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You would not need just the images, but also very accurate positioning data on where the photos were taken. In theory, perhaps you could extrapolate the positioning information by looking at static objects in the frame, shadows, etc., but I don't think that's anywhere near practical.

It's actually quite practical, I use this program all the time:

http://hugin.sourceforge.net/

You identify the static reference points, and the program is actually quite clever in finding the other corresponding points after you have picked one or two. You do this for all of them, choose your point of reference, done. It even reads the field of view information from the EXIF header of your digital camera.

A nice review can be found here http://software.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=05/08 /22/148209&tid=75

He is the master who has power over things which others wish to have or to avoid, the power to take these things away or bestow them: the power to inflict or to withhold. Whoever then wishes to be free, let him neither wish to have anything nor wish to avoid anything which depends on others. Who does not observe this rule, he must be a slave.--Epictetus

Here is a link about an unsecessful attempt to run five Windows viruses under Linux:

Running Windows viruses with Wine

It is possible to run some versions of Internet Explorer under Linux. The Codeweavers CrossOver Office version of Wine can run IE 6.0 under Linux.

Some Linux users also do use Codeweaver's CrossOver Office to Word 2000 under Linux or Excel 2000 under Linux. CrossOver Office is a slightly enhanced version of Wine with a more user friendly front end.

As a desktop Linux user, I have never had to worry about viruses, worms or most spyware. I can open my email without the fear of Active-X extensions, attachments, and viruses that most Windows users have. Of course, I do use one of the several free firewalls available for Linux. I don't run unnecessary services which a desktop user would not need and regularly check for security updates. Linux is not perfect, but it is much less vulneable to most of these problems.

I don't think it really matters since end users can soon buy CDs that contains Firefox and openoffice.org at retail stores according to this story at newsforge. http://software.newsforge.com/software/05/12/09/16 44221.shtml?tid=132

That is one way to look at it.

Don't worry, it's coming. Hooray for WINE! http://os.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=05/01/25/14 30222

Bringing MySQL compatibility to PostgreSQL

Ok, here is the home page of the gimp-cmyk plugin: http://www.blackfiveservices.co.uk/separate.shtml. Here is his disclaimer:

One thing preventing The GIMP from being useful in a pre-press environment is the lack of support for the CMYK colour-space. This plug-in goes some small way towards rectifying the situation, using a trick with layers to fake CMYK support. The plugin is unfinished, but usable for its primary purpose, and since I'm unlikely to have time to develop it further in the near future, I'm releasing it as is.

Now here is a link to an article discussing GIMP, Pantone and CMYK: http://software.newsforge.com/print.pl?sid=05/10/2 5/153221. Interesting, and it looks like the legal issues around Pantone's color lists are pretty fuzzy.

There's no issue whatsoever of "accuracy" in producing nominal colorspace conversions, but if your needs include decomposing an image to a proprietary profile such as Pantone[...]

Well, for pre-press work the accuracy of converting to and from any profile is pretty much everything (btw, the word "profile" in color management deals with devices and not color lists, and it's a standard (ref: http://www.color.org/profile.html). It's true that converting RGB to CMYK is "a simple matter of mathematics" in that it's "just" a transformation, but the difficulty lies in that different devices and colorspaces have diffferent gamuts, and the magic lies in how you deal with the additional or missing information. I don't believe there is a standard for these transformations, and in fact if you perform the same transformation on the same image with different engines you will get different results (I had to compare 4 leading products for a client last year).

In a nutshell, it appears that CMYK support for GIMP is fine if you don't care about color accuracy, but since pre-press DOES care about accuracy GIMP is unsuitable.

The origin of the bug is Windows and its shell: protocol, Mozilla simply handled those links back to the OS ad it does with protocols it doesn't know how to handle, other programs like MS Word were vulnerable to the very same exploit.

It was fixed 24 hours after full disclosure, and only Win32 versions of Mozilla were vulnerable, doesn't this ring a bell?

Anyway, read this link for more info.

The main loser (so far) as Linux advances is Sun Microsystems, one of the largest server vendors. Its Solaris software is generally deemed to be the most capable flavour of Unix, the family of powerful operating systems used in servers. But for many applications, Solaris is overkill, and Linux, a less capable flavour of Unix, is good enough. Many people who would once have bought expensive Sun boxes running Solaris are now running Linux on cheap, PC-like machines instead. This has forced Sun to embrace the technology that threatens its existence. Last year, Sun launched its first Linux-based server. After several zigzags, it has now decided on its Linux strategy. As well as offering cheap boxes running Linux alongside its more powerful Solaris-based ones, Sun will include its server software with both Linux and Solaris, to make its Linux boxes more attractive and to allow users to trade up to Solaris. Even so, many in the industry believe that, thanks to Linux, Sun is doomed.

The main loser (so far) as Linux advances is Sun Microsystems, one of the largest server vendors. Its Solaris software is generally deemed to be the most capable flavour of Unix, the family of powerful operating systems used in servers. But for many applications, Solaris is overkill, and Linux, a less capable flavour of Unix, is good enough. Many people who would once have bought expensive Sun boxes running Solaris are now running Linux on cheap, PC-like machines instead. This has forced Sun to embrace the technology that threatens its existence. Last year, Sun launched its first Linux-based server. After several zigzags, it has now decided on its Linux strategy. As well as offering cheap boxes running Linux alongside its more powerful Solaris-based ones, Sun will include its server software with both Linux and Solaris, to make its Linux boxes more attractive and to allow users to trade up to Solaris. Even so, many in the industry believe that, thanks to Linux, Sun is doomed.

It is actually possible to run IE under Linux, at least the the Codeweavers CrossoverOffice version of Wine. It really is possible to have a big "E" on your Linux desktop. Of course there are actually better browsers available for Linux. I would not really want to do that but here is info:

Running IE 6.0 under Linux

I don't have any idea if that particular trojan would run on IE under Wine in Linux. But, earlier this year someone tried to make some viruses to run under Wine. He wasn't very sucessful at that. Not a single virus was able to send email and propagate itself. Here is his article about tring to run viruses under Wine on Linux:

Running Windows viruses with Wine

I don't actually visit porn sites very often but have occasionally done that over the years while using Linux. I remember trying to download a few photos once and two of the supposed photos actually ended in .jpg.exe. I was glad that I was not running under Windows and IE at the time. Most likely, they were targeting their Windows using visitors with some kind of trojan, spyware or browser hijacker. Fortunately, Linux browsers do not automatically try to run Windows .EXE files under Wine. Does Windows still allow ActiveX controls and VBScript to enable Windows machines to be taken over automatically? Linux browsers do not support ActiveX and VBScript and they do not allow things like that to happen automatically. Most Linux users also do not run as "root" with administrative priveleges most of the time like most Windows users do on their home computers. Not running as "root" adds additional protection.

The moral of the story is, if you want to visit porn sites, don't do it while running Windows and IE. Use a Mac or Linux for that purpose instead. Visiting porn sites is like the Internet equivalent of a bad neighborhood.

This was originally a story on Newsforge.com (http://software.newsforge.com/software/05/10/28/1 625258.shtml?tid=132&tid=68&tid=5). It gives the reason why Ian created the video jukebox.

This is kind of odd. Burton Smith is not really a cluster guy, although he probably knows his way around HPC (High Performance Computing). Cray is not really a cluster company (except for the system they bought from Octiga Bay deal). If you want to read a review of what Bill Gates said at the recent Supercomputing conference, check out Where is the Cluster? at Cluster Monkey.

My post was a spur of the moment, rah, rah, me too, sort of thing, as, coincidently, I just installed ubuntu last night.

cheers

Waah! Lookit meee! Don't forget Microsoft! Lookit mee! Waaah!
Don't look over there.
Waah! Lookit mee! Don't forget me, Emperor Gates! Waah.

As someone already mentioned, China has already "driven" itself to Linux for awhile now. There is a good article over at Newsforge about this. China's Linux disease.

Isn't the LAME encoder an MP3 encoder that still needs to be licensed from Thompson?

In short, No!

Longer version: According to Dave Arland, a U.S. spokesman for Thomson Multimedia - 'its policy has always been to allow free use of the company's MP3 patents in "freely distributable software"'

Newsforge Article

Maybe you'd like read4me. It uses bayesian filtering on the server to choose which articles you're likely to enjoy. You train it by rating it's performance or clicking on titles that interest you.

i looked at this video (spreadsheet calc) and the presentation author makes multiple wrong mistakes (which he does correct but still) with annecdotes hilighting his lack of knowledge

please if you are going to release a tutorial (especially video/swf), try and get the methods right before hitting record+upload, most unprofessional and i would be embarassed to show it to any of my co-workers "uhh ignore this bit, this is where the author makes a mistake and we have to wait for him to correct it. so just press enter, i mean tick the arrow, i mean drag , i mean, are you still following team ? Team?....TEAM....hellooo.."

It's very nice working for an outfit that lets you do full-time research, doing pretty much what you want to do. Microsoft generally has fairly bad press, but I think that this is something that Microsoft should really brag about, because they pay lots of people to do essentially very freely directed research. They don't correct our papers, they let us go to whatever conferences we want to. I'm publishing at a higher rate than I did at the university.

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href="//ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=167966&th reshold=-1&commentsort=0&tid=158&tid=93&tid=4&mode =thread&pid=14004578#14004712">Re:Decrypt ~and~ analyze by Phanatic1a (Score:2) Thursday November 10, @10:41PM

• Re:Decrypt ~and~ analyze by Genevish (Score:2) Thursday November 10, @10:44PM

Forget Decryption by Propaganda13 (Score:1) Thursday November 10, @10:52PM

Re:Decrypt ~and~ analyze by BiggerIsBetter (Score:2) Thursday November 10, @10:55PM

mostly analysis, I suspect by SuperBanana (Score:2) Thursday November 10, @10:57PM

...I'm a big fan of both copyrights and patents, the problem was that our legislators didn't recognize the fundamental rule, which is: too much of a good thing no longer is. And so we're seeing things like the DMCA, like the idea that you could patent ideas, not just inventions, like the idea of taking copyright from 20 years to a hundred years with very little public debate on the topic and you sort of realize that it's a little bit like vitamin D -- you know, too little vitamin D and you get a variety of health problems. Too much vitamin D will actually kill you...

Lulu.com, the site David Wendt used to publish the book, has been really slow for the last few days, so if you want to buy it then using a direct link will be (slightly) faster:

Print version: http://www.lulu.com/content/168302
E-book version: http://www.lulu.com/content/168212

Or you could just wait until 1 a.m. and then place your order.

[On a side note, Newsforge posted a l-o-o-ong interview with Bob Young, Lulu founder and CEO, yesterday. You know... the Red Hat guy.: http://business.newsforge.com/business/05/11/01/15 34231.shtml?tid=3]

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href="//slashdot.org/users.pl?op=savemiscopts&opt_ osdn_navbar=0"> X
dollars to do so. The American Council on Education (ACE) filed an appeal with the circuit court last week against the new rules that Carnegie Mellon Chief Information Officer Joel Smith referred to as "definitely an overkill."

Under the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) of 1994, telephone companies must pay to maintain their systems so that federal agents can easily obtain wiretaps. The most recent orders under this act, issued by the FCC, asks that institutions providing Internet access also reengineer their systems accordingly within the next 18 months. Carnegie Mellon is one such institution. With a subpoena and the flip of a switch, federal officials could have access to e-mail accounts and online information of any student at compliant universities.

"The Department of Justice wants 24/7 access, whenever they need it, and they want remote access. We find that too extremely burdensome in terms of money, staff, and technology," said Maureen McFalls, Director of Government Relations for Carnegie Mellon and the coordinator of Carnegie Mellon's response to this issue. According to an ACE press release, the cost to universities could be upwards of $7 billion, or at least $450 extra on each student's tuition bill.

"Burdensome is really the best word for the new rules," McFalls added.

"Colleges and universities have a long history of working with law enforcement agencies pursuing criminal investigations and are proud of our working relationship," said Sheldon E. Steinbach, ACE vice-president and general counsel, in the same press release. "When you evaluate efficiency versus the incredible cost of compliance, we just dont think it makes a lot of sense."

According to the new rules set forth under CALEA, federal agencies want to be able to access a private institution's network from almost any location at almost any time. Currently, universities take special precautions to make this kind of remote access very difficult, in order to prevent online crime.

"We do recognize the need to be in compliance and cooperate with law enforcement," said Smith, "but it happens very rarely that they need this kind of access, here or nationally." According to a report from Educause, a nonprofit organization that deals with online issues in higher education, there were 3468 wiretaps ordered by local, state, national, and Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) courts in 2004. The report also stated that the number or wiretaps on campuses is extremely small.

So how is Carnegie Mellon's administration reacting to these new proposed regulations? The school plans "to work through the appropriate channels for the University to make our views known, just as a matter of fact, that it would be very costly for every student in every college," said University Provost Mark Kamlet.

"We are going to review the AAU [Association for American Universities] and ACE actions and perhaps take our own if we feel that we may have something different or more important to say than t

... facts are facts. ;)

FreeBSD:
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD (Jun 2004)
"[FreeBSD] has secured a strong foothold with the hosting community and continues to grow, gaining over a million hostnames and half a million active sites since July 2003."
FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project (Jun 2004)
"FreeBSD has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
What's New in the FreeBSD Network Stack (Sep 2004)
"FreeBSD can now route 1Mpps on a 2.8GHz Xeon whilst Linux can't do much more than 100kpps."

NetBSD:
NetBSD sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (May 2004)
NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (30 Sep 2004)

OpenBSD:
OpenBSD Widens Its Scope (Nov 2004)
Review: OpenBSD 3.6 shows steady improvement (Nov 2004)

*BSD in general:
Deep study: The world's safest computing environment (Nov 2004)
"The world's safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environment - operating system plus applications - is proving to be the Open Source platform of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and the Mac OS X based on Darwin."
..and last but not least, we have the cutest mascot as well - undisputedly. ;)

--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.

Born is simply a vary vocal, involved executive. He hangs out in the IRC chat room with Neuros firmware hackers and those looking for support, he posts on the Neuros forums, and he provides dozens of quotes for articles relating to Neuros. Any article about any product is PR, don't confuse that with Born's involvement.

By the way, Slashdot's sister site Newsforge also covered Neuros' OSS strategy. http://software.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=05/09 /13/1631226&from=rss

I think we should all support open source projects in any form but it would be nice is his project was written in something more portable like C/C++, perl or python.

I wish more projects out there were designed from the start to be portable on Linux, Windows and OS X. More often than not, a lot of so-called cross platform software originating on linux rely heavily on X11.

While Xen appears as a neat package, why choose Xen instead of vservers?

Perhaps because vservers lack some of the neat features of Xen, such as on-the-fly instance migration and full iptables support?

Furthermore, vservers is, for the foreseeable future, a Linux-only project. So far, NetBSD and Solaris have been ported to Xen, and basic support for FreeBSD as a guest host is available. Once Intel VT and AMD Pacifica are available, Xen will also support Windows XP SP2.

Given just these benefits (and Xen has many more), it's no surprise that Xen appeals to more people and applications.

Some windows viruses do run under WINE. However, they do not affect the system to the extent that windows viruses affect windows systems. They RUN, but mostly nothing else happens other than wasting CPU cycles.

I think this was posted on /. before.
http://os.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=05/01/25/14 30222&from=rss

Joe Barr sucks in general. Check out this biased newsforge article written by him and then the even worse slashdot writeup.

A note about Slackware, the name sucks. When Wind River dropped it's support of Slackware some friends and I went around (I was a high school senior at the time) and tried to collect money to send in for a donation. We made about $10 from the A/V geeks before going to the other students. We'd yell "save slackware!" and get some nickels thrown at us. People told us to get a job and such. Anyway, I'd always hate how I'd hit ctrl+d and it would tell me to type "exit" to logout.

(unlike Joe Barr, my bad review is a joke)

Loki ate itself from the inside out. It was a failure of their management, not of their business model. Every time this comes up, I have to say this, one, to dispel the myth, and, two, hoping that someone, somewhere will try again. Story.

... facts are facts. ;)

FreeBSD:
FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project (Jun 2004)
"FreeBSD has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD (Jun 2004)
"[FreeBSD] has secured a strong foothold with the hosting community and continues to grow, gaining over a million hostnames and half a million active sites since July 2003."
What's New in the FreeBSD Network Stack (Sep 2004)
"FreeBSD can now route 1Mpps on a 2.8GHz Xeon whilst Linux can't do much more than 100kpps."

NetBSD:
NetBSD, for When Portability and Stability Matter (Oct 2004)
NetBSD sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (May 2004)
NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (Sep 2004)

OpenBSD:
OpenBSD Widens Its Scope (Nov 2004)
Review: OpenBSD 3.6 shows steady improvement (Nov 2004)
OpenSSH (OpenBSD subproject) has become a de facto Internet standard.

*BSD in general:
Deep study: The world's safest computing environment (Nov 2004)
"The world's safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environment - operating system plus applications - is proving to be the Open Source platform of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and the Mac OS X based on Darwin."
BSD Success Stories (O'Reilly, 2004) (pdf) ~ from Onlamp BSD DevCenter
"The BSDs - FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Darwin, and others - have earned a reputation for stability, security, performance, and ease of administration."
..and last but not least, we have the cutest mascot as well - undisputedly. ;)

--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.

Since Solaris has DTrace (and FreeBSD will have it soon as well), wouldn't they automatically be better than the Linux kernel?

Is it BSD licensed? Is it under the 2 clause licence FreeBSD now uses?

If the 4 clause BSD licence was 'evil' due to the 'advertising clause' and FreeBSD has dumped 'the advertising clause' - why would they sign up for Yet we as a community do far too little to prominently credit the names of the authors.

your nearest Linux desktop next...

**ducks**

• Newsforge article on floppyfw and Coyote Linux
  
• SANS floppy-based firewall review
  

Microsoft says things are licensed on a physical CPU basis. You could put four quad-core chips in there and still be properly licensed. See this story or this document for more details.

That has been done. Check out This mouse and a review of it here. There is a wire to the mouse pad, but none to mouse. It is powered via RFID. I have one of these, and it works great. Never had any problems with it, even in games.

... facts are facts. ;)

FreeBSD:
FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project (Jun 2004)
"FreeBSD has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD (Jun 2004)
"[FreeBSD] has secured a strong foothold with the hosting community and continues to grow, gaining over a million hostnames and half a million active sites since July 2003."
What's New in the FreeBSD Network Stack (Sep 2004)
"FreeBSD can now route 1Mpps on a 2.8GHz Xeon whilst Linux can't do much more than 100kpps."

NetBSD:
NetBSD, for When Portability and Stability Matter (Oct 2004)
NetBSD sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (May 2004)
NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (Sep 2004)

OpenBSD:
OpenBSD Widens Its Scope (Nov 2004)
Review: OpenBSD 3.6 shows steady improvement (Nov 2004)
OpenSSH (OpenBSD subproject) has become a de facto Internet standard.

*BSD in general:
Deep study: The world's safest computing environment (Nov 2004)
"The world's safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environment - operating system plus applications - is proving to be the Open Source platform of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and the Mac OS X based on Darwin."
BSD Success Stories (O'Reilly, 2004) (pdf) ~ from Onlamp BSD DevCenter
"The BSDs - FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Darwin, and others - have earned a reputation for stability, security, performance, and ease of administration."
..and last but not least, we have the cutest mascot as well - undisputedly. ;)

--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.

Notice the mention of "MPEG2 content found on DVDs"? There is no mention whatsoever of HD-DVD, which is supposed to use WMV9 for the compression on video discs. Now notice how they say "This has been an option for content owners to use for some time for the Windows Media format".

So is this "We never said that" story truth, or more misdirection?

Sure. And Microsoft can always be trusted to tell the truth. [newsforge.com] Notice they say it isn't possible with MPEG2 from current DVDs AND that it is available with Windows Media DRM? What is the format that is supposed to be used for video on HD-DVD again? That's right, Windows Media.

Does this still sound like it is beyond reality?

Sure. And Microsoft can always be trusted to tell the truth. Notice they say it isn't possible with MPEG2 from current DVDs AND that it is available with Windows Media DRM? What is the format that is supposed to be used for video on HD-DVD again? That's right, Windows Media.

Does this still sound like it is beyond reality?

... no one has mentioned this:
http://business.newsforge.com/business/04/08/10/18 31241.shtml?tid=152&tid=37&tid=23&tid=2&tid=138&ti d=38
Circuit City, the second largest electronics retailer in the nation, decided to switch all of their POS and back-end operations systems to Linux over a year ago. How about a permanent thread that can be just bumped back up every time a company moves some/all of its operations to Linux?

This is a known problem with OpenDocument. From the sound of this article OpenDocument currently is not a solution for spreadsheet interchange due to the lack of a formula standard. The article talks about attempts to resolve that through OpenFormula, and more broadly states: "OpenDocument must only be about structure and how to represent content. It should define which standards are acceptable for each kind of data, not (re)create them all." While this sounds very neat and clean in an engineering kind of way, the fact is that formulas are only one kind of content for which a standard does not exist. What about macros? Imagine trying to work with a Word document with WordBasic macros embedded...

This is potentially quite a nightmare, and I think is the basis of some of the concerns alluded to by Microsoft. Of course, their framing of these concerns is self-serving - the point is to see where standards are lacking and define them in an open process. And of course, many many documents don't need things like macros. But the danger still remains: the early 1990s saw an attempt to 'standardize Unix' through a set of processes that simply became turf wars between different camps, with the result that 'the standard' was always standardizing significantly less functionality than users of the time had come to expect. OpenDocument could still fall into the same trap.

Any argument about these things that doesn't point to *specific* problems to be overcome is just FUD though.

http://software.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=05/09 /09/192250&from=rss

Why not just be honest and say "Hey, guys! I just ripped this news off from NewsForge and submitted it to slashdot"

The original post was made by Tom Chance one of the members of the NewsForge team here: http://software.newsforge.com/software/05/09/19/16 16206.shtml?tid=130

Clinton, next time try and credit the original writers...

2. StarOffice has a nicer GUI that Sun has not backported into OOo

Hrm... Based on the linked screen shots I'd say it's pretty much the same as OO.o Beta 2, which I've been using for months.

Does anybody have any clarification on this?

2. StarOffice has a nicer GUI that Sun has not backported into OOo

Hrm... Based on the linked screen shots I'd say it's pretty much the same as OO.o Beta 2, which I've been using for months.

Does anybody have any clarification on this?

2. StarOffice has a nicer GUI that Sun has not backported into OOo

Hrm... Based on the linked screen shots I'd say it's pretty much the same as OO.o Beta 2, which I've been using for months.

Does anybody have any clarification on this?