Slashdot Mirror

cortex writes with an excerpt from the L.A. Times: "In a first step toward helping severely paralyzed people communicate more easily, Utah researchers have shown that it is possible to translate recorded brain waves into words, using a grid of electrodes placed directly on the brain. ... The device could benefit people who have been paralyzed by stroke, Lou Gehrig's disease or trauma and are 'locked in' — aware but unable to communicate except, perhaps, by blinking an eyelid or arduously moving a cursor to pick out letters or words from a list. ... Some researchers have been attempting to 'read' speech centers in the brain using electrodes placed on the scalp. But such electrodes 'are so far away from the electrical activity that it gets blurred out,' [University of Utah bioengineer Bradley] Greger said. ... He and his colleagues instead use arrays of tiny microelectrodes that are placed in contact with the brain, but not implanted. In the current study, they used two arrays, each with 16 microelectrodes."

cortex tips us to a story about a nationwide effort to incorporate advanced technology into the next generation of prosthetic arms. Researchers for the DARPA-funded project are developing feedback techniques that range from sensors on the surface of the user's skin to electrodes implanted on the inside of the user's skull that intercept and interpret signals from the motor cortex. Quoting: "'Think about taking a sip from a can of soda,' Harshbarger says. The complex neural feedback system connecting a native limb to its user lets that user ignore an entire series of complicated steps. The nervous system makes constant automatic adjustments to ensure, for example, that the tilt of the wrist adjusts to compensate for the changing fluid level inside the can. The action requires little to no attention. Not so for the wearer of current prosthetic arms, for whom the act of taking a sip of soda precludes any other activity. The wearer must first consciously direct the arm to extend it to the correct point in space, then switch modes to rotate the wrist into proper position. Then he must open the hand, close it to grasp the soda can (not so weakly as to drop it but not so hard as to crush it), switch modes to bend the elbow to correctly place the can in front of his mouth, rotate the wrist into position, and then concentrate on drinking from the can of soda without spilling it."

cortex writes "I routinely need to analyze large datasets (principally using Matlab). I recently 'upgraded' to 64-bit Vista so that I can access larger amounts of RAM. I know that various Linux distros have had 64-bit support for years. I also typically use Intel motherboards for their reliability, but currently Intel's desktop motherboards only support 8GB of RAM and their server motherboards are too expensive. Can anyone relate their experiences with working with Vista or Linux machines running with large RAM (>8GB)? What is the best motherboard (Intel or AMD) and OS combination for workstation applications in terms of cost and reliability?"

QED writes "Airgo Networks, a privately held maker of wireless networking components, said on Wednesday it has developed chips that will increase the Wi-Fi speed limit by a factor of four. The Palo Alto, California-based company, which designs its chipsets around Multiple Input and Multiple Output (MIMO), a wireless technique that uses different radio channels to improve both speed and transmission quality, said it has achieved data rates up to 240 megabits per second (Mbps)... "

rm69990 writes "In a recently unsealed email in the SCO vs. IBM case, it appears that an outside consultant, hired by SCO in 2002, failed to find copyright violations in the Linux Kernel. This was right around the time Darl McBride, who has before been hired by litigious companies as CEO, was hired. It appears that before SCO even began its investigation, they were hoping to find a smoking gun, not believing that Linux could possibly not contain Unix code. Apparently, they ignored the advice of this consultant."

elecngnr writes "Motorola and Oakley are going to team up to create Bluetooth enabled sunglasses. At the CES, Motorola had also announced that they would be developing some bluetooth embedded clothing with Burton, a snowboarding company. " Speakers built into the hood, and controls built into the jacket for your audio player and phone.

vasqzr writes "Apple has announced new iBooks. New features include G4 processor up to 1.33GHz, built-in wireless networking capability, a DVD-burning SuperDrive and up to 1.25GB of memory. G5 PowerBooks can only be closer...They also show a single processor 1.8GHz G5 PowerMac desktop for $1,499"

vasqzr writes "CNN has a story about Dungeons and Dragons celebrating its 30th birthday. 'An estimated 25,000 fans in 1,200 stores celebrated the anniversary Saturday, said Charles Ryan, brand manager for role-playing games at Wizards of the Coast, a Renton, Washington, company that owns Dungeons & Dragons.'"

DesScorp writes "The National Endowment for the Arts has released a study that shows a decline in the reading of fiction, poetry, and short stories. The study began in 1982, but shows a particularly steep decline from 1992-2002, the first decade of the Age of the Internet. They never seem to draw the conclusion that the Net may have accelerated our turn from this kind of reading, but the timing seems suspicious to me. I know I don't read for pleasure as much as I did years ago because of the time spent on the Net (and in technical books). NPR has a good audio link here for you non-readers; the Seattle Post-Intelligencer has a nice article as well." You could also - assuming you read - see the study itself.

masq57 writes "My fellow administrators and I used to have company provided ISDN lines in our homes so that we could respond quickly to issues after hours. That was changed in the last few years to letting us expense our broadband service. Now our new CIO has elected to stop that benefit using the argument that we should be dedicated staff who desire to be responsive and should do what it takes to make that happen. The rumor now is that we should also pay for blackberries, cell phones and pagers. What sort of experiences do the rest of slashdotters have along these lines?"

tadelste writes "An important DoD program took a page from Open Source and Do-It-Yourself-IT (DIYIT) and applied for their own Security Validation. In this article Steve Marquess says:as a taxpayer, I felt very annoyed. But it made me realize a couple of things. First, if OpenSSL had been validated, then it was possible for us to do it again. Secondly, if we could do it we could save a lot of money for the program."

Andrew writes "ARIA have released figures that show for 2003, album sales have reached an all time high. In fact, according to Peter Martin, who recently went on Australian radio, before file sharing and CD burning they were selling 10 million less. Total unit sales were also at an all time high at 65.6 million. CD single sales declined 1.9 million over the year, but as Peter said file downloading is doing a better job. Should help Kazaa's legal problems."

jsight writes with his review of Rob McGregor's Practical C++, published by QUE. He writes "Some books attempt to do one thing really well, and others attempt a little of everything. This book is clearly an example of the latter, in full force. Weighing in at a hefty 900 pages, you would expect this book to be crammed with chapters and details on every aspect of the STL and basic C++. In the following review, I am going to cover where it succeeds in doing this, and where it fails." (This book has been out for a few years; what books would make more sense today for a C++ learner's library?) Practical C++ author Rob McGregor pages 900 publisher QUE rating 7/10 reviewer Jess Sightler ISBN 0789721449 summary Provides a practical guidebook to learning C++ Section I -- Programming 101 At first glance, the book appears to be written for people with experience programming, however reading through this section clearly dispels that myth. Here we have a section which goes over everything from for loops to if conditionals while simultaneously using verbose, duplicitous language at every step. Perhaps this was intended as a means of reinforcement, however, it seems most of the effort here would be wasted.

The technical depth is what you would expect for a novice, but without enough hand-holding and examples to make a novice feel comfortable. Making matters worse, there are numerous typos in this section, including quite a few in the examples (making them uncompilable without corrections). Some of these appear to be type-setting errors, however, there are enough to potentially confuse novice developers.

I believe that the combination of weak examples, and significant typographical errors are strong enough to give a novice much difficulty in learning the C++ language.

Having said that, the section should be provide no difficulty for any programmer with a good knowledge of any vaguely similar language (eg, Perl, Java, PHP, etc).

Section II -- Beyond the Basics

Ah, now we're getting down to Brass Tacks... this section goes over everything from Function overloading to Structure and Unions. The section on function members within structures also does an excellent job of preparing the reader for the upcoming introduction of Object Oriented concepts.

The sections on Memory management, both from an allocation standpoint, and from a bit manipulation standpoint are first-rate. Details are perhaps not as strong as they could have been, however the material is very accessible, and clearly described.

Probably my only complaint with this chapter is the overly general section on compiling and debugging programs. However, as this book does attempt to be somewhat compiler/debugger agnostic, this is forgivable. From here, we dive into the real power of C++, Object Orientation.

Section III

From the beginning, this book treats Objects as an extension of the structure syntax taught previously (with the default of Public switched to Private). This, along with the classic Plans vs. Product description of the difference between a Class and an Object are quite clear and robust.

Again, this is a solid chapter, describing the details of getting a system of classes up and running, as well as some sample data structure implementations.

And then finally, the last section is a slightly less than 200 page description of the STL. This section is probably the book's weakest part, as it is just strong enough to give you a taste of what is available, but often not strong enough to grasp the details. It's a good start, but much more attention should have been made to this subject (potentially even at the cost of some of the wasted words on how a 'for' loop works). It makes a decent introduction for someone with very limited STL background, however, there is not enough depth to reach a strong level of understanding here.

Summary Overall, this is a solid book for an existing programmer to pick up C++ concepts. A programmer with a strong knowledge of an existing procedural language (such as C) would have no trouble digesting the concepts of this book. Having said that, the poor typographical issues, and verbose wording often muddle an otherwise good book.

You can purchase Practical C++ from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Mikkeles writes "From an Associated Press story: 'It sounds like a chapter out of "Spy vs. Spy": Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have launched a project called Camera Watch that lists Internet cameras that monitor public spaces, letting Web surfers try the role of bored security guard.' The site permits searching for an available webcam in the geographical region (US) of your choice. About 600 webcams of 6000 in the pipe are now available."

objectboy writes with a review of Chris Fehily's SQL: Visual QuickStart Guide, writing "This book teaches ANSI SQL-92 programming to database beginners and intermediates. The publisher, Peachpit Press, publishes mostly end-user and novice titles that usually go unnoticed by professional programmers. Its Perl and PHP books, for example, are of little practical or tutorial use to an experienced developer. In fact, I noticed this SQL book only because a junior developer was using it for a course. The book's table of contents, index, and a sample chapter are posted on Amazon.com. The book's official web site contains errata and other information." Objectboy's review continues below. SQL: Visual QuickStart Guide author Chris Fehily pages 424 publisher Peachpit Press rating 9/10 reviewer objectboy ISBN 0321118030 summary A lucid SQL tutorial and professional reference

What this book does right: The myth that it's more important for a programming book to be technically accurate than well written endures even though the opposite situation is true: A lucid explanation of a difficult concept or clever algorithm is more valuable than a bug-free implementation of same.

Consider Ken Henderson's The Guru's Guide to Transact-SQL , a book full of useful examples but so marred by the author's bloated style and disrespect for the language that I cringe every time I'm forced to read the text rather than simply lift a code snippet. Henderson even goes so far as to include an introductory section, titled "On Formality," about how he is going to split infinitives (even though their syntax is a burden for the brain to parse) and how he is going to use "data" in the singular sense (even though doing so can cause confusion) and how he considers "record," "row", and "tuple" to be interchangeable terms (even though they're not) and on and on. Readers would be aghast to find such self-exculpatory nonsense in the pages of Donald Knuth or Patrick Henry Winston. As for SQL: Visual QuickStart Guide, the author, a statistical programmer, presents each topic with a mathematician's sense of restraint and order. I've found few typos, no technical errors, and consistent use of technical terms.

Almost every aspect of SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, CREATE, ALTER, and DROP is covered. What distinguishes this book is that every ANSI SQL statement -- and there are hundreds of examples -- was tested on six separate DBMSes: Microsoft Access 2002, Microsoft SQL Server 2000, MySQL 4.0, PostgreSQL 7.1, Oracle 8i, and Oracle 9i (8i and 9i differ considerably in SQL-92 compliance). The examples in each section increase in depth and complexity, so you can stop reading once you've learned what you need to know. When an ANSI SQL statement doesn't work as-is on a particular DBMS, the author shows you how to fix it or offers workarounds (which is particularly useful for MySQL, whose adherence to the SQL standard is poor). These DBMS-specific fixes are given as separate "DBMS Tips" apart from the main body of text, so they don't interfere with the conceptual flow. This organization is especially useful for consultants who have difficulty keeping track of how each implementation deviates from the ANSI standard, and is superior to the alphabetical, segregated approach of O'Reilly's SQL in a Nutshell.

This book was shoehorned into the publisher's Visual QuickStart format, which, as I implied earlier, doesn't work well for procedural languages, but does work for a declarative language like SQL. A two-column layout separates examples from explanatory text. Red type highlights the relevant portions of code and results. The book is extensively cross-referenced and has an 18-page index. This layout also makes the book a good quick reference for experienced programmers. Almost all the examples use a single, sample database (so there's no need to memorize multiple schemas). The code listings and sample database are available for download.

The derivative nature of programming books makes it difficult to determine whether the author truly has mastered the material. Writing a book is a difficult task (perhaps even harder than programming) but, at the risk of exaggerating my point, I suspect that any determined, organized, and competent programmer could write any O'Reilly Nutshell book by paraphrasing existing materials. But if an author establishes his credentials early, the reader gains a sense of trust that remains throughout the entire book. In the introduction to this book, the author avoids an error that almost every other SQL-book author commits: that SQL stands for structured query language. According to ANSI (the only legitimate arbiter here), it stands for S-Q-L and nothing more. Fehily even offers an amusing explanation of why structured query language is the worst possible description of SQL. Throughout the book, the author also scatters bits of practical advice (job candidates are wise to say my-es-kyu-el, not my-sequel), beginner-friendly insights ("Although SELECT is powerful, it's not dangerous: You can't use it add, change, or delete data or database objects."), and advanced topics (optimization, concurrency control, logical data independence). It is these asides and respect for basic research, rather than swaths of expository text, that lend authority.

This book describes the effects of nulls in almost every aspect of SQL, including the interpretation of null-contaminated query results. You can no more be a competent SQL programmer without understanding nulls than you can be a competent LISP programmer without understanding recursion. Particularly useful are the discussion of three-value logic (true/false/unknown) and an algebraic derivation of how a null can cause a subquery to return an empty result unexpectedly (which has bitten me more than once).

As a wizened developer weary of hand-holding users and junior programmers through routine queries, I've found it mollifying to give away copies of this book (it's cheap) to reduce my interrupt stack.

What's Missing: Some missing items that I would have found useful:

• A glossary
• A quick syntax reference
• A chapter about statistics
• A chapter about advanced SQL "tricks"
• DB2 coverage
• Coverage of security commands (GRANT/REVOKE)
• An expanded query-optimization discussion
• Improved normalization examples
• A little more mathematical rigor in the set-theory discussion

You can purchase SQL: Visual QuickStart Guide from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

dalslad writes "Oregon Schools Prove Linux Saves Money, says the headline but this article says "One has to wonder if Northwest school districts took ostrich lessons; they must represent the biggest secret in the Linux community. If their successes occurred in New York, Microsoft would be fighting for 5% of the PC desktop share". Maybe so? I've seen a lot of sites with Linux success stories, but the K12 Linux projects show progress I never knew existed." Yeah, I don't think that the schools are going to prove to be the sole factor in Linux on the desktop, but it's a good step. More importantly, I think the success of the system depends on projects like the K12 Linux project and its like, especially for broader individual usage.

OscarGunther writes "Four states have passed anti-UCITA laws and Massachusetts may soon become the fifth. Meanwhile, only two states have adopted the Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act, which gives software vendors all the benefits and none of the burdens of the consequences of publishing their software. The details can be found at ComputerWorld and an opinion piece by Frank Hayes can be found here."

Reivec writes "I was having a discussion with Keith Packard on IRC about the current developments in the XFree86 Saga and politics already discussed here earlier, and I learned many interesting things. The project has a new website, xwin, and things are getting underway. 'We're in the process of building community, from that we can construct a government. It's a hard process to construct a representative system from what we have now, so it will take a bit of time. Weeks, not months. --Keith'" Read on for some more details. Update: 04/13 03:30 GMT by T : Reader Khalid points to this informative interview with Packard at Linux Weekly News, too. " The site is has only been up a day or so and there isn't a lot on it right now, but he would like to see a lot of community involvement on the site and many user submitted stories to get conversation rolling. A french site has already taken notice and posted some information on xwin as well. Since such a fork could make a large impact on many *NIX users, I felt the need to ask, 'assuming you had an active fork under development, how interchangable would you expect it to be with Xfree (assuming release builds). Do you think distros would be quick to change if it offered improvements? Or could they provide both and have the user choose upon installation?' Keith replied, 'Given that distros will have input into how it gets built, I expect they'd be interested in a version closer to what they need. And, given that RH and Debian maintainers are both actively encouraging changes, it's hard to see how they wouldn't want to follow. (or lead).' So if you have had any interest at all in the XFree86 development, this is definitely a community site you should take advantage of."

u19925 writes "Now you can get atomic clock precision out of your grandma pendulum clocks. Here is how it works: There is a camcorder fitted inside the clock which monitors the pendulum swing. It has an atomic clock signal receiver. It compares the pendulum swings with the atomic signal hearbeat. The camcorder also has an arm. If the pendulum clock drifts, then it uses its arm to push or pull the pendulum to make correction." It's not an April Fool's joke, but it is rather impractical.

chill writes "According to CNet's News.com, 'Microsoft is expected to announce on Friday that Windows Server 2003 has completed testing and has been certified final, or gold, code.' With 35% of their server customers still using NT 4 -- the NT 4 that is so broke it can't be fixed -- Microsoft is hoping for quick adoption."

dejetal asks: "Does anyone know of a poet who's typical topic is some form of technology? I have been personally interested in this subject for some time now (with disappointing search results), but now I have some new motivation: I will be attending Columbia University fairly soon, and I would like to have an interesting topic to work on for a writing/composition course. Columbia also has some exciting new majors that may appeal to the Slashdot crowd, one of them being Digital Media Technology , the area of study that I wish to enter. Can anybody point me towards some good techno-poets?"

droopus writes "USA Today is reporting on an innovative business model for the music business. Free music for your spare CPU cycles. Honest Thief says the firm has developed software, to be available in the second quarter of this year, that will enable file-sharing providers to capitalize on the unused CPU cycles of their members. That in turn would allow them to raise money to compensate artists for the use of their material. Honest Thief said the software, known as ThankYou 2.0, enables a peer-to-peer file-sharing client to turn the computers of digital music fans into nodes in a distributed net. By leasing out the processor power on distributed nets to research facilities the firm could generate revenues that would be distributed back to the musicians. Some very smart people have suggested this before, but this seems like the first real implementation. "

Slashback tonight brings updates and amplifications on file-swapper hunting in Australia, Blender's progress since going open source, the badly subtitled LotR rips mentioned a few weeks ago, and more. Read on for the details.

Yes, does that come with insurance? An anonymous reader writes "Channel 4 news has a small report on the way that financial institutions are moving their computer systems and data backup out of central London to establishments such as The Bunker and Sealand."

Suddenly, those places seem a bit like less of a novelty and more good plain sense.

Copyright vs. Presumptive Scanning, part VXIIIXIX AnElder writes "The SMH (Sydney Morning Herald) now reports that 'Recording companies have asked the Federal Court to allow their computer experts to scan all computers at the University of Melbourne for sound files and email accounts, so they can gather evidence of claimed widespread breaches of copyright.' Are libraries next? "Counsel for the companies, Mr Tony Bannon SC, said industry studies of piracy had found public institutions such as universities and libraries were the biggest repositories of unlawful sound recordings."

Speaking of brand integrity. increment writes "The Engrish TTT Captions Site that was mentioned earlier here has apparently received a cease and desist order from AOL/Warner Bros and taken down their hilarious bootleg screenshots of The Two Towers. You did know that AOL is the parent company of New Line Cinema, right? AOL probably contends that humorous captions 'degrade their brand integrity,' though they should be grateful for such a vivid illustration of the poor quality of bootlegs. A few mirrors of the site can still be found around the net."

What about robotic juicers for the home? CallNElvis writes "Here's another interesting (translate that to "Cool! I want one") site lazydrinker.com showing a tabletop automatic drink pouring machine. It seems to be a little more polished than the last one posted here. The site includes a pretty cool mpeg of it in action."

Blend it into Knoppix, please :) 3-D modeling program Blender was converted from a proprietary license to the GPL last October. What's been going on since then? An anonymous reader writes "A couple of days ago, Blender 2.26 was released. This is the first open source version, and has all the features of the previous proprietary version, except physics support in the gamekit, which was not owned by NaN, and could thus not be opened.

Blender is 'the vi of 3d-modeling,' and was Freed by the community, when NaN (the company creating blender) went broke. It is platform independent (with roots in Unix), scriptable, has a steep but rewarding learning curve, ingenious but nonstandard user interface, and can be used to make games, 3d-web-thingies (there exists a browser plugin) and of course images, animations and models (which among others, can be exported to POV-ray)."

Mandrake keeps moving -- give it a whirl. An anonymous reader writes "The Mandrake 9.1 testing cycle is coming to an end. I haven't noticed any big fan-fare for testing this version, but I noticed that RC-1 is now on many of the ftp mirrors found here.

If you like the distro, don't forget to join MandrakeClub where you can help the company and have a say in what packages they include in their user-friendly distro."

Ermintrude the Flying Cow writes "Ever wonder what "Ode to Joy" would sound like if stretched to 24 hours? Now you can find out. 9 Beet Stretch is the result of running Beethoven's 9th Symphony in a digital stretching program, turning the one hour piece into a 24 hour attention span acid test. Thankfully, for those of us who know our limits, it's been cut into 19 parts."

Velcro_SP writes "When was the last time a company had the nerve to attempt a worldwide introduction of an all-new desktop computer with dedicated OS? Genesi has been demonstrating prototypes all around Europe, most recently in Poland, in the USA, and is even making noise about Moscow. Throwing all caution to the wind they are moving past beta stage, announcing the consumer release scheduled to occur at an Aachen, Germany convention on December 7th and 8th. The Pegasos is a PPC processor-based computer designed and manufactured in Europe. It runs MorphOS, a PPC OS based on the Quark microkernel."

musicmaster asks: "If you search the net for free drawings you will find a lot of them, but usually they are free for private use only. I tried to look for drawings that are really free - that is public domain, but I didn't find very much. Wikipedia has some images - scanned from books with expired copyrights - but not much Could you help me further?"

ErikRed1488 writes "There is a new virtual postcard from Friend Greetings, owned by Permissioned Media that prompts you to install their software to view the card. You are then presented with a EULA granting them permission to e-mail all the Contacts in your Outlook Address Book. Those people are presented with an e-mail from you telling them they have a greeting card to pick up. So, this thing spreads like a worm, but includes a EULA that 95% of users won't take the time to read. Symantec isn't detecting this as a virus, but does have information about it on their site. In addition to the worm-like way it spreads, it also installs spyware designed to deliver ads to your computer. You also give them permission to install further software any time they want. In my opinion this is completely nasty, but it's all clearly in the EULA that you must agree to before it installs the software."

Jucius Maximus writes "As announced on the Ogg Vorbis site, PS2/Linux developer Brad Barclay has built Ogg Vorbis libraries for PS2 Linux. I'm not seeing any encoder tools there yet, but this has implications in third party multimedia development on the platform, making it potentially cheaper for people to develop applications with music due to Vorbis's non-hostile licensing."

kernel_panic writes "Okay, I've been reading up on combining two or more SDSL connections together to give you one big fat pipe, but I haven't seen any references to doing this w/ ADSL. This place even manufactures a nifty little hardware device (ePipe) that combines two WAN ports for the aggregate sum. I've seen the Netopia 7000 Series routers support this capability as well, w/ an add-on card, but all of these places only mention accomplishing this w/ SDSL accounts. I've seen a lot of info on bandwidth load balancing, but I want bandwidth aggregation (inverse multiplexing). Has anyone had any experience doing this kind of thing w/ your Linux/BSD gateway boxen?"

gwn asks: "I have just over 100 Compaq Armada 100s laptop purchased early in 2001. Over 60 have developed cracks in the lid just above the left hinge and at the front corners. I had one of these on a VP''s desk, no abuse, and it cracked. Compaq has denied any other reports of this with any other customer, just my problem they say. They have stopped giving me a hard time when I send these in for repair and they are repairing for free. This is still a royal pain in the rear and does cost me money. Lately, they started coming back with Compaq Notebook 100 labeled screens and it got me thinking they are running out of parts. It can't just be mine that are cracking. Does anyone else have a Compaq Armada 100s or Notebook 100 with cracking case problems?"

chill writes "CNN is reporting "RealNetworks on Monday will unveil a new open source version of its streaming media software that supports multiple file formats for audio and video, including those that use Microsoft's Windows Media technology." and "RealNetworks did not formally license the ability to offer Windows Media software, but instead re-created the technology based on data streams sent between the server and player software, The New York Times reported. A Microsoft representative told the newspaper that the company would need to determine whether RealNetworks licensed the software before taking action. " I can't wait to see the actual license." Update: 07/22 19:10 GMT by T : The software can be downloaded from the Helix site, if you're interested.

Slashback's updates tonight (below) bring you more information on chemically interesting furniture, old-school electronics in new-tech devices, and Brigham Young's ultra-strong building materials. Welcome to the home, car and wind-farm of the future, please mind your step.

Bratty kids get to sit near the volatile elements. Theodore Gray writes: "About a month ago there was a slashdot lively discussion about my wooden Periodic Table Table. A bunch of slashdot readers sent me elements for it: Thank you slashdot! Two people actually sent me free Ag and Pd, contrary to the jokes in the discussion. I decided the world could stand another periodic table website. Since all the eight dozen other periodic tables on the web have better reference information than mine, I used some Mathematica programs to generate links to many of them for each element. But my site is more beautiful. I'm going for science as art. Mine also has by far the best quality sample photos: High resolution, high quality macro shots of 89 samples so far."

Starts with a crank, too. ripaway writes "With all the recent stories about vaccuum tubes, I find it ironic that I stumbled on this today. Sterephile reports about the Panasonic CQ-TX5500D(link to Japanese site) car stereo that uses a vaccuum tube, with analog vu-meters. It also plays mp3 files 8-) Naturally, this is for the Japan market only."

Sounds like material for a Burning Man tent ... nm1m writes "A superstrong composite developed by Brigham Young University scientists and students has received financing for its first practical application -- mammoth wind turbine towers able to more than triple the electrical output of existing steel models. Read the story here."

We mentioned this interesting lattice-looking material a few weeks ago.

Sucking requires a context to be good or bad. Sun Tzu writes "After the recent discussion on bad software, how about a different reason for why software sucks? Maybe we programmers and users don't have it quite so bad after all."

That dadburn whippersnapper, why when I was a boy ... Junks Jerzey writes "I remember reading about Halcyon Days: Interviews with Classic Computer and Video Game Programmers five years ago in Wired News. Pretty cool stuff, with an introduction by some guy called John Romero. It was available for a long time as a commercial product that used HTML for formatting, but it's now completely online, as reported by the author."

RichiP asks: "My memory is so poor I forget friends' birthdays and appointments I made a day ago. I sometimes have an idea I want to jot down but that I end up forgetting when I finally come upon pen & paper. To help myself, I was thinking of purchasing one of those integrated PDA and cellphone devices (first the Handspring Treo then another by Samsung), but I've always felt that these devices were still far from ideal. I was wondering if the Slashdot community would share their wishlist of features for what they believe would be the ideal Personal Digital Assistant. Features for input, processing and output are all welcome. Perhaps the device I want may be years from becoming commercial. Given the right ideas from input from others, I might be able to come up with my own device or start an open project geared towards it." Even if you do feel that PDAs have a limited lifespan, if you had a chance to add a feature to a PDA (especially if you felt it would increase the lifespan of the PDA), what would it be?

nm1m writes: "For the last few months I have been following with some interest a few stories (story link may not work) in the school newspaper about a new structural technology being developed at BYU. It is called PYRAmatrix, and is 12 times stronger than steel, yet less than 10 percent the weight of steel. A 47 foot cylinder of this stuff, 16 inches in diameter and weighing just 47 pounds, can support almost 4 tons. It seems to have obvious applications in aerospace, electricity utility poles, radar and communication towers, and just about any structure that needs exceptional strength. An interesting press release with facts and figures can be found here. Photos can be found here." The link worked for me -- and reminded me of the plastic-walking scene in Sabrina .

net_shaman writes: "As reported in Stereophile Magazine online -- There appear to be some serious moves afoot by the recording industry to move en-mass to another compact audio disc format. No doubt frustrated with the utter failure of every attempt to copy protect Compact Discs. But this could be an opportunity for both better sound, strong copyright security and reasonable fair-use rights. The Hybrid Super Audio Compact Disc contains two layers of encoded information; one for standard 'Red Book' Compact Disc, and another for high resolution audio recordings (SACD). Here is a description."

"An interesting feature of the SACD layer is plenty of room for strong digital rights management code.

Here's my proposal: it should should allow artists to get paid, and the citizens to have archived and portable copies of the recording they have purchased. The record companies should produce a superior audio product and get to protect it from serial copying. The CD layer should be freely available for personal copying such as to a computer or portable digital player. These 2 basic concepts are a model that can be applied in the future, when better formats become available. It may also serve as a model for digital visual recordings. Perhaps we can get the artists, publishing companies, electronics manufacturers and the federal trade commision to all agree on this compromise: 1.The high quality recording allows only one copy of itself to be made for archival purposes. 2.The lower quality recordings are available for personal copying.

Personal digital technology has brought a tremendous change to the realtionship between media publishers & consumers. It's time for a new paridigm that will re-define that relationship for modern times."

Jucius Maximus writes "A new change has appeared in Sun's strategy as reported by CNET. Instead of dismissing Linux as inferior, it is now trying to integrate elements of Linux into Solaris for easier porting of applications. This looks like a step in the right direction for Linux acceptance in the professional server market."

no reason to be here writes "New data from the Hubble Space Telescope suggest that the age of the universe is approximately 14 billion years old. Read this press release for more info."

drcrja asks: "I am conducting some academic research on the use of cloaking and how it affects search engine rankings (cloaking is the practice of delivering a specially optimized page to search engine spiders while delivering a completely different page to the user). I am currently using Alta Vista's Babel Fish to retrieve pages and compare those pages to the pages on the actual web sites but I am trying to find other methods of detecting cloaking. I am wondering if any members of the /. community have any experience with this?"

Slashback this evening brings you news and updates on several previous stories, including (not limited to) @home service, Linuxgruven, and some followups to Slashdot book reviews.

More news you can use on the @home front. Anubis333 writes: "After a while talking with customer support, I have learned that Comcast@Home (Soon to be ATT Broadband) has instituted a network-wide cap on user upload to 15KB! (Thats not much more than dialup) Also, they have now capped Usenet news access. What am I paying 50 dollars a month for again? More info on usenet here.

Upon even longer hold times, I found out that when Comcast switches over to ATT the cap will be set to 128KB and the usenet caps will be lifted, also they will support more groups. The full change over will be complete by the end of Feb. Any users in the Savannah Ga. Area, they will start here Jan. 15 and end in early feb. Call support for exact local dates if interested."

Yessir, about oh, yea big by a few more inches ... Dave contributed a link showing a side-by-side comparison of the current Apple laptop line, including the new bigger iBook. Shame about the resolution, though ...

By their fruits ye shall know them. zsazsa writes: "According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Missouri Attorney General Jay Nixon has sued James Hibbits and Michael Webbs, the two founders of Linuxgruven for deceptive business practices. He alleges that interviewers were actually salespeople paid to enroll job applicants in training programs costing up to $3,150."

Would the FSF call Sun "GNU-minded"? maitas writes: "It seems that Sun has removed Solaris for Intel from its free download list. It's really sad to see a company that promotes its 'GNU minded' culture to go back on the few good things it had made. They even removed the Solaris source code from their site! Sad, sad, sad."

That them thar' book larnin' Stardance points to an interview at Salon with Steve Grand, in which the "designer of the artificial life program 'Creatures', talks about the stupidity of computers, the role of desire in intelligence and the coming revolution in what it means to be 'alive.'" You may remember Grand's book Creation: Life & How to Make It, reviewed on these pages. Speaking of reviews, several readers have contributed links to the New York Times' review of Lawrence Lessig's new book.

bigdreamer writes "Looks like LOTR is a big hit even among non-nerds. this CNN article says it won the most awards, including Best Picture, at the first annual American Film Institute awards Saturday."

GeodeGW writes "With corporate America in a collective oral froth about copy protection, this parallel from the Un-Natural world just cried out for a Slasdot post! Apparently cloning primates isn't as easy as sheep... From the New Scientist... "A high percentage of cloned monkey embryos that look healthy are really a "gallery of horrors" deep within"...."the trauma of removing the nucleus from the egg might be what triggers the defects" http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns999 91679"

lodn asks: "I've been using a Linux gateway for some time now. It's a simple kernel 2.2.18 install with IP forwarding. Thanks to the great HOWTO on IPchains I was able to configure it with no problems. Now I'd like to upgrade to kernel 2.4, however I have not been able to find a HOWTO for Netfilters! Does anyone know where such can be found?" Anyone know of any IPchain-to-Netfilter migration utilities? I must admit, I haven't been able to find much information about Netfilter usage either when I went looking into 2.4, however my firewall is also still 2.2. Time to upgrade, methinks.

Andrew writes: "More than 5,000 years ago, the very first information revolution occurred when some unknown research team in Mesopotamia found a way to download and store language through a killer application called "writing.". The cuneiform digital library will have 60,000 texts ready in a couple of years. Using SVG and XML to represent their documents. Similar efforts are underway for hieroglyphics."

Jedbro writes: "I have really enjoyed the mouse gestures in Opera since its release, since then I have come across an awesome new project at Mozdev, called OptiMoz. OptiMoz (a.k.a. MozGest) is a XPI for Mozilla allowing Mouse Gestures to be available. It works great with Mozilla 0.9.4 and nightly builds. It currently has Gestures for: *New Tab Window (Moz Tabs!!) *Forward in History *Backward in History *Reload *New Document *Up a directory in the URL *View Source *View Cookies for Current Domain *View Meta Data for Domain and *Access Homepage."

chill asks: "The price of RAM has plummeted lately. On Price Watch I've seen 256 Mb PC-133 DIMMs for as little as $16 + shipping. Now that every machine I own has 768 Mb - 1.5 Gb of RAM, the question arises -- do I -need- swap space? I'm not talking about running large databases or enterprise machines, but the home PC/Workstation -- word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, some minor coding and that sort of thing." With memory so cheap, there is reason to wonder about the necessity of swap. Does a machine with 1-2G of RAM really NEED swap space if they are not running intensive software? Have any of you seen machines in production with the swap explicitly turned off?

chill writes: "Princeton scientist Dr. Edward Felten and his colleagues presented their paper entitled 'Reading Between the Lines: Lessons From an SDMI Challenge' at the Usenix Security Symposium. CNN has an article. This is the paper that the RIAA threatened legal action (DMCA) over in the past, if he made his findings public. They have since backed off their threats." Newsforge is carrying a piece on the same thing that goes into a bit more depth, and links to coverage of yesterday's press conference, and the Standard has a decent piece on it as well.

Last week, you asked Shawn Gordon questions about his venture TheKompany, an outfit which has been (fairly) quietly working on a small flotilla of software for GNU/Linux systems, and some cross-platform applications as well. His responses are below; you might be surprised at a few of them. (And some lucky Debian hacker might even pick up a job.)

1) Increasing user base
by truthsearch

"Your company's methods of licensing software seems very sound. Core components are open source while the end apps are closed for profit. That gives back to the community and allows outside developers to potentially create other apps with the same foundation as your own.

My question is simple: How do you plan on continually increasing your user base? Obviously there are many GNU/Linux users thirsty for solid end-user applications such as Kapital. But how do you plan on getting to current Windows users? Do you plan future ports of your apps? Or do you have an idea of how to get more Microsoft customers to move to Linux and use your apps (possibly a model others can follow)?"

Shawn Gordon: When we started 2 years ago we had one product in mind and a very specific goal. Since that time our products have expanded dramatically and so have our goals. Basically we are trying to provide developer software and desktop software on Linux, specifically using KDE. The idea is that you can't have critical mass for users on the desktop without there being some core software available, and you can't necessarily attract developers for specialized software and vertical market applications without there being a critical mass of users. By addressing these two ends of the spectrum we hope to get people on the platform.

Now something like our Kapital product doesn't initially make sense on a platform other than Linux because Quicken and Microsoft already have Windows and the Mac sewn up. However it is a way to entice people if it is running on multiple systems and they get all the systems for one price, it protects their investment more, but Kapital is currently KDE only and is likely to stay that way for a while but it does provide for another method of attracting customers.

When we started Kapital we were going to have Gnome support and even built the infrastructure to handle making it native for Gnome with a minimum amount of code; it's also one of the reasons the application has the transaction logic and UI code totally partitioned.

Now other tools and products like our database-oriented software DataArchitect and Rekall are written directly to Qt and will be packaged specifically for Windows and Linux in a single box, and when Qt3 is final we will also add Mac support in the same box. We are almost done with our Qt version of Kivio (which was how it was originally developed). Now Kivio is similar to Visio from Microsoft, and originally we hesitated to do the Windows support, but our price point is so much lower and by adding Mac support it becomes a compelling item for the end user. We will do a boxed version of Kivio, but Kivio itself is free (as in cost) so we are charging for the stencils and packaging in this case. We've had a tremendous amount of interest in something like this.

With developer software like KDE Studio Gold, which was always oriented towards KDE, a multi-platform version doesn't make much sense, but now that we've added the ability to build any type of C or C++ application, we might just do it. BlackAdder as a GUI IDE however makes perfect sense as a multi-platform environment (which it is) because you are developing Python and Ruby applications which are also multi-platform.

So the net result of all this is that we are trying to provide things that make sense that are multi-platform so people can say "Hey, this Windows upgrade blows, but my favorite software works on Linux too, so why don't I use that," and then also address the people who are already here and just looking for applications to do their work.

2) Question...
by American AC in Paris (toZIGm@snZIGowploZIGw.oZIGrg)

"Mr Gordon, Kould you komment on the klearly komplikated task of selekting produkt names that konform to kurrent konventions?

Kordially,
AAiP"

SG: Coming up with names is a brutal and terrible experience. We've had accidental names and well thought out names and names we thought were just funny. BlackAdder is the ultimate inside joke (well not that inside) since it was designed for Python and Python was named for Monty Python, but is also a snake, and BlackAdder was another British comedy and is also a snake (Phil Thompson, the author of PyQt and primary engineer on BlackAdder is British). Sometimes we use "k"s gratuitously, but that is mostly a holdover from when we first started. I agree that the 'k' and 'g' stuff for KDE and Gnome has really gone over the top now and we are just looking for product names from now on.

Our company name was a joke too. I was chatting on the phone with ne of my first employees about what we should call the company and I said "we should just call it 'The Kompany' with a K because we are doing KDE" and it turned out I was able to incorporate it. The upside is that everyone always remembers the name.

3) Why are you always talking about Ximian ?
by an Anonymous Coward

"In the past interviews I've read from you it seems to me like you always end up talking about Ximian. Do you see Ximian as a direct competitor of the Kompany? Are you concerned about Ximian's market share and strategy?"

SG: I've talked about them once or twice, ever since that Google ad debacle where Ximian bought our company name and some of our product names to point to their company, they've left a bad impression with me because of that. Prior to that I really didn't have an impression of them, they were a company in a similar space but with no competing products. Now of course we have our Aethera project, which is similar to their Evolution project, other than that we continue to be very different companies. I actually haven't seen anyone clearly describe where their revenue is going to come from, and now I hear they are going to make an open source version of .NET in cooperation with Microsoft.

So the bottom line is, we sell software, Ximian currently sells nothing other than trinkets like t-shirts and stuffed monkeys, but I doubt they make money on it. theKompany and Ximian don't compete at all, and Ximian doesn't have a market share that affects me. We are also self funded and have gone along fairly well for a couple of years now unlike Ximian who has raised huge amounts of money but with yet no (publicly) clear method of generating revenue from that. There are no surprises with us, you buy it and you own it.

4) Business models
by s20451 (s20451_at_hot_mail_dot_com)

"Following the attacks on open source by agents of Microsoft, claiming it's anti-business, there's been quite a bit of discussion on this site concerning business models for companies dealing in open source.

I am interested that your company does both open- and closed-source programming. My question is: How does your business model balance the benefits of open-source programming with the requirement to be a profitable software business? In your opinion, is it possible for a for-profit company to work purely with open-source, and sell support (or whatever)?"

and

5) Why not Open Source?
by ktambascio (kmt@po.cwru.edu)

"What was the reason behind the decision to make products like Kapital closed-source? Was it to provide a way of generating revenue? Or do you plan on using product support as your main way to generate revenue?"

SG: My opinion is that the support-only model only works in the corporate arket, and there isn't yet a corporate market for Linux desktop applications. We sell support contracts currently and have probably made about $200 doing it, so it doesn't seem real viable yet. I can get a piece of software on the shelves of a thousand stores and have people walk in and buy it. To sell support requires making software that isn't easy to use and requires hand holding and then tracking down people and talking them into paying for the support which has a nebulous perceived benefit.

The model of paying an annual fee and receiving all updates free of charge should also work for individuals -- but I wouldn't call this support, just an alternative method of purchasing/upgrading. We offer this for a couple of our products now and we see about a 40% subscription rate, so we are looking at how to expand this to some of our other products.

Our philosophy has essentially been that if it's infrastructure like our projects KDE-DB, VeePee, Korelib, etc then we make it open source because it's in everyone's interest to have it available. Some applications we do like Aethera and Kivio that are free, but will rely on selling value added pieces like plug-ins and stencils.

6) Promoting Ease of Use
by pgpckt

"My question related to how the Kompany can make Linux an easier product to use. Attempts have been made to make the product more user friendly, but Linux is still a product that requires more effort to use then most people are willing to exert. To some extent, this is even promoted by the Linux community, some people of which take the attitude that if you can't figure it out you're just out of luck. Perhaps documentation/tutorials are the answer? How can we make the process of going to Linux easier, including ease of installing the Linux OS, helping users find programs that will be equivalent to those under windows, and the like? How can us end users of Linux be more responsive to people who express an interest in Linux without scaring them off?"

SG: Personally I give Caldera a lot of credit for creating Lizard. Before that installing was not near as slick, but Caldera raised the bar and everyone suddenly jumped on it, but there seems to be another lull waiting for someone else to raise the bar again. SuSE has become my personal favorite over the last 6 months but it's still not as easy as it should be for the standard Windows crowd.

The flip side to ease of installation is the ease of packaging. We have built an automated process on our packaging server that can build for up to 10 different distributions at a time, but the set up takes some time and this doesn't include Debian. Let me use for example our Beta3 release of BlackAdder that just came out. The three files that had to be packaged took 15 minutes on Windows. It was 2 full weeks of one and two engineers making spec files, testing, installing missing pieces of software, etc., before we could finally get it built on the Linux distributions. We go to a lot of effort to make our software available on all the major platforms as possible, but it is starting to reach a point of insanity very quickly.

There have been endless discussions in our company and on various news lists about installers, and none of it gets around the fact that you have to pre-compile for the base distribution and that still may not solve the problem. Depending on your distribution you've got KDE in /usr, /opt/kde, /opt/kde2 or god knows where. For packaging everyone decided to make a new name for the directory between /usr/src and /RPMS, you've got 'redhat', 'OpenLinux', 'RPM', 'rpm', 'packages' and those are just the ones I've noticed myself.

We are getting to the point that we are seriously considering not supporting distributions that don't support the LSB. I've been very encouraged by SuSE's work in this direction, and disappointed at how bad RedHat and Mandrake are.

7) A question
by CMcTortoise

"I congratulate you upon creation of several pieces of software for the Linux market, and you have successfully blended open and closed source software; however, do you think you can be profitable in a community that sometimes rejects closed source projects? Has the fascination with Free/free software hindered your business plans or has the creation of Free code libraries/bases kept good PR with Linux users while allowing profit to coexist?"

SG: Lets consider the community as 2 groups -- those that would avoid closed source apps on a point of principle, and those that would happily use a closed source app if it met their needs. Today, the 2nd group isn't big enough to generate huge revenues. But, as the Linux community grows we think that growth is going to (mainly) occur in the 2nd group rather then the first - because of where those new users are coming from.

The first group may take offence at us exploiting their work for our gain. We hope that, by also contributing our own open source code to the community, we are paying our dues. In general what we make use of is infrastructure, and the majority of the emails we get are fan letters. Usually when someone flames you they do it from behind the protection of an anonymous post in a talkback forum.

8) OS Target
by frankie_guasch

"Are you focusing only linux? or do you think there is a market for:

• Solaris
• Windows
• *BSD
• other ..."

SG: We've been taking a more Qt centric approach of late. It is an old argument that Linux has to have a Quicken/Word/Excel workalike before users will abandon Windows. Another way of approaching this is to deliver the Linux applications on Windows. It will be much easier to get a user to move to Kapital from Quicken if they don't have to move from Windows to Linux at the same time. Eventually the user realizes they can move to Linux just by changing the OS, without incurring any other costs (as, for example with BlackAdder and DataArchitect, when they buy the Linux version they also get the Windows version -- they don't pay again when moving OS).

We've also recently signed an agreement to provide some of our products for BSD. If this proves to be popular then we will make all of our products available on BSD. Another advantage of the Qt approach is that there is much less to worry about for installation thus making more platforms much easier to support.

I do want to say that our more Qt centric approach is not taking away from our KDE'ness. We are building some infrastructure so that our apps continue to look and behave properly under KDE when they are just Qt.

Can I take this opportunity to solicit for a debian packager expert? We would like to add debian to our automated build process and offer direct support but we just don't have anyone in house that knows debian at this time.

9) Competing with open source?
by FortKnox

"How do you plan on competing on the linux platform with open source projects? Basically, why would I buy Kapital if I can use GnuCash for free? And if it doesn't do everything I want, its opensource and I can add it. It seems like a very stiff competition. How is your company planning on attacking it?"

SG: Comes down to the business model that funds the development. If GnuCash meets your needs then use it, but the investors putting the money into GnuCash are going to expect a return from its users at some point, we are straight forward about it, you buy the product and you own it, no strings or surprises. If those investors don't get that return then they are not going to invest in an open source project again. Will the GnuCash users stand up and be counted when the time comes?

10) How you spend your time
by Laplace

"Hi Shawn, I am very impressed with how hard you are working towards commercial Linux applications while still supporting the ideas of free software. I've noticed you on several mailing lists, and you seem to offer advice as much as you seek it. How do you find the time to run a company, develop software, and participate in the community?"

SG: Well, I've got a wife and 2 young children and I've played in rock bands on guitar and keyboards since my early teens, and I spend way too much time on the computer as you've noticed, as well as writing and recording music (typically progressive) and then things with the family like camping, sports, outings and such. I love to read SciFi and go out in our cul-de-sac and drink beer and shoot basketball with the neighbors. Until recently I was writing 3 columns a month for various trade magazines and have around 200 published articles. Oh, and I also have a job as an international male super-model that pays the bills.

11) Project Status
by djoham

"Hi Shawn,

First, I would like to bestow a heartfelt "thanks" to you and your company for all the wonderful work you do. Too often, you've had to defend yourself against the trolls who don't get economics 101. It's not often enough that I see people thanking you for the contributions you have given us. Thank you.

My question lies in the status of your projects. I'm sure some people here on Slashdot don't know about all of the software that you're working on. It would be neat if you could give us a status report on your projects as well as a brief summary of what they do and what we can expect in the future.

I'm especially interested in the integration of your work with KOffice. I know that you donated the base version of Kivio to KOffice (again, thanks) and I was wondering if you had similar plans for Aethera, Kugar and/or Rekall.

Best regards, David"

SG: First, thank you for your kind words, they are always appreciated. Well this is going to be a long answer, so I'll address your last question first. We already donated Kugar to Koffice some time ago. We had thoughts of Aethera in there and Rekall, but I don't think it's going to happen anymore for various reasons.

We divide our work into Projects and Products. The Products are our commercial offerings and our Projects are our 'free' offerings. I'll cover Products first and I'll do it in alphabetical order.

BlackAdder: This is a GUI IDE for the Python and Ruby scripting languages that runs on Linux and Windows. It is whole based on Qt and uses a special version of Qt Designer that we licensed from Trolltech. It has everything you need for building multi-platform applications with Python or Ruby, either GUI or Console applications. It's at Beta 3 right now with prices reduced to $49.99 during the beta period for a Personal Edition. The price goes up to $79.99 once the beta is over, which should be this summer. You get all the betas and the final release as part of your purchase.

DataArchitect: This is brand new and is a final 1.0 release right now, and is jointly developed and promoted by theKompany.com and Code by Design. DataArchitect is a powerful database modelling tool for Linux and Windows operating systems. Graphically create, administer and design your databases while gaining insight into their structure with the Reverse Engineering capability. Prices start at $39.95. DataArchitect is Qt based and you get Linux and Windows as part of the single price as well as free upgrades up to and including version 2.0 which we expect in September and will also have support for the Mac.

DocBrowser: This is actually part of our KDE Studio Gold Pro software and is a really great tool for research while developing C and C++ applications. We've integrated and indexed the Qt, KDE, libc docs as well as the 'info', and 'man' pages and support for html. DocBrowser can run as a stand alone application or integrated with KDE Studio Gold. You can make use of it with things like KDevelop as well if you like. You can find any class and member quickly as well as filter for a quick find of class and members. In this case you can copy include the string for the current class to the clipboard to paste into your code. Copy member name for pasting into your header file. For any class you also have a list of all inheriting members. This is at version 3.0 and is shipping today as a final release at prices starting at $29.95. You also get free liftetime upgrades with your purchase.

Kapital: This is our answer to Quicken on Linux and KDE. Currently we are in the 3rd beta and work is progressing, although we are a bit behind schedule. We are extending our free updates through the end of the year now. Kapital is selling at a reduced price during the beta for $24.95

KDE Studio Gold: As of today we are at Release Candidate 1, RC2 should be out next week and then we should be shipping the final version. There are two version of KSG, one is 'standard' and does not include the DocBrowser (you can buy it separately later if you want), the other is the 'Pro' version that includes DocBrowser. The price ranges from $24.95 to $69.95 depending on the version you get. KSG is a GUI IDE for C++ development. It relies on KDE to run, but will build any type of C or C++ application you like, there are lots of neat features, with some even neater stuff coming soon. Like DocBrowser, you get free lifetime upgrades with your order.

Kivio: This is our answer to Visio on Linux and KDE and is also our greatest risk/experiment for an application. In this case the application is free and you can buy more stencils from us, these cost between $5 and $10 each, but we are thinking of making a subscription program for them so you can pay one price and get whatever we've got or come out with. We have a collection of about 25 sets of stencils right now, and our new 'Elite' style is just beautiful I must say. We are almost done with a new version that is written using Qt3 and is running on Linux and Windows and it shares the same stencils. What we are planning on is making a boxed set of this with all of our stencils for $99.95 with both Linux and Windows binaries.

PowerPlant: This is our first product and it has been out for over a year now. The idea is that it is what we call a 2nd tier linux distribution aimed at developers. It is a collection of about 200 packages with languages, IDE's, databases, libraries, commercial demos and games from Loki. The regular price is $49.95, but during July we are discounting it to $14.95 as a kind of 'thank you' for all the support we've gotten and to celebrate the release of so many new products.

Quanta Gold: This isn't on our web site yet, or available till about the end of summer, but the authors of the popular Quanta web design software came to us and wanted to work with us on making a multi-platform version of Quanta that theKompany would sell. There is a lack of high end tools available for PHP and web development and we are excited to be working with these members of the Quanta team. Initial pricing is going to be $49.95 and the product will run on Linux, Windows and Mac. There will be more specialized plug ins available for sale electronically as well. Look for this in September.

Now moving on to our Projects:

Aethera is our PIM application which meant to address the space that Outlook and Notes address for Windows. It can/will use all kinds of digital information and will sync data with Palms or share data in a Groupware environment. Currently Aethera can manage MAIL (all mail protocols, contact manager, filtering) , SCHEDULER (todo and appointments using a KOrganizer plug in), NOTES (sticky notes), Instant Messages (Jabber plug in). The Jabber and Palm sync plug ins are commercial and will be available for $5 each. The groupware server interface will also be commercial, but prices have not been decided. As a stand alone PIM Aethera is GPL and free of charge, only pay for the enhanced pieces that you want.

KDE-DB is a set of libraries that will ease the development of database applications for KDE. It leverages the power of KDE Plugins to access the wider range of available free and commercial DBMS. It also provides a set of built-in widgets and dialogs that will boost your productivity in developing database applications for KDE. This is in a nebulous state now because of the new DB stuff in Qt3, but it looks like pieces would still be desirable, we are just trying to figure out how best to compliment it all.

Kamera is an IO slave and a KControl panel module which allows you to access folders and images within any digital camera supported by the gPhoto2 libraries. We donated this to core KDE and it is being kept up to date by others now.

Korelib is a cross-platform C++ library for developing plugin-based applications. It provides a uniform and consistent cross-platform API for developing modular applications. We use this in several of our applications now. Again Qt3 has something similar in it but Korelib supports more platforms and is GPL.

Kugar is an XML based report generation and viewer tool for KDE. Applications generate data in XML and specify a template (also in XML) to be used to format the data. The resulting report may be viewed on screen or printed. Templates may be specified as a URL allowing businesses to establish a centralized template repository. Kugar's implementation as a KPart means that the production of business quality reports can be easily added to any KDE application, and that reports can be viewed using KDE's Konqueror browser. We donated this to Koffice a while back. It is stable and done and available for use.

PyQt/PyKDE is the standard set of Python bindings for Qt and KDE. PyQt and PyKDE can be used to develop large scale Qt and KDE applications, or can be used to develop rapid prototypes in Python that are converted to C++ at a later stage of development. PyQt includes support for Qt Designer so that the same GUI design can be used to generate either C++ or Python code.

Rekall is theKompany's database product. It is a front-end to existing SQL servers, such as MySQL and PostgreSQL; it does not itself have any "native" SQL engine (in the sense that Access uses the Jet database engine). Currently, Rekall interfaces to MySQL and PostgreSQL, and also to XBase format files via a basic SQL wrapper library. The possibility also exists to implement drivers for non-SQL data sources, for instance data stored by theKompany's Kapital product. Rekall provides both the environment in which to design a database front-end, and the environment in which the front-end is executed, and allows the user to design and access tables, forms and reports. Table design is intended to provide access to features which are present in all or most SQL servers (standard SQL column types, indexes and so forth), but does not explicitly handle server-specific extensions. Forms and reports are structured in the normal sort of way, for instance forms can have nested sub-forms (and sub-sub-forms, to arbitrary depth).

Currently, there is a basic set of controls (simple text field, choice fields, and so forth), however, Rekall is designed to be extensible so that additional, possibly third-party, controls can be dynamically added. Scripting is provided using the Python language, with the ability to hook various events (user moves to new row, button is clicked, etc). Rekall contains a generalized scripting interface, so that other languages such as Ruby could be used. Forms and reports are stored either in tables in the SQL server, or in the file system. They are defined in an XML format, so in principal it would be possible to write a script which constructed and then executed a form or report (in fact, much of the table data display functionality is implemented this way). We are anticipating have the 1.0 release candidate available for sale at the end of August for a reduced price and the final version the first part of October. Expected final price is $79.95.

VeePee is a framework that makes it easy for KDE and GNOME application developers to embed the Python scripting language in their applications, and provides users with a powerful and consistent scripting environment. It is our intention to make use of this throughout our products as a user scripting environment.

12) My question
by MSBob

"Is the Kompany profitable? If not, when do you expect it to be?"

SG: I saw someone make the comment that if everyone that read the interview bought one piece of software we would be profitable that day, and that is true actually (so go buy something :) ). Well, we are self funded and have survived on some contracting and product sales for the last 2 years since we were founded. This is in stark contract to companies we get compared to like Eazel and Ximian. We all know Eazel burnt through $13 Million in a year and barely got Nautilus out, and Ximian has raised around $18 Million if I recall correctly and also have no actual products or services to show for it that provide revenue.

That said, a little investment capital would allow us to accelerate our already blistering pace of development, but we have a lot of things we want to get done and would like to do it sooner rather than later, and when I say a little I mean like six figures (if you're an investor feel free to call me :) ). I fully expect to be profitable in the next year, we run a lean mean operation and don't blow money on unnecessary fluff.

13) Let's Have Some Fun
by n3rd

"If you had three (3) wishes, what would you use them for?"

1. SG:
2. That my family has long healthy lives (that includes my employees who are like family).
3. . theKompany is successful beyond our wildest dreams.
   
4. To have Superman's powers.

Andrew writes "An initial news story tweaked me to the fact that, "Thomson Multimedia and the Fraunhofer Institute, the two creators of the MP3 format, released a coder and decoder (codec) for the MP3pro format Thursday on the RCA.com Web site". It apparently achieves parity with the MS version 8 player. Their download on their web site is here (Windows only)." *yawn*

Brian asks: "It appears that Citrix Metaframe 1.8 does not support third party voice accessibility programs, like JAWS. Has anyone successfully implemented federal accessibility guidlines for software that is running through Citrix or other tools like pcAnywhere? I have been on several projects now where Citrix is being used to 'web enable' a client/server application, only now to realize we can't meet federal accessibility requirements this way. Any thoughts?"

Starting the show off with some cool do-it-yourselfer sorta projects: Diederik Meijer submitted the The Silicon Graphics Refrigerator Project (or: How To Turn a $175.000 High-End SGI Challenge DM Server into a Fridge). Next up, mdaughtrey built a Mechanical Hit Counter jrbx1 sent us a link to an in-dash Atari 2600. Even coolor is that the dash its in is attached to a 1978 volkswagon ;) rednax sent us a review of a kit for adding neon to your PC. If you're not skilled enough to hack how it works, at least you can pretend you're cool and hack how it looks! I Nothing is more dangerous then glewtion's link to a story about a sculpture in england that that worries people since the heat it generates cook fry a bird mid-air. Oh, and I lied: even more dangerous then art is amasci's link to making pet ball-lightning. In your microwave, duh. If you've got some spare time, MxTxL submitted something that we've been seeing more of, email games. This one is battlemail, which apparently is glorified addictive paper rock scissors. f you were an Anime character, here's some helpful hints to keep in mind. Hieronymus Coward sent us a bit about The Drew Carrey Show featuring a 2 minute segment based on the sims. I wonder if they will use the vibromatic bed, actually the next expansion comes out soon (today?) so I probably am gonna have to resurrect my neighborhood sometime soon. Thirsty? Dipfan sent in a story about Coke wanting to put soda fountain style coke in every house right next to the water dispenser. Got Carbonated Milk? Finally for a little random product plugging, Rustin H. Wright found a place selling penguin crossing signs. Finally, anotherone noted that you can use Google in full swedish bork bork chef glory.