Slashdot Mirror

bahree writes "The BBC has an interesting story about how some people living in some of the most inaccessible areas of India are enjoying an improved postal service - thanks to the combining of e-mail with traditional 'snail mail'."

Slashback tonight with a followup on the Australian scramjet test, comparing audio formats with numbers (not just complaining about them), and questionably reasonable ways to sneak abuse-begging Internet laws in "for the children," (or plaintiffs, as the case may be). Read on.

Everything that rises must come down under. spam-it-to-me-baby writes: "The Australian trial of a scramjet engine has fizzed. 'The experiment at the Department of Defence's Woomera Prohibited Area, 500 kilometres north of Adelaide, was not successful because the [United States-supplied] rocket experienced flight anomalies prior to the scramjet experiment,' an analysis of what went wrong says. Not to worry, another test is tentatively scheduled for next week, assuming researchers can work out what went wrong with this one on the way up."

Not to be confused with this previous scramjet test, also unsuccessful.

Ah, much better, I thought you were being unreasonable there for a minute. After Jamie drew attention to it in a Slashdot piece on Saturday, SafeSurf changed their legislative proposal. In Jamie's words, "Woo!"

That's not all he said, of course: "Please note that, now, they ONLY want to fine you thousands of dollars for failing to label anything you write that is harmful to an 8-year-old. What a relief! "The penalty for a first offense of failing to label or mislabeling material harmful to minors shall be limited to a fine of under five thousand dollars."

Bennett Haselton passed on this commentary as well:

"If you go to http://www.safesurf.com/online.htm in Netscape and "View Document Info", it shows it was last modified on October 29, 2001. (This function doesn't work in IE.)

The original OCPA is [at google]. SafeSurf apparently removed this paragraph from section 6:

Publishers may be sued in civil court by any parent who feels their children were harmed by the data negligently published. The parents shall be given presumption in all cases and do not have to prove that the content actually produced harm to their child, only that the material was severe enough to reasonably be considered to have needed a rating label to protect children.

and replaced it with:

Publishers may be sued in civil court by any parent who feels their children were harmed by the data negligently published. The parents/plantiffs shall be given presumption, if the case involves graphic images, and do not have to prove that the content actually produced harm to their child, only that the material was severe enough to reasonably be considered to have needed a rating label to protect children.

and then added three new paragraphs listing more exemptions from this rule."

Can you hear that pea through the mattresses? For the audio objectivists, a good update to CmdrTaco's recent MP3 v. Ogg Vorbis inquiry: E1ven writes: "Everyone is always arguing about whether Vorbis sounds better than MP3, or vice versa. Here is your chance to see who is right! ff123 is doing a set of Blind Listening tests and could use your help. The more ears the better!"

schlika asks: "After getting some troubles with a highly loaded Web server running Linux 2.2.12 I read some infos about its max thread/processes limitation and 'not-so-great' virtual memory management. Could some of you comment such issues with other OS's such as FreeBSD (which everyone says it's better for that task without ever giving explanations), OpenBSD, NetBSD, Solaris, Linux2.4 and others? Please give real world examples/comparisons if possible."

Chacham asks: "There's a lot of scanners out there, and I'd like to buy one. I first checked the Ask Slashdot archives and found this, but at over a year old I thought it might be good for an update. I'm looking for a SCSI, Linux supported, color scanner. Although price will eventually play a role in which I purchase (probably up to US $500), I would like to hear comments with emphasis on quality. Speed is nice, but unless it's super slow, I'll go for quality. Deja lists scanners in a poll but it doesn't look like there are enough submissions for a real comparison. I was looking at SANE supported scanners. Many are listed as alpha or beta, and only a few as stable. I've been hearing good things about HP scanners, but with alpha support under SANE, I'm not so sure it's a good idea. Although, I guess I don't need to use SANE; are there other good packages out there? "

calibanDNS pointed us to unOfficial H4X0r'$ Guide to Slashdot. This is one of the funniest bits I've read in recent memory. It's nice to get a good belly laugh on a friday afternoon, and this one will provide it.

calibanDNS writes "The BBC is running an article about Microsoft surrendering in its instant messaging war with AOL. According to the article, the latest version of AOL's instant messaging software 'blocks interoperability by exposing a very serious security bug in its software.'" MS would prefer it not be called a surrender, of course; see also the Nando Times article which hints at running arbitrary code on the client. Is this FUD, or will we carry a story next week about a new AOL IM exploit?

calibanDNS writes "SuSE has a news article on their web page announcing a new partnership with VA Linux. Apparently SuSE will help develop a software load for VA systems. " Co-development is set to start in December and will mean that SuSE will be an option on VA systems.

calibanDNS writes "Slate Magazine (owned by Microsoft) is running an article by VP and presidential hopeful Al Gore. In the article he downplays tension over the recent 'Findings of Fact' and suggests a crucial issue for voters: 'Whose finger do you want on the ALT-CONTROL-DELETE button?' He also talks about the features of Win 2K. The article has the normal Gore tone to it, but it gives us a good idea of what Gore's policy on monopolies and dealing with them is." All in all, a surprisingly decent article. Really. Sure wish we could get VP Gore to do a Slashdot interview, but every time we ask we get fobbed off on a different campaign staffer. Oh well.

Chacham sent us some interesting Intel tidbits from Yahoo! News: First, they're cutting prices on P-II and P-IIIs between 26% and 41% (depending on model) tomorrow. Second, this October they plan to release a new line of 600 MHz+ Celerons using their recently-developed 0.18 micron manufacturing process, which isn't "new" news, but the referenced article goes into more detail than previous ones on the subject so it's worth a quick scan.

Martin writes "The newsticker of the german computer magazine Chip states, that the linux port of Corel Draw 9.0 will probably be out by the end of the year. The full Corel Office suite will be (nothing new) ported, too." The text is in German-Jochen was kind enough to send a translation.

Mishari Muqbil wrote in to tell us that we now have version 0.99.23 of The Gimp to deal with. Cross your fingers and hope that this is the last break before 1.0. Download it, and hammer the heck out of it and stomp those last bugs guys!

This Story was sent to us by a lot of people including Mishari "CyKiX" Muqbil and Damian Counsell. There was another earlier one, but I can't find it, so to whoever you are, sorry! Basically the article is almost pro linux, and then at the end it says you could get fired if it fails! Personally I've had better luck with setting stuff up on Linux boxes than NT boxes, but what do I know?