Slashdot Mirror

corbettw writes "Ted Alvin Klaudt, a former South Dakota lawmaker convicted of raping his two foster daughters, has sent news organizations what he claims is a copyright notice that seeks to prevent the use of his name without his consent." The story says Klaudt maintains "no one can use his name without his consent, and anyone who does would owe him $500,000."

countertrolling writes "A federal judge has ruled that the government failed to adequately assess the environmental impacts of genetically engineered sugar beets before approving the crop for cultivation in the United States. The decision could lead to a ban on the planting of the beets, which have been widely adopted by farmers. Beets supply about half the nation's sugar, with the rest coming from sugar cane. The Agriculture Department did conduct an environmental assessment before approving the genetically engineered beets in 2005 for widespread planting. But the department concluded there would be no significant impact, so a fuller environmental impact statement was not needed. But Judge White said that the pollen from the genetically engineered crops might spread to non-engineered beets. He said that the 'potential elimination of farmer's choice to grow non-genetically engineered crops, or a consumer's choice to eat non-genetically engineered food' constituted a significant effect on the environment that necessitated an environmental impact statement. There's still hope, isn't there? That we can at least get this stuff labeled properly?"

gbulmash sends in a classic Streisand Effect story of a Chicago landlord suing a tenant over a tweet complaining of mold in her apartment. The landlord claims that the tweet caused $50,000 damage to their reputation. If it didn't, then the fallout from their own ill-advised lawsuit surely will. The woman's Twitter account is now gone (possibly on advice of counsel), but the tweet that started it all lives on. And in a similar vein, reader levicivita notes a firing over a political comment on a Facebook page. "Lee Landor, who had been the deputy press secretary to Manhattan Borough President Scott M. Stringer since May, posted comments on her Facebook page criticizing Mr. Gates [Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr.] and the president, whom she referred to at one point as 'O-dumb-a.' ... The borough president has accepted Ms. Landor's resignation, effective immediately."

maotx writes "CCP's recent support for EVE Online in Linux is now set to be discontinued this March. Released last November along with the Mac OS X client, it has failed to share the expected continual growth as seen with Mac client. Feedback on the EVE Online forums, which includes the e-mail in which CCP announced this decision, suggest that the client was not preferred for Linux users as it did not support the Premium graphics client and did not run as well as the win32 client under Wine. For those who wish to stop playing EVE Online, CCP is offering a refund towards unused game time. Select quote from the e-mail: 'The feedback and commitment we obtained from players like you helped both CCP and Transgaming with our attempts to improve on the quality and stability of the client. Many of us in CCP use Linux and are convinced of its merits as an operating system.'"

hansoloaf writes "The NY Times is running an article about a business, Sourcetool.com that seem to be in a sort of a doghouse with Google. Initially Sourcetool uses AdWords to help build up its business. The business centers around providing links for business that sell industrial products. The owner, Dan Savage, explains in detail how Google over time used its AdWords bidding system to limit or reduce Sourcetool's ranking and revenue because the site's landing page is not 'googly' enough. Savage wrote a letter to the Justice Department as they are reportedly looking into Google and Yahoo's proposed deal." The article is nuanced in its observations about the complexity and ambiguity of anti-trust law. Even if Sourcetool and similar businesses aren't "Googly" — which is a Google proxy for "what the customer wants to see in search results" — should Google be able to pick winners and losers among industries and business models?

jd writes "An international consortium of specialists in genetics has announced the 1000 Genomes Project, in which at least 1,000 people from around the world will have their genomes fully sequenced as part of an effort to discover the relationship between genetics and disease. At present, over 100 regions of DNA are known to be related to illnesses, but the maps that exist are vague and are drawn from an extremely small population pool. According to the article, this results in the need for slow, expensive, and laborious studies to pinpoint causes, especially for rarer conditions. This project aims to find conditions that might only appear once in every 2,000 people (though how they intend to do that with half that number is unclear). The researchers hope to massively speed up the diagnosis of genetically linked illnesses and to improve the reliability of such diagnoses."

UnknowingFool writes "Groklaw is reporting that the Protocol Freedom Information Foundation (PFIF) has signed an agreement with Microsoft to release their protocols relating to Windows Work Group Server. The Foundation agrees to pay MS $10,000, and the agreement does not cover patents. This agreement apparently was made to somewhat satisfy the EU Commission complaints. With PFIF's objective to aid open source, this agreement means that the Samba Team may finally get the information they need to fully interoperate with Windows AD servers."

UnknowingFool writes "It appears for the moment that Universal will not renew its long term contract with Apple for content on the iTunes store. While the details are not known about the exact nature of the dispute, many speculate that it has to do with Apple's stance on fixed pricing and Apple's refusal to license their DRM. The worse case scenario may include Universal pulling its entire catalog from iTunes. Both sides stand to lose out with 1/3 of of new releases coming from Universal and an estimated 15% of Universal's sales coming from digital downloads. Apple's market share is about 75% of digital downloads, and digital downloads are growing while CD sales are shrinking."

UnknowingFool writes "SCO filed a motion to allow it to change its claims against IBM. Again. A brief recap: In December 2005, SCO was supposed to finally list all claims against IBM. This was the Final Disclosure. In May 2006, SCO filed its experts reports to the court which discussed subjects beyond those in the Final Disclosure. Naturally, IBM objected and wanted to remove certain allegations. Judge Wells ruled from the bench and granted IBM's motion: SCO's experts cannot discuss subjects that were not in the Final Disclosure. Now, SCO wants to amend the December 2005 Final Disclosure to include other allegations."

mdf356 asks: "It's been 5 years since I left graduate school and started designing and writing software for a living. After 5 years of writing operating systems code, I feel like I've forgotten some of the more advanced data structures I used to know. The next time an interesting problem arises, I'd like to have more in my toolbox than hashes, linked lists, heaps and various binary and n-way trees. I'd like something short and sweet, more in the line of the standard C book. Algorithm Design by Kleinberg and Tardos looks likely to be too basic, but I haven't read it (I'd like to avoid paying $90 for something that won't meet my needs). CLR is far too large and almost exclusively covers basic territory. Tarjan's Data Structures book looks like it has potential, but seems focused on network algorithms, which are unlikely to be applicable to the kernel programming I do. What are some good reference books on more advanced data structures and algorithms, particularly ones with potential applicability to an operating systems kernel?"

inKubus writes to mention an AP article about the approval of a warrantless wiretapping bill by the house. The legislation's goal would be to legitimize the wiretapping program President Bush previously authorized, with a few new restrictions. Despite this victory for the President, "Leaders concede that differences between the versions are so significant they cannot reconcile them into a final bill that can be delivered to Bush before the Nov. 7 congressional elections. The Senate also could vote on a similar bill before Congress recesses at the end of the week. For its part, the White House announced it strongly supported passage of the House version but wasn't satisfied with it, adding that the administration 'looks forward to working with Congress to strengthen the bill as it moves through the legislative process.'"

jd writes "Researchers have found what they believe may be a MECO (Magnetic, Eternally Collapsing Object) inside of a quasar. MECOs are rivals to black hole theory and involve plasmas that never reach the state of being a singularity. The most obvious differences between them are that MECOs have a magnetic field and do not have an event horizon. The problem lies in that the Universe cannot have both MECOs and black holes — it can only have one or the other. If this object truly is a MECO, then black holes do not exist. Anywhere. (Furthermore, this would require Professor Hawking to return a year's subscription to Private Eye and give Professor Thorne a year's subscription to Penthouse.) On the other hand, if this thing isn't a MECO, it's behaving very very oddly for a black hole."

darkwing_bmf writes to mention an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal in praise of videogames. Specifically, author Brian Anderson discusses the negative reactions videogames have gotten in the press, and why that reaction is unfounded. From the article: "The truth is, critics are often ignorant of the moral universe of video games--violent games included. Yes, the wildly popular Grand Theft Auto series, in which the gamer plays a criminal on the make in the big city, is pretty amoral. But most violent games put the player in a familiar hero's role, notes Judge Richard Posner in a 2001 Seventh Circuit appeals-court decision overturning an Indianapolis anti-video-game ordinance. 'Self-defense, protection of others, dread of the 'undead,' fighting against overwhelming odds--these are the age-old themes of literature, and ones particularly appealing to the young,' Mr. Posner observes."

jd writes "A study by US and British researchers on frequency of illnesses shows that even when you compare like groups in the US and the UK, people in the US are considerably sicker than their counterparts in the UK. This is after factors such as age, race, income, education and gender were taken into consideration. The most startling conclusion was that although the richest Americans were better off than the poorest Americans, they did no better (health-wise) than the poorest of the English. Previous studies of the entire population had shown similar results, with America placing around 25th amongst industrialized countries on chronic disease prevention, but it had been assumed that minorities and economics were skewing the results. This study suggests that maybe that isn't the case."

nb caffeine writes "Epic's Mark Rein is shooting his mouth off again, this time bashing the Revolution controller and EA's management style. This seems to be a recurring theme with him." From the article: "I guarantee you there's going to be lots of people who say the whole reason for this game is this controller, we made the perfect game for the controller. And all it'll be is about the controller, and not necessarily a great game...I've heard EA and Activision make absolutely ridiculous statements about, 'Oh, it's going to take 30 million dollars to make a game and we need 300 people' - that's just a bunch of bullsh... They're just covering up for their own management and incompetence. Or mismanagement I should say."

cybrthng asks: "With all of the choices from Gig-E, 10 Gig-E, SCI/Infiniband and other connections for grid database applications, which one is actually worth the money and which ones are overkill or under performing? In a Real Application Cluster (RAC), latency can be an issue with cached memory and latches going over the interconnect. I don't want to recommend an architecture that doesn't achieve desired results, but on the flipside, I don't necessarily want overkill. Sun had recommended SCI, Oracle has said Gig-E and other vendors have said 10 Gig-E. Seems sales commissions drive many of what people recommend, so I'm interested in any real world experience you may have. Obviously, Gig-E is more affordable from a hardware perspective but does this come at a cost of application availability and performance to the end users? What has been your success or failures of grid interconnects?"

farble1670 writes "Sun Microsystems has released their Application Server 9.0 PE platform as open source, under the code name Glassfish. Version 9.0, when complete, will be J2EE 5 compliant. Code is released under Sun's CDDL (common development and distribution license), the same license used to cover the Open Solaris, the open-source Solaris operating system. This is most likely a response to the popular open-source application server JBoss, which has cut into profits for Sun as well as other major application server vendors such as BEA and IBM."

limber writes "During this past weekend's Juno awards (a vapid Canadian music industry shindig) Canadian Heritage Minister Liza Frulla brought up proposed new legislation that would make downloading music on the Internet without paying for it illegal. High (or low) lights of the legislation include: forcing 'ISPs to monitor individual customer Internet connections for suspicious activity,' and giving the music industry and songwriters 'the tools to sue' illegal downloaders. Frulla further noted she 'wanted to persuade children that downloading music for free is wrong.'

JoshuaDFranklin writes "Boston's 'Big Dig' is famously long-running and over budget as noted before on Slashdot. But now Computerworld is reporting that a Software Ownership Battle Adds $10M to Cost of 'Big Dig'. The legal dispute was over whether Massachusetts had the right to share Transdyn source code with Honeywell, causing $2.72 million in damages and $7.2 million in costs of a four-month delay in the project."

stupidfoo writes "With all those nasty pro-democracy websites that Google keeps turning up, what's a communist country supposed to do? Well, create their own search engine of course! According to the AP, 'Bill Clinton on Monday helped launch a new Internet search company backed by the Chinese government which says its technology uses artificial intelligence to produce better results than Google Inc.' Accoona Corp. was one of the Chinese companies that donated an 'undisclosed amount' to the recently opened Clinton Library. Using the search engine from inside the US doesn't show any noticeable amount of censorship, but it also doesn't show how it's anywhere near the level of Google."

stupidfoo writes "AFP is reporting that, starting today, "Japan's growing elderly population will be able to buy companionship in the form of a 45-centimeter (18-inch) robot" designed to help them avoid senility. The robot, named Snuggling Ifbot and developed by Dream Supply, will be able to respond to verbal commands. "If a person tells Snuggling Ifbot, "I'm bored today," the robot might respond, "Are you bored? What do you want to do?"". It retails for 576,000 yen (5,600 dollars) and there is no English version currently available but "its makers plan to program the robot in English -- not for export, but to teach the language to Japanese children.""

t3rmin4t0r writes "The Pocket PC# group has ported DotGNU Portable.net to PocketPC. This is a significant step because the .NET Compact Framework SDK is heavily licensed, unlike the .NET SDK available for free from MSDN. Thanks to PocketPC#, now you can build Window.Forms C# applications for PocketPC without submitting to Microsoft's exhorbitant SDK licensing fees. Portability to embedded/low-end hardware is one of Portable.net's stated goals. DotGNU Portable.net also works on 9 major CPU architectures according to gentoo's portage. The Darwin-ports features a cool package with Windows.Forms for Mac OS X. Handhelds like iPAQ or Zaurus have also ports (the iPAQ one features Windows.Forms). Esoteric hardware like the Sony Playstation 2 or the Microsoft XBox can also run Portable.net."

bakreule writes "Online grocery shopping, once the laughing stock of the internet, has quietly started gaining ground. It seemed that the idea had been killed shortly after the bust as being just another bomb. The article has some good interviews and details to show how this industry is developing and whether or not this surprising growth can continue. I'm interested in seeing how grocery product advertising will be affected in this highly competitive industry."

greg_barton writes "James Gosling has responded to the two previous commentaries cited on Slashdot about the Java Dilemma. Some interesting excerpts: "In Rick Ross's 'Where Is Java In This Settlement?' he worries that Sun may have sold out the Java community. We didn't. We have not sold our soul to the Dark Side." and "There's a long thread of discussion on Slashdot 'Two Takes on the Java Dilemma' that is pretty entertaining, from a wow, what are they smoking! point of view. There are voices of reason, and conspiracy nuts.""

CliffH asks: "Has anyone else noticed a serious decline in 2D quality versus 3D quality in video cards? I routinely work on older systems right beside newer systems on the same monitor (Dell P1110) and it becomes blaringly obvious to me that 2D quality is starting to take a backseat to 3D quality. For example, my main system is a dual-boot Shuttle XPC SS51G with an added GeForce2MX 400 card in for the times I do want to play some games. A little, nasty, ready to be thrown away system I have on my bench at the moment is a K62-500 with my favorite card of all time, a Matrox Millenium II 4MB job in it. The 2D quality between the two is just shocking. Where the Matrox is nice, crisp, extremely easy to read at 1280x1024, the GeForce2 is kind of blurry, not as well defined, and the colors aren't as vibrant. I would be skeptical if this were the only newer card I have seen with the results, but it has gone through the GeForce line (last one I tested was an MSI branded 5900 Ultra) and a small handful of ATI Radeons with similar results. So, the question stands. Am I going nuts or has there been a definate tradeoff between 2D and 3D quality in recent years?"

whovian writes "Chandra, the x-ray observatory launched by NASA in 1999, is being used to study the composition of Earth's moon, perhaps putting an end to the age-old question, "Is the moon really made out of cheese?" 'Nuff said. The original press release is starting to get noticed here(1), here(2) and here(3). A neat idea, if you ask me, but will this postpone any manned lunar missions?"

FatRatBastard writes "ZDNet News is speculating that SCO's next target in its legal actions against Linux may be SGI. According to the article its legal strategy will be to claim that XFS is a Unix derivative and therefore under SCO control, much like they claim JFS is in their suit with IBM. One fact not mentioned in the article that would support SGI being the next target is the malloc code they claimed was infringing at this years SCOForum was copyrighted SGI."

mr.crutch writes "Few details are available, but CNet is reporting that IBM has filed counterclaims against SCO. CNet also has an interview with Red Hat CEO Matthew Szulik..." Jizzbug writes "Thanks to the folks of K5, we can all obtain our rights to use the Linux kernel from SCO, and without paying up to SCO's extortion. If kernel.org kernels aren't safe, sco.com kernels certainly ought to be." LWN has a copy of SCO's Linux License for your perusal. Bruce Perens is speaking of the dangers of patent portfolios to open source software, notable because IBM's counterclaims include patent infringement. And finally, a company is selling SCO Check, a tool to de-SCOify your Linux system, if SCO ever presents any evidence whatsoever of infringing code in Linux. Update: 08/08 00:16 GMT by T : SCO's public response to IBM's counterclaim is short and to the point. Among other things, it says "If IBM were serious about addressing the real problems with Linux, it would offer full customer indemnification and move away from the GPL license." Given the other links in this story, perhaps SCO should go first on that count.

seafortn writes "A Canadian man is claiming he has solved the mystery of the construction of the pyramids - the ancient Egyptians attached curved boards to the building blocks and rolled them into place."

Slashback tonight with more on model rocketry (and metaphysical rocketry to boot), Metallica's music online -- this time voluntarily, the fall of Ars Digita, nmap's reaction to SCO, and more. Read on for the details.

How is this sanguine? peterb writes "Slashdot has previously reported on Eve Andersson's whitewash of Ars Digita. Her screed placed responsibility for all the problems fully on the shoulders of the Venture Capitalists, while ignoring the role of those that asked the VCs for money. Ars Digita's Michael Yoon has a somewhat more sanguine and less hysterical version of the same story."

I wonder if shoulder chips can be recycled as fuel ...

All them perls don't come cheap. dogma01 writes "It's been almost a year since I submitted this story on Slashdot about the Perl Foundation Fund Drive. With a new year there has been a new round of grants. Every dime helps improve the community and bring us one step closer to Perl6. Please donate here."

The largest model is actually the one that's currently in use. joshamania writes "I knew when I saw the first post about the 'largest scale model of the solar system' I should have piped up. The second post has driven me over the edge. I call shenanigans! The Maine model is not the largest, and Peoria, IL, my hometown, has had the largest model for many years now, the Pluto model (in Kewanee, IL) being over 60 miles away from the sun model. In fact, a bicycle tour of the model is organized every summer and reoccurs in August."

Still at maximum. Danta writes "As the QNX site seems to have received an indirect slashdotting, here is a BitTorrent link to the free version of the QNX OS."

And what's in your makefile? JediTrainer writes "Community backlash begins! The author of Nmap has decided to remove all support of the SCO operating system as of version 3.28. Quoting the changelog, 'SCO operating systems are no longer supported due to their recent (and absurd) attacks against Linux and IBM. Bug reports relating to UnixWare will be ignored, or possibly even laughed at derisively. Note that I have no reason to believe anyone has ever used Nmap on SCO systems. Unixware sucks.'"

Speaking of backlash ... Ransak writes "Speak out! Space-Rockets.com has started a letter/fax campaign to sway political opinion, but needs your help! This hobby enjoyed by thousands of future scientists and astronaunts has been put in serious jeopardy by bad legislation. Senator Herb Kohl was one of the coauthors of the Safe Explosives Act, who not surprisingly, is blocking an amendment to ease restrictions on model rocketry. Wisconson geeks, take note of your Senators actions!"

... and speaking of rockets: BuR4N writes "The x-prize foundation has decided not to accept an application from a Budapest based team called GCT (Gravity Control Technologies) due to their highly questionable proposal. GCT pitched a "propellantless propulsion technology" that quote "is capable of controlling gravity for flight". Here is the full story. It would be very interesting to hear from the scientific community if this is just silliness or something that eventually could lead anywhere.."

I hope these guys don't take up making ham sandwiches. acidblood writes "Following up on yesterday's story concerning ice cream and liquid nitrogen, it appears someone was keen to try it out, and this is the result."

I can't tell from the page when exactly this was made. Whether it was truly in response to Gray's recipe or not, this site certainly provides more amusing visual aids.

The medium is the message, or something like that. LineNoiz writes "There is an interesting article over at MSNBC outlining Metallica's attempt to take advantage of the internet as a music distribution medium. It seems their newest album 'St. Anger' has a code on it which can be used to access their "Audio Vault" where users can download MP3 recordings of live concerts. The site's motto? 'Download. Burn. Share. Kick Ass.' Is this just a flagrant attempt to recapture the interest of the thousands of fans they lost in their battle with Napster, or a genuine good idea?"

Readers may recall this interview with Metallica's Lars Ulrich.

Gropo writes "Same old 'scary cyclops' quicksilver face. Up to 1.42 Ghz, FireWire 800, 802.11g and entry-level pricing has dropped. " With the SuperDrive and one of those massive LCD screens, you have a one highly desirable chunk of hardware.

tqft asks: "As an amateur crypto freak I am interested in the NSA. I have been following them on and off for years. Having read 'Body of Secrets' by James Bamford while I got a good feel for some of the history particularly ELINT and political maneuverings, I am interested in finding a more thorough book, article(s), links on their cypto work. Anyone know of good references on their crypto work? Yes I know they don't publish per se, but the references to what has been published are out there somewhere."

heytal asks: "Yes, It's old news, and you all have been to Google News at least once. And yes, it crawls Slashdot and considers it as one of the news sources too ;-).This article is an interesting article on how things work, and how Google News would change the industry. What I want to ask the Slashdot users is their experience with Google News, how much they use it, and how has it changed their news surfing habbits?"

oobeleck asks: "With my birthday just around the corner and my 8 mile runs needing music, I am thinking of asking for a portable mp3 player. What is the Slashdot community's experience with MP3 portables. What has the most support, what should I stay away from. I have been eye-balling the Diamond Rio 600/800 model. Any opinions on the Rio? I want something that works good with Linux/OpenBSD. Thanks for your help." Ask Slashdot last ran such an article back in April of 2000, I'm sure bigger and better MP3 players have been made since then. Which of today's players would you all recommend?

boowax writes "The New York Times (free registration required) reports that there may be a new type of matter according to researchers at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island. This apparently has come from interpretation of data gathered from work with muons and discrepancies between predicted wobble and the actual affect. Their are doubters though, who claim that the difference comes from problems with the calculations used for prediction and not a separate form of matter."

Bistronaut writes "Reports are in today on the final arguments between the 9 State Attorneys General and Microsoft (articles from eWeek). CNN also has a summary. Spoiler: States say, "Here are our priorities for reforming MS." - MS says, "We don't need no stinkin' remedy.""

mshiltonj writes "In case no one has noticed, the lastest Netcraft web server survey showed a marked shift in market share in just one month. Apache gained 2.63% and IIS fell 2.06%. However, the previous month showed an even larger change in Microsoft's favor, so Apache is (quickly) making up for lost ground, as discussed before. Was this turnaround due to the release of Apache 2.0? Sadly, in the last 12 months, Apache's market share has noticeably eroded, while IIS has gradually gained ground."

dipfan writes "Further to this Slashdot piece on the activities of the Business Software Alliance, the BBC reports on a European conference on piracy organised by the BSA. The good news is even Microsoft distinguishes between open source software and piracy; it quotes Microsoft's top in-house lawyer Brad Smith as saying: 'Linux is a way of developing software whereas piracy is copying.' The rest of the article is the usual panic-attack about the size of software piracy in general, and how this is holding back the software industry in Eastern Europe, according to Brad. Although the article notes the irony that despite all the piracy, software sales are forecast to grow from $50 billion in 2000 to about $90 billion by 2005."

magicsquid writes: "GameSpot is carrying the news that Square has finally returned to Nintendo systems after a 5 year absence. This brings with it the knowledge that Final Fantasy XI will truly be playable on every console as well as PC to be uniquely massively multi-player." Planet Gamecube has a similar story.

DeadBugs writes "News.com has an article about the size of the upcoming revision for the Itanium. The "McKinley" chip will be 464 square millimeters which would make it one of the largest ever produced. Most of this is due to the 64 bit registers and 3MB of Level 3 Cache. There is also a link to an article about "Chivano" an Itanium which will include concepts from the Alpha architecture"

FatRatBastard writes "The Reg. is reporting that Microsoft has purchased the rights to most of SGI's 3D patents. Speculation from the Reg hacks is that MS may want the patents more for crushing OpenGL support than for technology they're building inhouse." Well, crush is strong - but it would give them more leverage with some hardware vendors for sure.

chasmosis asks: "My company's decision to go with a heterogeneous SAN setup has our DataCenter Engineers banging their head's against a wall. Interoperability nightmares include matching microcode for various components to achieve some level of stability. One of the biggest current problems is with SAN connected StorageTek tape libraries, anytime a server scans the SAN for devices (ie on NT system boot, an AIX machine running cfgmgr , etc...) it accesses the tape drives, interrupting any currently running backups. What have others done to make their SANs more dependable, especially for backups/tapes?"

Dr. A. van Code writes: "NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory has captured a stunning view of the center of our Milky Way galaxy, with hundreds of white dwarf stars, neutron stars and black holes bathed in an incandescent fog of 10-million-degree gas around a supermassive black hole. Daniel Wang of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and co-workers took the 30 separate images covering a 400- by 900-light-year swath of the center of the galaxy, a region 26,000 light years away from Earth, using the orbiting X-ray satellite's Advanced CCD Imaging Spectrometer (ACIS). His paper appears in the Jan. 10, 2002, issue of the journal Nature. There is also a Chandra page at Harvard, and an AP wire story."

bobdinkel writes "While I know it isn't the most glamorous thing, mailing lists are a fact of life. And they gotta be managed by someone. In my organization, that someone is me. For whatever reason (they won't exactly say) the powers that be do not want to use majordomo and sendmail. So I pose this question to you, dear reader: What is the best MLM - MTA combo in the Unix world?" One only needs to shake a stick to see the amount of software available that handles mailing lists. Which ones have suited your needs?

darrellsilver writes: "As reported at the nytimes (free reg, etc) here and msnbc here, an independant task force initiated in July by the now resigning Dan Goldin concluded this week that "radical changes" need to be put into place if the space station is to continue functioning. The full report in PDF format is available from NASA here." We've reported on this before but we didn't have a link to the report itself. Budgetary woes have already taken their toll on the station and this report is recommending even more cuts.

Not long ago you asked Kurt Skauen about his AtheOS, a GPL'd OS with an integrated GUI and notable commonalities and differences from certain other GPL'd OSes. Kurt responded at length on everything from choice of programming languages to whether you'll see a version of AtheOS soon for the PPC. He also talks about dealing with interoperability (with Windows and with *NIX), why he chose the GPL, and what might drive him to change the AtheOS licensing.

Application framework & Development
by absurd_spork

Two questions, actually:

I think that not having X on board is a good idea, actually, because if you had X on AtheOS, everybody would start porting over X applications and then you'd have a lot of applications with an entirely different look & feel, which would spoil the integration that AtheOS currently offers. However, for the future, there's going to be need for a well-documented application framework in order to facilitate application development (for options such as component development and so on); since you already ported part of Qt to the native AtheOS system, what would you think about porting as much of KDE over to AtheOS as possible without including X, so that not too much of the native system's advantages would be lost, yet you could use the portability of KDE to ensure a broad supply of end-user applications?

I realize that you do very much of the actual development yourself, at the moment. What would you think of partially delegating development, such as putting up a list of "what is needed" to-dos, discussing the actual implementation with some developers, but letting them do more of the actual work? Because you've come really far with the OS, but I presume it's at a critical point at the moment where it needs to gain momentum. You could assume some sort of "benevolent dictatorship," we have at least one case in operating system development history where it worked out fine :-)

Kurt Skauen: Well the "Qt port" used by KHTML for AtheOS only supports exactly those features used by KHTML and nothing more, so I would not really call it a Qt port. It was just that I had to either rewrite the HTML/FORM code in KHTM to use the AtheOS widgets directly or wrap the AtheOS widgets with some "thin" classes that exported a Qt-like interface and used the native AtheOS widget internally. Each widget (like button, checkbox, listview, etc, etc) is implemented individually and the rest of the GUI infrastructure is not ported from Qt but is handled by the AtheOS toolkit itself. I had two main goals when making the port. First to make the browser behave like a true native AtheOS application, and secondly to make as few changes to KHTML as possible and still reach goal one to make it easier to update it when the KHTML team continue to do magic. This solution fulfills both goals pretty nicely.

Making a full Qt port would still be a lot of work. Besides, porting KDE over to AtheOS is not an option. That would just lead to another UNIX with a GUI on top. Not something that I'm very interested in. The AtheOS kernel, filesystem, and GUI have many features that are not found in UNIX and that will play very important roles in the desktop environment. Porting a desktop environment from UNIX would not make AtheOS a new desktop OS. If I wanted to run KDE I would probably have been better off installing FreeBSD/KDE than to write my own kernel/GUI, then wrap the GUI in a foreign toolkit stripping away any special features from the native GUI, and then port KDE to this.

Take a look at the "What are file attributes?" FAQ at www.atheos.cx for one of the reasons why porting KDE or any other UNIX desktops to AtheOS is not something I consider an option.

I don't see why AtheOS is at any critical point or why it needs to gain momentum now. Since the very beginning I have been working on AtheOS on my own, not telling anybody and still the project didn't die. The only change so far was when the TCP/IP stack was finished enough to make it possible to run a web-server on AtheOS. Just for the fun of it I put up a web-site running on AtheOS and suddenly /. found it and a lot of people got a peek at AtheOS.

To me AtheOS is just a hobby that I have been spending a lot of time on. I don't work on AtheOS to "take over the world," or to make Linux obsolete, but simply because I find it interesting to write an OS. Spending 90% of my spare time arguing about technical issues on some kind of discussion forum is just not my piece of cake. I find it much more interesting to implement something than to discuss how it could have been implemented. And I don't know what you mean when you say that this has worked out fine before. So far I have not seen any open-source OS that I personally would consider a successful desktop OS. Take a look at the other non "mainstream" alternate OSes that are developed by a committee or group of developers and compare their progress to AtheOS. Then you can decide whether talking about implementing or implementing is the most efficient way to develop something :)

I am of course greatly welcoming application and device driver developers who target AtheOS though. I clearly don't have the time/resources to concentrate on either device drivers nor applications of any reasonable size at the same time as trying to develop the OS. After all the by far most common kernel-hacking on Linux is on device drivers and not the actual kernel anyway.

How does AtheOS handle Binary Compatibility?
by MeowMeow Jones

(As I'm sure you know) one of the problems with C++ is that modifying a class changes the binary structure of an object. This then breaks any programs that were dynamically linked against this. This problem has been addressed in several ways (CORBA, COM, statically linking in the code, or keeping 800 copies of MFC40.dll on your machine, etc, etc)

This seems (to me, at least) the biggest problem with writing an OS in C++. How does AtheOS deal with this problem?

KS: The fragile-base-class problem will of course always be a PITA when putting C++ code into DLLs but there are ways around it.

There are two problems with the static nature of C++ objects. One is that adding a new data member to a class moves all subsequent members in both the modified class and all classes inheriting from it. Since C++ resolves member offsets at compile time and not run time, this breaks all code that believes it knows where to find a member. The other problem is adding virtual members. Adding a virtual member expands the vtable and moves successive table entries down. Also the vtable offsets are resolved at compile time so this will again break all code that believe it knows where in the vtable to find one of the virtual functions.

The first problem is easy to solve. You just move all data members into a separate private class/structure and only keep a pointer to an instance of this in the API-visible class. Now it is possible to add as many new data members to this private class as needed without changing the layout of the class. This technique makes it impossible to have public data members but that has never been considered good design anyway.

The other problem is a bit more tricky. I know of no absolute solution to this but there is a workaround that give some extra head-room. By adding a few extra (unused) virtual members to each class it is possible to reserve some spare entries in the vtable for leaner times. If it later become necessary to add a new virtual member you just replace one of the unused members with a "real" member. Old applications will still have a reference to the old virtual member so when replacing the dummy I must also add an assembly function labeled with the mangled C++ name of the dummy member that simply returns immediately to avoid undefined references in old applications.

This is of course not a full solution since it is impossible to guess beforehand how many virtual members a class will eventually going to need and sooner or later all the extra-slots are gone and you are left high and dry.

When this happen the only solution (short of declaring the project as finished) is to give the library a new version number. The version number is encoded into the name of the DLL so all old applications will continue to use the old library while new applications will use the new version.

So far I have achieved most of the backward compatibility by making the protocol between the GUI server and the GUI toolkit library backward compatible and then renamed the toolkit library whenever I have had to break backward compatibility in the library. In V0.3.5 however I started to reserve extra virtual members like described above and V0.3.7 will be the first version that achieves backward compatibility by stealing a reserved virtual. The View class in 0.3.7 has an extra virtual callback for mouse-wheel support and this was added without breaking the library.

There are compatibility issues with renaming the DLLs as well, like old applications won't take advantage of bugfixes unless the fixes are backported to the old libs, applications with plugins often can't load plugins linked against a different version of the system libs, and breaking the protocol between the GUI server and the GUI toolkit library will either require a protocol update for the old libraries or the old libraries and the apps that depend on them will become obsolete. Still the techniques described here should be able to give a reasonable degree of backward compatibility and a good overlap allowing people to recompile/redistribute old applications.

It might be worth mentioning that even the latest version of AtheOS is mostly backward compatible with the first released version. I recently unpacked the V0.1.1 archive and tried to run some of the GUI apps and most of them still worked. The most interesting detail here is that between 0.1.4 and 0.2.0 I rewrote the GUI to use floating point instead of integers to describe coordinates. To keep it backward compatible the toolkit library that V0.1.1 - V0.1.4 binaries are linked to are converting all coordinates to floating point before sending them to the GUI server and back to integers when receiving them again. So AtheOS has been backward compatible even across quite dramatic architectural changes.

Embedded devices?
by proxima

Have you ever considered promoting AtheOS as an OS for GUI-based embedded devices? The competition in that arena now is Windows CE, Palm OS, and Linux - but an OO based GUI built into the OS may be beneficial in terms of performance.

With Linux, a device developer has to get the core Linux kernel working and then build a GUI on top of it (XFree86 or a smaller X server). Palm OS doesn't have multitasking and isn't very scalable to powerful devices. Windows CE requires a royalty. AtheOS could provide a powerful operating system for embedded devices for free.

KS: I have no such plans. So far I have no problems filling my todo list with tasks for the desktop version :)

Design an OS with C++
by JWhitlock

According to Bjarne Stroustrup, the core application domain for C++ is systems programming. Having created an OS in C++, what would you say are C++ strengths and weaknesses for your needs? Has the OS evolved along with the evolving standard (the STL, templates, the new type casts, etc.), or have you stuck with the C++ that was around when you started? What features do you depend on, and which do you avoid like the plague? And, of course, if you did it today, would you use another language or make different language choices?

KS: First I might mention that not everything in AtheOS is written in C++. When I first started working on AtheOS C++ was just a post increment to me. Both the kernel and the GUI was written in C. A GUI is pretty much object oriented by definition and almost all GUI toolkits are object oriented in some way. And so was the first AtheOS GUI. It had an object model with objects, inheritance, and virtual members. Writing object oriented code in a function oriented language is of course like shooting yourself in the foot but I didn't know any other way. When I later learned C++ I realized this and rewrote the GUI in C++ and was finally able to 'concentrate on the functionality rather than on how to twist an object oriented design into a function oriented language. The kernel however is much more function oriented so I have not seen any reason to rewrite it in C++. I have often considered to compile it with a C++ compiler to be able to take advantage of some of the "advanced C" features in C++ but so far I have not taken that step. C++ is a bit too implicit to make it comfortable to use in the kernel.

I like C++ for several reasons. It is well supported, integrates easily with C and has a nice balance between highlevelness and efficiency. I sometimes miss the more dynamic structure of higher-level languages but I'm not sure if I would be willing to pay the performance price required to get those into C++.

As for following the evolution of C++ I think AtheOS is doing pretty well. There is nothing in the architecture that prevents me from using any of the C++ features. AtheOS make heavy use of STL. It also uses most other features, like exception handling, RTTI, multiple inheritance (and thus also the new type-casts), operator overloading, templates, etc etc. In short I use all the C++ features I need to get the job done. I would not have chosen another language today. The first choice (C) was a very bad one (for the highlevel stuff) but I'm quite pleased with the current one.

Are you happy?
by An Anonymous Coward

... about not having some bearded weirdo running after you, crying: 'It's GNU/AtheOS, it's GNU/AtheOS!'?

KS: Well, I'm not sure if that is what makes me happy but I believe having some bearded weirdo running after me crying 'It's GNU/AtheOS, it's GNU/AtheOS!' would make me sad :)

CD-Rom support
by timothy

Kurt:

I much prefer to install software (at least anything over several megs) with a CD than over the net, and there are a lot of old documents that I have converted to CD for storage. I wouldn't want to buy a machine without a CD-ROM drive :)

Is bootable (or other) CD-ROM support planned? Perhaps many people would be able to sample AtheOS easier if they could (for instance) order a CD from Cheapbytes and install it locally, pass to a friend etc. Considering the progress on the other aspects of the system, how important do you think this is, or are there technical difficulties (other than time) in getting CD-ROM support to work?

KS: There are some technical issues with a bootable AtheOS CD but nothing that would be a real show stopper. The issue I had in mind is the fact that the AtheOS filesystem have much better support for user defined metadata than traditional filesystems and while the current version of AtheOS don't make any use of this it will be very crucial in a not-too-distant future. This should not be a real problem though. It only means that the boot-CD must contain a native-AtheOS file system rather than a ISO filesystem.

The real problem is lack of drivers that can support a CD-ROM. Personally I don't miss the CD-ROM very much so the driver is not very high on my personal priority list.

I know several developers have been poking around on a IDE driver that Jesper Hansen originally wrote to add support for ATAPI. So far I have not seen any results but I assume that sooner or later someone will come up with at least an IDE driver that can handle a CD-ROM.

AFAIK there is nothing in the kernel that would prevent adding support for any kind of CD-ROM with a regular loadable device driver.

Limiting the scope of AtheOS
by brennan73

It seems to me that it'll be extremely difficult for AtheOS (or any new OS, really) to do everything well; even Linux, which is pretty widely used, isn't a be-all, end-all solution yet (and maybe never will be, or never should be). So have you considered limiting the scope of AtheOS (possibly severely), and aiming at doing a relatively few things exceptionally well? Here I'm thinking of BeOS, which was usually promoted as a "multimedia OS." It seems to me that this might be a way for alternative OSes now and in the future to stake out some territory: do a few things very very effectively rather than trying to be all things to all people.

Of course, if you're doing this as a fun/interesting thing, you may not care as much about a niche or widespread acceptance. But, still.

KS: What few things can be done so exceptionally well that you don't need anything else to make a useful desktop OS? First I might mention that the main motivation behind AtheOS is my interest in OS programming. I have no "strategic plan" on how to lure people to AtheOS. To me the most important thing when it comes to AtheOS is that I work with things that interest me. I'm very interested in making a user-friendly, consistent desktop OS that is easy to configure and where the command-line is only something you use if you are familiar with UNIX and like to do certain things there. Not something you must deal with in your everyday use of the OS to maintain cryptic text-file based configurations. To achieve this I believe it is necesarry to have a quite broad feature set.

PPC?
by mcc

Some minor questions:

Do you consider it likely that at some point in the near future AtheOS will develop a PPC port?

I realize that the AtheOS developers are very busy with the hard work they are doing and that there is no good reason for them to expend effort on a PPC port. However i was wondering if you think that there is enough interest among extant developers familiar with the ppc/chrp/macintosh platform that someone might feel like cobbling together a port.

That being said, I was checking and trying to figure out: does AtheOS have some kind of flexible arbitrary-server auto-upgrade "package"-style system along the lines of the debian apt-get? if not, are there plans to implement one, or perhaps port apt-get and dselect to AtheOS?

KS: I have no interest in such a port at this stage. There is still a lot to do even without trying to support multiple platforms so I don't feel like using any energy on getting AtheOS to run on non-x86 machines anytime soon. Almost everything in AtheOS is written in portable C/C++ and there is nothing in the design that binds AtheOS to the x86, so there is a fair chance that you will see AtheOS on other platforms some time in the future but don't hold your breath. The babes won't like your new face color. This is covered a bit in the FAQ BTW.

AtheOS doesn't have a package manager. Some kind of application installer would be nice but I'm not sure if a regular package manager from Linux would be appropriate. In UNIX all the files from all the packages are blended together in one totally unmaintainable (by humans) soup of files. AtheOS is a desktop OS not UNIX so there is no reason why things should be handled this way under AtheOS. I have built all the CLI packages so each goes into a separate directories to make them a bit more manageable. Native applications will mostly be handled by the desktop manager and there is/will be features in AtheOS that can aid applications in locating their own directory (based on location of the executable) so it will not matter where on the HD an application is installed as long as the desktop manager knows where the executable is.

AtheOS and GPL?
by Midnight Ryder

Greetings ... Another poster mentioned the idea that you were considering moving AtheOS to a different license. Is that the case?

Secondly, if you are considering putting it under a different license, why? And, why did you select GPL licensing for AtheOS as opposed to a number of different licensing choices out there? (Regardless of if you are or aren't moving AtheOS from a GPL license.)

KS: I will probably change the license of the kernel and possibly the application server to LGPL to make sure the AtheOS license don't "leak" into third-party device drivers. I don't want the OS to dictate what license people might choose for their software.

The reason I chose GPL in the first place is more of a coincidence than anything else. I'm no lawyer and the GPL seemed like a decent choice. I must admit that I have grown very tired of all the fanatic GPL advocates screaming loud whenever they see something non-GPL though and if I ever go away from GPL altogether (to for example the BSD license) it would most likely be in protest against the attitude of the GPL advocates.

Now what?
by baptiste

My question: Sure you did this for fun and it is a beautiful OS. But as it gains attention and user interest, do you have a target audience in mind? Who do you think should use AtheOS -- who will derive the most benefit?

KS: The next step is to tie most of the kernel/GUI functionality into a desktop environment that takes better advantage of things like file attributes, mime-types, node-monitoring, the AtheOS messaging system, drag-and-drop, etc etc. Right now AtheOS looks more like a regular UNIX than anything else since few of the AtheOS specific features are really used. This will be a important step to define AtheOS as a desktop OS and not just a UNIX with a GUI.

Still for the forseeable future I guess the target audience will be application and device-driver developers. It doesn't make much sense for anybody else to install the OS before a decent application and HW support base are in place.

Windows apps?
by JohnTheFisherman

I know a lot of people hate Windows here, but it certainly has the lion's share of apps. Can/will/do you plan to add a windows emulation layer, or some fairly painless way of running Windows apps? Same for X/GTK/etc.

KS: I have no plans for a "windows compatibility layer" of any kind. The sheer amount of work this would require is enough to put it down. Beside I work on AtheOS for the fun and trying to emulate something as gross as Win32 and then trying to keep up with newer versions is not really something I consider fun.

As for X11, things are a bit different. It would be nice to have a X11 server for AtheOS that integrated X11 apps as nicely into the native desktop as possible to be able to run remote X11 applications from UNIX machines. This works quite nicely with several X11 server under Windows and I don't see why it shouldn't work for AtheOS. I stress that I consider this a good idea because it would make it possible to run remote UNIX apps on the AtheOS desktop. Not because I want to port GTK or any other toolkits to AtheOS. Having multiple toolkits will just cause the same compatibility and interoperability problems you find on Linux.

Another take on Windows apps
by n3m6

Why not include a DirectX emulation? It would be easier on his OS since its not tied to X and input devices are not a separately controlled ... if he could do that could this be the next gaming platform? Now that would be serious competition ...

KS: There isn't much point in DirectX emulation without the rest of the Windows API's since none of the games would run anyway.

I believe it would be much better to go for an open standard like OpenGL than to try to reverse-engineer a closed standard like DirectX in order to emulate it.

snuf23 writes: "The crew of Discovery has attached the Z1 Integrated Truss Segment to the International Space Station. In addition to serving as the base for the U.S. solar array, the Z1 houses the Space Station's communications systems. Like the Space Shuttle, the Z1 has a slower S-Band system as well as a fast Ku-Band Communications System which transmits at 50 Mbps.
Shuttle Online Press Kit has detailed information about the Discovery's payload on the 100th Shuttle flight." Specifically, here's the information about the Integrated Truss Segment, which sounds like a smart way to use expensive hardware in multiple ways.

snuf23 asks: "Altavista has a report on the future of Windows as presented by Bill Gates at Microsoft Professional Developers Conference. Curiously, one of the touted features is called "type in-line." Essentially, it's a text based interface to the computer which uses a natural language interface. Having worked at a translation software company for three years, I am familiar with the complications of parsing meaning between human languages. It seems that in computer to human you would have somewhat less complexity, at least in terms of general use. Have any natural language interface CLIs been built? Voice recognition software comes to mind ("Open the file, HAL") but what attempts have there been to replace shell interfaces with natural language interpreters?" While I'm all for making computers easier to use, would typing "move all files beginning with the letter a to the directory called 'foo'" be any improvement over "mv a* foo" (or "move a* foo" for that matter)?