Slashdot Mirror

jonerik writes "Contrary to long-believed Soviet reports that Laika the space dog - the first living animal to be launched into orbit from Earth - lived for a week or so after she was launched into orbit aboard Sputnik 2 in November 1957, CNN is now reporting that Dimitri Malashenkov of the Institute for Biomedical Problems in Moscow has presented a scientific paper at the World Space Congress in Houston, Texas in which he revealed that Laika actually died a few hours after launch due to thermal insulation problems overheating the cabin interior. Sputnik 2 remained in orbit a total of 162 days, before burning up in the atmosphere on April 14, 1958."

Colin McMillen writes "I've recently had an interesting run-in with the DMCA... apparently, US Customs has rejected entry of a PC<->Sega Dreamcast serial cable into the US, supposedly due to copyright violations. This cable was to be used for Dreamcast programming for the Real-Time Systems class offered at my university. This seems to be a clear case of the DMCA abridging a perfectly valid educational use of a perfectly legal piece of hardware."

Colin McMillen writes "I've recently had an interesting run-in with the DMCA... apparently, US Customs has rejected entry of a PC<->Sega Dreamcast serial cable into the US, supposedly due to copyright violations. This cable was to be used for Dreamcast programming for the Real-Time Systems class offered at my university. This seems to be a clear case of the DMCA abridging a perfectly valid educational use of a perfectly legal piece of hardware."

davidu writes: "The Fraunhofer Institute in Germany (makers of the mp3 codec) licensed the divx ;-) video codec for future use. This is good for users because the codec is open source and is now on its way to becoming a standard. For those who don't know, this is unrelated to the failed Circuit City program, hence the smiley. ;-)" On the audio side of things, Mike Hicks writes: "Saw this on LWN's Daily Updates. Kenwood has come up with a car audio playing system that understands the Ogg Vorbis compression format, the Music Keg. Me want.. Time to start digging for spare change in the couch ..." Update: 02/05 03:24 GMT by T : Two clarifications below put a slight damper on each of these, though the overall news is still good.

Vince Busam from Phatnoise writes: "The author of the mp3newswire article goofed big time! Nowhere does it state that the Keg plays Ogg files, only the desktop software. Ogg will be supported when free ARM libraries are available. The author is further incorrect when he mentions the Kenwood X959 plays MPEG video files on the tiny OLE display. I have no idea where he got that idea." And reader Guspaz points out: "OpenDivX is indeed opensourced, but it is not the same as DivX 4, which was what was liscenced (And is what people download to use)."

jscribner writes: "Tis the season for tech forecasts and wrap-ups; I got to post this discussion on www.research.ibm.com; it's about how (merely 30 years after Feynman's speech) nanotechnology is finally being applied to chip and storage technologies. The IBM Research article covers RF (Radio Frequency) MEMS, micro-actuator MEMS, and the Millipede project. You can also find some interesting material on IDA's MEMS site and the IEEE/ASME Journal of Microelectromechanical Systems."

jscribner writes: "Tis the season for tech forecasts and wrap-ups; I got to post this discussion on www.research.ibm.com; it's about how (merely 30 years after Feynman's speech) nanotechnology is finally being applied to chip and storage technologies. The IBM Research article covers RF (Radio Frequency) MEMS, micro-actuator MEMS, and the Millipede project. You can also find some interesting material on IDA's MEMS site and the IEEE/ASME Journal of Microelectromechanical Systems."

Mike Hicks asks: "The release of Windows XP was heralded by Microsoft as the Death of DOS. No longer is everything riding on command.com and friends. However, most BIOS update utilities -- whether for motherboards or DVD drives -- are still written to work under DOS. Certainly, a lot of DOS boot diskettes are squirreled away all over the place, but they are going to disappear over time. What will we be using in the next few years to update firmware? Do adequate non-DOS solutions exist now?" I would hope that maybe BIOS updates would then be distributed as disk images that would boot you right into the update utility, however more than likely there will be a Windows XP utility to do this. Here's hoping, however, that an OS-neutral solution presents itself in the future.

mike skoglund writes: "According to this 8/20 RIAA press release, the RIAA is concerned about CD burners. Hilary Rosen, president and CEO of the RIAA, said: "Many in the music community are concerned about the continued use of CD-Rs . . . and we believe this issue deserves further analysis. A preliminary survey of tech savvy online music enthusiasts recently conducted for the RIAA showed that nearly one out of two consumers surveyed downloaded in the past month and nearly 70 percent burned the music they downloaded. All of this activity continues to show the passion of the consumer for music and the need for both legal protection and legitimate alternatives.'" I enjoy Rosen's claim that "consumer loyalty to the physical product still dominates and we are committed to providing the quality product listeners desire." I wonder if they'll eventually push through a Canadian-style tax on anything that can carry data.

Mike Hicks writes: "Looks like some of your favorite (*cough*) stations owned by Clear-Channel communications will get their streaming audio back on the web shortly. The new streams will use Internet-only ads targeted at you -- they will ask for your age, gender, and ZIP code." I would love to have the ads for laxatives and pregnancy tests replaced by ones for fireworks and local restaurants -- think they can get that from my age, sex and ZIP?

Top-down cool. A huge glob of capital hovers on the 43rd floor of a skyscraper somewhere in America, telling you and me what we should think is hip this week. Welcome to the whole damn world. Fortunately or otherwise, our cool-chasing is built into our genes, and it can exist with or without money driving it. Maybe the grassroots can't destroy our money-driven musical culture, but I bet there's a way a natural culture can thrive alongside the one we're force-fed. (This is the last of three features on pop music; you may want to read part one and part two for background.)

The capital doesn't have any opinions, of course. It just perpetuates itself. It's potential energy; when it's spent on the mass media, it drags youth culture in its wake, and through some miracle perpetual motion machine, that energy is recaptured in the sale of T-shirts, CDs, movie tickets, Gap vests, makeup, and shoes.

There's an indefinable quality about this kind of "cool" I'm talking about. I can't really put my finger on what I mean, but the closest I can get is: looking up to someone because you perceive their opinions regarding dynamic cultural subjects you care about to have value.

If your peer group looks anything like mine, recognizing the importance of, say, RSS a couple of years ago would have set you apart as someone whose vision could be trusted by your peers. And local peer group is all that matters for cool.

On the other hand, if your local environment buys into the top-down idea of what cool is, bands-and-brands, you're kind of screwed if you invest your mental effort in evaluating networking hardware. Ninety percent of high school is realizing that catching up with the global cool is something you don't have the resources for, and instead finding a local cool that works for you. You heard it here first.

So how does someone become, in this narrow definition, cool? The key is that it involves dynamic culture. Trends come and go, and come back again. Being with the trend, or (better) just slightly ahead of it, scores big. I'm guessing the cool people who first wore flared pants a few years ago, two weeks before we suddenly all decided it was mainstream, are now watched by their peers to see what other trends they're going to predict.

On the other hand, in 1992, wearing bell bottoms (I'm sorry, it's the same damn thing) would have had the opposite effect on your social status. Fads rise and fall, and we need to buy low and sell high. I plead guilty to still liking Fatboy Slim, which I'm sure would have been very chic three years ago -- now it means I have no taste, apparently.

Corporations spend millions on getting in and out at the right times. They speculate on the meme market, buying a trend small and selling it back to us for real dollars when it's big. MTV is day-trading our culture.

Did you think you were the one who discovered (fill in the name of something you thought was cool)? Chances are, some executive paid for research three months prior, and upped the hip of some TV show or commercial by letting you see it. Sorry, but your discoveries have all filtered through money.

I'd really like to denigrate the cool-chasing impulse, and that's easy to do when it's a driving force in someone else's peer group or the characters on Daria (episode 505, "The Story of D"). But it's part of being human. We all like to play this game a little, some of us a little too much maybe.

It does affect us all our lives, starting when we're little kids "acting out" to draw focus and attention (few things are less cool than being ignored). It ends shortly after we arrange to have our ashes shot onto Mars, thereby becoming more cool after we're dead.

And it runs parallel to economic considerations. Money is a good way to motivate someone, and it has the advantage of working on complete strangers. But the peer-group drive was motivating human beings to spot trends tens of thousands of years before money was invented.

("People are saying the tribe over the hill is doing throwing spears this year. We should make some throwing spears too." Our vacuous impulse toward fashion and fitting-in is probably a spinoff from a survival instinct. I want to align with the one who can find roots and berries; that's pretty damn cool if my tribe is on the brink of starvation, and we'll all trust the root-finder a lot more when we're eating better. Berries, Spice Girls, same thing.)

The trust system works for music. I don't browse record stores anymore; they're 99% junk (to my ear) and I don't have time or energy to sift through it all. Instead I ask friends what they're into. Which friends? Cool friends.

How do I know they're cool? My brain keeps a ledger. One of the interesting ideas that sociobiology brings us, as it struggles to shed its ugly reputation from the 1970s, is that human beings are hardwired with the capability to keep track of about 150 other human beings. Perhaps that's the size of a typical village on the African savannah, 50,000 years ago.

The evidence is pretty anecdotal, but each person's internal map of pecking orders and trust networks seems to grow not much beyond that size. You and I can track coolness factors for about 150 of our closest friends, no more.

But a computer can track more.

What we need is a system that can store musical (and other cultural) recommendations for 150 million of our closest friends.

Napster doesn't address this at all; though some have found new music through it, I sure haven't. The few times I've tried to chat with people sending me something from an artist I already know I like, nothing's come of it. It's been great at finding junk I already knew about from hearing on the radio, though.

But: recommendation systems. Basically the idea is to accumulate preference vectors from a large number of contributors, and then provide a way to ask, "if I like A and B, and dislike C, what else might I like?"

There have been a handful of master's theses and dissertations written on the subject. There are academic projects like GroupLens, but, like GroupLens, they're all 3-4 years old and there's no source.

The best-known recommendation system was Firefly, which actually worked pretty well. My initial experience was telling it a few musical artists I liked, and seeing it start spitting back to me other artists I already knew I liked. "You enjoy Peter Gabriel and Tori Amos? Have you heard Kate Bush?" Firefly was swallowed by Microsoft and is now apparently part of Passport (which I don't use, so I don't know what it looks like now).

But what's needed to leverage cool-tracking into a free (speech and beer) culture is an open system that will integrate with existing communities on the internet.

I've gotten to recognize a number of Slashdot users' nicknames on sight, and it might be interesting to see what you-all are listening to. My latest example is an Apocalyptica CD I bought last week based on a reader's recommendation in a comment (it hasn't arrived yet, so I can't say if Barnes & Noble's 24kbps preview did it justice). I'd click through to user pages a lot more often if I knew you-all were sharing musical preferences.

Note that none of this is necessarily tied to music trading. It might be nice if my user page listing the fact that I like Sarge had the music itself, or a preview, a click away. But the important thing is the recommendation, not the trading, and to build a network uninfluenced by money, the distribution system has to be separable. If Barnes & Noble is the only supplier, and has any control over what recommendations I get, I won't be able to trust them.

So the software really should have a distributed database of people's recommendations, one that's not ownable by any one entity. Ideally, the users of Slashdot, Kuro5hin, and Ain't It Cool News should all be able to drop their cultural likes and dislikes into the same database (hierarchical namespace based on domain name?). Queries drawing on users with taste like yours should be able to come just from one community, or from the entire database, your choice.

And -- the important point, the key to it all -- the database needs to recognize who was on top of which cool when. If I drop in Jonatha Brooke in February, and then 10,000 other people discover her in June, I need credit for being on the rising curve of the trend.

I don't know if I need a little star by my name or anything (I'm far too modest for that, oh stop, no really) but my positive rating of that artist or album should count for more if I got in early. Time is crucial in measuring trends.

And following the directed graph in the other direction, if I tell the database that I like these six CDs, it needs to be able to tell me the top ten users who plugged in their recommendations for those same CDs first -- on the theory that, if they led the curve last year, their opinions for this year will be of interest to me (and 10,000 other people).

Corporate cool-chasers pay good money on research, every day, to find this stuff out. In a voluntary contributory system, everyone could have access to the same information, for free. It would undercut corporate cool the same way GPL'd software undercuts Microsoft: when it's free, nobody will pay for it.

Writing code that can be integrated into existing internet communities is key as well. Firefly failed because nobody went there. Everything from the database to the web interface was proprietary, and its information was only on one website. But allow Slashdot to tie into your system, and you instantly add hundreds of thousands of potential users.

There's no money to be made in this, or not much compared to the $150 billion that the big six make every year by selling us trends.

But if you're a programmer looking for a way to influence musical genre for years to come -- or rather, to remove the influence of the glob of capital and allow a natural culture to flourish on its own -- this is a great way to start.

Music distribution and economics have historically been the two major influences on the evolution of its style. The internet has reached a point where that doesn't need to be true. Culture can be abstracted from economics, style from money. There are 10,000 singers and musicians working day jobs right now who don't care if they ever make a million dollars. They just want to be heard, and while the internet lets them reach a billion people, there's no way for word to spread. They might as well not exist. They might as well go back to selling 3 CDs at a time at gigs.

If that can't change, it's a damn shame. The alternative is another century of small-time musicians giving up in disgust while a wad of cash stuffs our ears with the Abercrombie and Fitch song.

The entrenched money is here for good. We'll have the RIAA and its prepackaged bands until copyright law changes drastically. We'll have (quasi-)payola in major radio markets until the radio itself goes away. We'll never get rid of the top-down cool because there's just too much money in it.

But we can have a market of our own, not based on money. We can leverage the best part of the internet, its communities, to produce a grassroots cool.

Douglas Arnold asks: "This summer I will take over as director of the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications in Minneapolis, one of the world's premier institutes in the mathematical sciences. (This year's program on mathematics in multimedia should interest many Slashdot readers) The IMA hosts visits by over a thousand scientists a year, mostly using Linux to meet their computing needs. I am interested in pursuing telecollaboration and teleconferencing at the institute, so a scientist there can work with a scientist off-site, carrying on a mathematical discussion as if they were at the same blackboard. What sort of hardware and software exists for this sort of application? Is there anything that works well under Linux? I am thinking of things like shared whiteboards, 'collaboratories,' networked graphics tablets (on which it is comfortable to enter formulas and do calculations), integration with audio or video conferencing systems, and so forth."

Douglas Arnold asks: "This summer I will take over as director of the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications in Minneapolis, one of the world's premier institutes in the mathematical sciences. (This year's program on mathematics in multimedia should interest many Slashdot readers) The IMA hosts visits by over a thousand scientists a year, mostly using Linux to meet their computing needs. I am interested in pursuing telecollaboration and teleconferencing at the institute, so a scientist there can work with a scientist off-site, carrying on a mathematical discussion as if they were at the same blackboard. What sort of hardware and software exists for this sort of application? Is there anything that works well under Linux? I am thinking of things like shared whiteboards, 'collaboratories,' networked graphics tablets (on which it is comfortable to enter formulas and do calculations), integration with audio or video conferencing systems, and so forth."

Tom asks: "I was once a Dvorak keyboard user but the fact that where ever I went I was forced me to go back to QWERT. IMHO the ultimate solution would be a small software independent hardware converter that acts between the keyboard and where you put in the motherboard. This solution would allow you to move to any computer and quickly use Dvorak without messing with software key remapping. I searched hard around the web and the only thing I found that was close to it was the Chameleon Keyboard Customizer also linked here (just scroll down a bit on this page) made by some company named Sirius Industries. Does anyone know where to get this converter or have any other hardware converters that they know exists? Or any type of schematic diagram that will let one build such a convert? Help is appreciated." The first link lists a number for Sirius Industries, but it was tied to a fax machine at the time of this writing. It would be nice to know if they are still in business and if there is any way of contacting them directly about their product.

Mike Hicks asks " The current state of fonts for XFree86 has been lamented many times by many people. The resolution and clarity of modern displays continues to get better, meaning that fonts designed for 75 and even 100 dpi are becoming small and unreadable. Not to mention the fact that many fonts are relatively poor -- many only have a single set of attributes. Most fonts that I come across are just normal, bold, or italic. It is very hard to find a new font set that has normal, bold, italic, and bold italic typefaces. Of course, a true Open Sourcerer would go out and make these fonts, but there are only a handful of font-creation utilities out there (and most of them are only good for bitmapped fonts). All seems nearly lost, but I re-discovered something this weekend. The METAFONT package was developed by Donald E. Knuth (et al) in the late 1970s in order to produce high-quality fonts for the Tau Epsilon Chi (T_EX -- now you know why it sounds like `blech') typesetting system." Has anyone used METAFONT for the express purpose of creating fonts for X11? How did it work out?

"After reading through Knuth's 1979 book, TEX and METAFONT: New Directions in Typesetting, it seems to me that METAFONT would be a good way to produce new fonts for X Windows (and console and printing..). I'm not certain if it's possible to produce PostScript Type 1 fonts from METAFONT (some say it isn't possible, while the GNU Font Utils package seems to be a way to do it), it would still be possible to create a large number of bitmapped fonts for various point sizes and display resolutions.

Well, I -think- it's possible...

Has anyone ever done what I'm describing? I haven't had much luck deciphering the documentation I've been able to find. Granted, I haven't yet plunked down $50 for a copy of The METAFONTbook, but even that reference may not be of any use, as it probably predates any widespread use of X Windows."

Thanks to all of the fine folks who contributed these updates, you are in for another illuminating, invigorating, inspiring round of fruity nuggets picked from the tree of wisdom, irradiated, waxed, polished, chilled, packaged and shipped (metaphorically) to your browser. Swallow two of these a week, call if symptoms recur.

Who needs an atmosphere? Xibalba writes "As a follow up story to the orbiting Web server, NASA already has an ftp server installed on UoSat-12 and has been sucessfully transferring images for the past week." Soon there should be no shortage of IP-addressable tin cans floating around space.

World domination, increment 00000003707391: xaniamud writes "NVidia have released version 0.93 of their OpenGL XFree86 drivers, check it out." Hopefully, nVidia is interested enough in selling video cards to the faithful to wipe it's nose clean of GPL violations, too.

This time, let's help DivX succeed ... Mike Hicks writes "An update to a previous story. FlashingYellow has combined with OpenCodex, and they now have a $10,000 prize along with an iMac DV for the first individual or group to produce an open source DivX ;-) plugin for Quicktime." Added to which, I will supply the second individual or group with a letterboxed DVD of Carlito's Way, Heat or The Godfather.

You may already be a winner! You may recall that Dr. Günter Bechly recently offered a $3000 incentive to the developers of KDE if the license under which KDE is released were amended such that it could be distributed with Debian's main (free) distribution.

Dr. Bechly has now withdrawn the offer, for the reasons he outlines below. He writes:

"Hello, I just wanted to let everybody know that KDE did not bother to send an official answer to my offer of a donation of $3000 in case that they fix their licence problems that currently prohibits an inclusion of KDE in Debian GNU/Linux. Just two people of the KDE camp answered at all, and both basically said that the licence change is impossible to do since there is too much code of third parties (including those who sent patches) involved who can hardly be traced. This is quite interesting, since in the past most KDE representatives claimed that the licence issue is moot since the requested exception clause in the licence is implicitly given due to the fact that the KDE programmers coded KDE-software for the QT-toolkit. Now they admit that they use a lot of GPL'ed code of non-KDE programmers which have never given such an implicit permission to link their GPL'ed code to QPL'ed libraries.

Just as a reminder: The issue is not how to use KDE with Debian (e.g. by adding the link site to apt-sources), but how to legally include KDE as free software in Debian main. The issue is also neither that KDE is indeed free software nor that QT is indeed free software, but the issue is that the two involved free licences (GPL versus QPL) are mutually incompatible, which makes any distribution of binaries of GPL'ed software that is linked to QT simply illegal! The KDE project obviously does not care at all that it violates the GPL licence of other peoples code. This is not only rude behaviour but simply unacceptable. I hoped that my offer would help to solve the problem, but the reaction or rather the non-reaction of KDE shows that this attempt failed, just like any other attempts to solve this issue before. Apparently KDE and the distributions that include KDE are relying on the mean consideration that private authors of free software will not take the finacial risk to sue them for their licence violation. Maybe the only hope for the final solution of the problem could be that one of these authors proves this consideration to be ill-founded!

Allegations that Debian is just using the licence issue as camouflage for their general dislike of KDE are absolutely unwarranted, since I got only very positive responses from the Debian camp including the Debian leadership. There is no doubt that Debian would happily include KDE as soon as the licence problems are solved. Anyway, it does not look like that is ever going to happen. KDE unfortunately has a long tradition in violating the free software spirit:

1.) It was founded by Matthias Ettrich who developed the very fine program Lyx, but then used the non-free toolkit xforms for its GUI, instead of e.g. using a free alternative like TCL/TK.

2.) When the KDE project was started, it was built on a non-free toolkit, too, since QT1.x was not under QPL or any other free (open source) licence. KDE attempted from the very beginning to become the standard desktop of Linux by using a non-free toolkit. They could not know that QT would later be forced by the outcry in free software community and the attempt to develop a free replacement (Harmony) to release QT2.x under an open source licence (which unfortunately is still not compatabile with GPL).

3.) When the free QT replacement Harmony was still in development (it achieved a rather advanced state!) the KDE project refused to agree to switch to this toolkit in the future and they even announced that they will incorporate any useful new features of future versions of QT, which made it impossible for Harmony to ever reach compatability.

4.) KDE had no problems in the change of the licence of kisdn, which was developed under GPL, and as soon as it was accomplished was transformed into shareware. I am quite certain that they did not ask all people who sent patches for their permission for this licence change!

5.) Finally, KDE is blatantly ignoring their constant violation of the GPL of other peoples software that is used in KDE (e.g. in kflopppy). To sum up: There is no other volunteer project in the Linux world that has shown so much disrespect and ignorance of the free software movement than KDE (just for the record: this is said by someone who used KDE since beta4 and once in a flamewar with Bruce Perens even strongly defended the KDE-project; sorry Bruce, I did you wrong!). Therefore, even though KDE is very nice and usable software, I will say goodbye to all KDE stuff and will now only use Gnome which is rapidly evolving into a comparably mature desktop environment (current Helix-Gnome is certainly as good as KDE 1.1, and forthcoming Gnome 2.0 with Nautilus will be on a level with KDE2 and konqueror). Even koffice will soon be made superflous by The Gimp, Sketch, Sodipodi, Gnumeric, Abiword, gcalender, etc. I hope that many will follow this migration from KDE to Gnome.

My offer of 3000,- $ will not be lost for free software and will now be given to Debian for an improvement of the Debian installer. Further details will be discussed with the Debian project.

With kind regards,
Dr. Günter Bechly

Dontcha love it when life imitates pundits? styopa writes "It seems that TurboLinux and Compaq Computing have announced an Alliance. Compaq will support TurboLinux on all of their platforms. Could this be the beginning of the end of TRU64?" Of course, this was carefully arranged to follow the recent story on Linux mergers, which now seems a bit more relevant. Of course, ZDNet had Compaq pegged for a date with Mandrake, but close enough.

Mike Hicks asks: "Whenever I experience interesting weather, I'm moved to look around the Internet for reliable and up-to-date weather information. While some towns in southern Minnesota were succumbing to flash floods last night, I came across some interesting information. There is apparently an existing network called EMWIN that sends weather data out over radio and satellite at 1200 bps and 9600 bps, respectively. There's also a Debian package for decoding some of this stuff. On that page, there is a "Modest Proposal" that the Debian project should be the prime contractor for EMWIN's replacement. I know that I would love to be able to get reliable weather reports whenever I wanted (regardless of whether my local TV/radio stations want to break into programming or not..) Do you guys have any opinions? "

Ledge Kindred asks: "I am looking for a distributed filesystem to run on my Linux boxes at home. I have several and most of the "extra" space on each one is "going to waste" - I'd like to be able to combine it all into a single network-able filesystem. How?" Click below for more.

"So far the two (three?) solutions that had the most promise are: AFS or Arla, and Coda.

The reasons against: AFS is commercial and I don't want to pay $15,000 in licenses just for a convenience to me. Arla still appears to be extremely alpha quality, even for a Linux hacker used to seeing major parts of his kernel labeled "alpha" or "beta". I had Coda up and running for a couple of days before I ran into a fairly severe flaw in the fundamental design that showed it to be inappropriate for what I want it to do. (But Coda is still the coolest thing since individually-wrapped cheese slices, and if you don't need to worry about that little problem, it's cooler than sex.)

I've found lots of references to the "GFS" project which is not at all what I want, and here and there mentions of other projects such as "DFS", "xFS" and a distributed filesystem for Beowulf clusters but no further details, URLs or most importantly - code - could I dig up.

I don't need RAID, redundancy, failover, or anything like that. I only need to take these extra machines on my home network and make all their extra disk space look like a single volume on the network. Support for Linux as a client is, obviously, essential, but I also have Windows, BeOS, *BSD and Solaris machines on my network, so clients for those would be appreciated but not necessary. Since this is just for me at home, (yes, I've got all that crap on my network at home - so I'm a little crazy) I'd rather stick with free software. Is there anything that can do this? "

If not, then it sounds like it would be an interesting project to work on. The ability to be able to harness the spare disk space across a private network can only be a good thing.

Mike Hicks writes "Scientific American has a short article talking about fractal antennas. They can be 25% more efficient when used in place of the stubby antennas on cellular phones. An antenna that's fun to look at -- who'd a thunk it? "

adraken writes "It just seems like minutes ago that 2.3.1 was out, but 2.3.2 is out... " Remember folks: use a mirror. Standard "don't use unless you know what you're doing" disclaimer applies.Update: 05/15 02:43 by J : There seems to be a ChangeLog available.

Headius is concerned about the following: "In today's bleeding edge technological world it's a chore just to keep up with all the new developments. My only answer is to keep expanding my library, both digital and physical. The only problem is my reading speed and speed of comprehension. I always read everything word for word, or I miss some critical bit of information. Does anyone know of a "speed reading" course that really works, and works well for the tightly packed information in most tech texts today?" I've always wondered about this. I've seen folks speed read before and I'm just amazed at the fact that they can go through pages of text in under 10 seconds and comprehend it all. This would be a worthwhile skill to learn.

whimsy writes "A senior Compaq executive credited Microsoft Tuesday with making computers easier to use, more reliable, and less expensive." It interesting to see how Compaq has been scrambling the past few days to not look like a "victim". This relates to John Rose, Compaq official, who's the next witness in DOJ trial currently going on. The article talks a little about the history of Compaq and Microsoft, as well as some of their disagreements.

whimsy writes "Christmas Island (.cx) is offering free (for now) domains for the taking. Get the good ones while they're around, all the naughty ones are going fast... " Interestingly some guy from Texas registered slashdot.cx...J: For those who didn't notice, they are about US$17 after the first month for non-residents.

whimsy writes " It seems a company, DMOD, has released its own take on the MP3 format - an encrypted one, where each track costs a buck a pop. An interesting idea (cheaper than singles, undoubtedly), but unlikely to fly with the MP3 community." Still to expensive. 25 cents? 50 cents? What is a single track of music worth? A buck a track offers no price advantage over physical media- we can still rip our own tracks and have a CD for the same basic cost. Getting closer though.

smackdaddy writes "An MP3 Virus hoax is circulating on the net and snaring some of the more popular MP3 sites in its scam. In spite of what appear to be an official announcement, a little fact checking reveals the organizations cited to be nonexistent and no record of the virus with any credible authority. Check it out here "

Mike Hicks sent us a link to a CNN article where you can read about an executive order signed by the fearless US presidentant declaring war on software piracy. My machine is legal. How 'bout yours?

Surazal sent us a link to an article about a new batch of denial of service attacks being waged againt usenet. Welcome to the warzone. Check your laptop at the door, and keep your sigs under 4 lines.

Mike Hicks writes "Raster has put up some more screenshots of GTK/GNOME themes at this page for those of us who like to look at great desktops... " All I can say is yummy.

Kory Lasker writes "In the last place I would have expected to hear about Transmeta, PC Magazine (a ZDNET sibling) included a tantalizing bit about Transmeta in an article about the CPU landscape." It's stuff that a lot of us know (they're working on CPU stuff, its secret and something about a fast software translator for the x86 instruction set. And if you just want a nice laugh (it's saturday! Smile!) you should read The Linux Apocalypse by Christoph Lameter.

Chris Mikkelson writes "Walnut Creek's FTP server (ftp.cdrom.com), powered by FreeBSD, set the record for the most bytes transferred in a single day, at 417 Gig! Note that this is a single 200MHz PPro (overclocked to 233, last I heard). The previous record of 350Gig in a day was set by Microsoft during the Win95 release. They used 40 servers to get this!" You can read the press release if you desire. Very very cool.

Alan Bailward sent us a link to a funny User Friendly. And Joe wrote in to tell us that FoxTrot is doing a series where Jason writes an OS over here. daschel wrote in to send us a link to a site about Bubble Wrap. What a strange world. Angus Davis wrote in to warn us that they've posted lots of interested stuff for mozilla hackers. This includes some docs on the new layout engine and porting instructions. They also need help porting the new engine if anyone is interested. And lastly, just wanted to mention that Everything has swollen to 6600 nodes in around 48 hours. There's some cool stuff in there to read now, and the server is holding up pretty well under somewhat less intensive usage than Wed.

Mike Hicks wrote in to say that CNet Radio has wrapped up project Heresey and Brian Cooley and Dan Shafer have given their opinions. They're more or less positive, with reservations in all the places that we would expect. They also say they'll be revisiting Linux every few weeks to see what's up and coming. Quite cool.

Dave Finton sent us this link where you can hop over to ZDNet/Yahoo's Internet Life Yippee/Yahoo thing. Then click on "Join the Propellerheads" If you post comments, you gotta read what they have to say about us. Although what is this 'propeller head' thing? This is like the 4th time I've read a review of Slashdot using that term. And they linked through The Cursed WWW^TM *grin*. (which shall hereafter be referred to as TCWWW^TM) I think this should be the official way to see if people really read Slashdot, or just skim.In anycase, cool to get recognition, Its pretty much how I like to look at Slashdot, although they did forget that 50% of our content is open source related. That's kinda important.

Chris Mikkelson wrote in to tell us that BYTE Magazine will cease printing after its July issue. It was a good magazine, many a issue has been bathroom reading material for me.

Mike Hicks sent us this abcnews story where you can read about a conference on technology and the poor. Certainly this is a very real problem- computers can be had cheaply, but for a family on a shoestring budget, a $500 machine is probably out of the question. Will the net become a place where those who can afford the hardware can hang out, and a place where the poor are just out of luck? It's a harsh reality that this conference is going to try to address.

Too much good stuff sent in today. W. O. Frobozz sent us a link to User Friendly, another cool geek comic strip. Josh Baugher writes "Jenni of JenniCam fame is going to be interviewed on the 10:00 Fox5 news (out of Washington, D.C.) tonight. " And finally, Kory Lasker sent us a link to the mp3mobile which has been updated to include a bit more info for those who are as envious as me.

This certainly has been a hot topic around here the past few days, but check out what Dave Finton says: "In the latest edition of Linux Gazette They talk about the good and the bad points of Linux evangelism. This guy couldn't be more true, in my opinion. Linux ain't for everybody. However... My goal in life is to prove that Windows ain't for everybody, either. Maybe not even for most people. :) "

Mike Hicks wrote in with an interesting note: The Committee for the Moral Defense of Microsoft, a pro-microsoft site has been running for awhile now to provide the other side to TMS. It's a fair site. Wrong in several key ways, but this is an excellent way to use the internet to its fullest potential, by posting other ideas. The funny part is that the machine the site runs on, like most of the net, runs Apache. Normally I don't find this kinda stuff all that interesting, but for some reason, this one struck me as cool. Telnet into port 80, and type HEAD / HTTP/1.0

Get ready to rumble as the tidal wave continues. First off, Andrew Mobbs sent us an important list of must-read RFCs. RFC2321, RFC2322, RFC2323, RFC2324, RFC2325. He also reminds everyone that ds.internic.net is no longer the canonical RFC archive. Luis Villa sent us Important news on the Java API. Gernot asked us to check This directory on ftp.gimp.org. Lastly, james sent us this one and Raj Dutt sent us this one.

Hey guys, it's spring break for me, so rather then spend the next hour entering articles, here's a list of quickies: Danny O'Brien sent in a link to NTK Live show, the RealAudio version of Need to Know, the very cool weekly geek 'zine. Vladimir Vuksan wrote in to tell us that Netscape is having a party to celebrate Open Source. Funny stuff on that page. Next Dave Finton sent in this link about how employers use the net to find info on potential employees. Finally we have BeOS Releasing another beta sent in by Hans Veneman. Now to find my beer, a copy of Fantasia, and stick in some Floyd.

Justin Chapweske wrote in with a link to Tasty Bits (The best nerd news besides Slashdot out there :) where you can read about the governments of the world, and the fact that they have been evesdropping on the majority of phone calls since 1981 and noting key words. Pretty scary. Time for phone encryption I'd say.

Mike Hicks wrote in to say "At the beginning of February, I corresponded with one person associated with Computer Chronicles, a TV show on PBS that has been a good showcase for new technologies for probably around fifteen years.

They almost ran a show titled "UNIX & Linux," but decided not to for some reason or another. This year's schedule appears to be set, and I doubt it would be very easy to change that now. What can be done, however, is to correspond with them about what we'd like for next year."

We also have an email address and if you follow the link below, you can see the comments from compcron.

--
Date: Mon, 02 Feb 1998 12:12:12 -0800
From: Elana Kehoe ekehoe@cmpnet.com
To: Michael Hicks hick0088@tc.umn.edu
Subject: Re: Linux?

Hi Michael, thanks for writing. Stewart decided not to do the show on
UNIX and Linux, unfortunately. I too wish he had...my husband just
installed it on his laptop :-). I will forward this on to him however,
in the hopes that he decides to do it next season. The schedule is set
for the rest of this season (til September).

We do appreciate you writing. It's letters like this that help us
figure out what to cover in the upcoming shows.

Elana Kehoe
--

If everyone asks politely, perhaps next season we can get a show focused on Linux and Unix.

Dave Finton was the first to send in this link where you can read about Linus' plans for global domination through Linux. It's a pretty funny article really.

ZDNet is reporting that 27 states are filing against MS. This is nothing short of amazing, thanks Dave Finton for running this our way. This is even more impressive when you read this This Washington Post Story. Basically Bill says that MS is struggling to hold market share, and that this government interference is really not helping matters. Thanks to Mike Martin for sending this one to me.

Dave Finton wrote in with This Wired Story where you can read about a lawsuit against MS over (get this) Multithreading. The scary thing is that MS was no where near the first OS to use Multithreading, and these days, virtually everything is threaded. He'll lose the case, but what some people won't try for a buck.

Dave Finton sent in the coolest nugget for today here Amazing as it may sound, the SPA declared that its eigth guidline for software publishers relates to Operating Systems. Prepare to smile.

Dave Finton sent this link to wired where they Cover the GNU Revolution. RedHat & Linux both get plugs.

Well Gates has pulled a Turner and is going to give 1 billion dollars to the UN. James Riordan sent us this link where you can read about it. Great publicity for someone who has been getting so much bad press tonight. I wonder if they will mention this on 20/20 tonight.

Dane Johnson sent us this story where you can read about a Tamagochi sitter actually opening up in Hungary. Allright, I thought I took the whole concept to far.

Ryan Morgan wrote in to tell us that a new version of MindsEye- a 3d modeller for *nix was released this morning. There are binaries available if you want 'em. Check out their web site and their ftp site if you want to download them. I've never tried this program, but I may give it a whirl this weekend.

The original is back with a new issue. The Linux Gazette has out its January 98 issue which features a ton of cool stuff. Dave Finton pointed me to the Gnome/KDE article in this issue which is an excellent comparison of the 2 major contenders in the desktop Widget Wars which will significantly change our desktops in the years ahead.