Slashdot Mirror

securitas writes "The Cartoon Network is about to premiere a new series of animated shorts based on the Star Wars prequels. The series comes from Genndy Tartakovsky (Samurai Jack, Dexter's Lab) and debuts Friday Nov. 7 at 8PM Eastern Time. One correction: The USA Today article is incorrect in saying that 'Clone Wars marks the first animated series to involve any of the saga's leading characters.' That distinction goes to Nelvana's Droids, which followed the adventures of R2D2 and C3PO."

daveo0331 writes " New Scientist has an article about what could be a promising defense strategy for people targeted by the RIAA. Basically, anyone on the Gnutella network can frame other users by making it look like someone is hosting RIAA music, even though they're not. Therefore, the RIAA's "evidence" against file sharers is theoretically unreliable and wouldn't stand as good a chance of holding up in court. No mention of whether this has anything to do with the RIAA's eagerness to settle the lawsuits out of court. The article is based on a research paper (PDF link, HTML version) posted anonymously to a web hosting service in Australia."

Scott Snell asks: "I have inherited the C code for an embedded system project that has run out of code space. The source code is highly fragmented and the compiler doesnt generate efficient code for stack handling. Ideally I would direct the compiler to 'inline' a lot of the functions but unfortunately it doesnt support the inline keyword. Using macros is dangerous and manually inlining is driving me crazy! What I need is a tool that will take the source files, look for the 'inline' keyword and generate new source files that are inlined. Any ideas?"

mge writes "Andrew Tridgell has won the Special Achievement Award for his work on Samba, the seamless file and print service for SMB/CIFS (Windows) clients, at the Australian UNIX and Open Systems User Group's inaugural Australian Open Source Awards. Aussie, Aussie, OI OI OI." And an "Oi, Oi" to you too.

mge writes "Despite all the nasty things people say about us, Australians are still at work breeding a tastier (and cheaper) cow for you... Beef Researchers at (where else but ?) the Beef Cooperative Research Centre, Australia have found that a) a cows temperament correlates with its taste, b) this is inheritable, and c) the temperament can be measured by its "flight speed". "Flight Speed" is the time it takes the animal to cover 1.6m after release from a weight crush, into an open pen. There's pictures and an explanation (PDF Sorry - Google version Google version in HTML) of how flight speed is measured at the BreedPlan site."

timmgrant asks: "Inspired by a love of technology I have always wanted to develop embedded software for consumer electronics. I have just finished a computer science degree and have now been looking for work in that industry but it seems that every job in this field requires previous professional experience in embedded programming. For those that have made it into this field (or any other specialised field) what path did you take? What steps do you propose would take me closer to my ultimate goal?"

Stuart Park writes: "According to this article, this year could be very important for media ownership and internet access with a lot of pressure on the FCC and the U.S. Government to remove restrictions thus allowing a small number of large corporations to control everything. Help stop it happening via this link."

GByte Me asks: "I'm working on an XML document standard for a customer, working in mortgage origination and insurance (I'm aware of LIXI). We want to define some standard transactions, and respective schemas. There isn't a mature standard at the moment (or is there?). I really don't want to re-invent the wheel and I note that organizations like OAGIS, OASIS and others are setting some excellent standards. I'd like to ask any slashdot readers if they have experience working with these XML standards bodies. There seem to be a number of places to start looking for more information, and I'd certainly be interested in hearing of other readers experiences in this area. Before I start I really want to make sure I have a good overview of what prior art there may be. More generically how do you wade through and evaluate the various schemas that are already in the public domain?"

fsck writes "Australian actor Yahoo Serious is fighting Internet portal Yahoo! for the trademark to the word Yahoo, registered with the Australian Trade Marks Office in August. Yahoo! was founded in 1994, whereas Yahoo Serious changed his name by deed poll in 1980. It sounds as though Mr Serious is, among other things, tired of receiving any more misdirected Yahoo! snail mail." The levels of comedy to this are astounding.

batty writes: "The Sydney Morning Herald has this article about how Robert Elz, the bloke who connected Australia to the internet in 1984, is refusing to hand domain name authority over to auDomain Administration, the body set up by the politician who introduced Internet censorship to Australia. They're not complaining that Mr. Elz is refusing to hand over control, they just can't handle him refusing to even give them an answer. That's a pretty loud 'Bugger Off' in my book. It is largely due to Mr. Elz's work that Australia doesn't have a 'cybersquatting' problem. I'm not entirely sure what to make of this quote: 'There is almost no litigation in that area ... But we feel the time has come to move on .'"

spam-it-to-me-baby writes: "Interesting court case going on down under at the moment involving a prominent Australian businessman who claims he was defamed by a Dow Jones article published on a web server in the United States. Prosecution is digging up an obscure 1848 judgement over what constitutes an act of publication to ensure the case is heard here rather than in the U.S. Dow's claiming the story was for a U.S. readership. The case continues ..." And since laws on what you can legally say aloud or in print vary greatly from country to country, please make sure your words are only available in pre-screened jurisdictions.

spam-it-to-me-baby writes: "Telopolis writes The Dutch Government is considering a commission proposal to offer the country's citizens a 'digital safe-deposit' box for personal and financial data as a means of speeding up the government's administrative process. The article says the Dutch Government's current register of population "holds on every Dutch citizen about two hundred items of personal data, like name, date and place of birth, tax number, partners, children and other parts of the 'administrative course of life'." "The police, tax office, pension funds and other organisations which are allowed to access these personal data should get an interface for direct access to the digital safe-deposits. The commission thinks this will discourage fraudulent behaviour," it says."

spam-it-to-me-baby writes: "Adam Hinkley started out as a bright 17-year-old Australian software hack with a good idea. Now he's 22, broke, and has lost all his intellectual property after being crushed by the multinational software company that first took him into its folds and then dragged him through the courts in an at-times bitter and protracted battle. He has a few words of warning for any other young mind thinking of starting off down the same path." Sobering, but it looks like Adam has been able to shrug off the ruling with admirable ease. Learn from what he says.

spam-it-to-me-baby writes: "Welcome to Australia. Over the course of a few months, Aussies now can't gamble online locally, you soon may not be able to serve p0rn from a website, we have what could be the world's greatest luddite for an IT minister, but now we find there's nothing wrong legally with spreading a bit of bestiality via e-mail. Is something upside down Down Under?"

spam-it-to-me-baby writes: "It's only based on one reported sighting (i.e. it could be bulls**t), but anti-virus software hacks Central Command say they have found the first Windows/Linux cross-platform virus. It appears only to be a proof of concept with no malicious payload, and targets Windows PE files or Linux ELF files once it recognises the infected OS." There are stories at CNET and at Wired as well, not to mention at NewsForge. Despite the Wired story causually saying so, though, this is anything but an "equal opportunity" virus, except in that it seems to infect multiple media sources without discrimination. When was the last time you ran unknown programs (as root) on your machine, then manually copied them (and ran as root) on another machine as well?

spam_it_to_me_baby writes: "An Australian listed company, Autogen, has acquired research rights to the Kingdom of Tonga's gene pool. The Pacific island's 108,000 residents will be used by the company to identify genes that cause common diseases. Autogen says serum or DNA samples collected in Tonga shall remain the property of Tonga, while Autogen will build the genetic database on which the research will be based. More here." Similar to research going to collect the genetic information of everyone in Iceland, another place with a winning combination of low population and historical isolation. A single company (Decode) also won the "rights" to that information, for a mere $200 million.

waimate writes "This fascinating article describes a scheme devised by the Soviet Union for superfast underwater travel - faster than Concorde. The idea is to use Cavitation - an effect usually the enemy of marine architects, and turn it to an advantage, creating vessels (initially torpedoes) encased in a bubble of vacuum and powered by rockets. All under the water. Watch out for that mullet !"

mge writes: "According to this story in some local Aussie IT pages, Nokia is looking for developers to make online games for mobile phones and it has established R&D centres in Helsinki, Belgrade and Sydney to provide content for the company's new mobile entertainment centre. There's a WAP Client Toolkit, Game Construction Toolkit, Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), documentation and sample source code for applications to download. An Australian company, Fluffy Spider Technologies, is also offering assistance to game developers. They have posted free code online for a simple Tic Tac Toe game. Of course, they want games, but how about automated dial-ins (to take advantage of lower call/ISP rates), smart forms etc ... " Well someone needs to start giving all our smart phones something to think about, eh?

Dan B. writes "The Chandra X-Ray telescope, launched 60 days ago, has had its first pictures released by Nasa. These are as stunning as the millions already produce by the Hubble space telescope. "

An anonymous contributor writes "Antony Searle, a physics student at the Australian National University has issued the first public release of BACKLIGHT. From his web page: "In essence a four-dimensional raytracer, [BLACKLIGHT] produces scenes demonstrating the optical effects of special relativity - delayed observation, angular aberration, Doppler shifting and the headlight effect." Check out the Movies section as well. "