way tries to get at the root of why people are switching.

NapalmCheese writes "NASA tested their AI (Remote Agent) in space last May and it passed with flying colors. The articles makes it sound like HAL, I don't know if that is a good thing, but definately cool. The first article is found at The JPL and is nice and informative, the second article found at, rax is even more so. Hmmmm, if only it had a big red eye. "

jwhyche writes "Just what the heck is Eta Carinae doing? Well astronomers are not quite sure. After being one of the brightest stars in the Southern sky it dimmed for a few decades. Now it's back, emiting five time the energy of the sun, and is right next door. So, how big is a hypernova explosion anyways? Big boom anyone? "

NIck Porcino writes "Warp drive one step closer to reality! From the abstract: A spacetime is presented for which the total negative mass needed is only the order of grams, accompanied by a negligible amoung of positive energy. This constitutes a reduction of the absolute value of the energy by 65 orders of magnitude. The new geometry satisfies the quantum inequality concerning WEC [Weak Energy Condition] violations and exhibits the same advantages as the original Alcubierre spacetime. Read it here. The two big problems to be resolved are 1) how do you get an object inside a warp bubble? 2) What happens to the object when the warp bubble collapses? "

Catatomic writes "The Village Voice has an interesting article about Katz "Voices From The Hellmouth" Check it out here. " Well, interesting is one way to put it; incendiary is another. Worth checking out though. Click below to get a response from Katz, who was interviewed for this article. I'm not a big fan of intra-media incestuous disputes, and I take plenty of criticism and disagreement without complaint. But I'm getting a lot of e-mail about this, and I feel strongly about the Hellmouth series, so I feel ought to respond. The Voice piece was, in my mind, neither an honest nor accurate reflection of a very brief, hurried interview I gave on the phone with the writer who calls himself Jane Dark a couple of weeks ago. First off, I made a huge point of not comparing these experiences to the Holocaust. Not a single e-mailer made that comparison, and I think it's ludicrous, although the pain in these messages was truly breathtaking.But to liken their experiences to the Holocaust has never occurred to me, or to the thousands of kids e-mailing me. Many did compare the experience of being outsiders to being gay.

I said the e-mails had the feeling of testimony, which survivors of disasters often used. He asked me if this were like the Holocaust, and I said I suppose the idea of testimony was similiar, but that they weren't comparable experiences. So here's a lesson in how media work.

Dark asked me a half dozen times if these were all middle-class males, and I said no: nearly half were women, and my impression -- Î couldn't know for sure -- was that a huge chunk were working class kids. The Voice piece obviously reflects a pre-conceived and provocatively contrarian point of view, to which the writer is perfectly well entitled.

But I think it's pretty snarky to misrepresent what I said in support of it. He could just say it himself. I don't know why he even bothered to call. And I'm not into squawking about what reporters write. If you dish it out, you ought to take it.

Then, of course, there's the profoundly stupid idea at the heart of the piece that middle-class kids bring victimization on themselves, or don't deserve sympathy if they are harassed, humiliated, excluded, or sent home or suspended for being different from most other middle-class kids. In fact, it's so foolish an idea I doubt he even believes it.

This may be an honest difference of opinion, but it sure wasn't honestly gathered.So I'm telling the people e-mailing me to move on. Let's not play.

Mihg writes "The judge in the Sun/Microsoft case over Java has issued preliminary rulings on 3 of the 10 issues in the trial. (Siding with Microsoft twice.) Basically, the rulings indicate that Microsoft has the right to author their own clean-room versions of Java without Sun's input, but none of their current products qualify as "clean-room." Read more at NEWS.COM "

Jeff Hyche wrote in to point us the latest RIAA shenanigan. The record industry organization had been attempting to garner a larger amount of royalties from digital distribution - IE Internet, satellites and cable modems.

id_entity writes "For those of us not lucky enough to see the Phantom Menace this weekend, view the first Star Wars in ASCII-mation. It was created by Simon Jansen, a talented man with lots of time on his hands, and includes almost 10,000 ASCII frames of animation. " Someone needs a new hobby. I mean it.

Kenny_Dope writes "FreeBSD 3.2-Release is now available at the usual FTPs (ftp.freebsd.org , and mirrors) with lots of cool new features. go get it now! ( taken from freebsdrocks.com " You BSDies know what to do.

Robert Rwebangira writes "There is a nice review of Caldera OpenLinux 2.2 over at Salon - read the original review. Bottom line: The easiest Linux to install so far, but there are signs of increasing fragmentation in the Linux distributions. "

cluening writes "I was shocked to see that one of the best poetry writers, Shel Silverstein, had died. Although not really technical in nature, I am sure his poems and drawings were enjoyed by a whole lot of the Slashdot community... " I've enjoyed several of his coffee tables books over the past winter-it's sad to see people like this go. Update: 05/11 04:25 by H :Thanks to Jesse Berney for sending us the Washington Post write-up about Shel.

Midvale writes "PC Week article about the plans Intel has for the next set of StrongArm chips, .18 micron process, up to 600mHz. These things would be great CPU's for wearable computers." Its nice to see that this isn't gonna die out.

Nomikos writes " 12" LCD screen giving a 3D view - no glasses needed. "Designs created, float between the screen and the user." They don't give any specs, only mention a head/body tracker (clip-on emitter, screen receiver) which makes it only a tiny bit plausible IMO.
Anyone know of a technology which'd make this possible? "

ShadoWolf sent us one of the more creative uses that I've seen for Lego Mindstorms. This one is a 3D Plotter that makes use of Legos, GNUPlot, and a Netwinder. It can make a 3d model of any surface. Not bad for a toy, huh?

Kaa writes Sent us this wired story about AltaVista wanting to serve advertisements as search results. For words with more than 100,000 hits, they will sell the number one result, indistinguishable from a normal match. Here's a great quote "They will likely implement this very quietly," the letter says. "One point to remember is that AltaVista is still a popular search engine among 'old time' Internet users who might react vocally to this change once they know about it." " I dunno how vocal I'll be. But AltaVista was my primary search engine. Update: 04/15 01:21 by CT : Wired retracted the comment that we posted here saying that it was unconfirmable.

Squeezer sent us the April Edition of ext2 and Jim sent us the April Edition of FreeBSDZine . For the obsessive, Evan Vetere sent us a link to the Amazon preorder form for novelizations of the prequels. Its a 4 book set: 4 different covers, but 4 copies of the same book. Doommaker sent us linkage to info about that other cool movie coming out: Southpark is also gracing the big screen. bjb sent us a link to a applet that will Shred Any Web Page. Particular cheering after a long unsuccessful day. DaMan Penguin Pez Well, its the season for Peeps, and Italica sent us a url to a page of fun things to do to your leftover marshmellow bunnies. Not enough candy torture? frohike writes sent us another one. What did those bunnies do to deserve this? An anonymous reader alerted us to www.fishdot.org. Wierdos. Finally, an another anonymous reader sent us the most Hilarious Attorney Page Ever. Its for Leonard Crabs, Attorney At Law. "If your legal case is not won within 24 days, we''ll buy you a free combo meal at Taco Bell." Go now. Its funny.

NakNomik writes "IDC says "Other Operating Environments Will Have Trouble Keeping up with Linux's Growth" in its first ever forecast release about Linux. Read the release document over here. " Well, it's nice to see more people paying attention. And IDC gets the attention of the PHBs-for better or for worse.

hepjedi writes "News.com is reporting that Novell is giving away its source code. " They did this at their annual conference and rolled out plans to "...the release of core NetWare protocols, to test releases of its clustering software, to further refinements in its strategy to provide management tools for NetWare and Microsoft's Windows NT operating system." Their basic aim is to get more developers for the system (Duh).

Several people followed up the today's earlier apple Open Source article by pointing us to Apple's Official Website on Open Source. Features Yet Another License, the Apple Public Source License but requires a login to get much more than the license and a faq. Update: 03/16 07:52 by CT : Virtually unrelated, thanks to darren wilson, the original creator of the crystal apple icon there.