Slashdot Mirror

First time accepted submitter MrvFD writes "Ever since the most recent layoffs were announced by Nokia last month and the end of Qt related programs at Nokia was rumored, the fate of Qt has been in the air despite it nowadays having a working open governance model. Fear no longer, Qt brand, since Digia has now announced acquiring the Qt organization from Nokia. While relatively unknown company to the masses, it has already been selling the non-free (non-LGPL) licenses of Qt for 1.5 years. Hopefully this'll mean a bright future for Qt in co-operation with other Qt wielding companies like Google, RIM, Canonical, Intel, Skype, Microsoft, Jolla and the thousands of Qt open source and commercial license users. Digia now plans to quickly enable Qt on Android, iOS and Windows 8 platforms, where work has already been underway for some time."

An anonymous reader writes "Jerry had a motorcycle accident last May and lost a finger. When the doctor working on the artificial finger heard he is a hacker, the immediate suggestion was to embed a USB 'finger drive' to the design. Now he carries a Billix Linux distribution as part of his hand."

Shirke writes "A Finnish computer magazine reports that Finnish Standards Association has fired Mr. Lassi Nirhamo (article in Finnish). Some excerpts: Mr. Nirhamo was chairing the OOXML standard proposal meeting. During the meeting Mr. Nirhamo asked other board members to be excused of his duties and voice his opinion as a private citizen. After this was granted he criticized the standard proposal and resumed his duties as chairman. Mr. Nirhamo has now been let go due to a 'lack of trust.' Independent observers have assessed his chairmanship as 'excellent' and 'one of a kind.' The Association is accepting applications for the position. Anyone interested?"

OmnipotentEntity asks: "I usually come down hard on the side of Google, as I feel that they have a good philosophy and they follow it. However, a forum I regularly visit had a run in with the bad side of Google's AdSense program, and our AdSense account was terminated because of 'invalid click activity.' Some research by a fellow member of the boards turned up other people facing the same problems we ran into. These problems seem localized to sites hosted in Europe. I'm an American, so I have no clue about the European side of AdSense. Have any of our European webmasters ran into the same problems, or are these simply isolated incidents? Is anyone in America experiencing similar difficulties?"

OmnipotentEntity asks: "I usually come down hard on the side of Google, as I feel that they have a good philosophy and they follow it. However, a forum I regularly visit had a run in with the bad side of Google's AdSense program, and our AdSense account was terminated because of 'invalid click activity.' Some research by a fellow member of the boards turned up other people facing the same problems we ran into. These problems seem localized to sites hosted in Europe. I'm an American, so I have no clue about the European side of AdSense. Have any of our European webmasters ran into the same problems, or are these simply isolated incidents? Is anyone in America experiencing similar difficulties?"

TeknoHog writes "Robotics researchers from the UK and Japan have linked up a slime mold to remotely control a six-legged robot. The mold, which is naturally light-sensitive, is able to hide the robot in dark corners, and the scientists expect to further this technology for use in smaller, autonomous units. There is also a preprint of the research paper available from the University of Southampton."

TeknoHog writes "New Scientist Reports on a remarkable runaway process of global warming that has been going on in Siberia for the past few years. 'Western Siberia has warmed faster than almost anywhere else on the planet, with an increase in average temperatures of some 3C in the last 40 years.' As a result, a million square kilometers (the area of France and Germany) of frozen peat bog have been found to be melting, according to Russian and international scientists. This releases methane, a potent greenhouse gas, which contributes to further global warming."

tRSS points out this CNN article about the ongoing "What the Hack" gathering in the Netherlands which starts out "There are hundreds of tents on the hot and soggy campground, but this isn't your ordinary summertime outing, considering that it includes workshops with such titles as 'Politics of Psychedelic Research' or 'Fun and Mayhem with RFID.'" Read on for news from this weekend's other major hacker gatherings, namely (drumroll, please) The Gathering and DefCon. From Las Vegas, giucmo writes "The Hacker Jeopardy crew are sending images and video live from DefCon to a moblog at textamerica.com Last night they captured the lights going out in a tent full of hackers. Tonight is the main event." And sysrec writes "I've been to an even number of defcon's greater than 3 and wanted to share some personal insights from the largest hacker con in the world." (Largest, I guess, is in the eye of the beholder.)

Jumping back to Europe, Late writes "The Assembly 2005 demoparty, possibly the largest in the world, is taking place in Helsinki, Finland. As I write this the best compos are still to come and you can view them and a lot more live via the AssemblyTV streams (we use VideoLAN.org's VLC media player). If you do miss the compos, the entries will be available for download from our mirrors and as video clips from the AssemblyTV media gallery."

Gladiat0r writes "Nat Friedman blogged on Planet Gnome today that Novell has hired Tor Lillqvist (of Gimp for Windows fame) to help Fredrik Hedberg port Beagle to Windows, and after that his main task is to port Evolution to Windows."

Jari Komppa writes "Looking at how learning programming these days is much harder than when I was starting, I decided to write a tutorial on how to make graphics at pixel level. The aim for the tutorial is to show that programming can actually be fun."

Jari Komppa writes "Looking at how learning programming these days is much harder than when I was starting, I decided to write a tutorial on how to make graphics at pixel level. The aim for the tutorial is to show that programming can actually be fun."

jpatokal writes "Flashback to the future with UC Berkeley's Transportation Futuristics! An excellent exhibition of amazing diagrams on how transportation was expected to evolve, featuring flying saucer buses, airplane escape pods and, yes, monorails. But where are the Segways and SUVs?"

An anonymous reader writes "The last verified human Legend of Zelda (NES) speed record was 34 minutes. A few months ago, a re-recording emulator was used to make a 'perfect' video which was 31 and a half minutes. A team worked to optimize the path, and using an emulator created a new video which is 26:56, four and a half minutes faster. The video is 14% faster, and is the first Zelda run to be under a half hour. Furthermore, it achieved a sub-27 minute time, which was presumed impossible. Definitely worth checking out - you can grab the BitTorrent version of the AVI replay at Bisqwit's NES time-attack movie page." There's a thread on the NESvideos forum discussing the attempt, but can anyone succinctly explain the exact tricks the team used to speed up their time?

An anonymous reader writes "The last verified human Legend of Zelda (NES) speed record was 34 minutes. A few months ago, a re-recording emulator was used to make a 'perfect' video which was 31 and a half minutes. A team worked to optimize the path, and using an emulator created a new video which is 26:56, four and a half minutes faster. The video is 14% faster, and is the first Zelda run to be under a half hour. Furthermore, it achieved a sub-27 minute time, which was presumed impossible. Definitely worth checking out - you can grab the BitTorrent version of the AVI replay at Bisqwit's NES time-attack movie page." There's a thread on the NESvideos forum discussing the attempt, but can anyone succinctly explain the exact tricks the team used to speed up their time?

jpatokal writes "CNN reports: Nokia has bought out Psion's share of Symbian, pushing its stake in the mobile phone OS to a dominant 63%. This means rivals like Siemens and Samsung may now pretty much be forced to choose between proprietary Nokia or Microsoft technology. Symbian may be the more open of the two, but GPL it ain't - does Linux now have an edge?" We reported on a rumor to this effect late last year.

jpatokal writes "The New York Times confirms what we've suspected all along: PowerPoint makes you dumb. In a new essay, information theorist Edward Tufte outlines why PowerPoint 'forces people to mutilate data beyond comprehension.' The Columbia Accident Investigation Board at NASA agrees, noting that the slides produced by engineers to report on the wing damage were so confusing that 'a senior manager might read this PowerPoint slide and not realize that it addresses a life-threatening situation.'" Tufte's essay (and the shuttle/PowerPoint critique) has been available for sale since earlier this year, but the NYT article gives a greater sampling of its content than Tufte's website does.

Moggie68 asks: "Always when the big two release new GPU's and graphics cards that reach astounding heights with their benchmark scores, the same heated debate about unfair benchmarking utilities rises again. But what about the flipside of the coin? Would it really be that easy to construct a fair benchmarking utility for GPU's and graphics cards? What facts need to be considered? What problems solved?"

bergie writes "There is an interesting article on Advogato on why it is so difficult for Open Source projects to interoperate or support common standards. Often cultural differences between projects, egoes, and many other issues stand in the way. The article outlines some practical ways for improving the situation, based on experiences from OSCOM efforts to get support WebDAV, SlideML and other standards into Open Source CMSs. Examples of successful interop projects include freedesktop.org, the cooperative effort between GNOME and KDE."

ewhac writes "It seems a programmer named Jetro Lauha, for his submission to the Assembly 2002 competition, decided to explore the realm of solid body physics simulations. So he wrote Porrasturvat -- 'Stair Dismount'. The game involves the application of force vectors to solid bodies connected by links with constrained range of motion, and observing their impact forces against other objects in the environment. ...Or, more colloquially, you push a guy down the stairs and see how much damage he takes. Apparently, any similarity between this game and the Terrible Secret of Space is entirely coincidental."

bergie writes "Advogato is running a thought-provoking article on whether open source content management systems should interoperate. This is a big question involving social issues inside the projects, but also promising huge benefits to developers deploying open source CMSs and to desktop projects like Mozilla, OpenOffice and Xopus wishing to connect with a collaborative backend. This discussion will also be a major topic on the upcoming OSCOM conference."

With the usual round of updates, corrections, reactions and related stories, Slashback tonight has word of yet another giant Euronerd conclave, as well as some news on the odds of being smashed into a pulp in the year 2019, and a gentle response from Richard M. Stallman on appropriate behavior in absurd circumstances.

Good place for a lemonade stand. The march of the gigantic temporary European computer city-state goes on: Late writes that "Assembly 2002 starts in Finland on Thursday at 12.00 EET-DST (GMT +3). With over 2800 computer places and an expected total of over 4500 visitors, Assembly is one of the largest combined demo- and lanparties in the world. Those of you who can't make it, can watch our streamed TV broadcast. We'll be broadcasting all the competitions, at least part of the seminars that include such speakers as Rob Hubbard (C64 music legend) and a whole bunch of other programs."

You are condemned to live even longer. h4mmer5tein writes: "The BBC has an update on the asteroid story from a few days ago saying that it won't, after all, hit the earth in 2019. More information is being collated but it seems that 2060 is unlikely to see an impact either."

Iron IronGorilla adds: "Much like a Microsoft crash^H^H^H^H^Hrelease date being pushed back, NASA is reporting here that we are not, in fact, all going to die on February 1st, 2019 ..."

The dangers of meeting someone who means what he says. A few weeks ago, reader Al3x wrote his account ("Results of the Commerce Dept's DRM Workshop") of the recent gathering in DC of (officially invited) representatives of the entertainment industry and the less-officially invited members of the public. Alex criticized the approach of several members of the Free software community on hand for the discussion, including Richard Stallman.

Stallman writes in response:

"Al3x went to the July 17 Washington Digital Restrictions Management panel feeling admiration for me, but left disappointed with my views and actions. I think his disappointment was partly due to a couple of misconceptions, so I hope this explanation will partly restore his good opinion of my work and methods.

I cannot deny Al3x's charge that I, and the rest of us, defied the rules of the meeting by refusing to be completely silent. If it is wrong to disobey an unfair system, I stand convicted, but I am not ashamed. However, in the scale of civil disobedience, ours was very mild. Women demanding the vote sometimes chained themselves to doorways, which might have been inconvenient for some passersby. Blacks demanding an end to segregation sometimes broke rules, and even laws, by sitting in a Whites-only diner or at the front of a bus. It is up to each of you to decide your ethical approach to judging acts of disobedience to an unfair system.

Al3x criticized NY Fair Use for 'preferring to show up and disrupt the debate' rather than ask for a seat on the panel. Our occasional laughter and less frequent verbal comments did not disrupt the panel, and all the panelists were able to express their views; but because our means were so limited, we could not communicate very much. We would have much preferred to participate officially, on an equal footing with Jack Valenti, but they had refused our request, just as they refused the EFF. Our measured protest appears to have obtained for us the chance for a seat on a subsequent panel.

After the meeting, Al3x asked me for my views on intellectual property. As it happens, I think it is a grave mistake to formulate one's views in terms of 'intellectual property,' and I explained why.

I explained that the term 'intellectual property' lumps together disparate areas of law, including copyright, patent, trademark, and others, and that they are so different that it is a mistake to try to group them together. The public policy issues of these various areas of law result from the details of how they restrict the public, and those details are different; if you try to form your opinions about 'intellectual property,' you will miss all of these issues, and you will be led to propose sweeping generalizations which cannot help being foolish. I explained the problems of the term 'intellectual property' to Al3x hoping this would help him and others he communicates with avoid that pitfall in thinking.

I suspect a miscommunication took place there, because when I said that his proposed copyright system for music might be a good one, he perceived that as a contradiction. Perhaps when I said 'the term "intellectual property" is bad,' he heard me as saying 'everything people call "intellectual property" is bad.' That, however, is exactly the sort of sweeping overgeneralization that the term 'intellectual property' leads people to form; it is to discourage such simplistic views that I ask people to avoid the term. I have views on copyright, views on patent, and views on trademark, but I do not have *any* position on 'intellectual property.' As Al3x learned, I'm not 100% opposed to copyright, though I believe it should be much less restrictive to the public than it is now.

See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.htm for more explanation of the problems of the term 'intellectual property.' If you're interested in my views on copyright, see www.gnu.org/philosophy/copyright-and-globalization.html.

jpatokal writes "Building your own roller coaster may be fun, but how about something a little more practical -- like a monorail in your back yard? Kim Petersen designed his from scratch, building the elevated track from wood, scavenging the engine from a motorized walker and handcrafting the train from sheet metal. Total cost: $4000! See the photo tour and the construction history."

bergie writes: "The new IDE for Midgard and PHP developers is entirely written in PHP using the PHP-GTK toolkit. PHPmole aims to provide the free software world with a web development environment comparable to DreamWeaver and MS Visual Studio, with additional content management functionalities. PHP is not only for web developers any more ..."

Jari Komppa writes "After getting tired of tons of newbies starting MMORPG projects as their first programming project and calling for help on flipcode message boards, I decided to write a little rant in attempt to give these people some idea of the magnitude of the project they're starting. There seems to be hundreds of these projects out there.."

Jari Komppa writes "After getting tired of tons of newbies starting MMORPG projects as their first programming project and calling for help on flipcode message boards, I decided to write a little rant in attempt to give these people some idea of the magnitude of the project they're starting. There seems to be hundreds of these projects out there.."

sti writes: "Cringely's column this week argues that Apple should port OS X to the Intel platform. He makes an interesting case for it. I would definitely favour this. I've always had this warm spot in my heart for Apple but rarely had the money to pay for their overpriced hardware."

NecroPuppy writes "Hewlett-Packard is introducing the first commercially available DVD recorder, according to this. According to the article, it will be on store shelves in September, and list for $599, and uses the DVD+RW standard." Well, now that I've just bought the supposed to be awesome CD burner from TG (end plug), it might be time to pick this up come September. It'll make backing up a lot easier - since I don't have the Linus method of backing-up.

Recently, I've had two readers come looking for some obscure graphical tools. Their requests were similar enough in a sense that I felt I would post them both in a single article. For those of you who remember, there was a tool that would display Tux the penguin in colored text from the Linux source code. Well, I'm sure there are several tools like that out there creating images out of things more interesting than that. This article is for those people looking for those or similar programs.

Eli asks: "Ages ago on Slashdot there was a post of a company in England who would take a picture you sent them and they would return it to you as a poster with every pixel in the original represented with a greyscale character. It was nifty, but it cost money. Then a few days later, someone posted a Gimp Script-Fu that did the same thing, for free, in full color, with any user supplied text file. I used this for ages but have since lost the script. Do any of you old skewl dotters happen to have this in an archive somewhere? Has anyone made improvements to it? It's not in the /. archives. I'm sure it was pre-Andover days."

And this related question from Panu Hällfors, which is asking more for a specific website than a software tool, but I figure there is a software tool behind there somewhere: "Some time ago there was this project of making a huge image montage in which small Linux-related images would make up a picture of Tux. I used to check out the preview versions every now and then and even submit a few pictures myself. But now! Where's the site? What has happened?

Neither their site nor their email account (linux@remotepoint.com) seems to exists anymore. Does anyone know who were working on the project and where they are now? I'd like to see the project go on, if possible."

So I'm sure there is software out there for creating an image out of specified text or even other images. What packages are out there? Which ones do you use?

Doug Muth writes: "Earlier today, I came across an old document on Lars Wirzenius's website titled Linux Anecdotes, which tells about the side of Linux that we never knew. An excerpt: 'At one point, Linus had implemented device files in /dev, and wanted to dial up the university computer and debug his terminal emulation code again. So he starts his terminal emulator program and tells it to use /dev/hda. That should have been /dev/ttyS1. Oops. Now his master boot record started with "ATDT" and the university modem pool phone number. I think he implemented permission checking the following day. '"

Doug Muth writes: "Earlier today, I came across an old document on Lars Wirzenius's website titled Linux Anecdotes, which tells about the side of Linux that we never knew. An excerpt: 'At one point, Linus had implemented device files in /dev, and wanted to dial up the university computer and debug his terminal emulation code again. So he starts his terminal emulator program and tells it to use /dev/hda. That should have been /dev/ttyS1. Oops. Now his master boot record started with "ATDT" and the university modem pool phone number. I think he implemented permission checking the following day. '"

plaa asks: "I was wondering what it would take to change the license of some software. Is it enough if all the authors accept the change or do the licenses have to be 'compatible'? Does this affect the older versions of the program in any way? What if somebody has already used some code from the program in a program of his own? How easy would it be to migrate software to it (so that the older version was not an option to the user)?" What, in particular, do users and developers have to worry about when something that once was free, becomes commercial?

Woodie asks: "Hi,I'm wondering, after reading Dvorak's article on crackers , whether good intrustion detection software exists for Linux. He specifically mentions a product called "BlackICE" - which I checked out the details of - that sounds very interesting. What Linux alternatives are there? I'm not necessarily expecting an easy to use GUI; some kind background daemon that generates a usable log and that can be preconfigured to respond to certain "attacks" would be great. " How reliable are the results from various Intrusion Detection packages? Are these things worthwhile? Or would do-it-yourself monitors be a better choice?

Update: 11/03 11:58 by C : Jargon was also interested in Linux Intrusion Detection and was curious if there were Linux contenders to the likes of Cybercop Sting, and Mantrap"

Marko Rauhamaa asks: "I'm a software manager in a medium-size technology company. Today I ran into a professional argument with my superiors about our company's software design process, which, I suppose, is fairly standard: The software team is to write one or more MS Word documents that have predefined section headings. The documents should describe all aspects of the coding phase that is about to begin. Then the documents are peer-reviewed, polished and submitted under document control. Questions: What kind of design process do the successful free-software projects have (Linux, gcc, Apache, XFree86, etc)? In your experience, how often are design documents revisited after the project? Have design documents helped in technology transfers (that is, have they been more helpful than the source code alone)? Are engineers good at writing design documents? Have you been able to read design documents written by other engineers? Have old design documents been kept up to date with the changes in the implementation? Has the quality of your products been better because of design documentation?"

bergie writes "The Mozilla milestone release 8 is now available! Go check the coverage on MozillaZine. Go fetch it! " For those interested, MozillaZine has a pseudo-changelog available. It seems blizzard's Xlib port is coming along quite nicely. Anyone at OLS next week will be able to attend Mike Shaver's "Inside the Lizzard" talk. Congrats to the Mozilla folk!

acb writes "Remember GEM, Digital Research's Mac-clone GUI, seen on old PCs and Ataris? Well, Caldera have now released the source code under the GPL. Should be interesting, from a retrocomputing point of view. " Someone fire up my ST. Oh wait-I don't have one.

Panu Hällfors writes "The first one installfest ever in Finland takes place in Ulvila from 16. to 17. January. I'm expecting something like 60 to 70 new installs and of course about as much experienced users to drop by to lend a hand to new users. We'll probably install mainly the new RedHat derivate SOT-Linux which is translated to Finnish. More info can be found on the Internet site of the event, "> here (In Finnish and *only accesible from Finland*) "