Slashdot Mirror

An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from Torrent Freak: "A leading Australian Internet service provider has pulled out of negotiations to create a warning notice scheme aimed at reducing online piracy. iiNet, the ISP that was sued by Hollywood after refusing to help chase down alleged infringers, said that it can't make any progress with rightsholders if they don't make their content freely available at a reasonable price. The ISP adds that holding extra data on customers' habits is inappropriate and not their responsibility."

Tesladownunder writes "This huge LED is on steroids and then some. It is intended for use as a streetlight. It has a 7000 lumen output at 100W and will burn a hole in a CD case without focusing. And that's without the infrared that a halogen or discharge lamp has. Very efficient and low maintenance. Stronger than HID car headlights or a 500W halogen. Hit the site for lots of data and pics of it in action including burning and irresponsible bicycle luminosity. You'll want one to attach to your keyring, too."

james writes "What do you get when you combine a MSI Wind U100 notebook with liquid nitrogen? The new Intel Atom frequency World Record ... and some damn cool pictures! A large copper pot is used, sitting on top of the GPU and chipset, and cold transfer through the original heatsink plate to the CPU. This was cooled down to about -20 C to achieve the new world mark. (Intel Atom N270 @ 2315mhz) For more information you can check out the original forum thread.

Klootzak writes "Michael Malone, head of Australia's largest ISP iiNet announced today that his company would sign up to the Government's live trials of the Great Firewall of Australia. In an article published by The Age, Mr Malone is quoted calling Stephen Conroy 'The worst Communications Minister we've had in the 15 years since the [internet] industry has existed.' Despite at first giving the impression that iiNet is rolling over like a good Government puppy the article quotes Mr Malone saying that the reasons for participating in this trial is to show how unfeasible and stupid it is — Quoted from the article: 'Every time a kid manages to get through this filter, we'll be publicizing it and every time it blocks legitimate content, we'll be publicizing it.' Let's hope that in typical fashion of government-instigated Internet-filtering that this stupid idea is just as useless, inefficient and ineffectual as the last one, and that the Australian Government realizes this before wasting more taxpayer dollars on it (seeing as the first attempt only cost taxpayers $84,000,000)."

Arian writes "Phantom Entertainment (formally Infium Labs) are set to finally release their first product after years of investors trust and years on John Public's distrust. The product is the Phantom Lapboard, a wireless keyboard/mouse combo designed so you can frag from the comfort of your couch. It is designed to work with the upcoming Phantom Game Service, if and when the service is released. Preorders for the Lapboard are available on the Phantom Entertainment website. It is due out in November, at a full retail price of $129.99.

DuncanE asks: "We are looking at migrating an old legacy database application to a newer web based framework for the front end. For me the two obvious choices are ASP.net vs Java Server Faces. CodeGuru has side by side look at both, but does anyone have any real world comparisons? ASP.net appears to be MS only, which is a concern, depending on how mature mod_mono has become." Which framework would you prefer to use? Under what situations and conditions would you recommend the use of the other?

tezbobobo writes "Well, Open Solaris has only been available a matter of days and already there are new projects available. SchilliX is an OpenSolaris-based live CD and distribution that is intended to help people discover OpenSolaris. When installed on a hard drive, it also allows developers to develop and compile code in a pure OpenSolaris environment. More details are available on the author's blog."

tezbobobo writes "Tiger been out hours and already the Apple download page has been updated to take advantage of the update's new features. These cover areas including Spotlight plugins, Dashboard plugins, and Automator plugins. These allow a range of actions from searching within omnigraph documents (spotlight), to resizing photoshop documents (automator), and (my fav) a dashboard wireless locator. The best bit -- a cursory glance indicates about half are freeware."

JabrTheHut asks: "Having been a Palm user for over two years now, I've upgraded to a Tungsten T3. While the features I'm used to using have not changed, I have become increasingly frustrated by what I see as a lack of progress. It doesn't seem to want to deal with text files (there is no import feature for the Palm Desktop notepad or memo pad, for example). Also there seems to be no way to copy arbitrary files to the Palm - all files must be "owned" by an application. With a 256MB SD card I expected to use it to copy files between work and home. Has anyone else noticed these or other shortcomings and have figured out ways around them?"

will writes "The North American Electric Reliability Council has released four documents concerning the August 14th power outage power outage in the North East. The blackout investigation homepage lists all NERC's documents relating to this event. Press coverage is at The Washington Post, CNN, and CBS News. The take home message: FirstEnergy did it. The are, of course, denying it." The report is also available at reports.energy.gov. Reader stinkydog writes "According to Yahoo News part of the blame for the big fizzle of 2003 lies with a failing SCADA system, GE's XA/21 power management system. 'Not only did the software that controls audible and visual alarms stop working at 2:14 p.m. EDT, but about a half hour later, two servers supporting the emergency system failed, too.' According to the product specs, it is a Unix system with X Windows."

trotski writes "In its day, Ultima 7 was one of the most complex and detailed RPG's ever made. Lets put it this way, in 1992 it required 20 mb of hard drive space and a 386 processor; cutting edge equipment that at the time retailed at well over $2000. Unfortunatly, until now getting Utlima 7 to run properly under win9X or worse, win2K or XP was heart-breaking. Fortunatly, someone has designed a utility that allows you to run this program under all versions of Windows as well as Linux! Very exciting for people out there who want to play this classic." Actually, Linux support seems to be only hypothetical at this point; along with the link to download the code is a note that says "Anyone who wishes to study the source code, or to port it to Linux or any other OS, is welcome to download this file."

warewolfsmith writes "The Bulova Accutron. Introduced in 1961, it was the first successful transistorized watch, far more accurate than any other watch then on the market and a major advance in timekeeping technology. Prior to reading this article I had never heard of it. Interesting history." There are a number of websites devoted to it.

lpontiac writes: "People have been making noise about the new Australian copyright laws making web caching and Playstation mod chips illegal ... and now, the Australian attorney-general has come out and stated that the new laws also make it illegal to forward email without the explicit (ie written) permission of the person who wrote the email. (Just as surprising to me is that the article claims to know who Claire Swire is :)" Update: 03/04 11:22 PM by T : kipling writes "Regarding the Australian e-mail copyright story, the ABC news site says that the Australian Attorney-General has dismissed these claims. Looks like another news ltd beatup." Update: 03/05 02:55 AM by T : And thanks to downunderrob, here is the AG's press release calling the idea "ridiculous."

DuncanE writes: "On monday morning it will be illegal to modify playstations in Australia to play pirated games. More info can be found [in this Australian IT article]. The new law will apply to all electronic devices." This is one consequence of the same Australian law we mentioned last week. Practice? Meet theory. Theory, Practice.

thoglette asks: "The ongoing security problems of IE/NS and the difficulty in controlling what the browser can/cannot do makes me want to move to something like Pine, however I need to use 'certificate' encryption (& https.) to access certain client sites. What support is there in other browsers for HTTPS?" How many bits are supported is important too. Encryption in IE and NS are up to 128-bit security whereas before 56-bit was the standard.

Rob Kaper asks this interesting question: "We all know LWN's 1998 timeline and some of us read Linus' timeline written in 1992 as well. But is there a more complete 1991-1999 timeline filling the gabs? I know it was once a work in progress for the Linux Promotion Project, but I've never seen something like it."

Russ Magee was the first of many of you to write in about Robert Cringely's analysis of the Halloween I document. He thinks the OpenSource community has no cause for concern, and he reminds us to stay focussed on Linux, not Microsoft. Karsten M. Self wrote "The article Art of War by Varian and Carl Shapiro is a good introduction to the basic strategies involved in a standards war. The book Rules by the same authors is a very good read with a lot ideas pertinent to the current debate.". However Ben Woodard writes "I was talking to the Access tech support people here at Cisco about Halloween and how MS is planning to use embrace and extend, Em&Ex, to capture the market. They told me how Microsoft has a broken version of CHAP negotiation in the PPP protocol and if you want CHAP to really work you must use Microsoft's proprietary version of CHAP. It got me wondering if other people know about places where Microsoft has used Em&Ex but it is burried so deep in the protocols that most people don't know it exists. It would be interesting to try to compile a list of these little known incidents of Em&Ex. " Obviously it is impossible to know whether Ben's example is an example of flawed testing or real intent to break CHAP, but were serious evaluations of OS's to include standards-compliance tests, an interesting picture might emerge. Not only are standards an issue, but so are patents. So far, Linux has been lucky: many Unix patents have elapsed. Patents are something to mull over, while hacking.