Slashdot Mirror

Ieshan writes "Strange alien scares or just New Jersey Pollution? Occam's razor points towards the latter, but still, odd black blobs are appearing in a New Jersey city - no joke. CNN has the story - apparently, no one can identify them yet. Investigators say that they're not petrolium based, and that's about all anyone knows. On the plus side, at least they don't have stalks with green eyes?"

A.L. Blais writes: "By using the molecular-recognition capabilities of living cells, scientists have made selective electrical contacts to neurons."

Atryn writes "An article at the Register reports that a recent Black Hat conference presenter demonstrated how to crash Nokia cell phones using malformed headers in SMS messaging protocols. Though the SIM card can be recovered by moving to a new phone, this is perhaps an interesting preview of security issues as data goes wireless." Of course, when you live in the US, where your wireless services are about eight years behind the curve, this is less of an issue. *grin*

PatJensen writes "Star Trek TNG: Nemesis, the 10th Star Trek movie gets the green light from Paramount today. It will be directed by Stuart Baird, who did Executive Decision, US Marshals and Tomb Raider. Looks to be pretty action packed. Digital Domain (LOTR, Titanic) will be doing the SFX. The movie seems to be based around Romulan conflict with the Federation. " Can't be as bad as Insurrection. At least, I hope not. BTW the first movie is out on DVD now and they did a pretty good job with the re-release.

Drek was among the many who wrote in to tell us about the following: "Wired is running an article about how the MS/DoJ settlement was reached. More importantly, the DoJ has set up an email address where citizens can send comments about the case: microsoft.atr@usdoj.gov. This might be a good way for Slashdotters to do their civic duty."The address has been around for a bit, but still, a renewed call for comment.

Reidar Gunn writes: "This article is about nano technology... I read it over to make sure I was really reading what I read! Red to Blue cloths, sizes going from bigger to smaller... Wonder if they'll make wireless clothes with a subscription service, Yah never know! Logo changing shirts eh!"

DavoKid writes: "Intel rolls out the .13 micron Pentium III processor based on the Tualatin core at 1.2GHz. This chip really shines and overclocks to 1.47GHz. The benchmarks are fairly impressive too! Reviews at: HotHardware, Anandtech, and Tech Report." Also given plenty of attention is Intel's new D815EEA2 motherboard, since that appears to be about the only choice for the new chip. The consensus seems to be that this chip is at least intended to be "the new Celeron," but marketed also as a power-frugal chip to impress server-farms with electrical savings.

SilenceKit writes "The New York Times has a cool story today on a sequel to Flatland, the classic geometry/social satire which "it may be no exaggeration to say has been read by every self-respecting physicist, mathematician and science fiction writer." The new one, by Ian Stewart, is called "Flatterland" and is a tour of a century of strange geometry -- from fractals to "Minkowski space," whatever that is. The story (free registration required) is at the Times" I was loaned Flatland: A Romance Of Many Dimensions by one of my college profs - it's a great book, and this come from someone who really hated geometry (What bad high school teachers can do). It's still available on fatbrain - pretty good for a 19th century text about geometry, to still be in print.

Eric_Grimm writes "Carl Kaplan of the New York Times has done an interesting story on a draft law review article (click the "download paper" icon for a PDF version) relating to the metaphors that should be employed to assist legislators in understanding the personal data protection or "electronic privacy" debate currently raging in Congress and state legislatures. Both Kaplan's story and the law review article are well worth a read."

geophile writes: "This article in Salon says that China will be building its own 'very own information superhighway.'" The story basically repeats the optimistic-sounding promises of the Chinese government that the new system will be faster, safer, brighter and fight cavities, too, though it does mention in passing that the Chinese "government routinely blocks Web sites of foreign news organizations and groups it opposes." Speaking practically, how easily can the worldwide dataflow be arrested in a country as populous and geographically diffuse as China?

geophile asks: "Is it still supported? Are there new applications being written in it? Has it been extended? Did it die? When and why? Whatever happened to those funky keyboards?" APL ^[?] has the distinct reputation of being one of the most cryptic programming languages ever invented, due to the fact that it's a language based entirely on symbols. Is anyone out there still using it? If so, for what types of projects?

Stop Making Sense! writes: "First, an overview: To put it simply, Cyan has been a very busy little adventure game company lately. So busy, in fact, that it has left the job of a third Myst sequel, Myst III:Exile, to the notorious Presto Studios. With the impending release of realMyst, a realtime 3D version of Myst, and the accompanying Demo and Trailer, quite a few revelations about Cyan's long-term project have been woefully missed by most. A word about this project, before we get to the sweetness: It is codenamed MUDPIE." (Read on for more.) [updated by timothy] Due to a defective brain node, certain sentences were posted redundantly in this story. The node has been cauterized, and the sentences too.

"It is going to be an organic, realtime multiplayer game running on the same 'Headspin' 3D engine (which Cyan bought from the now-defunct Headspin Technologies along with a bunch of Headspin's programming staff)as realMyst and is going to take place in the Myst/Riven universe.

In the blizzard of Myst information, the sweetest snippet of all has basically gotten lost in the shuffle: a Screenshot of MUDPIE. People think at first it's a small chamber until the realize that the blob front and center is a person.

The engine is very pretty and relatively low on bugs, if a bit slow. Some people think the edges of the front pillars aren't soft enough, but they look fine to me :). For more info and clarification, see [this info page on Cyan's site]."

Start this one off with a creative hack: tim.kerby sent in just that: using a tortilla as a bread board when your local radio shack is out. Future creative hacks may involve i4u's link to camborg which tracks wearable cameras. Ant found cats and robots. You can practice by playing Kitty Lick 3, an FPS you play as a feline (thanks bjorky) But If cats aren't your pet of choice, how about pigs? Rookie sent in linkage to a story about a one in first class that you'll swear is fiction (but it isn't). radiator sent in a hilarious parody: first aid for a dying dot com. Some auctions worth noting: drDugan sent a picture autographed by Linus being sold on eBay (and donated to charity). Dirty Yanni noted that Metallica/Napster parody t-shirts are for sale on eBay. And the last auction (but not on eBay) is Spock's original ears from the original trek. Oh, and how about t-shirts mocking the MS breakin & source code theft? CArnesen noted that Anime Expo 2001 has been scheduled for this summer. I'm seriously considering going. Mothy notes that famed Rubber Chicken vendor Archie McPhee is now selling the Linux Voodoo Penguin (however the ad features a "Sysadmin" wearing a tie! Have to much free time? Ant does! He sent us a reflex tester (I've managed a .24) but thats nothing compared to Am I Hot or Not which is fun for hours on end if you're the type that amuses easily. And finally, tshell noted that that now that there is a complete O'Reily ate my balls site, the Internet is now complete. You can all go home now.

This time, an astute reader points us to the place where Guido Van Rossum speaks out on the Python license issues recently posted about here on Slashdot, and an Everquest enthusiast points to the Official Word (well, chatroom response) to Everquest server emulators. Oh, and remember that CueCat scanner you picked up last week (and quickly wrote a Linux kernel driver for) -- did anyone at Radio Shack mention something about an embedded serial number? Hmmmm. I thought not. Good thing reverse engineering isn't yet a capital offense ...

That's one long and winding snake of an issue ... Kevin Reichard writes: "Since you covered the original issues surrounding Python licensing, you may also want to note that Guido van Rossum of PythonLabs has officially responded in a Linux Today interview. He has many interesting things to say."

Which things notably include: "The sad thing is that all of this is based on technicalities: Stallman agrees that Python is free software, but a technicality in the licenses prevents compatibility. The choice of law clause in the CNRI license, which is causing the incompatibility, is very common is software licenses, and CNRI doesn't want to drop it because the validity of the general disclaimers in the license may depend on it. At the same time, Stallman doesn't want to allow any choice of law clauses, because one could stipulate the law of "Unfreedonia" which might reverse the meaning of the GPL."

Abort, retry, fail, bend, fold, spindle, mutilate? L Fitzgerald Sjoberg writes: " A recent posting on the official EverQuest boards by a spokesperson for Verant states that even RUNNING an EverQuest emulator violates the EverQuest license agreement.

If the emulator is legal, and emulators seem to be making a lot of legal headway these days, doesn't this essentially amount to Verant forbidding you to use a competitor's product? Not a good sign, if you ask me."

"Sir! Sir! There's something wrong -- this knob goes up to eleven!" Signal 11 writes: "I took apart a cuecat and did a rundown of the circuit tracings on the board. What follows is a short summary of what I found. I'm working on putting together a schematic for it and hope to have it together within a couple weeks.

The cuecat is fairly simple. It uses a pair of infrared LEDs to direct light onto the sheet of paper with the barcode on it. It is then picked up by an IR detector, whose output is tuned by a single potentiometer (adjusted at time of manufacture, I would guess) and then fed into the analog input of a microprocessor. The detector is the same type one can pickup at radioshack. All you do is enclose it in a box and then make a pinhole at one end. Cheap, but it works well enough.

The microprocessor I haven't had time to put together a circuit from the specs provided by texas instruments to download the microcode out of it. It is also a matter of me not wanting to learn about microprocessors although I understand it is common in the industry.. I'm an analog guy. :) I suspect it is nothing more than running the output through a ACD (analog->digital) inside the microprocessor and then referencing the binary input with a list of values to produce the barcode string. After that, as has been previously noted, it is passed to an XOR algorithm, and then modulated to be fed out onto the PS/2 interface. There are a pair of transistors on the board near the outputs of the microprocessor - I suspect these are used to either boost the signal to run over the PS/2 interface (the microprocessor may not have enough power), or as part of an oscillator to get a clock for the processor. Until I finish tracing out the board paths, I can't say for sure.

Somewhere in the chip they probably set the serial number into the nvram, which is prepended to the output. The software does the rest. As has been demonstrated, there isn't much to do on the software side either - one could just create an indexed array containing scancodes. One might even be able to write a new key definition file under linux.. no programming required.

This is a really simple device. This is also probably why they were so concerned about competitors.. it wouldn't take them more than one afternoon with an EE and a microcode programmer to reverse-engineer it and produce their own. Then again, the device was probably designed in the same amount of time, likely by a random contractor. The reason it took me so long? I've been messing around with electronics for all of three months, so yes, I'm not a professional - I also haven't gotten into DSP technology yet, which is all the cuecat is. As always, if someone could provide me with a basic circuit for reading the contents of the processor's memory out, I'd appreciate it!

Anyway, DigitalConvergence - I'm waiting for my cease and desist now."

zAmb0ni writes "We have posted a preview of the upcoming version 3.0 client for SETI@Home. The preview is based on the beta version 2.70 in limited release. You can check it out here: Team Ars Technica Lamb Chop." I wonder if it will run on this pci thing we mentioned yesterday.

Signal 11 asks: "I've been doing some research on government security certifications for Linux, specifically the C2 classification put out by the NSA. The results are that there is only one project underway - SGI Linux is apparently a low profile project underway at SGI (sorry for breaking it wide open guys) to get C2 for Linux. They won't begin testing though until 2001. Given that there is virtually no information about this project, however, I rather wonder whether SGI is still pursuing it. My question is: what's being done for C2 or higher classification of Linux right now?"

zigzag noted a nice article Summarizing the Wine Architecture. It has some interesting technical stuff, as well as poll results asking what Wine's priorities should be (running Office came first, followed by games. I vote games, but I'm sick of having to run Diablo2 on my crappy old laptop w/o 3D Acceleration since it's my only windows box). Anyway, not a lot there, but this is a seriously important project so take a gander.

Back for more already? Good. Today's early dinner of information includes humble pie baked by NASA, quantities of penguins rescued from roiling in oil, a morsel about sex discrimination in the computer world, and a take-out order of XF86 for the diners in our Slackware booth.

Absolutely no danger whatsoever at all. Contradicting the BBC story reported last week on Slashdot, NASA officials deny that a 1997 shuttle mission was ever in danger because of communication interruptions. Signal 11 writes: "NASA has a press release out which refuses a previous story from the BBC stating that an unknown 'hacker' was able to disrupt communications between mission control and the shuttle." Aardwolf64 pointed to MSNBC coverage of the NASA denial.

The NASA release reads, in part:

"NASA's Inspector General's office found that during the STS-86 mission in September of 1997, the transmission of routine medical information was slightly delayed due to a computer hacker. However, the transmission was successfully completed.

At no time was communication between NASA and the astronauts compromised. The communication interruption occurred between internal ground-based computer systems."

Fly away little birdies! Fly away! Errr, swim away, little birdies! Swim away! Errr ... come back later! An unnamed correspondent writes: "follow up on recent story about penguins caught in oil spill. After being cleaned, the penguins were flown to Port Elizabeth and released to swim the +/- 800 km's back to Cape Town. This will give enviromnetal cleaners a short space of time to clean the oil from the beaches where they live. Two of the penguins are being tracked. This site tracks their progress via satellite. Can't someone novelize this rescue attempt under the title "Penguin's Progress"?

Sir, please stop hitting me with the 'No Discrimination' sign. fegg writes: "Emmett recently posted a story in which there was a reference to an AP article which discussed gender bias as regards women and computer science. This was put -- I thought cavalierly --i nto the "this-has-nothing-to-do-with-gender-dammit dept." Unfortunately, the evidence suggests that it has everything to do with gender or, at least, how the world is presented to young boys and girls.

This is a rather important topic to me, especially now that I have two daughters (not to mention a wife who is a professional computer scientist). I view this as a must read for anyone who wants to develop a reasonable understanding of why there is such an imbalance of men and women in computing.

The gender bias situation is real, and it has been known for quite a while by many in education and technology circles. I would like to refer the Slashdot community to Ellen Spertus, who, in 1991, wrote "Why Are There So Few Female Computer Scientists?" Particularly compelling, IMHO, is the piece therein on stereotyping.

Spertus's "Women and Minorities in Science and Engineering" provides an excellent set of pointers for people interested in this topic."

Isn't this what killed John Belushi? strredwolf writes "If you haven't heard, XFree86 4.0.1 is out in full force, with binaries and docs online. Slackware users can get the "Slackballs" via the Linux Mafia, along with other goodies." (Here's the direct link to the 4.0.1 files, but linuxmafia.org is worth exploring anyhow. Warning: it is an unabashed Pro-Slack Zone.)

This would be worth more than my car. Dredd13 writes "Empeg, Ltd., a UK company, shipped the first of its Mark 2 MP3 car-stereo to customers this past week. This is the same stereo that runs Linux and has won awards. The Mark2 is expected to be a full production run, (as opposed to the initial Mark1, which only had about 300 units) with enough to satisfy ample demand. As a former MkI owner (and one of the guys who got a Mark2 today from Mr. FedEx), I can say its worth every penny!" Slashdot's been following the Empeg saga for a while now; check out this item Rob posted in 1998. I hope they can bring the price down a bit, to better compete with the various mainstream MP3 players now emerging.

Crowdpleazr1 asks: "I'm starting to wonder if someday I'll consider going out to a theater to be a quaint experience. I just finished downloading the online-only movie 405, created in the spare time of two visual effects guys, and I thought it was a lot funnier than most flicks I pay money for. On top of that, I've been having a blast watching the choose-your-own-adventure movie, It's Your Movie. With Titan A.E. recently being downloaded to a movie theater, I wonder if all movies will soon become online-only affairs. Is there a business model to support this?" An interesting thought. Do you all think that digital movies may eventually bypass the traditional cineplex and be delivered straight to your home? I would pay for something like that.

FoxIVX asks: "What is the carrying capacity of earth's atmosphere, in terms of pure bandwith? With radio, TV, HAM, citizens band, cellular, and countless other radio frequencies, each of them taking up space on the proverbial 'dial' what is left for the 'Wireless Revolution'? I know that, for now, radio-based data is slow and isolated, but what about the future, when everyone goes with cell phones instead of land-lines, and people start carrying around next-gen PDAs with full screen video capabilities and gigabytes of magnetic RAM? Does the spectrum of radio frequencies give enough room for this kind of data transfer? I know that with factors like distance/wattage, and various kinds of multiplexing you can squeeze more out of a certain wireless band, but there has to be some sort of a ceiling to it all. This could be an important new field as more and more areas and people go wireless. And this doesn't even touch on the issue of who owns the airwaves and who is going to regulate it all." Would the International equivalent of the FCC need to be formed to handle these kinds of issues on a global basis?

Signal 11 asks: "I've been reviewing different filesystem-level encryption schemes and so far, I have found only one solution - applying a kernel patch and using the loopback device. The problem is in generating large amounts of random data to seed the initial filesystem - it takes about 16 hours to create 20GB of pseudo-random data from /dev/urandom. Is there a faster (and equally secure) way to generate large amounts of random data?" Any clues? I'd figure a kernel patch to turbocharge /dev/urandom (while not losing too much security) might be another route to take.

Nericus asks: "I'm in the process of linking four separate networks via VPN. Each has its own little DNS sub-domain (lazy, quake, sector13 and overkill) with each possessing its own little branch of resources, here's the problem. I'm looking for a way to authenticate to a server (NIS) in each domain so the owners can have access control to the various resources. The problem lies in the fact that a decent chunk of the machines are running Windows 95, 98 or 2k (no flames, please) and I can't find a simple (re: cheap/free) method of authenticating Windows to a NIS server, M$ seems to think that Unix boxes should authenticate to a Windows box that'll emulate a NIS server, but won't authenticate TO one without third party software. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated (P.S. Yes, I've considered having them authenticate to Samba, but that's a less than elegant solution from what I can tell) "

This not-so Anonymous Coward asks: "I work at a large corp, and our daily firewall logs measure over 12GB. For the average cracker to actually do any real damage, they would need to be in the system for at least a month (keep in mind this is a large telco). With all the recent press regarding the cracking community, the FBI seems to be nabbing these guys awfully quickly as those terabytes of logs must be analyzed to trace these guys. How are these arrests made so quickly, or are they? " More than likely, law enforcement agents will use more tried-and-true methods in parallel with log analysis (and they have access to real hard iron to do this on, too). What other tools are available for law-enforcement agencies to use to track users (crackers and non-crackers alike) online?

Rob Kaper asks: "When being assigned to make changes to the Web site statistics program for one of the sites our company hosts, I was suprised to find that the site was using my own (open source and GPL-ed) program, which I had written long before I started to work at the company. Between my employment and the assignment to update the program for work I have been working on a new, improved version in my spare time. Many of the changes I am implementing or have planned to implement are the same as the ones the company would like as well. I am kind of puzzled and not sure how to continue. What will happen to the copyrights when I start working on the program during work time? Could I include those changes into my open source project? Would I have to reimplement them in my spare time?" Updated (Read on...)

"Since the program is GPL-ed I would like to think that all changes should be out there and ready to to be remerged in my home tree in the first place, but I would prefer to avoid a conflict of interest. The employer who introduced my code into the company no longer works there and I am not too sure that the managers give a damn about the GPL. A lawsuit to enforce it would not be an ideal situation.

So, any suggestions?"

Updated 5/14 by C : Signal 11 asks this semi-related question which many folks have already touched on, but this offers a different look at the issues involved: "I am in something of a quandry - I have been offered a position which I am very interested in, but the confidentiality agreement states that any inventions created during my employment become the property of my employer. This apparently includes works I create which do not use company resources. This concerns me - what claims can an employer legitimately enforce in a confidentiality agreement with regards to my 'intellectual property', and to what end? This is apparently a standard arrangement for employment in many high-tech organizations and applies to many of us." now we've dealt with this question in several Slashdot articles before, and the resounding answer was a chorus of "Watch that contract!" as you can prevent a lot of these problems by renegotiating with your potential employer, but what rights do employers have for writing such strong contracts. Do employers actually have the right to implement such clauses in employee contracts? I've heard it mentioned before (even here) that you can't sign away basic rights, and the rights to what you create on your own time and on your own equipment using your own knowledge sounds pretty basic to me. Thoughts?

geophile sent us a really interesting comparison of the similarities and differences between Intel's notorious FDIV bug of ages past (well, at least it seems like ages) and the recent ILUVYOU macro virus. Its amusing, but at the same time it really gives an interesting perspective on the whole deal. Hit the link to read it

The following was written by Slashdot Reader geophile

Pentium FDIV Bug Outlook Macro Viruses Nature of the bug Loss of precision in floating point division. Gaping security hole due to the combination of VBA scripting and Outlook. How to provoke the BUG E.g. x - (x/y)*y for some x, y. Open the ILUVYOU attachment. Damage caused by the bug Probably none in practice Millions of damaged files and registries Bug found by Thomas Nicely, Math Prof Numerous virus writers. Bug created by Intel. Microsoft. First response by bug's creator. Claims the problem isn't serious. It's a feature, not a bug. Second response by bug's creator. Free replacement of faulty CPU. It's a feature, not a bug. Cost to public Probably $0 Probably $millions Cost to creator of bug $billions $0

As you clean up your registry and replace your damaged files, just keep a few things in mind:

• Microsoft just wants to be free to innovate and to bring great software to consumers.
• We wouldn't have great software like Windows and Office if Microsoft hadn't violated anti-trust laws.

geophile sent us a really interesting comparison of the similarities and differences between Intel's notorious FDIV bug of ages past (well, at least it seems like ages) and the recent ILUVYOU macro virus. Its amusing, but at the same time it really gives an interesting perspective on the whole deal. Hit the link to read it

The following was written by Slashdot Reader geophile

Pentium FDIV Bug Outlook Macro Viruses Nature of the bug Loss of precision in floating point division. Gaping security hole due to the combination of VBA scripting and Outlook. How to provoke the BUG E.g. x - (x/y)*y for some x, y. Open the ILUVYOU attachment. Damage caused by the bug Probably none in practice Millions of damaged files and registries Bug found by Thomas Nicely, Math Prof Numerous virus writers. Bug created by Intel. Microsoft. First response by bug's creator. Claims the problem isn't serious. It's a feature, not a bug. Second response by bug's creator. Free replacement of faulty CPU. It's a feature, not a bug. Cost to public Probably $0 Probably $millions Cost to creator of bug $billions $0

As you clean up your registry and replace your damaged files, just keep a few things in mind:

• Microsoft just wants to be free to innovate and to bring great software to consumers.
• We wouldn't have great software like Windows and Office if Microsoft hadn't violated anti-trust laws.

Phexro extended our congratulations to Bruce and Valerie on the birth of Bruce 2.0, otherwise known as Stanley Charles Perens. this is jimmy asked us all to compete in the great Beltsander Races. Need to send crazy Aunt JoAnne some E-mail? Try something from the Great Spam Archive, sent in by Jones. Nezumi-chan wasn't the only one to write in with this one, but all I can say is Oh, yes. ahaning wrote in to tell us about the Obsolete Computer Museum. Want something to plug them into? blizzard shared Electricity from Giant Artichokes. Also, check out the Ultracade, which is cool unless you're a video game purist like me. Dropkick wrote in about a cyber-riffic washing machine. Last but not least, Penguin_99 writes in about cool photos from Galileo. That's it, folks. Thanks to AfterY2K for the title inspiration.

rbuysse writes "Just browsing around, and I ran across that unix.com is going to be put up for sale! Starting 5/11, it is going to be auctioned off on eBay". Pretty sweet domain name... How much do you think it'll go for?

Crowdpleazr1 writes "In case any of you were still opening up email from people you don't know, the Weekly World News is reporting that you could now be killed by a malicious email virus that will alter the molecular structure of your CPU, making it explode!! Of course, as a person who understands these newfangled computer things, even I can not imagine what evils those hacker people can come up with. I think I'm going to go hide in my Y2K compound now. "

sekure writes "I was just on OpenBSD.org, and as I was reading the wanted hardware page I noticed that the OpenBSD project needed more Alpha gear, and if they don't get what they need, they won't ship OpenBSD/alpha on the 2.7 CD-ROM. I don't know what everyone else thinks, but I think it would be a shame. I know I'm going to talk to my boss about lending (or maybe even giving?) an Alpha to the OpenBSD project. Maybe people have old (or new) Alpha's kicking around they don't use anymore, or maybe there are some multi[million|billion]aires that wouldn't mind donating some fresh new Alpha's. What do you think?"

phydeaux2 writes " Yahoo! TV Coverage reports that the project to remake Planet of the Apes has gotten the green light. " Wow. I'm stunned. Tim Burton...and Planet of the Apes.

Stiletto writes "According to this article, the British government is planning on forcing automobile manufacturers to install devices that allow satellites to monitor the vehicle's speed and control it when it is moving 'too fast.'" I suspect that any U.S. politician who tried to push through something like this would be out of office immediately. I can't speak for U.K. residents, but I bet it's the same there. Does anyone think *any* government could really get away with this?

Yoel Inbar writes "John Copeland, a professor at Georgia Tech, has discovered the possibility of using Macs running OS 9 as a distributed DOS tool. Basically, by sending a Mac running OS 9 a custom UDP packet, you can get it to reply with a 1500 byte ICMP packet(these packets are normally sent as part of MTU discovery). Send these UDP packets to a bunch of Macs, spoof the source addresses....voila, instant DOS. Apparently this is "in the wild"; he reports several scans designed to elicit these packets. "

cremes asks: "I'm a technology manager (not a PHB) at a Financial Services firm, and I've recently bumped my head against another dreaded management issue. Most of my employees are salaried with a rather weak "overtime" compensation package. I've asked them if they want to go hourly, but there is resistance. I promised them I would Ask Slashdot what the country & world are doing about high tech wages and the feelings about flat salary versus hourly (+ time and a half). So, how are most of you paid? Salary or by the hour?" We've discussed the amount that you think is fair compensation for this industry, so it's only fitting we talk about how that amount should be earned.

[Xorian] writes "There's a new portable mp3 device called the Personal Jukebox. Apparently, this is the result of a research effort from Compaq's Systems Reserach Center (one of the two Compaq research groups that developed the Itsy). The kicker is that it's supposed to be able to store about 100 CDs worth of music (it's got a a 4.8 GByte hard disk) and have 10 hours of battery life yet fit in your jacket pocket. No word on pricing yet though. "

odo asks: "I'm finding more and more discussion about the Athlon K7 not working with the the Linux v2.2 releases. It seems, from the newsgroup discussions, that I have found that starting on October 6th there have been some people finding problems with the MTRR module being incompatable with the new Athlon chip and causing a kernel panic. It appears to be from the MTRR used in the compiled kernel that comes with many of the popular installations. Which means that you can't even get an installation working enough to be able to fix the kernel. Has any one else seen this?"

Anonymous Coward writes "For those of you out there with Alpha hardware, it seems that Compaq is now offering its Tru64 UNIX to 'technology enthusiasts' for a mere $99." A heavily restricted (VERY non-GPL) license is attached to the deal, but it looks like it would be a nice combination toy and "teach yourself commercial UNIX at home" tool.

Signal 11 writes "Congress has shot down the Fidnet project - to read about more details on Fidnet, go the original story about the project. In related news a national jam echelon day is coming up. Unfamiliar with Echelon? It is best to educate oneself. " Well, the sequence of events for FIDNET goes something like this: Clinton proposes computer security group, liberties groups hate it, Congress shoots it down for funding, Clinton attachs it to another bill. So, we won and lost - for more details, check out our recent YRO Story.

Mr. Pliant asks: "I'd like to set up a CVS server on my Linux box but I'm having some trouble finding the docs to do so. The stuff on Cyclic's site was a little crytpic and the info wasn't organized very well. Anyone have any pointers? "

Signal 11 writes "Bruce Schneier at Counterpane has some interesting comments about the so-called NSA key embedded into all current versions of windows. " If you missed the fireworks, read the first story or Microsoft response.

geophile writes "This Boston Globe article starts out talking about Java's failure to take over the world, and then questions whether Linux will suffer the same fate. " Interesting question, and perhaps I'm being partial, but I feel as though Java promised that it was going to change the world-right then and there. Linux has been building for quite sometime, and continues to develop.

JDC writes "Apparently, Intel has first silicon on their IA-64 processor. I wonder how long till I can play Descent on one of those babies... ;) " Linux has been working on the simulators, and is reported to work on the actual silicon. However, contrary to prior reports, Windows does boot and run on the engineering prototype.

Well, Morrigan seems to have had a bad week. He sent in this interesting first-person tale of network woe at 0:dark:thirty. It's here to greet you this morning so that anyone in a similar situation can give Morrigan a big "right on," and those who simply use the network instead of maintaining it can gain a little insight into how hard it is to keep it working. The High Tech Sweatshop

Its 4:30 am on a Friday and I just finished the last Mountain Dew. We ran out of coffee hours ago, the remains of it now black sludge at the bottom of the pot. The buildings air conditioning went off sometime the previous night and its up to almost 90 degrees in the server room. The two volunteer hackers on the staff went home after 12 hours, leaving me and the sysadmin...

This is a normal day for me.

I'm a systems engineer in the client services division of a network security software company. Basically what that means is that when networks break, I fix them.

I am 22 years old, I make a large multiple of the national average salary, and if I cashed in my stock options I could buy a very nice house. I'm also sixty pounds overweight, I sleep an average of four hours a night, and I have several ulcers. I usually spend about 60 hours a week at the office, but I'm on call 24 hours a day seven days a week. If I was honest with myself Id probably say I worked about one hundred hours last week. This is a normal life for someone working in this industry.

We live in a world today that runs on information. And people want all of it now. When was the last time you actually wrote out a personal letter to someone, on paper, in pen? Why bother when E-mail is so much faster and easier? But what goes on behind the scenes when you hit the "send" button? There are thousands of people out there just like me who have titles like "Network engineer" and "Systems administrator". We keep that information flowing, and we get paid what seems like a lot of money to do it. If you've been in the market for a good network admin lately you know what I mean. The market is pushing the salary into the 100k+ plus range for someone with the necessary experience to handle even a relatively small network, never mind what the really large companies like State Farm insurance or Wells Fargo bank have.

I started work on this problem with the sysadmin on Thursday before the close of business, getting things set up, preparing for the changes etc... The company was switching internet service providers that night because the previous one hadn't provided the level of service they needed. This entailed changing the IP addresses, and DNS configurations of every machine in the building, running three different operating systems, probably two hundred machines all told, then setting up the servers, routers, and switches necessary to get it all running. It's a big job, but with six people working on it we figured we could get it done before start of business the next day. Normally you would do this kind of thing over a weekend, but the ISP could either do the changeover tonight, or wait till next week, and we needed to be online before Monday.

Getting back to what happens when you press the send button. You expect the computer to send the message, and that the person it was sent to will receive it. What happens to the message then is an incredibly complex series of storage, sending, routing, switching, redirecting, forwarding and retrieving, that is all over in a fraction of a second, or at most a few minutes. But you don't care how or why it gets there, only that it does, and this is all you should care about. After all you don't have to know how your cars engine works in order to drive it right. But someone has to know in case it breaks. And when your email breaks you expect someone to fix it. It doesn't matter what time it is, or where the message is being sent, you want it to get there now.

Its now 8 am and the network is still down. We've managed to isolate a routing problem and are in the process of fixing it. The ISP gave us the wrong IP addresses and now we have to go back and redo all two hundred machines in the building. The router was crashing and we couldn't figure out why. Two hours on the phone with the vendors support, and three levels of support engineer later we fix it. People are starting to come in to work and ask why they can't get their email. The changeover process takes us about three hours and finally everyone has the right IP, but things still aren't working right. A bunch of people use DHCP for their laptops and the DHCP people cant get out to the net. The CEO of the company is one of those people...

So what do we do? Well we hire people to take care of the network. And we give them benefits and pay like any normal employee. We also give them pagers, cell phones, a direct phone lines to their houses so that any time, any where, we can get them, because the network could go down, and we DEPEND on that network, and those people. This is where things go skew from the normal business model.

All compensation is basically in exchange for time. The only thing humans have to give is their time. When I pay you a salary it is in exchange for me being able to use your abilities for a certain period of time every year. The assumption is that the more experienced or knowledgeable you are the more your time is worth. This works fine when you are being paid a wage, but salaried employees aren't. They exist under the polite fiction that all their work can be done in a forty hour period every week, no matter how much work there is. We all know this isn't the case of course. And when it comes to Systems administrators and network engineers that polite fiction isn't so polite. In exchange for high salaries and large stock options the company owns you all day and all night, every day and every night. You are "Mission critical". High salaries become an illusion because when it gets down to it your hourly rate isn't much better than the assistant manager of the local Pep Boys.

I finally went home at 1 that afternoon. I couldn't stay awake any more and if I didn't leave right then I wouldn't have been able to drive home. The funny thing is I felt guilty for leaving. Things still weren't working quite right, and I felt like I should have stayed until they were. Even funnier is that I volunteered for this. The only part of the job that I actually had to do was to change a few IP addresses and configure the firewall, but I thought I'd lend a hand, and I couldn't do the firewall till everything else was working anyway. My wife hadn't seen me in two and a half days, and I could barely give her a kiss when I walked through the door and collapsed on my bed. The SysAdmin was fired a few hours after I left. Back to work Monday morning.

chris wrote in to tell us that Registration for the 3^rd Annual Atlanta Linux Showcase is open. First 100 registrations get an OS-Wars T-Shirt (I have one, they rock) brazilian brain sent us an English Translation of an Interview with Alfredo Kojima of WindowMaker fame. Scott wrote in to tell us that the July issue of Daemon News is online and Jim wrote in to tell us that the July issue of The FreeBSD 'zine is out too. geophile wrote in to tell us that Propoganda 10 is out. More excellent background images to consume your free RAM. Very yum. erios23 notified us of a new toy on jwz's webpage. BluBall sent us a Slashdot reference in Salon's Silicon Funnies. Spoofs Linux and Slashdot and even me a bit I guess (well, my name anyway). And finally chrisd (who may be biased on this one) wrote in to say that VA is one of the 10 best companies to work for (According to ZD) ranking amongst Replay, Nokia and Novell. I suspect that Nerf has something to do with it.

Henry Cipolla asks: "Somebody recently asked a question about text to speech with Linux. Following the links brought me to festival, but I could not find anything that worked happily with Esound. Does anybody know of any hacks or patches or whatnot that will allow some sort of text to speech under Esound?"

Andrew Konkol sent us another portable MP3 Player, except that this one has 64 megs of memory and costs only $99. And of course, its not available until mid '99 (which by my math is only a few weeks away...

i0n wrote in to send us a Chicago Tribune article about Linus and Bill at Comdex. Has anyone rummaged up transcripts of either speech? I've seen several articles on each, but no transcripts. Update: 04/20 02:07 by CT : Knish sent us a PC Week Story on the keynotes. Update: 04/20 03:17 by CT : Ign0rance sent us Bill's Speech. Update: 04/20 03:34 by CT : BitMan sent us an MSNBC article.

Signal 11 writes "Kevin grants a rare interview with Forbes Reporter Adam L. Penenberg and blames the media frenzy surrounding the now infamous hacker squarely on John Markoff of the New York Times. More info about Kevin Mitnick. "

Loic Dachary wrote in to say that catalog, a GPLd perl script to create your own Yahoo style directory is up for download. ja wrote in to say that LyX, TeX a frontend for dummies has officially hit v1.0 From my own blatant self promotion department, I actually registered CmdrTaco.net and have moved most of my non-slashdot stuff there- as well as cleaning up some design issues and making pages smaller and faster and prettier. Update your links, the old stuff will go away in the not so distant future. David Carver noted that the March 1999 issue of (What? Paper?) Performance Computing magazine mentions Slashdot on Page 13 regarding last Novembers reports on Cheap Alphas. For something truly strange, we have something Blaxthos sent: The Church of the Quivering Otter. It's actually even wierder than it sounds. An anonymous reader sent us a link to a CNN article about the Victoria's Secret commercial during the superbowl: Apparently the website got a million hits in the following hour. Was the game boring or do we just really like Stephenie Seymour? The answer to both of these is probably yes. Somewhat related is another patent following the one we mentioned yesterday. Rosmo sent us (Not for the ultra moral!) a patent that might be even scarier that that one.

In an update on the windows refund story, BiGGO writes "Someone was quick enough to open a site about the EULA-refund trick. They are encouraging people who were forced to pay for Windows but never used it to ask for a refund on a special refund day, Feb 15th" 136 people have already joined them in the 24 hours since the site went live. Update: 01/20 07:09 by S : David Cornette contributed this Wired story on it, and elflord forwarded this ZD-Net Story.