Slashdot Mirror

The Redherring is carrying an explosive article about Microsoft's secret memos which discuss how to kill DR-DOS, and in general how to leverage the Windows monopoly. Funily enough, that's the sort of behaviour the Sherman Act prohibits. In related news, a group of people who just don't get it have banded together into the TAAC, an organisation of VARs that claims the DOJ is stiffling innovation. ("s/Innovation/bug count/" ????) David Hart and El contributed the second link, while Adam Radulovic, John Lazzaro, Sunil Gupta, David Price, Matt Francis, David Hart, Phillip Brown, toebee, and I found the first link.

R-2-RO writes " Sun has a neat little article called A Gallery of Games in Java Technology. Topics in the article include Luring Consumers with Games, Why Java Technology Suits Games, Dodging Barriers in Multiplayer Games, New Dimensions: 2D and 3D, Building Interactive Communities, Going Beyond C++, and What Java Technology Brings to Gaming "

Kevin sent us a link to an early story about Quake III Arena. As you would expect, it will feature new multiplayer stuff and a new graphics engine to make everything prettier. And if id follows their pattern, we'll have a Linux port as well. To bad 1999 is a long way off.

JobSeeker writes "Yesterday, key House and Senate Republicans reached a final agreement on the bill to hire as many as 190,000 foreign professionals over the next six years. It is scheduled to be voted on in the House this afternoon, even though the White House administration threatens to veto it on the groups that US worker protections have been watered down. Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass) plans to block debate on this bill in the Senate. This weekend the Senate will recess until the end of August but by then re-election campaigns will be in full swing. "

Kevin sent us a link to this wired article where you can read about Al Gore supposedly planning to announce support for personal privacy in the digital age. Seems to me that he is getting ready for election time with this one, but if it means encryption laws become less stupid, I guess I'm for it.

Cory Lueninghoener sent us a link to another press release, this one announcing that Caldera has released version 1.0 of Netware for Linux.

Kevin got the word out to us that FBI director Louis Freeh wants to require CellCos to provide the FBI with the location of mobile phone users without a court order or warrant, via a Congressional Appropriations bill. Very scary - Orwellian, as the article points out. The FBI says it would only use it when they suspect a felony is being committed, a human life is in danger, or a certain few other situations. It would also cost billions of dollars. Cavete magnum fratrem!

Kevin writes "This was reported in the San Jose Mercury , The Clinton administration, in a small concession to the American software and financial industries, Tuesday said it would ease requirements in some cases that software makers get an export license for each sale of strong encryption software. The loosened rules apply to deals with foreign banks and financial institutions in 45 nations that have acceptable money-laundering laws." Read about it here.

Kevin writes "An Ohio federal judge ruled late last week that U.S. government restrictions on exporting encryption software were legal, saying data-scrambling source code was not entitled to strong free-speech protections. "

Kevin writes "To make all the slashdot readers more informed on the WIPO bill, here are some links. This is the bill being voted on in the House, H.R. 2281 This is the treaty as proposed by WIPO. This is the EFF info page about the WIPO bill. And the bill EFF supports in place of H.R 2281 "

Kenneth Oswalt writes "Performance Computing (aka the magazine once known as "Unix review") has an interesting review of Caldera Openlinux on their website and in the july issue of their mag. In it they describe the relative ease of installation, and the wide variety of applications, as well as comparing Redhat's documentation to that of Caldera. (spoiler, redhat wins.) "

clarkcd wrote in with an easy question that I don't think has been addressed before: " Do you know of anyone with a list of Linux Powered/Linux-Friendly ISPs ? I'm moving soon, and since I'll be changing ISPs anyway, I thought it'd be nice to make an informed choice. I got lucky this last move and found an outfit running FreeBSD. It made my life much easier." It just strikes me that geeks should try to accumulate ratings for ISPs somehow so when you move to a new city (or visit another one :) you can find out easily where to get good access.

John Hartnup sent us a Perl Script for tracking stuff that happens at Distributed.net. Speaking of Which, Slashdot has broken into the top 10 overall! Keep it going folks! Next, Matthew Kirkwood sent us a link to link to another linux support site. Third, Jesse Off sent us a link to another one of those silly You know you're a nerd when. Mostly Unix jokes. Pretty good. Next, Jason Poll sent us a link to a collection of online books, the site includes programming and Linux books apparently. Continuing along, David Sinck sent us a link to one of those James Bond super cars with fancy video doo dads. This one has instructions to build your own if you have tons of cash to drop on all sorts of strange hardware. It's really pretty cool. Lastly, Harry McKee sent us a link to an article about a Telepathic Clapper. Hopefully they can come up with an ad campaign less obnoxious than 'Clap On/Clap Off'

Denis Oliver Kropp writes "Fischlustig and DOK-Ware are proud to announce the availability of the first version of AntiChrist for Linux. AntiChrist is an offensive violent 3D-Shooter that is availible for following platforms: Win32/OpenGL, Win32/Direct X (HAL & RAMP), Linux/Mesa/Glide. Requirements for the Linux version: 3dfx card, sound card, glide, mesa with 3dfx support, libpthreads. You can download the binary distribution here. "

Jeff Grady writes "I requested technical information from Plustek in order to write a Linux driver for my OpticPro 4800P scanner, and I received this response: "Unfortunately we do not give out that type of information pertaining to our scanners. However, we are planning on writing LinuxUnix drivers hopefully by the end of the year. " Looks like mainstream companies are really starting to support linux! Cool, man. " I wish companies would be more open about releasing specs, but if they can't do it, its cool that they'll at least code drivers. Linux is becoming more of a viable alternative every day.

LinuxFreak writes "Faximum has released the second Linux beta of their commercial fax server product. Go here for the details. " Faximum is commercial code, but its still nice to see commercial linux software becoming more common.

Farrell McGovern writes " Here is a followup on the previous article. It brings up some interesting questions...does Digital/Alta Vista remove references to other search engines? And if the tech doesn't take much to modify to be used on other search engines, has Digital/Alta Vista shot themselves in the foot? Another thing it points out is the conflict between the spirit of the Net, and those who would make money from it without keeping that spirit. "

Farrell McGovern wrote in to tell us about Electric Monk. Basically, it is/was a nice search engine that took natural language as input, and searched AltaVista. Well, recently it seems that AltaVista started rejecting their referrals. I'm at odds with this- anyone ever look at AltaVista.Com? It It's not The Real AltaVista, but rather a front end that someone else was selling ad space on. Ages ago it used to be barely noticable that it wasn't the real thing, and I found that bordering on offensive, but Electric Monk really one upped the original interface. What do you guys think?

Jorge G. S. wrote in to remind everyone that tonight (April 1) Marc Andreessen will be at the SVLUGto talk about the release of Communicator Source Code. And this isn't an April Fools day thing *grin*. Just another example of why I need to move somewhere cooler than Sticksville, MI.

Eddis Jefferson wrote in to tell us that it looks as if Intel might sue Apple over the recent (extremely funny) commercials that have been aired. You can read more here. Personally I thought the ads were great- the G3 hardware is great. To bad it has MacOS8 on it reducing it to a snails pace. Rhapsody, Be or Linux will make that machine killer.

This story covers what exactly is going to happen between intel and compaq and digital with all the hoopla over everyone buying pieces of eachother lately. Thanks to Farrell McGovern for sending this our way.

delaney wrote in to tell us about this wired article about The Gimp. With the countdown on, it's nice to see that PR before one point oh. If there are any adobe employees reading, I'm curious what their take is.

Donncha O Caoimh wrote in to tell us about the RFMS spam mail server. It is $700 (!!) and ships out email in bulk. This is the kind of stuff that really burns my bottom. Not only is this company violating SMTP standard to send email nobody wants, but they are charging an amazing amount of money to do it. I don't really know how to handle this. Perhaps we should spam their 888 number. I don't have a problem with spam sent with a valid header- I can filter that, but this is exactly what is wrong with the 'net. Companies like this must be stopped. I'm waiting to hear everyone's suggestions, but there has got to be something legal that the thousands of Slashdot readers can do to make this kind of thing stop.

joe wrote in to tell us that SCO now has a Win5 emulator available. Read about it here. Between Wine, Wabi, OS/2 and others emulating 95, it's getting closer and closer to a point where you can try a new OS without giving up your old software. This is important stuff people.

This link tells of how Hotmail, one of Microsoft's recent acquisitions is taking on spammers. Basically Genesis Networks and a few other naughty companies have been forging spam headers with replies going to hotmail.

ChunKing writes "I'm thinking of organising a geek documentary film festival and was wondering what Slashdotters would expect to see at such an event. I think we've probably all seen Revolution OS, Startup.com, and The Code a bazillion times and those films are getting a little long in the tooth now. Hackers Wanted would be great but I don't think it has been released yet. The Stephen Fry film out recently is ideal and will encourage discussion. Downloading content from YouTube for screening would be fine so what does the community recommend?"