Slashdot Mirror

pmadden writes "Dan McKay, a friend from years ago, has won a prestigious literary award. I've enjoyed technical manuals over the years, but never like this. Who would have guessed that such great writing would come from the grad of a small technical school."

Frank Caviggia writes "The Inquirer has a story about ABIT's spiffy new IC7-MAX3 motherboard. Apparently, this motherboard has a feature called 'Secure IDE,' which is marketing-speak for hardware-based encryption ... ABIT goes on to claim that 'Secure IDE' 'will keep government supercomputers busy for weeks and will keep the RIAA away from your Kazaa files.' Pretty bold claims for a motherboard maker ..."

webguru4god writes "Sony Japan has just released a killer new Clie, complete with integrated Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and a camera, in a small laptop-like enclosure. It runs Palm OS 5.2, has a 65,000 screen, and a built in keyboard! " I've always been a bit skeptical of handhelds that have flip out keyboards like this, but have repeatedly been impressed with the quality of various models of Clie. This might be worth a look.

Stranger4U writes "Researchers at New Mexico Tech and the NRAO have used the Aricebo radio telescope in Puerto Rico and some specilized equipment to more closely examine the pulses from the Crab Nebula pulsar. Some of the signals lasted less than two nanoseconds, meaning the originated from a volume no bigger than beach ball. Stories are here(1) and here(2)."

Stranger4U writes "Researchers at New Mexico Tech and the NRAO have used the Aricebo radio telescope in Puerto Rico and some specilized equipment to more closely examine the pulses from the Crab Nebula pulsar. Some of the signals lasted less than two nanoseconds, meaning the originated from a volume no bigger than beach ball. Stories are here(1) and here(2)."

Frank Caviggia writes "The Inquirer has a story up about Red Hat providing educational institutions with the ability to certify students as Red Hat Certified Technicians (RHCT) and Red Hat Certified Engineers (RCHE) how this will relate to Microsoft's MSCE program. You can find the story here. Red Hat has more information on the program here."

YetAnotherName writes "Geeky college pranks are not just the purview of big name science and technology schools. Now that statutes of limitations have expired, Stealth Force Beta, a group of 'constructive vandals' who operated at New Mexico Tech, tell of their exploits. From crawling around steam tunnels, to mounting complex radio surveillance, to getting trapped in elevator shafts, the stories are inspirational, funny, and probably familiar in some way to many /. readers."

Shippy writes "According to this article at the Stereophile Guide to Home Theatre, Tivo and SonicBlue have decided to dismiss all patent-infringement claims 'without prejudice' and instead focus their energies on energizing the DVR market. 'We believe our energies are better spent expanding the market for DVRs rather than fighting each other,' the former adversaries said in a joint statement. The article also discusses their plans for marketing and also how they plan to respond to criticisms that the DVR market is doomed."

imAck writes: "After the election fiasco last year in Florida, many have discussed the possibilities of using a computerized voting system to replace the old punch-card ballot system. Florida's Broward county is considering buying a $20 million dollar computerized touchscreen system to handle future elections. What makes the story interesting is how they are planning to test the system for security holes. The county plans on holding mock elections in high schools and at senior citizen communities. They are actually asking the students to try and hack into the system during the mock elections to learn of possible security issues." I wonder if Broward County would look into spending their money on hardware and supporting development of the GNU Project's existing electronic voting software.

nick_patt writes "It looks like the zany scientists in Los Alamos have been up to no good again. According to this article, they claim to have figured out the mystery of some simple knots. Anyways, the thing I'd like to know is how close the computer simultations and mathematical models (mentioned in the third paragraph) came to the observed behavior." An interesting approach to science - macro experiments to gain insight into micro behavior.

Let's start this off with SanLouBlues's submission about a video made by splicing old 8bit video games (I don't think it'll work on Linux, but it's worth finding a box to watch this). And now, the senseless destruction portion of the show: stevenma sent an ISP's excuse letter, including a photo of the bullet damage from the wire! friedo knows how to make a hard drive squeal, but on purpose. If that's not enough destruction for you, knisa sent in a story about a meteor destroying a 1980 Ford. Slightly less-destructive violence was submitted by Steve Stag, who notes that Nerf has discovered that their weapons appeal to adults too. (well duh!) An anonymous reader noted that Liam Neeson's lightsaber from Phantom Menace is being auctioned off for charity. WhyPanic sent us a site that talks about Vintage Unix. An anonymous reader noted that in Finland, you pay traffic violations based on your income, and this dot-com millionaire was fined $70,000 for 20 miles/hour over the speed limit! Speaking of dot-coms, warland wonders if todays dot-coms would get funding if they tried to pitch their ideas today? And now for the truly strange stuff: conraduno sent in a palindromic C program. NinjaPablo sent in a link about a guy breaking a centipede 14-year-old record by scoring 7,111,111 points (and I thought breaking 200,000 on joust made me cool ;) head_the_mongoose sent us "Call Me Darth", a Darth Vader site that simply needs to be seen.

Fluid Donkey was the first of many to let us know that kernel 2.2.15 has come down the wire. It's a fairly large patch (just over a meg), but it contains many updates, including support for Intelligent Input/Output (I20) devices. You can find it in the usual places. (ftp.<two-letter-country-code>.kernel.org if you forgot)

BeanDip writes "For those who don't know what xmame is, xmame is the 'nix port of the ever popular Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator. Mame is an emulator for many popular arcade machines ranging from pacman to NeoGeo games. The xmame page has moved to here at xmame.retrogames.com " You can get Snapshots, or visit Dave's Classics- a great emulator starting point. The classics never die, they just get emulated

BeanDip asks "Does anyone know of any resources for adding better support for newer printers under linux? I own an HP Deskjet 672c and under linux, with the support for the hp up to the 600 I get bad quality color prints 300x300 dpi when under M$ with the HP specific drivers I get good quality prints." I get a lot of questions like these about getting Y printer to work under Linux, so what can you do to get a new printer...any new printer to work with it?

Indomitus writes " For those Slashdot readers who are interested in the upcoming Star Wars prequels, the title of Episode 1 has just been announced officially on Starwars.com. The title of the movie? Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. Some people like it, some don't. For a good explanation of the title in context of what we know of the plot, check out AICN."