Slashdot Mirror

Pete Brubaker writes "PCExtremist.com is running a story about some clever individuals that figured out how to layer data on a CDROM to achieve storage capacities 200 times over conventional CDROM's. Thats more than 30 times the capacity of a double sided, double layer DVD. "

ttyp0 writes "I am a student at Purdue University. Three years ago, I decided to purchase the domain PURDUEONLINE.COM and use it for whatever reason. Just recently my ISP received a letter from Purdue's Executive Vice President threatening legal action if I do not transfer ownership of my domain to the University's control. (More below.)

"My website offers free services to students, two of which are web based email and a student directory with full search capability yet Purdue claims that my domain infringes on the school's trademarked name. My question is, what legal rights do I have to keep my domain name? Any suggestions, or even a good lawyer whom I can call?"

Things like this make me also worry about the new cybersquatting laws that may end up putting the little-guy-with-the-neat-domain between a rock and a hard place.

ttyp0 continues: "After investigation I found that Purdue had only two names trademarked, which are "Purdue University" and "Purdue Boilermakers". I clearly state that we are not affiliated with Purdue University. There are other similar sites which use the word "Purdue" in the same fashion, such as, PURDUEPEOPLE.COM, PURDUECHAT.COM, and PURDUEDATING.COM to name a few...

ttyp0 writes "I am a student at Purdue University. Three years ago, I decided to purchase the domain PURDUEONLINE.COM and use it for whatever reason. Just recently my ISP received a letter from Purdue's Executive Vice President threatening legal action if I do not transfer ownership of my domain to the University's control. (More below.)

"My website offers free services to students, two of which are web based email and a student directory with full search capability yet Purdue claims that my domain infringes on the school's trademarked name. My question is, what legal rights do I have to keep my domain name? Any suggestions, or even a good lawyer whom I can call?"

Things like this make me also worry about the new cybersquatting laws that may end up putting the little-guy-with-the-neat-domain between a rock and a hard place.

ttyp0 continues: "After investigation I found that Purdue had only two names trademarked, which are "Purdue University" and "Purdue Boilermakers". I clearly state that we are not affiliated with Purdue University. There are other similar sites which use the word "Purdue" in the same fashion, such as, PURDUEPEOPLE.COM, PURDUECHAT.COM, and PURDUEDATING.COM to name a few...

David Schick writes "This cool picture was the Astronomy Picture of the Day from the Goddard Space Flight Center on August 30. Apparently, someone on Mir had a chance to take a snapshot of the solar eclipse over Europe. Kudos to Brian B. Riley on the AMSAT-BB mailing list for finding this cool nugget. " Check out the image archive while you're there. Several little files that meet Rob's First Rule of Art ^[?] .

Branden Robinson writes "The Open Group has created a new sub-organization, X.Org, to hold stewardship of the X Window System. X.Org will be a membership organization similar to the old I2O group, with open membership but voting restricted to paying members, and rules for expulsion of members. Check out their site and this NewsAlert story for more. "

Chris Deckard asks: "I have been assigned the task of finding the best web authoring software or package to use for site layout and design. Currently I am looking at Macromedia's DreamWeaver 2 and Adobe's GoLive 4. Cross platform compatability is a must (MacOS and Windows). Which packages are used by those out there and why do you like them? Name other packages that are out there. We want the one with the most features, but that is easy to use as well."

Leapfrog writes "I found an interesting and useful site called The Dot Eaters which gives a pretty thorough history of the electronic gaming industry. I found it very informative. " (yes, Hemos and I got to San Jose. Lost baggage. Lost Nate. 6 hours late. But alive)

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

Max Karpiak writes "The source to X11Amp's new (long awaited) version is available at the main homepage, and should hopefully propagate out the to the US site soon as well. Go get it. It's cool." Mine's making on the next desktop.

Branden Robinson writes " Scott McNealy told a group of reporters that consumer privacy issues are a "red herring." "You have zero privacy anyway," "Get over it."" Wonder if he's been getting out recently, or heard how quickly Intel back-pedaled on the unique CPU id?

CMiYC writes "James Lewis, a strong Linux advocate, has posted a response to the (now) popular ABCnews article. I am submitting this because, this email response shows a "correct" response to writers who down Linux. (This is opposed to the "windows sucks, linux rulez, dumba$$--response that I see quite often.) [It is me, or is the sudden negative press signs of fear?]"

Rajak writes "Another example of the Internet overload was shown yesterday when thousands upon thousands of people tried to watch the space shuttle launch on the net. CNN reported 494,000 hits per minute at their peak, a 45 % increase over the Starr report's peak."

Ben Large writes "Partition Magic now has full support for resizing and moving ext2 partitions!" I thought I remember reading Theodore T'so was writing this for them, and that the ext2 code would be available under GPL eventually. Can anyone confirm? Read below for the rest of Ben's submission.

1. ----------------- Dear Partition Magic User: Partition Magic 4.0 is finally here. Upgrade for only $24.95 before October 15 (that's nearly 65% off the retail price)! Buy the downloadable version of Partition Magic 4.0 Upgrade and receive it today! Or pre-order your physical copy! For more information, please visit:
2. link Because we value you as a customer, we wanted to let you take advantage of the tremendous power and flexibility of Partition Magic 4.0 by giving you this special limited-time offer. Why upgrade? Check out these fantastic NEW features: * BootMagic (TM)- This powerful new boot manager with a graphical interface and full mouse support allows you to easily run multiple OSes on the same machine without compatibility problems. The native DOS and Windows configuration programs allow you to change menu items and start-up options for all your OSes while in DOS, Windows 95/98 or NT. * Native Windows 95/98 and NT Executables - Now you can run Partition Magic without leaving Windows and take advantage of the enhanced interface and functionality for even greater efficiency. * Wizard Functionality - Effortlessly perform partitioning tasks with simple step-by-step guides for automatically redistributing free space, reclaiming wasted space, creating new partitions, and analyzing your hard drive for enhanced performance. * Batch and Execute Commands Simultaneously - Preview the effects of partitioning your hard drive before actually making any changes to your system. Then execute all the commands simultaneously. * Large Drive Support - Partition magic 4.0 now supports hard drives even larger than 20 GB! * Linux Support - Now you can create, resize and move Linux ext2 and Linux swap partitions without losing data. * Expanded File System Support - Complete support for FAT16, FAT16X, FAT32, FAT32X, NTFS, HPFS and Linux Ext2 partition types. Convert from FAT to FAT32, FAT to NTFS, FAT to HPFS, and FAT32 to FAT without losing data. Enjoy comprehensive support no matter what file system you are using. Reserved for you: exclusive UPGRADE opportunity for the next 30 days only! Don't miss out! Click here to buy it now: link P.S. If you purchased Partition Magic 3.0 on or after July 15, 1998, supply us with your proof of purchase and get your upgrade for just the cost of shipping. Call 1-800-379-2566 for details. NOTE: Please remember that a single-user license of Partition Magic allows you to use Partition Magic only on the hard drive(s) permanently connected to a single computer. Once Partition Magic has been used on a single computer, it may not be used to partition another computer. For information on purchasing additional licenses of Partition Magic or upgrading to a technician's license, which allows you to use Partition Magic on an unlimited number of workstations, please contact PowerQuest's large account sales at 800-379-2566 or sales@powerquest.com. Offers are good in the U.S. and Canada only! Thank you for being a valued PowerQuest customer! Sincerely, Eric Ruff President

Usman Latif has written a feature for us on Be, and why he believes that it makes sense for them to take their OS and release it as open source. The following article was written by Slashdot Reader Usman Latif Why Be should make BeOS GPL

With Apple's refusal to embrace alternate OS vendors, and announcements like the availability of Solaris free of charge for personal use, things have turned

from sour to bitter for Be. There is no question that Be has great technology on its hands but can it really make people switch to that technology?

BeOS's audience was supposed to be Mac users but with Jobs at the helm at Apple this is one thing that is not going to be. Be can kiss the Power PC version of its OS goodbye. On Intel Be does have a fairer playground in terms of hardware but will it be able to sell its OS? The primary audience of BeOS in the eyes of Be management is the multimedia user and the graphic designer. However, it is unclear whether such an audience is enterprising and hacking savvy enough to switch to a completely new OS with hardly any useful applications.

It is plainly obvious that BeOS will be vying for the Linux and BSD user base. Unfortunately by being closed source it immediately turns away loads of Linux and BSD users. BeOS needs four things to survive, users, free applications, hardware drivers, and attention of the media. Going GPL solves all these problems very neatly.

Linux and BSD users are extremely adventurous and will be willing to make space for BeOS on their hard disks. To achieve that Be needs to lower the price barrier to a minimum. Be can do that by imitating the Redhat model. Give away a totally free distribution that contains no commercial software and make money by selling a more complete distribution that contains documentation, support, and some commercial goodies. By going open source Be will also open itself to competition. This is insurance against failure. How? Very simple, if Be management is not able to make a smooth transition to the Redhat model it is still probable that some new startup will have more luck, and then Be can go ahead and either copy the ideas from the new company or simply buy the company outright.

Free applications are extremely important for the success of any OS. Linux is successful not because Oracle and other commercial vendors are supporting it but because it has a huge variety of high quality free software. All Linux distributions come with several thousand dollars worth of free software (equivalent to commercial alternatives.) The Gnome and KDE projects will at the least double this figure in the next two years. To be competitive BeOS needs to have the same amount of high quality free software that Linux has. BeOS needs category killers like GIMP. By going open source Be can aggressively recruit KDE and Gnome developers by offering them a better platform to develop on and for. Without those developers BeOS will be left in the dust.

BeOS desperately needs hardware support and the Bazaar model can remedy that. I am not going to count the other advantages of the Bazaar model here as they have been pretty well documented else where. It suffices to say that the Bazaar model will work very much in favor of BeOS.

BeOS also needs the attention of the media. Lately the media has become very friendly towards Linux. By going open source BeOS can share some of that limelight. Wherever Linux gets mentioned BeOS will also get mentioned. If Linus appears on the cover of some magazine, BeOS will have a section devoted to it in that magazine.

There is one more advantage to going opensource. Demand for the sub $1,000 category of computers has been building up. I have even heard of computers that sell for $ 399. All these machines come with Windows and Windows costs money. At the price point these machines sell, Windows becomes a very large percentage of the cost price. Using Linux instead of Windows is the differnce between making no money and making a lot of money. Sooner or later hardware vendors are going to see that and they will think of clever ways to market Linux on these low priced machines. Currenly open source BeOS stands a better chance at appealing to the hardware vendors. This ofcourse is not going to last very long.

Users not revenues are important in the short run for an OS company. Be needs to get all the users it can get. Inadvertantly or advertantly Be is aiming for the Linux user base. It should be clear to Be that the niche it is trying to occupy is already occupied by a very strong competitor. Be does not stand a chance if it continues with its current strategy. If Be wants to survive it will have to imitate the model of its competitor and if it can't do that then sadly Be will become the first victim of Linux.

Usman Latif has written a feature for us on Be, and why he believes that it makes sense for them to take their OS and release it as open source. The following article was written by Slashdot Reader Usman Latif Why Be should make BeOS GPL

With Apple's refusal to embrace alternate OS vendors, and announcements like the availability of Solaris free of charge for personal use, things have turned

from sour to bitter for Be. There is no question that Be has great technology on its hands but can it really make people switch to that technology?

BeOS's audience was supposed to be Mac users but with Jobs at the helm at Apple this is one thing that is not going to be. Be can kiss the Power PC version of its OS goodbye. On Intel Be does have a fairer playground in terms of hardware but will it be able to sell its OS? The primary audience of BeOS in the eyes of Be management is the multimedia user and the graphic designer. However, it is unclear whether such an audience is enterprising and hacking savvy enough to switch to a completely new OS with hardly any useful applications.

It is plainly obvious that BeOS will be vying for the Linux and BSD user base. Unfortunately by being closed source it immediately turns away loads of Linux and BSD users. BeOS needs four things to survive, users, free applications, hardware drivers, and attention of the media. Going GPL solves all these problems very neatly.

Linux and BSD users are extremely adventurous and will be willing to make space for BeOS on their hard disks. To achieve that Be needs to lower the price barrier to a minimum. Be can do that by imitating the Redhat model. Give away a totally free distribution that contains no commercial software and make money by selling a more complete distribution that contains documentation, support, and some commercial goodies. By going open source Be will also open itself to competition. This is insurance against failure. How? Very simple, if Be management is not able to make a smooth transition to the Redhat model it is still probable that some new startup will have more luck, and then Be can go ahead and either copy the ideas from the new company or simply buy the company outright.

Free applications are extremely important for the success of any OS. Linux is successful not because Oracle and other commercial vendors are supporting it but because it has a huge variety of high quality free software. All Linux distributions come with several thousand dollars worth of free software (equivalent to commercial alternatives.) The Gnome and KDE projects will at the least double this figure in the next two years. To be competitive BeOS needs to have the same amount of high quality free software that Linux has. BeOS needs category killers like GIMP. By going open source Be can aggressively recruit KDE and Gnome developers by offering them a better platform to develop on and for. Without those developers BeOS will be left in the dust.

BeOS desperately needs hardware support and the Bazaar model can remedy that. I am not going to count the other advantages of the Bazaar model here as they have been pretty well documented else where. It suffices to say that the Bazaar model will work very much in favor of BeOS.

BeOS also needs the attention of the media. Lately the media has become very friendly towards Linux. By going open source BeOS can share some of that limelight. Wherever Linux gets mentioned BeOS will also get mentioned. If Linus appears on the cover of some magazine, BeOS will have a section devoted to it in that magazine.

There is one more advantage to going opensource. Demand for the sub $1,000 category of computers has been building up. I have even heard of computers that sell for $ 399. All these machines come with Windows and Windows costs money. At the price point these machines sell, Windows becomes a very large percentage of the cost price. Using Linux instead of Windows is the differnce between making no money and making a lot of money. Sooner or later hardware vendors are going to see that and they will think of clever ways to market Linux on these low priced machines. Currenly open source BeOS stands a better chance at appealing to the hardware vendors. This ofcourse is not going to last very long.

Users not revenues are important in the short run for an OS company. Be needs to get all the users it can get. Inadvertantly or advertantly Be is aiming for the Linux user base. It should be clear to Be that the niche it is trying to occupy is already occupied by a very strong competitor. Be does not stand a chance if it continues with its current strategy. If Be wants to survive it will have to imitate the model of its competitor and if it can't do that then sadly Be will become the first victim of Linux.

Michael Eilers has written a sort of introduction to Beowulf, what it does, what it doesn't do, and why we should care. It really is a sort of quickie distributed computing FAQ that many of you might enjoy. So hit the link below and find out. The following is a feature by Slashdot Reader Michael Eilers Beowulf beyond the Hype A Quickstart to the Beowulf Concept During the last weeks the Beowulf project got a lot of attention in the PC press and even on Slashdot. With Red Hat's Extreme Linux CD the relevant mailing lists show an increasing number of newbie questions. Unfortunately the informat ion Red Hat provides on their Extreme Linux web pages is less than informative and full of hype. This may result in disappointed users. It seems appropriate to make some comments an hardware and software and give some guidance for the v ery beginner.

The name Beowulf stems from an old English tale and was the name of the first e xample of this class of computers. In fact a Beowulf is nothing else as a local computer network. You might say I have a small network in my flat (f.e. an old 486 connected to my newer machine), do I have a Beowulf? The answer is yes. Yo u do own already the hardware to start. Even if your connection is via PLIP/SLI P you can call your construction a Beowulf as soon as ping is successf ul. Forget all the hype about expensive special networking stuff like switches, Myrinet or SCI. For some tasks it is helpful but others won't benefit. A 10/10 0Mb connection seems to be sufficient for serious starting.

A Beowulf is not a solution for all of your speed problems. Building a Beowulf has not the same effect as f.e. the increasing of clock speed. With a Beowulf y ou won't see a speedup of your daily software and the class of software that is already adopted to Beowulfs can have very different speedups.

The hardware part is nothing more than connecting PCs with standard networking hardware. The main idea is to make your PCs to talk to each other. The most com mon solution is message passing. There are two main ways for doing message pass ing: PVM and MPI. The decision between them is mainly a matter of taste (see here for a comparing paper). I will foc us on PVM but keep in mind that MPI is as good. You can get that stuff here. The pvm3.x.x.tar.gz package has a long history and is rock solid stuff. Sinc e 1993 I did install it on half a dozen unices and never met a major problem. A fter unpacking and compiling play around (yes there is a "hello world" example) . After playing with the examples. You will see that the main commands are pvm_ send and pvm_receive and If you think that you do understand the examples start your own programming If you know what matrix multiplication is, try to impleme nt a parallel version. This is an instructive example. If you have problems you may ask for a debugging utility. Try to get xpvm-1.2.5.tar.gz from the above U RL. Its not a debugger but it visualises the behaviour of your parallel code. T he whole thing may take you two or three evenings. After that you know the basi cs of the Beowulf concept of making a pile of PCs looking as one machine.

Now you may have some questions:

Q: Sounds interesting, but I don't have a network at home. What can I do?
A: You have a network (the loopback device) in your Linux box. This means that you can install PVM/MPI and play with it. Of course you won't see a speedup. :-(

Q: I have access to a computer pool but I'm only a common user.
A: You don't have to be "root". You can install PVM/MPI as a normal user and tr ansform this pool in your personal Beowulf.

Q: I'm not a C programmer, but I use [Perl|Tcl|Python]?
A: There are interfaces available at the PVM home page (MPI??).

Q: Im not a programmer. Are there interesting applications?
A: Im sure there are plenty of applications that exploit the power of Beowulfs. Most of the stuff lives in academic environment and this means that availabilit y and quality differs. I use f.e. GAMESS a quantum chemistry program that uses MPI. Maybe one appl ication need's to be specially mentioned. There are two Beowulf-ready patches f or the famous POVray ray-tracing program. PV MPOV is more flexible but less robust and FLY3 is robust but a little inflexible. If you use POVray very o ften and play with the idea of buying a PII[34]00 MHz you may rethink this idea if you checked the povbench res ults at The fastest rendering was done with a messa ge passing version of povray.

Q: If you state that building and using of Beowulfs is that easy why aren't the re more Beowulfs?
A: I don't know why there aren't more, but I think this situation will change.

Q: I'm a little confused about the many packages that allows computing of Beowu lfs?
A: Indeed there is a whole zoo of packages for programming networked workstatio ns. For a first attempt you don't need them but some of them solve special prob lems. For an overview about the important ones check out the "Linux Parallel Pr ocessing HOWTO" by Hank Dietz.

Q: Is there a PVM/MPI version for Windows95?
A: Yes there are Win32 versions of PVM and MPI, but who cares. In fact every (pseudo)multitasking operating system with network support can in principal be used to build a Beowulf (f.e. there is Win 3.x port for PVM).

Q: Where can I get more Information?
A: As you may have seen from the above the message passing part is the stuff th at is tricky. You find links to books and tutorial for parallel programming on the PVM/MPI home pages. Hardware related information at introductory level you will find in the "Beowulf HOWTO" by Jacek Radajewski and Doug Eadline. A comprehensive overv iew on hardware and software in the "Linux Parallel Programming HOWTO" by Hank Dietz.

Q: Do I need the Beowulf software packages from the Beowulf project at NASA?
A: If you use Linux, then you probably use one of the network driver developed by Donald Becker. So the Beowulf project is already at your home and in this se nse necessary. The rest of NASA's Beowulf software provided for the use with cl usters helps you to manage a large cluster but it's not necessary and probably not the first step to do and beyond the scope of a quickstart. Even the suits a t NASA have realized that Beowulfs are a powerful tool, but the shutdown of the Beowulf web pages is like preventing the production of cars by closing a horn factory.

Q: If you can connect local PC's to look as one computer, why not coupling comp uters via Internet to a supercomputer?
A: Standard message passing software uses communication protocols that are very sensitive to packet loss. But there are activities in this area. Look for the keywords "metacomputing" or "hypercomputing".

Michael Eilers

Keith Brown writes "O'Reilly has an interresting link on their homepage to The Real Grass Roots Movement. It's short and very sweet. "

Artimage writes "Summer Con '98, an annual hackers convention, has just been officialy announced. If your going to go to only one convention this year this shouldn't be it, but if you like to drink with other hackers then check it out. There are some excellent speakers this year, Theo de Raddt (Open BSD) and Mudge (of L0pht) to name two. check out the website for details.

This Story at USA Today was sent to us by Brian Servis. Apparently Uncle Sam is going to start sending snail mail to spammers telling them to lay off. Fortunately they've brought in the U.S. Postal Inspection Service. I'm sure if anyone can help fix the spam problem, it's the post office. *grin*