Slashdot Mirror

StefanJ writes "This is either a marvelous Photoshop hoax or something really . . . cool? Sacreligious? Unnecessary? Reportedly, George Lucas has given his first commercially released movie, THX1138, a digital workover, enhancing backgrounds and altering scenes for more eye-appeal. Here are some comparisons of original and altered scenes. For those who haven't seen the film: Without giving too much away, it's about a working stiff living in a repressive underground bomb-shelter society. Emotion-suppressing drugs are mandatory; people shuffle from work to home, pausing to buy consumer goods along the way. (The goods aren't used for anything; you just feed them into a disposal unit after you get home. Making them keeps people busy . . .) If the drugs don't work, you can vent your spleen in a confession booth manned by a really bad A.I. It's really bleak, and sometimes ugly, but worth seeing. I hope the enhancements don't add too much color: The drab, sterile, white-on-white environment of the underground city is an important mood-setter. Consume more; be happy!"

StefanJ writes "Two researchers at the Royal School of Veterinary Studies at the University of Edinburgh have been experimenting with DAP (Dog Appeasing Pheromone) a chemical that calms down dogs. The study described in this press release subjected dogs in a shelter to the hormone. The homeless animals barked less, and reacted better to visitors. I've heard that realtors prepping a house for show sometimes put a drip or two of vanilla extract on a kitchen stovetop, in the theory that this particular scent makes people feel at home. A specific Human Appeasing Hormone would really up the ante. You spray it on elementary school kids when the weather is nice, or when a substitute teacher is due. And on jail inmates. And people in malls who are sitting on benches instead of shopping, the damn freeloaders! Oh, Brave New World, that has such psychoactive scents in it!"

Foredecker asks: "Companies like AMD, Intel, NVIDIA, ATI and others are continuing to drive silicon performance to new levels. Of course, every day computing (basic web browsing, email, word processing, spreadsheets, personal finance, and the like) don't require a Intel 3.2Ghz P4 with Hyperthreading or a AMD Athlon 64 FX and their associated platforms. Of course, there are apps that will leverage today's high performance platforms. Games are an obvious category, as is video editing. I'm looking for apps that will be widely adopted and will drive volume hardware shipments. Things that come to mind are: effective, speaker independent voice recognition, accurate repeatable object recognition in digital photos and videos (or from live feeds such as web cams). What other application categories are there that will drive the need for bigger-faster-better hardware platforms?"

StefanJ writes "Researchers at the University of Washington -- supported by the NASA's Astrobiology Institute, its Planetary Atmospheres program, and Intel -- have come up with a new simulation of planetary formation that suggests that not only are terrestrial planets (small, rocky worlds, as opposed to gas giants) are common, but that water worlds (the subset of terrestrials that have sufficient water to support Life As We Know It) may be plentiful as well. A key factor as to how 'wet' a planetary system's terrestrial worlds get: The eccentricity of the orbits of the system's jovian worlds. It will be a while before we have telescopes good enough to actually see terrestrial planets and spec out their atmospheric composition, allowing us to reality-check these simulations. But it's still cool to play with sims like this. I can't wait for the home version! (Emergency backup link to Science Daily article based on the press release.)"

Lawrence Person writes "Well, this has to be one of the stranger bugs in recent memory: 'If you used Open Firmware Password utility to create a password that contains the capital letter "U", your password will not be recognized during the startup process.' Straight from the mothership. I'm guessing that not too many people use Open Firmware Passwords, but it's a very nasty bug for those who do. Props to the always great As The Apple Turns for pointing this one out."

darkstar2a writes "Back in the dot.com boom years, a bunch of us would crash the empty customer service department for some fun LAN gaming. Nowadays, though, we use our own computers, and have a significant ratio of Mac users - about 55%. This has brought up a huge frustration in finding games that work cross-platform (PC and Mac), and what exactly we need to make them work. We've only been reliably able to get the following working: Unreal Tournament (but the same game can get kind of old after hours of play), 4x4 Evo 2 (which we got cheap and was a great change of pace), Descent 3 (out of print and relatively difficult to locate.) This has to have been covered somewhere, but we've been unable to locate a resource for it. Can Slashdot Games readers help?"

Lawrence Person writes "This article on Low End Mac talks about why the PowerPC 970 is so fast, covering its superiority to Intel chips in Multiply Accumulate, double precision arithmetic, and Fast Fourier Transforms, among other operations. A short, clear article for those who don't have the time to wade through Parts 1 and 2 of Ars Technica's exceptionally detailed dissection of the 970/G5." Trollaxor writes "IBM has a neat two-page history of the PowerPC architecture, detailing its evolution from the first RS/6000 chipsets in 1990, through the POWER ISA, and into the processors that we know and use today. A very interesting read."

Foredecker asks: "I'm developing some audio and video encoding benchmarks. (yes, they will be open source), and I need royalty free high quality audio and video. Unfortunately, I can't simply rip CD's and DVD's for distribution. I need to distribute the content with the benchmark to provide a consistent data set. I'd like both stereo and 5:1 audio and regular and high-def video. Anyone have any ideas where I can get such content?"

Lawrence Person writes "According to this article in PC World, Microsoft 'publicly confirmed 2005 as the release year for Longhorn, the successor to Windows XP.' And of course, we all know tha Microsoft release dates never slip..."

sohp writes "The longest running Internet cartoon of all, Dave Farley's Dr. Fun, has this laugher on some tasty case mods for the Easter season." cojoco sends in a webpage covering the secret dangers of bunnies, and we here at Slashdot would like to make a public service announcement that humans have a responsibility to care for their pets even if they chew through computer cords. linuxwrangler writes "It's Easter and the 50th anniversary of the Marshmallow Peep. The fine folks at Peep Research have found them to cooperative test subjects. People with too much time on their hands (tm) have braved copyright complaints to create "Lord of the Peeps, FOTP" and we can't forget NASA's brave peep-o-nauts. Happy easter."

acroyear writes "WTOP, 1500am, a news radio station in the DC area, is reporting that the Patent Office Is Seeing Record Backlog, with 2 years for a patent now, and potentially 4 years to wait by decade's end, and the PTO is considering a 15% increase in filing fees. Personally, I think if they had set a trend of actually rejecting patents that don't belong, they'd have sent enough of a message to keep application numbers to a reasonable level; right now, everybody files because just about everything can get one."

Lawrence Person writes "Given all the interest Slashdot has shown in casemodding as of late, I thought they might be interested in an extreme "casemod" of a Nissan Sentra, turning it into a lean, mean race machine! Emphasis on the lean part..."

millisa asks: "With the tightening economy, technology workers are finding themselves picking up extra tasks in the workplace which in turn can raise stress and detract from the ability to relax. Many of us are strapping an assortment of gadgets that beep, vibrate, and blink at us (and most of them aren't the fun kind) with the purpose of on-call response at any and all hours. Where does the restful bedroom exist? What I'm looking for are ways other nerds in the community have made their bedrooms into a place where they can release tension of the day and improve their overall quality of life? What measure have others taken to be considerate towards that signifigant other (in order to keep them being the signifigant other)? Hidden receivers and speakers for mood music? Ambient lighting? Walled windows and soundproofing? What's in your de-teched sanctuary that keeps the minimum for you to fulfill your job obligations? Economical suggestions are quite welcome!"

"The lucky few of us who've managed to not remain single can have one recalcitrant database or webserver strain a relationship to the extreme when it misbehaves multiple nights in a row. I personally have developed severe sleep disorders over the past half decade due to the little issues that always seem to happen just after that much needed REM sleep kicks in. I certainly can't fathom the patience my signifigant other has for sharing the disturbances.

I woke a few months back with a laptop near the pillow, flat screen still powered on the tv tray and an equal distribution of cats and wireless devices at my feet. I had a headache from various system fans, drives spinning, and the 'dings' of incoming mail. Enough was enough. I decided I wanted to make the bedroom as much of a sanctum as possible. The other 85% of the house can have wires, TiVos in various states, and homemade networked kitchen appliances; the place of rest should be geared to that purpose if I'm to be an efficient geek."

StefanJ writes "'Are you pondering what I'm pondering Pinky?' An item on MSNBC reports that researchers at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston have produced mice with big, convoluted brains by inserting an single extra gene. I am reminded of two pieces of SF: Olaf Stapledon's novel Sirius, about a lab experiment that produces a brainy dog, and Bruce Sterling "Our Neural Chernobyl," in which the country is overrun with cunning coyotes and tribes of raccoons."

millisa asks: "I've been looking into options for inexpensive web based load balancing services for both Apache and IIS based web servers. There are plenty of commercial products out there that claim to do the job, but they are often too pricey, offer too many features, or are unreliable. I have lost the small amount of confidence I had in the MS based NLB services and do not like the idea of running multiple services on the same system anyways. I would like to build one (or more) simple front end load balancing Linux (or BSD) servers to direct traffic to the back-end systems if possible. I have seen mention of implementations based off of the Linux Router Project or the global load balancing oriented Eddie. What approaches are other geeks out there using for their LAN load balancing needs? I am especially interested in implementations that can maintain state (ie, handle sessions) as well as do some form of request inspection (so as to redirect those pesky web spiders to their own playground so a live user has the best web experience)." It's been long enough since the last time this came up, so lets revisit this question and touch upon the new solutions that have come up since 1999.

Keith M Ellis asks: "I've decided it's about time to fully utilize privacy and digital id technology into my internet use. I've used PGP off-and-on for years, of course; and have been half-aware of other services like VeriSign et al. However, now that I'm looking more closely at these technologies, I've been disappointed to find that there doesn't seem to be anything that seamlessly and relatively unobtrusively plugs-in to my various applications and OS. What are the current options for achieving this level of integration; and, if there really aren't any, I'm interested in any thoughts anyone might have about why this is the case and what the future might hold."

JT Martin writes with his review of Barrington Bayley's The Knights of the Limits. Fans of obscure science fiction should thank JT for the service thus rendered. Knights of the Limits author Barrington J. Bayley pages 218 publisher Cosmos Books rating 9 reviewer JT Martin ISBN 1587153831 summary Nine stories suffused with a sense of wonder

Obscure genius Little known even inside the genre of science fiction, Barrington Bayley has been composing tightly plotted work for almost 50 years in relative obscurity.

This astonishing selection of nine short stories has been loudly admired by almost all the stalwarts of the genre; Mike Moorcock recently named it one of his top ten sf books in an article for The Guardian. Bruce Sterling has praised it to high heavens in a piece he wrote for Cheap Truth, calling Bayley "the zen master of modern space opera." John Clute, Brian Stableford, Charles Platt and even the late, great William Burroughs have all spoken of Bayley in fervently admiring words.

Despite all the accolades, strangely and sadly nobody has even heard of the book. Originally published in 1978 it came and went in the blink of an eye, remained unavailable for the past few decades and commanded ridiculous prices in the used book market.

So why all the fuzz Bayley is one of the great ideas guys of the genre science fiction. When he actually gets mentioned, the response usually is a smile and a gasp; "Oh, he's that wild guy!" Exuberant, weird, metaphysical, astounding, thrilling are all words that apply. Trailing Borges with a serious nod to A. E. Van Vogt, his stuff perplexes and confounds you with the barrage of bizarre ideas he weaves into these stories. He belongs to the great freewheeling tradition of imaginative writers; forget Kim Stanley Robinson and Arthur C. Clarke, think Charles Harness, Olaf Stapledon and Rudy Rucker - he invents his science (that's why it's called fiction, eh?) and bounces off to the nomansland like some mutant kangaroo. This is stuff you can barely find on the shelves today as franchise poop is being pushed on all the fronts.

Bayley knows his science but isn't limited by it - his writing bellows straight from his subconscious pool of theoretical thought, winging it with gusto and joy. For an example, "Me and My Antronoscope," -- one of his signature stories -- describes a universe completely filled with rock. The existing life inhabits pockets of space within. With obvious delight Bayley pauses at the thought and starts imagining "what would it be like?" He finds the answer and runs off with the thought, goes off to describe their version of space travel and the obvious problems facing any such attempts. It is a brilliant vision, conceptualized with wonder, but as much of what is called science fiction today is really just extrapolations of current sciences many readers will simply not see the point of it.

The same is true of most of the rest of Bayley's fiction - it doesn't portray the future; it imagines, dreams and invents new cosmologies, universes, alien life and their respective philosophies. He writes existential pieces about robot consciousness, he tinkers in his workshop wondering about the nature of space, mixing and matching analytical philosophy, mathematics, physics, biology and anthropology in a melodramatic and exuberant manner.

One should be forewarned that his powers of characterization and dialogue are more restrained -- the function of people in his stories tends to simply be setting off the scenery. His love of old pulp science fiction is obvious, and the bizarre juxtaposing of robots and rayguns with rigorous metaphysical invention can be startling, but with a sly satirical touch he succeeds laudably.

It is distressing to see such a vividly entertaining thinker miss the boat -- if Bayley had been born in Poland or Argentina we'd all be reading him now alongside Stanislaw Lem and Philip K. Dick, but as Kubrick never filmed THE SOUL OF THE ROBOT (instead using it as fodder to his conception of A.I.), he remains unread in the English language while the Japanese devour his translated works. So if you feel you're attuned to this brand of extravagnce, THE KNIGHTS OF THE LIMITS is the perfect intoruction, presenting 9 of his key stories. If you decide to give it a try, keep in mind that this most certainly is not extrapolative hard science fiction. It is wildly original speculative stuff that will literally boggle the mind and open new venues of thought and invention.

Related Links:

• Astounding Worlds of Barrington Bayley

• Annihilation Factotum

• Cheap Truth

• Jorge Luis Borges

• A. E. van Vogt

You can purchase this book at Fatbrain.

pagen writes: "Better meteor shower than most living folks have ever seen! "The perfect viewing time is estimated to be between 4 and 6 a.m. EST, on Nov. 18.""

Foredecker writes: "I couldn't believe my eyes when I read an EE Times article about about remote breathalyzer technology developed by TCU. This device is apparently intended for installation in new cars. In essence, it is a sensor in your car which would signal any nearby police if you had been drinking."

PaGeN writes: "It's about time. Per today's New York Times, thinking and respected jurists are raising eyebrows at the legal principle that seems to have sprung up overnight: "You have no right of privacy in on-the-job online communications." Judge James M. Rosenbaum, Reagan-appointed chief judge of the United States District Court for the District of Minnesota, in Minneapolis, expresses surprise that employees should be expected to tolerate "an electronic rummage through their lives." "The present concept permits -- and even encourages - 'Big Brother' searches," wrote Judge Rosenbaum. "... just as an employee does not surrender all privacy rights on the company's premises, so they should not be automatically surrendered on the company's computers."" The column linked above is interesting; you can also read the original paper online.

Mike Hall asks: "It has come up at work again. We are about to start a new design on our product and the spaces vs. tabs discussion is back. When you indent c/c++ code should all spaces, or tabs be used? Almost everyone agrees that a mix of the two is a bad idea. Currently most of the programmers here want to use tabs set to 4. I am a space junkie. I prefer all my code to look the same if I am looking at it on vi, emacs, less, or on a paper after a lpr command. What does the slashdot community feel is the pros and cons of spaces and tabs in code?" I'm kind of torn on the issue. I believe that properly indented code is important in improving readability, but I'm also a firm believer in the fact that to edit code, you shouldn't need to spend hours and hours on formatting. Tabs are the fastest way to align your data, but they have their drawbacks and formatting code with spaces takes for ever. What works best for some of you, out there?

eGabriel writes "One of the benefits of free software that I haven't seen explored here is that of the opportunity to study elegant, masterful code. Besides the fact that we can all share and enjoy applications, and reuse their source code, we can also simply download the code and view it for pleasure, to learn from masters of the art. Certainly there are different criteria for determining what makes a piece of code excellent or beautiful, and I am not as interested in discussing that. If however, anyone has found a piece of free software that serves as an excellent example for study because of qualities they as programmers hold dear, I would love to read that code also and be educated thereby. Equally interesting would be code that really is bad, as long as it didn't turn into direct attacks upon the programmers involved (they can't all be gems!) Any code that shows elegant and masterful design would make for excellent reading; the language in which it is written isn't as much a concern. 'Literate' code is a bonus."

Foredecker writes: "Many, many Internet appliances are being built with non-x86 processors such as Mips, ARM and PowerPC. Supposedly, one of the barriers to using such processors in Internet appliances is the notion that x86 has, by far, the advantage that many popular browser plug-ins are only available for x86. If they are available for non-x86 systems, then they are either available late (x86 first) or their are inferior to their x86 brethren. Is this a problem? Is it true? If it is true, is this going to make it harder for non-x86 based Internet appliances to win acceptance in the market?" Earlier this year, we talked about how the Web is now flooded with non-HTML content. Now I don't mind enhancing one's Web experience, but it would be nice if the folks who make these plug-ins realize that the Web is not only for those folks running Wintel or Macintosh systems. When will plug-in makers realize that there is a larger market out there who may also be interested in their product?

Stefan Jones writes: "VR pioneer Jaron Lanier has written "Half a Manifesto" -- a long and considered rant taking on notions favored by Extropians, Singularity fans and others -- on the exclusive salon for long-hairs, 'Edge.' Lanier believes that the totalists are not only promulgating an irresponsible and inhuman ideology, but indulging in bad science. The site also features fascinating and spirited reactions by a slew of luminaries, including George and Freeman Dyson, Bruce Sterling, Lee Smolin, Rodney Brooks and Kevin Kelly. Good stuff, no matter where you stand on this issue." Oh c'mon -- no one around here would fetishize technology per se, would they?

Joe asks: "I've checked freshmeat a number of times, but I can't seem to find any software that will stream mp3 files 'on demand'. Most software for mp3 streaming (be it windows or unix) is based on the broadcast model (shoutcast/icecast), where a fixed or growing playlist keeps playing at all times. What I want is something that works on the 'play samples' model, where a sample of the tune is played automatically through a streaming protocol, rather than downloaded and played once downloaded. Any such beast exist? If not, why not?"

"I suppose with enough fidgetting, one could write a cgi program (even as a /bin/sh script) that would start a new icecast process on a particular port, start the shout stream, and return to the browser the "playlist" that would signal the browser to start winamp/xmms on the appropriate port; the "start the shout stream" process would wait play silence for a few seconds before shouting the desired mp3 in order to give time to the player...but that seems rather kluge-like."

pointym5 asks: "ObjectSpace, home of many well-respected software packages for Java (Voyager, JGL, DXML), has had a much appreciated tradition of providing most tools free for development and even non-redistribution commercial use. While some tools still are distributed that way (for now), the DXML product seems to have been yanked from the "free" list onto the "pay $$$" list. By way of introduction: DXML is a tool that translates an XML DTD into a set of Java classes. There are other tools like it, but this one operated in a way I felt to be most programmer-friendly. In addition, the tool made it possible to leverage the work it did in parsing the DTD so that at run time one could access the meta-data and do wonderful magical things." While I'm sad to see another piece of quality software removed from the ranks, the code belongs to ObjectSpace and is licenced how they wish, though I would be interested in knowing if there were any overriding (non-profit margin related) reasons to this decision.

"While up until a few weeks or months ago one could download DXML from the ObjectSpace Web site (including source and docs), the old download URL is now a dead link and the product can now only be found as part of their "Voyager Pro" kit. They don't have any links to documentation of the old versions, nor can I find any sort of "News" items about the decision to change the distribution mode. Weirdest of all, when I tried to send mail to the old "dxml-interest@objectspace.com" mailing list I get errors that suggest the list itself has been pulled.

So I have two questions, one general and one directly personal:

• What do people think about the practise of offering software "free" for a period of time (say, just long enough to debug it ...) and then pulling it back into the for-money product line? Clearly it's theirs to do with as they wish, but isn't it at least inconsiderate?
• Does anybody have a copy of DXML 1.1 or 1.2 stashed away? :-)

"

psiwave writes: "Following the growing trend towards corporate ineptitude, Fuji Television has smacked every fansite of that oh-so-popular Japanese food-fighting show, Iron Chef, with a cease and desist order. Since June 1st, IronChef.com, IronChef.net and every other fansite of any merit has been ordered to remove all Fuji-owned IC graphics and sound (though none of these sites are for-profit). It seems that rather than embrace the show's growing (and somewhat fanatic) Internet fanbase, Fuji is hoping to alienate and disillusion it." (CT: I love this show. This makes me grumpy)

The Ass, The Dog And Their Master

A Dog and his Master's Ass, having grown acquainted over the years, had become great friends, though the Ass spent many long hours ploughing the fields, and the Dog mainly lay about with little to do. One day the Dog decided that the work of his friend the Ass was quite remarkable and under-appreciated. Taking a bushel of grain from the year's harvest, he proclaimed to all passers-by: "O, just look upon the work of my friend the Ass! Is it not remarkable!" Some onlookers did make comment on the quality of the grain, whereupon the Ass brayed in delight. Yet upon returning home, the Master found two handfuls of grain missing, and thereupon beat the Dog soundly, chained him up, and warned the Ass never again to countenance thievery.

Moral...

dex writes "The law firm of Milberg Weiss, lawyers for the plaintiffs in the Pokemon lawsuit, have discovered they are coporate counsel for one of the defendants. According to this article they will probably now be barred from participating on either side. " See the recent story about it on Slashdot.

Booker writes "Red Hat, Inc. has released their 2nd quarter financial results. You can see the press release here. Operating at a loss, but then we all knew that would happen for a while. Revenues up 95% over last year. Kinda ironic that an Open Source company has to join The Man on Wall Street before their balance sheet becomes publicly available. :)

Gedanken writes "Nasa has released the first images from the new Chandra Project X-Ray telescope and they are spectacular. It will be researching high energy events such as supernovas, quasars and black holes. "

Booker asks: "Lately I've seen a disturbing trend in my spam - there seems to be no originating machine in the headers. They typically go through an insecure mail host, and list only a toll free number for a contact. How do I track these people down? I need the satisfaction, however fleeting, of helping to terminate a spammer's account!" There is an example header of this sourceless SPAM. Click below for more.

Here's the example:

Return-Path: jdekrpzsad@hotbot.com
Received: from ns.mobic.co.jp (ns.mobic.co.jp [210.162.104.178])by deliverator.io.com
(8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id XAA14862;Tue, 27 Jul 1999 23:51:58 -0500
From: jdekrpzsad@hotbot.com
Received: from default by ns.mobic.co.jp (2.5 Build 2630 (Berkeley 8.8.6)/8.8.4) with SMTP id NAA02786; Wed, 28 Jul 1999 13:58:25 +0900
Message-Id: 199907280458.NAA02786@ns.mobic.co.jp
To:
Subject: $15,000 Monthly Guaranteed! No Work Required!
Date: Tue, 27 Jul 1999 21:08:01 -0700
MIME- Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary="----=_NextPart_000_4264_00005913.00007A3E"
X-Priority: 3
X-MSMail-Priority: Normal
X-UIDL: 29f083c057306b12c10f509e156f7a87
Status: U

I thought there were laws that prevented this sort of things. How can we help prevent spam if the spammers are becoming more and more anonymous?

Booker sent us a message from [RMS] found on the Gnome mailing list where he says "The FSF would gladly pay someone $20k for the rights to a well-written and comprehensive GNOME programming manual. We would then publish as free documentation--free as in freedom, of course. We would sell copies in bookstores, just as these companies do, just as we do for our existing manuals."

Booker writes "Miguel has posted a status report of the Gnome project to the Gnome mailing list. A good summary of what's been done, and what remains. And an admission that Gnome 1.0 might have been a leeeetle bit premature. Many packages are up to 1.0.8, and in my experience, they are vastly improved since the 1.0.0 days. Also, RHLabs has released a full set of Gnome RPMS for RH 5.2 systems, with all the latest stuff. "

So I'm here at the Babylon Cafe, and all these people are chatting and drinking and having fun, and I'm in the corner posting morph- is asking for someone with a lick of design sense to design a Logo for SlashNET- email him if you come up with one. 600x150 pixels on black. mschmitt linked us to the UNIX pronunciation HOWTO. Carlie Fairchild wrote in to plug The Linux Journals online Store. An anonymous reader sent us a link to an InfoWorld article that talks about the recent warring in the free software movement. President John F. Kennedy wrote in to tell us that Propoganda 4 is out if you're looking for sweet background images. cpfeifer sent us a link to a site that is selling aluminum light sabers. I bet they don't work, but I still want one. Brian Craft sent us a link to the most Unusual Ergonomic Keyboard that I've seen in awhile. Lord Hiades sent us a link to a t-shirt based on Adminspotting. cpfeifer sent us a link to The Jesus Dance. An anonymous reader sent us a link to a freaky site where you can get funky contacts to scare your friends with. An anonymous reader sent us a link to the truth about Steve Balmer

Booker writes "Red Herring magazine has an article about Open Source software from a business perspective. They seem to think that it will NOT be the Next Big Thing in business, but it's interesting reading. There are quite a few articles in the "Related Links" section at the bottom, including ones about Open Source startups and Open Source hardware, and an article by ESR. "

Booker writes " There was lots of gnashing-of-teeth over the evil lords at Nvidia "obfuscating" the source for Xfree86. The latest on the XFree86 web page states that the "Open Source NVIDIA driver has been included" for 3.3.3.1. " It also adds Gnu/HURD support, and improved Media GX support.

Booker writes "I'm just wondering... did anyone notice that Enlightenment DR 0.15 was released with the Gnome 0.99 stuff? It's over at ftp.gnome.org, under the gnome directory. RPMs and debs, as well. The E page isn't updated yet, so perhaps this isn't the 0.15 release?" update Apparently, although LinuxToday also published this story earlier today, readers are stating that this is just a CVS snapshot of what will be DR 0.15. Oh well. Updated title accordingly. update 2: Mandrake has confirmed this is not DR-0.15. Updated title again.

Booker sent us a link to the KDE website: and a quick quote from it "Our release coordination master, Kalle Dalheimer announced the accomplishment of the second step in the way of the code freeze towards the big KDE-1.1. Since today, the libraries MediaTool, KFile, JScript, KFMLib, Kab, KImgIO and KSpell are closed to commiting until the final release. Only major bugs corrections can be further on operated on this code. Only 8 (eight) days are remaining until the complete freeze of the CVS."

kenzoid writes "CNN describes a very positive reception for Gecko, the new version of Netscape's rendering engine. Apparently, it's speed is VERY impressive, and the engine's size is only 900K; including support for HTML 4.0, CSS1, and XML. The article goes on to describe Netscape's praise for how fast Gecko progressed at Mozilla.org. Another score for OSS! "

James Baughn sent us this link and this one to information about a project underway to convert win32 apps to native OS2 apps. No emulation, just flat out conversion.