Slashdot Mirror

Attribution where due. Frank Bajak, Technology Editor for The Associated Press, wrote with a correction to last week's post "CNN Talks WIth ACLU Tech Maven Barry Steinhardt," writing "CNN didn't speak to Steinhardt. We, The Associated Press, did. CNN merely posted our story." Thanks for pointing that out.

If it's an orb, it had better do some glowing! shakes writes "Since the recent outbreak of interest in the Ambient Orb, I took a moment to homebrew one using a PICchip. The source code is currently incomplete as it does not support serial communication, but that will come in the next day or so."

Please secure the locking safety mechanism, or call an attendant if you have trouble. BoomZilla writes "I was intrigued with the home made roller coaster report on Slashdot last year. Just the sort of thing I *need* for the kids. Problem was that I had neither the skill nor the time to build such a beast. I've recently become re-inspired by the Back Yard Roller Coaster site. It's short on details (just a few pictures and a video) - but long on firing up my enthusiasm. Straightforward design. Easy construction. Modest cost. All I need is a hill (check) and the patience and understanding of my wife (stand by for news on that...)"

Oooh, look at the pictures. The visually intriguing meta search engine Kartoo is now more accessable to flash-poor browsers (and lazy or stubborn flash-avoiding users). Alexandre Dos Santos writes "Kartoo now offers an alternative to the regular flash display. The html version is only in beta. It offers the same functionality as the flash version, i.e. you can add or subtract keywords. It's obviously an attempt at reaching out to users who are on machines without flash, or very slow connections.

The option to use html only had been there before, but now Kartoo seems to push this more to the front...and important point...Without sponsored links."

Keeping their options open, or closing doors? bigmase521 writes "LinuxWorld has an article with statements from the Minister of Information Technology and Communications of India stating that India is NOT going to support Open Source alternatives Government-Wide. However, different branches of the government are still considering open source as their primary computing solutions. So I guess unfortunately, it seems as if Mr. Gates' Bribe err 'heartfelt visit' may have worked after all."

Why meet people in real life? Roland Piquepaille writes "I wrote [Saturday] a column about social-network mapping tools mentioned by Slashdot. Slashdot readers sent me many comments and e-mails about other visualization tools. Here are these new tools, in no particular order: email constellations, Apache Agora, NetVis Module, EtherApe, inGridX, NameBase's Proximity Search, Surf3D Pro and the dazzling KartOO. Finally, a reader talked about another kind of tools, the Visual Thesaurus. This web tool is not about social mapping, but it shows graphical connections between words. In this previous column, "The Visual Thesaurus: What Does it Show About Thanksgiving?," I already explored this very funny tool. Check this new story for more the details about all these tools."

Update: 03/19 00:34 GMT by T : Directly related: Josh Tyler writes "Related to a recent Slashdot posting on social networks is this paper on automatically discovering communities based on email data, just published by our group at HP Labs. We find that simple communication data is enough to identify communities, both formal and informal, and possibly even to identify the leaders of these groups."

Speaking of online community ... TGK writes "Audioscrobbler (which many of us visited the first time it was posted here) has a new site up, and most importantly, new plugins for XMMS and Winamp 3."

From the site, a capsule description of what Audioscrobbler does: "It grows to know what music you like by monitoring what songs you play on your computer. From this information you can discover other users that share some or all of your taste in music."

Feedback is always cool. An anonymous reader writes: "Sudhakar Govindavajhala, co-author of the paper referenced by the Saturday Slashdot article 'Using Memory Errors to Attack a Virtual Machine,' has responded to many of your [Slashdot readers'] questions and comments. His commentary is located at his Princeton CS website."

Another reason that Social Security isn't. GregAllen writes "Remember the recent case of SSN data theft at The University of Texas? A student has turned himself in. In his confession he says that he acted alone, and had no intention to disseminate the information. Maybe this will convince them to stop using SSNs for student IDs." Bonker also points out that "Salon is carrying an AP article that's a followup to the story a few days ago about the mass of Social Security Numbers stolen from University of Texas. Christopher Andrew Phillips is described as a 'fine young man who has never before been in trouble with the law'. Apparently he wrote a program 'to access a university Web site that tracks employees who attend training classes'. Whether or not this was done for illegitimate purposes remains to be seen. As a former UTA student, I'm glad my SSN is no longer in danger!"

What's the state of the device? An anonymous reader writes "N-Philes.com did another State of the GBA Industry Article and Roundtable. Here is the Industry Article, and here is the Roundtable"

Update: 03/19 00:34 GMT by T : And one more presroi writes "Just one week after even slashdot has noticed the new 2.2.24 linux kernel, Alan Cox has announced a new version due to a security issue found in 2.2 as well as in the 2.4 branch. I hope that we all were to lazy to upgrade from 2.2.X to .24 until now :)"