Slashdot Mirror

Slashback tonight brings some clarifications and updates to previous Slashdot stories, including: anti-Net-neutrality article modified; no bugged Canadian coins; a tech program for women in Silicon Valley; Pirate Bay and Sealand; and Microsoft evangelist apologizes for "pawns" comment. Read on for details.

Network neutrality. MobyDisk writes, "Network Performance Daily retracted last week's interview with Professor Christopher Yoo from Vanderbilt University Law School on his opposition to net-neutrality policies. The new article is a clearer, more subdued interview. The editor, Brian Boyko, says he never received Mr. Yoo's corrections to the article before press time. From the apology: 'The article had done him a disservice and we resolved to repair any inaccuracy or anything that would be unfair to his words or image.'"

Bugged Canadian coins. Lars T. writes in a journal article, "A recent Slashdot story asked: Bugged Canadian Coins?. Now The Globe and Mail has an update on the story — or rather the non-story. '[A] U.S. agency that investigated the complaint found no evidence of any secret transmitters, or of any other tampering. It's not clear why this information failed to find its way into the released U.S. Defense Security Service report.' So you can all pack in your tin-foil hats — at least that's what they want you to believe."

Engineering gender gap. Ellen Spertus writes, "Regarding the recent article The Hidden Engineering Gender Gap: Mills College has a post-baccalaureate program in computer science, which was recently written up in the San Francisco Bay Guardian. The program is co-ed, although the majority of students are female. Graduates of the program have successfully gone on to CS PhD programs and industry jobs."

Pirate Bay and Sealand. Kawahee writes, "Coming off previous coverage here of The Pirate Bay's intentions to purchase Sealand after it was put up for sale, The Pirate Bay has revealed on its website www.buysealand.com that it has entered into negotiations with Sealand. From the post: 'The Government of Sealand has initiated negotiation. Tomorrow, the ACFI and Government of Sealand will sit down in the SMTP chambers of the Internets to discuss the future of the micronation. We welcome the request and hopefully we can settle on a price. But knowing how hard non-kopimistic people can be to negotiate with, we will go with Plan B if they're not willing to meet our demands, press officer of ACFI says.' BuySealand.com is also now sporting a donation meter, and as of the 15th of January it stood at USD $13,714."

MS evangelist apologizes for "pawns" comment. gogat0rs writes "Former Microsoft Tech Evangelist James Plamondon, who made headlines this week when a 1996 speech he gave became public during a Microsoft antitrust trial in Iowa, has apologized to the Microsoft developer community for using a metaphor that described key industry influencers and developers as 'pawns.' Plamondon wrote that calling developers pawns was both offensive and inaccurate. He goes on to say, It mischaracterizes the mutually supportive relationship that must exist between a platform vendor and its platforms early adopters, such as that which Microsoft and independent software developers created in the 1990s. I regret having used the "pawns" metaphor; I apologize for any misplaced ill will it may have caused towards Microsoft; and I won't use it in [the] future.' Since the apology was issued, the full text of the Plamondon speech has been released as a public document on a Comes v. Microsoft website, along with 80 other exhibits."

Ellen Spertus asks: "My husband and I lease a pure electric GM EV-1, which we love, and need to replace our second car, a conventional Honda Accord, which recently died. We'd get a second EV-1, but GM has stopped making them. I haven't been able to find any available all-eletric car with the range (>=50 miles roundtrip) and speed (>=65 mph) that I need. Does the Slashdot community have any experience, wisdom, or advice on choosing an alternative fuel car?"

"I'm currently considering:

• Toyota Prius, a hybrid sedan
• Honda Insight, a hybrid two-seater
• Honda Civic GX, a compressed natural gas (CNG) powered sedan

We test drove a Toyota Prius today, and it seems like a nice car. It's said to provide a quieter and more comfortable ride than the Honda Insight, and it uses pure electric power at low speeds. The Honda Insight, on the other hand, has better gas mileage. I could refuel either at regular gas stations. The Honda Civic GX would need to be refueled at special stations, but there are many where I live and work, the San Francisco Bay Area. The GX is the lowest in emissions, which would qualify me to drive alone in the carpool lane. All of the cars are about the same price, around $20,000 new. Used cars are also available."

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.

Ellen Spertus has sent us a review of Phillip (and his dog!)'s Guide to Web Publishing. Known for being an outspoken prof at MIT, with interesting ideas, his web publishing manual is similarly interesting, focusing on collabrative web sites.Piotr has updated me. Neither the man, nor the dog is a prof at MIT, although they spend time there. Mea Culpa. Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing author Philip Greenspun pages 608 publisher Academic Press/Morgan Kaufmann rating 9/10 reviewer Ellen Spertus with Keith Golden ISBN summary Entertaining and informative book on why and how to build collabrative web sites. The Scenario

Philip Greenspun - web guru, expert photographer, free software writer, and unique personality - has written an irreverent, informative, and visually attractive book on why and how to build collaborative database-backed web sites. (Alex, his photogenic co-author, is his dog.) The book is a rewrite of Greenspun's earlier Database-Backed Web Sites, whose history and flaws have been described in Greenspun's amusing Book behind the book behind the book. This time around, Greenspun got to do the book the way he wanted.

Greenspun's philosophy can be summarized as follows:

• Whenever possible, web sites should be designed to allow users to contribute material. (I think most of us at slashdot would agree.)
• Web views should be personalized for individual users. (Ditto.)
• A relational database is the best tool for accomplishing these goals. Greenspun even provides free space on his database server for people to use his collaboration tools on their own sites.
• The user interface should be optimized for the convenience of the user. This does not mean that aesthetics are unimportant, just that they should not interfere with the communication of information.

The book convincingly argues this philosophy by presenting numerous examples from high-level design to actual code. What's Bad?

The biggest negative is that parts of this book are repeats of his earlier book. While most of the material is new, reading through the old stuff can be annoying to people who have read the first.

What's Controversial?

Greenspun's sense of humor. There are many things he says that a reasonable person would find offensive or hilarious or both. (For an example of the last, see his Dating Game.) While it makes the book fun to read, I'd think twice before assigning the book to my students. Some people might be offended by the (artistic) nude pictures, although I was not.

I was at MIT at the same time as Greenspun, where he was known for always speaking his mind (to put it kindly). This same irreverance is evident throughout the book, where he is not shy about stating his dislikes. The following excerpt illustrates Greenspun's style:

Most of what I've said in this chapter goes against conventional wisdom as observed on big corporate sites and in books on Web page design. My theory is that graphic designers get interfaces so wrong because they never figured out that they aren't building CD-ROMs. With a CD-ROM, you can control the user's access to the content. Borrow a copy of David Siegel's Creating Killer Web Sites (Hayden Books 1997) and note that he urges you to have an "entry tunnel" of three pages with useless slow-to-load GIFs on them. Then there should be an "exit tunnel" with three more full-page GIFs. In between, there are a handful of "content" pages that constitute the site per se.

Siegel is making some implicit assumptions: that there are no users with text-only browsers; that users have a fast enough Net connection that they won't have to wait 45 seconds before getting to the content of a site; that there are no users who've turned off auto image loading; that there is some obvious place to put these tunnels on a site with thousands of pages. Even if all of those things are true, if the internal pages do indeed contain any content, AltaVista will roar through and wreck everything. People aren't going to enter the site by typing in "http://www.greedy.com" and then let themselves be led around by the nose by you. They will find the site by using a search engine and typing a query string that is of interest to them. The search engine will cough up a list of URLs that it thinks are of interest to them. AltaVista does not think a Dave Siegel "entry tunnel" is "killer". In fact, it might not even bother to index a page that is just one GIF. (chapter 5)

While most of his opinions are as well-supported as this one, some are more controversial, such as section headings "Java and Shockwave - The BLINK Tag Writ Large" and "CORBA: MiddleWare Meets VaporWare".

What's Good?

Greenspun is a real expert on web publishing and communicates a lot of interesting information. It is clear that his goal is evangelism, not making money: Greenspun makes his code freely available, and the entire book is available for free online (although many people will want to buy it for convenience and its stunning photographs).

So What's In It For Me?

Plenty. Reading this book (and downloading the code) makes it easy to create a database-backed web site. (I know because I did so.) You get not just the basics but real depth, such as how to create a high-performance site, capable of serving 20 or more database-backed requests per second.

Purchase this book at Amazon.

Table of Contents

1. Envisioning a site that won't be featured in suck.com
2. So you want to join the world's grubbiest club: Internet entrepreneurs
3. Scalable systems for on-line communities
4. Static site development
5. Learn to program HTML in 21 minutes
6. Adding images to your site
7. Publicizing your site
8. So you want to run your own server
9. User tracking
10. Sites that are really programs
11. Sites that are really databases
12. Database management systems
13. Interfacing a relational database to the Web
14. ecommerce
15. Case studies
16. Better living through chemistry
17. A future so bright you'll need to wear sunglasses