Slashdot Mirror

anik315 writes "Nature is reporting a major breakthrough in embryonic stem cell research. A straightforward procedure using mouse fibroblasts harvested from the skin can be used to produce pluripotent stem cells that can potentially become any other cell in the body. Not only can Yamanaka's method use the most basic cells, it can be accomplished with simple lab techniques. Possible applications of this breakthrough are to check molecular changes in cells as certain conditions develop. Stem cells produced using this procedure, however, can not be used safely to make genetically matched cells for transplant."

The Bad Astronomer writes "Astronomers in Europe have announced the discovery of a planet with only 5 times the Earth's mass, orbiting a red dwarf star 20 light years away. It orbits the star so closely that it only takes 13 days to go around... but the star is so cool that the temperature of the planet is between 0 and 40 Celsius. At this temperature there could be liquid water. Models indicate the planet is either rocky like the Earth or covered in an ocean. While it's not known if there actually is liquid water on the planet, this is a really big discovery, and indicates that we are getting ever closer to finding another Earth orbiting an alien star."

Fished asks: "This may be a selfish question, but so far as I can tell it hasn't been asked before. I'm currently a Solaris System Engineer in a Very Large Company. This Very Large Company has predictably standardized on Windows as their corporate desktop. However, they are also of the opinion that nobody needs anything -but- Windows on their desktop. If you're a UNIX/Linux systems engineer/administrator in a large company, do they give you a desktop for the platform you manage? Do you have any tips on justifying your need for a second, UNIX-based desktop to the powers that be?" "While Windows may be a truth for most employees, as a System Engineer I find that my productivity is much lower when I am forced to use Windows on my desktop. I spend way too much time overcoming the ways in which Windows is just different from UNIX, and not enough time getting my job done. Loading Solaris X86 is not an option, since we are required to use a bunch of software that is Windows only (much of it sloppily written, IE only internal websites, with fun things like ActiveX controls.) VmWare works, but is certainly less than ideal."

CokeJunky writes "During a weekend maintenance window, the Canada Revenue Agency (Fills the same role as the IRS south of the border) experienced data corruption issues in the tax databases. As a precaution, they have disabled all electronic filling services, and paper based returns will be stacking up in the mail room, as returns cannot be filed at all until the problem is fixed. Apparently on Monday they discovered tax fillings submitted electronically where the social insurance number, and the date of birth were swapped."

UglyTool writes to alert us to an initiative by the state of Ohio and the city of Columbus to lure Canadian rocketeers PlanetSpace to launch from an area airport (the former Lockbourne Air Force Base, now called Rickenbacker International Airport). A decision on the incentives could be made by January. From the article: "Such a package could include tax credits, financing programs and training grants amounting to millions of dollars... PlanetSpace's chairman, Indian-American entrepreneur Chirinjeev Kathuria, told MSNBC.com he expected the incentives to amount to 'somewhere in the neighborhood of $20 million.'" Five other states have spaceports approved or planned.

Dreben writes "Gaia, an opensource project to develop a 3D API to Google Earth, has decided to comply with a request from Google. The search giant's Chief Technologist, Michael Jones, contacted the project with a request to cease and desist from all past, present and future development of the Gaia project. Amongst other things, they cited 'improper usage of licensed data,' which Google licenses from assorted third party vendors. They are going so far as to request anyone who has ever downloaded any aspect of Gaia to purge all related files. From the post to the freegis-l mail list: 'We understand and respect Google's position on the case, so we've removed all downloads from this page and we ask everybody who have ever downloaded gaia 0.1.0 and prior versions to delete all files concerned with the project, which include source code, binary files and image cache (~/.gaia).' How does such a request, likely to have turned into a demand, affect fair usage? While the API is intended to interface with the the Google Earth service, Google Earth is nothing without the data. Yet at the same time, Google openly publishes their own API which uses the same data in the same manner."

MJanofsky asks: "I am the IT guy for a new, smallish non-profit organization. I won't always be able to be in my office to access information about our a users machine or to get the word that there is an issue somewhere. What I am looking for is something similar to the likes of Numara Track-It!, but it is very cost-prohibitive despite having all of the features needed. What it needs to include is integration of the HelpDesk and Asset Tracking parts (i.e. a user submits a ticket with equipment associated to it via a web interface and when I view it, I get the option to view the profile of the equipment), it has to be able to use bar-codes, be web-based, and ideally under $300. It would also be nice to have auditing via the network, and remote-control features but those are in the 'if it has it, great' category. Do Slashdot readers have any suggestions in their endless wisdom?"

Spy der Mann writes "Wired news has published an interview with the Pirate Party of the U.S., which was formed a week after the raid on Pirate Bay. The group patterns itself after Piratpartiet, the Swedish political party associated with The Pirate Bay, and says it wants to reform intellectual property and privacy laws."

Lurker McLurker writes "An animation from the EFF shows DRM technology as a group of supervillans who aim to invade your home, interfere with your devices and stop you from using your digital media the way you want to, even if it is legitimate. Doesn't say anything about the subject most of us wouldn't know, but a great link to send to your friends as an introduction to the issue."

Spy der Mann writes "A year ago, Guatemalan inventor Carlos Armando Amado sued Microsoft for stealing an Office idea he had tried to sell them in '92. They were found to be infringing on his patent and had to pay him $9 million in damages, but they refused and appealed the decision. Today, just a year after they appealed, the Court confirmed the verdict: Microsoft loses. If that wasn't enough, the amount was raised to $65 million for continuing infringement."

tavilach writes "Jim Martell has a license to hunt polar bears, but when his latest kill had "white fur [that] was spotted brown and it had the long claws and slightly humped back of a grizzly," officials seized the body in order to conduct DNA tests. These tests confirm that the dead bear had a polar bear mother and grizzly father, the first documented grizzly-polar hybrid in the wild. This was lucky for Jim, who was facing a fine and jail time for possibly killing a grizzly. Scientists who would have liked to study the bear are not so lucky."

Slashback, as always, provides updates and clarifications to previous Slashdot stories. Tonight we bring you updates on Australian Smart ID Cards, the security danger that USB memory sticks pose, Wal-Mart's Wikipedia War, Lego Mindstorms, LiveJournal's stance on Ad-Blocking software, and news about 'Spam King' Alan Ralsky. Read on for more. Update on Australian Smart ID Card. CaptainDefragged writes "According to an article at Australian IT News, the data from Smart Card that our government is introducing is going to be used for a lot more than just health care and welfare fraud prevention. From the article: 'Intelligence agencies and police will be given access to a vast database of biometric photographs of Australians to be created for the new health and welfare smart card to fight terrorism and more general crime. ASIO and the Federal Police will be allowed routine access to the smart card database on national security issues, while state police will have restricted access for general crime investigations.'"

USB sticks as a security threat. martijnd writes "The BBC follows up on the risks of USB sticks as a threat to business by looking at data theft and virus-spreading-as-from-a-floppy infiltration."

More On Wal-Mart's Wikipedia War. An anonymous reader writes "Past the media coverage of their article 'Wal-marts Wikipedia War', Whitedust has apparently received an interesting email from Mike Krempasky (representing Edelman Public Affairs in Washington, DC). While maintaining that Whitedust has no actual specific issue with Wal-Mart - the article was published on the simple premise that Wikepedia's important neutrality was apparently being compromised - and in the interests of a more balanced argument, Whitedust have published the email in full to their readership along with some other interesting notes."

Mindstorms NXT: Mindstorms Resurrected?. Since the announcement of Mindstorms NXT; many people believe that my earlier article was completely off target. My latest article, Mindstorms NXT: Mindstorms Resurrected?, attempts to complete the analysis. It concludes that Mindstorms NXT does not represent any change of direction for Lego; and unless forced by competition to act otherwise, Lego will continue to market Mindstorms as a niche product line."

Spam King Alan Ralsky NOT Jailed. narzy writes "DailyTech.com is reporting that contrary to reports last week, spam king Alan Ralsky was in fact not picked up by the Feds. Inquires put in to the DoJ and Detroit FBI field office resulted in puzzling dead ends as both agencies had no information as to having Mr. Ralsky in custody. Early Monday morning the original source recanted the story of Mr. Ralsky's arrest."

LiveJournal Explains Ban on Ad-Blocking Software. An anonymous user writes "LJ Founder, Brad Fitzpatrick, blames the change to the Terms of Service on boilerplate language put into the document by 'some lawyers'." From the article: "This is a pre-announcement that a more user-friendly TOS change is on its way. (After all, we can't even detect that you're even using ad blockers to begin with, so there's no point in us saying you can't. Plus you might not even have control over what's installed on your computer, etc.) So, yeah, sorry: we messed up."

lord_rob the only on writes "According to a ZDNet article, the next release of Debian should be available in December 2006. From the article : 'The date represents a dramatic improvement in the regularity of Debian's development cycle. Etch will be shipped only 18 months after the previous release, version 3.1.'

evil_breeds writes "A study by S.G. Cowen & Co. says that Google users tend to be richer and have more Internet experience than users of the other search engines, including Yahoo!, AOL, and Microsoft's search, according to an article on Infoworld."

cowmix writes "Hot on the heals of Skype being purchased by Ebay, a research group called Info-Tech just put out a recommendation to its customers that all corporations should ban the use of Skype on their networks. The reports sites a laundry list of issues it feels plagues Skype, most of which will have a familiar ring (ie the normal anti-IM and P2P talking points). Will this cool Skype's rapid progress into the business arena?"

atkulp writes "While cities and incumbent telecommunications operators are fighting it out over municipal WiFi, it looks like rural Oregan is leading the way for large-scale deployments of WiFi and WiMax." The privately funded $5 million dollar wireless network services a modest 700 square miles and seems to be the only show in town.

ZosX writes "According to eSchool News Online, the 13 students from Kutztown, PA originally charged with felonies for hacking have been given a deal, dropping charges in exchange for 15 hours of community service. From the article: 'The probation department realizes this is small potatoes,' said William Bispels, an attorney representing nearly half the accused students. This is great news for the students and their families."

Andre Medeiros writes "CNet is featuring a visual preview of the upcoming entry in the Quake series." From the article: "Bodies everywhere - As you can see, Quake 4 stays true to a well-worn first-person shooter trope: no matter where you go, your expendable fellow Marines will litter the ground and silently warn that you're about to be ambushed by plasma-wielding aliens."

CarrotLord asks: "I have some small, fairly well-defined programming projects that I need done, but I don't have time to do them myself. So, I've been looking into sites like Get a Freelancer and ScriptLance. Does anybody have any experience of these types of sites? Specifically, I'd like to hear your recommendations and advice, as well as your experiences. My concerns include: getting very poor quality work; communication and language barriers and also losing control over the work that I've paid for -- if I'm paying for some work, I want it licensed on my own terms."

swissfondue writes "macprime.ch. is reporting a link to a pdf presentation by Motorola's North Asia manager Michael Tatelman, VP and GM Mobile devices, made on 21 June 2005 to analysts of Morgan Stanley in Beijing. Page 15 of the presentation shows a picture of a yet unknown Motorola phone playing iTunes visualizer, with the usual Apple logo. The silhouette of the phone is not in RAZR style, but in PEBL. It seems to also be featuring a scroll wheel."

Slashback is back from vacation with updates on the Apple switch to Intel,a now-fixed glitch in the recent release of Debian 3.1, a hyper-efficient Honda, and the real numbers on online music networks. Read on for the details.

It still feels like a strange dream that they're really switching. An anonymous reader writes "With our latest Unix (MacOS-X) vendor's switch to x86, I figured now would be a fine time to revisit an old MIT Graduate Student Beer announcement from 2001."

Also, samchung writes "CoolTechZone has its latest article up that discusses the possibilities of Apple's protection on x86 hardware to prevent users from running the Mac OS X on non-proprietary hardware."

More fuel: Reality Master 101 writes "Michael Robertson, CEO of Linspire posted an editorial talking about his disappointment that Apple wasn't embracing generic hardware. But the really interesting part was that he states, "My sources say that Jobs is going to use Intel's cryptographic technology called LaGrande to make sure OS X will only boot on Apple-branded hardware. This is a similar technique to the one that Microsoft used to make sure Linux could not be loaded on Xbox..." I'm still not sure how they'll do this with an open source Kernel." They're clearly part of the Linspire marketing effort, but Robertson's messages, including this one, are usually pithy and worth reading.

Hey, you could always wait for a service pack. An anonymous reader submits "Because of an error in a configuration file, Debian Sarge, released June 6th, does not have security updating enabled by default. ZDNet Australia reports that after several years of testing, the release team's error caused a significant delay in deployment. Steve Langasek, of the release team, says, 'Whoops, don't go pressing those 10,000 copies of [3.1] just yet.' Fortunately, the error may be fixed quite easily, and an update is expected within several days. OSNews also covers the story.

Sticker shock alone could defeat the other drivers. josemunizn writes "Remember the Honda FCX, from a Slashdot article in '03? Well the New York Times has an automotive review of a week-long, unsupervised test drive of the Honda. Choice quote: 'In most important ways, the FCX feels ready for prime-time combat on the world's roads.'"

Carry the one, subtract 5, voila! An anonymous reader writes "WinMX and Limewire are the most popular P2P apps? That's what NPD group claims in its research on iTunes covered on Slashdot yesterday. But as Jon Newton points out on P2Pnet and MP3 Newswire, the entire premise that more people use iTunes over the file sharing networks is 'nonsense.' With sites like Slyck.com reporting eDonkey alone has over 4.5 million concurrent users and P2P research firm BigChampagne saying in the U.S. in May an average of 6,290,327 people were logged onto the p2p networks at any given moment, how can iTunes' 1.7 million downloads over an entire month put them anywhere near the top? Zeropaid has also chimed in on these claims and even CNET is now questioning the results it reported in its original article on the NPD research."

Catching up to the 3rd parties who have caught up with the competition. An anonymous reader writes "For the impatient or those few not ready to adopt Firefox, there is now another option to get tabs. BetaNews reports, 'Users of Microsoft's Internet Explorer Web browser will not have to wait until IE7 to experience tabbed browsing. MSN has shipped a new build of its MSN Search Toolbar that adds basic tabbed browsing support to IE6. But the feature is not fully integrated into the browser, instead relying on the toolbar to create tabs.' Here's an article including a screenshot.

dotpavan writes "While studies have shown that spying on workers tends to make them less productive, that hasn't stopped approximately 1/3 of all U.S. companies from employing email monitoring tools. 43% of those companies employ staff to check outgoing emails. This seems like quite a waste. While there are some times when it makes sense to monitor emails (or it's required by law), most of the time, this seems like a complete waste of money. Not only are you upsetting workers and decreasing productivity, the benefits are pretty hard to spot. The number of "problem" emails tends to be incredibly low. If someone really wants to send out inappropriate emails, they're going to figure out some other way to do so, such as via a free webmail account somewhere. Yet, the companies are buying up expensive tools and hiring staff to watch just in case they catch the one or two problematic emails that go over the corporate network."

Tamundson writes "Over the last few weeks I've built myself a mobile access point for my car. It's based on a Soekris net2421 embedded Linux box and uses Verizon's 1xRTT/EVDO network as its uplink, resharing it over 802.11b. Wherever my car goes, my Internet link goes! :) I finally put some webpages together on how I built it. The components are pretty cheap and anybody with basic Linux skills can build their own just as easily. I've also got it interfacing with Google Maps to do live vehicle tracking via gpsd. It also uploads pictures from an on-board webcam every five minutes or so."

PDA_Monkey writes "Neuros Audio, makers of the Neuros Digital Audio Computer and the Neuros MPEG-4 Recorder, have announced on their open development blog that they will pay $1,000 USD to the first developer to enable sending and receiving podcasts from/to the Neuros."

skyman8081 asks: "Have anyone had any luck getting DV footage to use a 2.35:1 Cinemascope aspect ratio? The wide-screen functions built into most video cameras are all 1.77:1, which is not what I am looking for. And the only anamorphic lenses for DV cameras are 1.85:1. Matting it out to make it fit 2.35:1 would not be an option as that would cause detail to be lost in the total image in the process, which would be very noticeable when you are working with Standard Definition of 720/480 and not the High Definition resolution of 1920/1080. So, how does one get the wider Cinemascope aspect ratio on a DV camera without sacrificing detail?"

VaultX points to an article on CNET (linked below), writing "According to Dell, Red Hat needs to lower pricing. 'We believe Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3, for the small and medium-sized business market, was out of the price range of these customers.' With Dell's strong presence in the Linux server market, Red Hat may want to listen."

*no comment* writes "Some clever bloke has come up with his own chess set using a standard chess board and RF connectors." This sort of thing pleases me greatly.

gandy909 asks: "I am facing the need to replace a major server in the next few months due to both EOL status and disk I/O bottleneck issues with the array containing the data. The server is configured with a 2 channel array controller. It is a RAID 5 array and has 4 drives, 2 per channel (2 data, 1 parity, and 1 hot spare). Obvious performance benefits in replacing the server are quadrupling CPU speed and doubling the memory. Other side benefits I will gain with the new drives, that I think should help my performance, are moving from u160 to u320, and going from 7200 RPM to either 10k or 15k RPM." How would you configure a larger array to best increase its performance? "Having googled around, the consensus is that increasing the number of drives is the preferred way to attack the I/O bottleneck. What I don't find much help on is determining the configuration of the larger array. Assuming I am going to be using a 12 drive array I have come up with the following possible configurations:

1 2 channel controller, 6 drives per channel
1 4 channel controller, 3 drives per channel
2 2 channel controllers, 3 drives per channel
3 2 channel controllers, 2 drives per channel

Would any one of those configurations provide better performance than the others, or would they all even out considering other factors?"

r.jimenezz writes "This month's Wired magazine has a fascinating article about an American roboticist and an Italian scholar who apparently have demonstrated that one of Leonardo's creations, a three-wheeled cart, is actually a 'physically programmable robot'. Very interesting reading."

mog007 writes "It looks like id Software is in the process of making an expansion for Doom 3."

Fiz Ocelot writes "Reuters reports that the last Atlas 2 rocket was launched on Tuesday. The rocket was the last to launch the old-fashioned way. For this launch, the 120-member team was inside a blockhouse 1,400 feet from the launch pad. It was also the end of an era dating back to the 1950s, when most rockets, including early manned flights, were launched from concrete blockhouses adjacent to the pads."

bus_stopper copies and pastes: "The BBC is quietly preparing a challenge to Microsoft and other companies jostling to reap revenues from video streams. It is developing code-decode (codec) software called Dirac in an open-source project aimed at providing a royalty-free way to distribute video. The sums at stake are potentially huge because the software industry insists on payment per viewer, per hour of encoded content. This contrasts with TV technology, for which viewers and broadcasters alike make a one-off royalties payment when they buy their equipment." We've mentioned this project before but this story goes into a bit more depth about the goals and motivations of the developers.