Slashdot Mirror

Defender2000 writes "GeForce FX NDA lifted today, reviews are up at ExtremeTech, Tom's Hardware, and HardOCP. So far, it is indeed better overall than the 9700Pro, but not enough for it's price. Perhaps NVIDIA has something up its sleeve for the long term?" There's also a review at Anandtech, about which reader StrongBad writes "Unlike the rest of the reviews, however, wonderboy gets down and dirty with the FX's antialiasing and anisotropic filtering methods using some nifty on mouseover java commands."

Slashback tonight with several updates, ranging from patent encumbrances to SOAP 1.2 to the transcript for Eldred v. Ashcroft, with more bits in the middle on the recent Geek Cruise in the Caribbean, the all-important cable TV lineups, and more. Read on below for the details! A little light reading. hayek writes "The transcript of oral argument at the Supreme Court in Eldred v. Ashcroft is now available online."

And then we saw the sharks. a9db0 writes "Part II of Doc Searl's travelogue recounting his experiences on the Geek Cruise has been posted here by the fine folks over at the Linux Journal"

In an earlier report from Geek Cruise, Linus predicted 2.6 by June 2003. If you liked the list of features being considered for 2.6, you can thank puriots0 for "the list of what's been included in time for the feature freeze for Linux 2.6", as found at kernelnewbies.org.

Peel back your eyelids and let these images flood your brain. strredwolf writes "I think we had half the story when Cartoon Network said they were going to remove Zoids and G Gundam in their Toonami block. It was more like remove Zoids, move G Gundam to Midnight Run with GI Joe, put HeMan and Transformers on full weekdays, and double up on DB and DBZ. The website and broadcast prove it now. (This report was done while watching to Toonami live.)"

And Stalke writes "Recently, rumours about Stargate SG1 7th season included it both being renewed as well as speculation that it might be cancelled. MGM and Scifi put those rumours to rest today by officially announcing a 7th season. It will begin filming next year with a full 22 episodes ordered. No word about Daniel Jackson returning though :("

Cracking down on alien fraudsters. yep writes "Administrators of the alien-hunting distributed computing experiment SETI@home have announced they will crack down on cheats who rort statistics on computing power lent to the project. The announcement follows a united protest from the chief contributors. SETI@home director David Anderson announced SETI@home would do its best to investigate users returning suspiciously high amounts of work and delete their accounts if it uncovered solid evidence of cheating."

Sure they're not. tiltowait writes "The Hartford Courant article "The FBI Has Bugged Our Public Libraries" has been retracted (this was mentioned here - but the older article has been removed). Even if the retraction can be trusted, this doesn't change the fact that the FBI can still bug libraries as freely as the CIA can assasinate with impunity, or that more McCarthyism is on the way."

This story retracts the claims of bugging made in the previous one. Since the FBI has little incentive to tell the truth on this count, I don't see what incentive anyone has to believe their denial.

Cleaning up the future for SOAP. Makarand writes "A major hurdle in finalizing the SOAP 1.2 specification has been removed. Both Epicentric, a subsidiary of Vignette, and WebMethods, which makes integration software, had said in earlier statements that they may have patents that cover the technology used in the SOAP 1.2 specification which would have made SOAP 1.2 non royalty-free hindering approval by W3C. Epicentric has now amended its earlier statement saying they no longer believe they hold any such patents, and even if they did, they are interested in making them available on a royalty-free basis. WebMethods has made no comments yet."

tiltowait writes In response to the incredulity expressed in this story about the technical prowess of libraries, I'd like to present a short essay titled "Librarians: We're Not What You Think" - read on for more. Update: 10/20 18:15 GMT by M : The author has also put up his essay on his own webpage. From the spinster librarian in It's a Wonderful Life to the crochety archivist in Attack of the Clones, librarians are often portrayed (in everything from movies, musicals, children's books, literature, science fiction, comics and cartoons to pornography - yes, pornography) as something less than noble or admirable. The perception of librarians has been a popular topic recently, with several articles focusing on the fringe-type librarians (ska, rockabilly, bellydancing, modified, bodybuilding, laughing, and lipstick). Although something of an anti-stereotype, these people illustrate the range of librarian personalities.

Many people may hold the image of a librarian as a shushing school marm who does little more than stamp and shelve books because that's all they've seen librarians do. Well think again - that's about as inaccurate as believing that Alan Greenspan is nothing more than a glorified bank teller. The job titles may change but the mission of the profession remains the same: organize information and help people find it. Libraries have been around a lot longer than the Internet, and even library technology can hold its own with the best out there. For example, Google's savvy results ranking was hardly the birth of citation analysis (next up: metadata - cough, cataloging, cough), and there are enormous library systems that also predate the Internet.

Although library geeks and technology nerds may have contrary images, in today's world the boundary between the career of the librarian and the information technologist is disappearing. Librarians today not only administer Web servers and dynamic databases to help manage large digital collections and thousands of electronic resources, they teach people how to use library systems. And just as enlightened computer engineers are advocates of noncommercial software and campaign for online rights, the library profession has a long history of staunchly defending freedom - from book burnings to the FBI's Library Awareness Program to the latest copyright battles and almost all other current issues in intellectual freedom.

Check out LISNews.com (recognize the format?) and some library blogs if you're interested in reading more about real librarians.

Skip Franklin writes: "IBM and the German government are getting together to implement Linux as the government's computing platform of choice. The deal is being touted as a big blow to Microsoft, although personally I prefer the glass-half-full perspective of a big win for Open Source. The BBC has the story."

subharmonic writes: "Sony announced through an e-mail that the Linux PS2 kits were available for pre-order. The kits should be shipped May 22nd. There's a FAQ and a order site."

Skip Franklin asks: "I'm looking for a mag-stripe card reader to use with a Linux kiosk. I've searched all over the web, but I'm not finding much in the way of hardware vendors that say they support Linux. There's tons of stuff on smartcards, but I just want a simple (read: cheap) mag-stripe reader. Anyone using one of these (preferrably USB interface, serial if necessary)?" Anyone who's had better luck than Skip at finding such a beast?

smart_ass asks: "I doubt I am the only one of us out there who has to spend some of our "work" time on the road. My question for you all is what internet connection providers do you use for international connections. There's gotta be something better than AOL and Compuserve with near-complete world coverage." Man, I sure hope so!

Qrious writes "I read Tad Williams' "Otherland" a while ago and was facinated by the interface that is used for controlling computers with your hands. Now I am wondering how far technology is in this field. Aren't replacements for mouse and keyboards around ? Gloves and a virtual keyboard ? A flick of the wrist that changes back and forth betweeen keyboard and pointing device ? Are these things already made ? If not, why not ? I for one would like to work with something faster than a keyboard. Typing in the air or on a table with some kind of gloves instead of a keyboard would take some getting used to, but would be a lot faster when you are used to it. Anyone else have ideas to some other way of interacting with computers that would make it easier on the hands and faster to control ?"

There are certainly a lot of radical extensions of the keyboard as we know it -- chording keyboards like the BAT and the Twiddler, Deep Ergonomic ones like the Kinesis, and many variants on the one-handed keyboard.

IBM of course is now selling ViaVoice for Linux, as well. But are there interfaces that are even more out there available now?

Arcanix writes "This story at MSNBC explains how the Quebec government is suing companies who do not post French versions of their web sites." French-speakers are notoriously protective of their language. And this isn't new; I talked to a Quebec photography studio two, maybe three years ago that was going through the same thing. They really do prosecute sites for this. Guys: your meme-complex is doing fine in meatspace, it can fend for itself on the net.

spankenstein asks: "At work we are trying to switch to using NFS mounted home directories but have run into a problem. All of the technical staff have root access to their machines. It is necesary for this access. However, this leads to extremely easy ways to override NIS and any other "authentication" provided over NFS so almost anyone could mount someone else's ${HOME}. Is there any reasonably secure way of doing this? So far it's looking like Samba is the best answer but that makes no sense in a 90% Linux environment."

Bananenrepublik writes "The GNU Project has released the GNU Free Documentation License. It is meant 'to assure everyone the effective freedom to copy and redistribute it [the documentation], with or without modifying it, either commercially or noncommercially.'"

I'm sure most of you have heard about the Human Genome Project by now and how it is working to map our DNA. Aparently there is now a race going on with corporations also performing the similar experiments, except with the intent of patenting the results. Now troc is wondering if another distributed computing effort might be in order. What do you all think? Click below troc's actual question.

troc asks: "I was watching a TV programme on UK TV last night about the Human Genome Project and how there was a race to sequence and publish the whole thing before the private companies do it and patent the sequences. Basically lasers are used to break up the strands, these are then read and fed into a computer that tries to match the bits up with other bits like a giant jigsaw puzzle. This requires a lot of computing time.

Is this an opportunity for the open source movement to help decode the sequences and publish the whole thing becore it's patented?

<soapbox>

I, for one, don't like the idea of a private company owning my gene sequences. They will be able to limit the use of these so only really rich pharmaceutical companies will be able to develop drugs etc and then sell them at huge profits, which isn't realy for the benefit of mankind blah blah blah.

</soapbox>"

I agree. I don't see how information like this can be patented. There is nothing truly proprietary about it, and it would do more good in the public where the benefit can truly be felt.

UuCon writes "On LinuxPR.com there is announcement about Co-Founder of Linux Today, Dave Whitinger has announced LinSight. A "Powerful, artificially intelligent network of websites will provide world-class service to the Linux community." Funny thing that the first member of the team listed is Elton Wells, who has "left his position as Program Manager of Developer Tools at Microsoft to join LinSight". "

ColourCure asks: "Maybe this has already been asked (definitely not an original thought), but how much of an impact do you think Linux would have made as a non-open source operating system? There's definitely more to open sourcing than being able to peek at the code. Would the open source movement even be that big without Linux backing it up? " Ah, I expect this to generate some controversy, but my personal feeling is that the time for Open Source has come. Linux just accelerated the time table.

James Ensor writes " Cnn.com is running an interesting article comparing MCI Worldlnet's recent frame relay outage to an outage that AT&T had last year, comparing their method's of handling the situation. Good Reading. " It's fun to watch major corporations blunder about. Unless it's your connection that's down.

troc sent us the the British strike site for this weekend's European Internet Users Telecommunications boycott. The boycott is over having to pay metered internet phone bills, which quite frankly, seems almost as silly as US crypto laws. There is also a site for the EU as well.

Amoeba Protozoa has the first Quickie for the day: The Linux Image Montage Project needs logos to create a montage poster. If you have a Linux related logo, send it to them. mazeone sent us a link to the always excellent NTK which has a great note about Bruce Perens at the start, (And yes, I read NTK too ;) And now a whole bunch of fun little links that have been building up: PopeClayton sent us a link to a Homer Simpson Fortune File. cpfeifer sent us a link to another O'Reily Book Parody. Zibalatz sent us a link to a MacBeth Star Wars Parody. rpm sent us a link to the Magic Nipple. It predicts the future. Sorta. Now we have a few more Porn Parody sites: desertAngel sent us Amish Porn and Gambit32 sent us telephone sex. Both are hilarious. The Only Anonymous Coward sent us a link to an emergency Security Alert: apparently a dangerous bug was found in GNU acronym. An anonymous reader sent us an important page: a Guide to Babes for Geeks. Follow these to the letter. Oh wait, most of us probably already do. That might explain my social life anyway.

First up is a pretty cool Slashdot bit: drwii sent us a link to Scanned in Proof that Slashdot is actually in the Feb print edition of PC Magazine. Spiffy. An anonymous reader sent us a wired article explaining Wired. Wired the deal with MP4s. `PEZ sent us a couple of links to more information about the 'Yepp' MP3 player- The samsung announcement and the Yepp Web Page will quench your thirst for knowledge. svetz wrote in to say that Gnome 0.99.3 is on. desertAngel was the first to squeel that 2.2.0pre7 is out. Alron Dameon-ArkMoon wrote in to say that LinuxBox.com is providing free hosting for Open Source developers. schvin wrote in to plug portico.org, a new *Nix tips and tricks page. saturated wrote in to say that apparently Linux Now! is back on line after a little absence. Michael Howard sent us a must see penguin image. ToiletDuk sent us a great pyromaniac web site- fireballs with bic lighters? Don't burn yourself. soren.harward wrote in to tell us that stomped.com has Quake III Arena movies if you're curious what your future will look like. cynbe sent us a link to an amusing piece called The Last Dinosaur and the Tarpits of Doom: How Linux Smashed Windows. It's funny. I think.

Prothonotar writes "Kernel 2.2.0 pre4 is out." www.kernel.org being overloaded use a mirror. Mirrors are expressions of the form ftp.country.kernel.org or www.country.kernel.org, such as ftp.us.kernel.org.

If you're bored, there's a ton of strange links on the next page, selected by the warped minds of my slashdot co-authors ;-).

tom writes various stuffed Tux's (including a 1m high one), BSD Daemons and a TeX Lion at link (under "Un*x fan shop" and "ZU DEN ARTIKELN" - unfortunately the site's in German, but they speak English). Excellent quality, IMHO.

Robert Ennals writes A writer for the guardian/observer has a mention of one of their articles being linked from slashdot and considers this honour to be the "nearest I'll get to a Nobel prize" link

Kam writes Furniture Porn. Not much else to say... link

Louis Bertrand writes The December issue of DaemonNews, the monthly ezine devoted to the three open-source BSD operating systems (FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD) is available at link

SpaceDust writes No URL on this one, and not sure if it is really a /. thing. A friend who works at EA, tells me they are currently in Beta for Sim City 3000. Supported platforms will be Windows (mid Jan) and MacOS (in 6 months) I guess Linux gets squat (though, the /. effect may convince them otherwise) It's not too much different than "SC2k" except for a couple of new buildings, an improved interface, and now you have to manage garbage as well. They're in late Beta now, it's pretty stable and most of the major problems have been resolved but it still needs some tuning.

Josh Mast writes According to ,"> link A new opensource DOOM port has been started. "The Open Gaming Resource Engine project has been launched. This is a manifestation of the "Merger" project among members of leading DOOM source code projects, and will be an open source project. Looks nifty, maybe we'll finally have a decent port of DOOM for Linux now.

che guevara writes You bet it!!! I was surfing around on Camneerg- and saw this site that has an iMac that was hacked for a disk drive. You can get some info here, but don't try this if you don't want to void your warranty! Peace.

Brent Dearth writes ever since i got their demo tape at an underworld site, i've been searching for Market's webpage. well, i found it, and they have a couple mp3's full length for download. not really news, but i recall Hemos having good taste in music. link (sorry didn't paste)

Ben Smith writes The Onion has a silly little iMac joke in their new issue. In the left side column they have a neon blue stapler, and the caption says " New Stapler Makes All Other Staplers Look Like Worthless Shit". Good for a midday laugh.

Anonymous Coward writes Steven Hawking will appear on the Simpsons. Go figure. link

Anonymous Coward writes Kinda slow site.. (geocities) but well worth it :))))) link

Anonymous Coward writes More GNOME screenshots are available on the GNOME web site.

Clark Shishido writes " MacWeek has rumors on Gateway's plans for AmigaOS 4.0. sounds like the good old days when Amigas could run Mac software faster than a Mac. Also note the irony that it might boot BeOS which is Gasse's Mac-Amiga succesor. Maybe this will knock some sense into Apple that it has to innovate and compete instead of killing clones. I'm not an Amiga head, and I'll probably be editting makefiles for compiling under MacOS X, but I think that it's good that Apple can't be complacent. " Update (S) Apparently this information may not have been completely true, but a practical joke. Oh well.

Sonicron wrote in to talk about a cool Java Applet. He says "It lets you graphically track any flight within the US in real time. All you need is the airline and flight number. It also tells you the current airspeed and altitude of the plane, along with some other neat stuff. If you don't have an airline or flight number to enter, it can find a random flight for you. " Once I rig this applet up to my space lazer canon, my work here will be done. Oh wait, I've leaked the master plan *grin*.

CrazyLion writes "The Gnome team has released 0.27, which seems to be intended to be a bugfix release for 0.25 which had quite a few build problems." To get the software, go here.

It's late. Watchin' MST. Cursing slow 21.6 connection. Sharing good stuff: Trae wrote in to tell us that this weeks Guest Tiler is Mandrake. Ben Hutchings wrote in with a link to Official Word on the Amiga/Linux stuff. Jambi wrote in to seek help in his network analysis work. Brandon Beattie wrote in to see if anyone out there is interested in assisting in developing a Linux game. Interested folks should email. Brian Keifer sent us a link to an article talking about Atomic Microscope Technology which could allow amazing amounts of fast data storage.