Slashdot Mirror

linuxizer writes "Since my last Slashdot entry, I've been discussing various copyright issues with the ever-interesting Peter Fader. Out of those conversations came sniu.info, an attempt to document the various forms of substantial, non-infringing use over peer-to-peer networks before MGM v Grokster goes to the Supreme Court. So far I have about 50 entries, but more suggestions would be much appreciated. Some fellow /. readers might also be interested in my fairly regular posts on copyright/IP issues, which are mostly links to interesting articles with occasional commentary."

belmolis writes "As they promised, Novell has filed suit against Microsoft over WordPerfect. Here's the complaint, and here is Microsoft's press release in response. From what I know of the history, it seems very likely that Novell will be able to prove that Microsoft engaged in illegal anticompetitive behavior. Indeed, the complaint cites some of the same acts that figured in the US government case against MS. What isn't so clear to me is how much of the loss of market share they will be able to show was Microsoft's fault, since there seems to be a diversity of opinion regarding the relative quality of WordPerfect and MS Word." Reader tekiegreg points out Reuters' story on the new suit, as carried by Yahoo!.

jnagra writes "The results of the 2004 ICFP Programming Contest have been announced. First place is to a program in Haskell, second place is to a program in C++, and the judges' prize is to a program in OCaml. The ICFP contest is an annual contest to promote functional languages (although programs in any language are accepted) and bestows on the winners unlimited bragging rights."

jnagra writes "The results of the 2004 ICFP Programming Contest have been announced. First place is to a program in Haskell, second place is to a program in C++, and the judges' prize is to a program in OCaml. The ICFP contest is an annual contest to promote functional languages (although programs in any language are accepted) and bestows on the winners unlimited bragging rights."

jnagra writes "The results of the 2004 ICFP Programming Contest have been announced. First place is to a program in Haskell, second place is to a program in C++, and the judges' prize is to a program in OCaml. The ICFP contest is an annual contest to promote functional languages (although programs in any language are accepted) and bestows on the winners unlimited bragging rights."

jnagra writes "The results of the 2004 ICFP Programming Contest have been announced. First place is to a program in Haskell, second place is to a program in C++, and the judges' prize is to a program in OCaml. The ICFP contest is an annual contest to promote functional languages (although programs in any language are accepted) and bestows on the winners unlimited bragging rights."

jnagra writes "The results of the 2004 ICFP Programming Contest have been announced. First place is to a program in Haskell, second place is to a program in C++, and the judges' prize is to a program in OCaml. The ICFP contest is an annual contest to promote functional languages (although programs in any language are accepted) and bestows on the winners unlimited bragging rights."

TheRealFoxFire writes "Taking a page from the popular Corewars competitive programming game, the 2004 ICFP Programming Contest task has been turned into an online competition: Ant Wars. In the game, programmers create state-machine ant "brains" which battle against each other for food and programmer glory. And just in time for the ICFP contest itself, where this year's winners will be announced."

belmolis writes "According to this editorial in today's New York Times, US military personnel for whom regular absentee ballot procedures are inconvenient are being provided with a questionable alternative, the Electronic Transmission Service, run by a private contractor, Omega Technologies. According to the NYT, the secrecy of ballots could be breached when they are faxed or emailed from the field, when they are in the hands of Omega Technologies, or when they are in the hands of local officials. The NYT was unable to obtain any information on security procedures from the company or from the Pentagon. A manual describing the system can be downloaded here [pdf document]. Like Diebold, Omega is far from non-partisan. Omega President and CEO Patricia Williams has donated $6,600 in this election cycle to the National Republican Congressional Committee and is a member of its Business Advisory Council."

tiltowait asks: "An interesting story on LISNews.com this morning about savvy U.S. students photocopying textbooks in Mexico then returning them for refunds got me thinking about data havens. There's already few places on the web where you can exploit countries having different copyright durations and eligibility. On the flip side, there's restrictions such as broadcast blackouts and country-wide firewalls. But just as the rich can use of international tax loopholes and in light of the recent file-sharing victory, are there any projects out there, beyond the P2P networks, to distribute possibly-protected information by any means necessary? For example, your company may already outsource labor, but what about an off-site backup in case of an FBI raid?"

prostoalex writes "Folks at the Scriptometer conducted a practical survey of which scripting language is the best. While question like that is bound to generate flamewars between the usual Perl vs PHP, Python vs Perl, VBScript vs everything crowds, the Scriptometer survey is practical: if I have to write a script, I have to write it fast, it has to be small (less typing), it should allow me to either debug itself via a debugger or just verbose output mode. sh, Perl and Ruby won the competition, and with the difference of 1-2 points they were essentially tied for first place. Smalltalk, tcc, C# and Java are the last ones, with Java being completely unusable in scripting environment (part of that could be the fact that neither Java nor C# are scripting languages). See the 'Hello world' examples and the smallest code examples. Interesting that ICFP contests lately pronounced OCaml as the winner for rapid development."

gnetwerker writes "Wired and others are reporting about artist Steve Kurtz, professor at Univesity of Buffalo (NY), and member of the Critical Art Ensemble will face a Grand Jury in two weeks on bioterrorism charges over artwork that used samples of harmless bacteria to make a statement about genetic engineering and food safety. He is charged with BioTerrorism under Section 817 of the PATRIOT Act. Apparently John Ashcroft can't tell a weapons lab from an art installation. There is more info and a Defense Fund on the CAE Defense Fund Site."

Bbazzarrakk writes "It's still a little ways off yet, but a date for the 2004 ICFP Programming Contest has been set. If you're like me, you need a little warning to plan for it and avoid missing it. The contest will begin Friday, June 4th at noon. For more information, keep an eye on The Official Contest Site."

cbnet2004 writes "In what can be considered a win for Linux, Novell has announced NetWare will cease to exist as a standalone product by the end of the year. However, the CEO says: 'We are still committed to it and it is not going away. Our new Open Enterprise Server offering will have two components to it: SuSE Linux Enterprise Server and NetWare. NetWare is here for a long time to come.'" Read on for more bits from Novell's BrainShare conference, including a planned company-wide move to Linux.

Roger Foss writes "Novell has announced it will release its cross platform iFolder file synchronization software as open source. This is pretty cool: far more transparent and easier to use than Unison or some of those friendly Rsync variants. iFolder does multi-master delta synchronization and is user friendly. The source software will be available at Novell's own Forge site and release under the GPL. This sure beats Novell's earlier open source efforts, when they released their proprietary IPX protocol stuff years ago. For those who want to try it, there's a live demo site that I doubt would withstand slashdotting."

Finally, mj01nir writes "According to Miguel de Icaza's web log, Chris Stone just announced that Novell will be moving the whole company to OpenOffice by the end of the year, and to Linux on the desktop a year after.

Tickenest writes "According to a Yahoo-reprinted press-release, Rockstar Games has officially announced Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, the latest in the GTA series. The press release continues: 'Developed by world-class designers Rockstar North, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas will be available exclusively for the PlayStation(R)2 computer entertainment system and is expected to be in stores in North America on October 19, 2004 and in Europe on October 22, 2004.'" This confirms earlier rumors of (initial?) PS2 exclusivity and possible name for this much-awaited game.

Aaron asks: "After last year's debacle with TurboTax's copy protection system, I want to avoid their software (even though they say they won't do it again). But after reading some of the reviews on TaxCut, it sounds a bit buggy. What tax preparation software are people using for their 2003 taxes? I've heard of TaxACT, the free tax software - is that any good? I don't suppose any decent tax software works on Linux..."

belmolis writes "In the latest episode of the The Skeptical Environmentalist affair, The New York Times reports (December 23, p. F2) that the Danish Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation has issued a critique (five-page English summary [warning: MSWord document]) of the Danish Committee on Scientific Dishonesty's condemnation of Bjorn Lomborg's book The Skeptical Environmentalist, which argued that many of the concerns of environmentalists, particularly global warming, were based on poor science. The Committee had called for Dr. Lomborg's dismissal from the Danish government agency that examines environmental regulations." (Read on below.)

"The Ministry critique holds that the Committee's procedure was unfair. It does not address the scientific issues. Lomborg's book caused outrage among many environmentalists and scientists, while right-wing organizations such as the Cato Institute have defended Lomborg. Scientific American devoted eleven pages of its January 2002 issue to a critique of Lomborg. Lomborg was only allowed to publish a one-page rebuttal, to which Scientific American replied here. When Lomborg defended himself by posting the Scientific American critique on his web site and that of Greenspirit with his commentary [PDF file] interspersed, Scientific American threatened to sue and both sites took it down. It is, however, still available at the iGreens web site."

(Slashdot ran a review of Lomborg's book early last year.)

Cobarde Anonimo writes "The Knowledge at Wharton has an interesting text about the RIAA strategy of suing its customers. As Wharton legal studies professor G. Richard Shell writes below, this same tactic was tried 100 years ago against Henry Ford. It didn't work then, and it won't work today."

jellings writes "Dennis Ritchie and Kenneth Thompson will be recipients of this years' Harold Pender Award, given "to an outstanding member of the engineering profession who has achieved distinction by significant contributions to society" by the University Of Pennsylvania School of Engineering. Under the direction of Pender, ENIAC was born, and under Ritchie and Thompson, UNIX was born."

jellings writes "Dennis Ritchie and Kenneth Thompson will be recipients of this years' Harold Pender Award, given "to an outstanding member of the engineering profession who has achieved distinction by significant contributions to society" by the University Of Pennsylvania School of Engineering. Under the direction of Pender, ENIAC was born, and under Ritchie and Thompson, UNIX was born."

jellings writes "Dennis Ritchie and Kenneth Thompson will be recipients of this years' Harold Pender Award, given "to an outstanding member of the engineering profession who has achieved distinction by significant contributions to society" by the University Of Pennsylvania School of Engineering. Under the direction of Pender, ENIAC was born, and under Ritchie and Thompson, UNIX was born."

segment writes "Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have discovered three of the faintest and smallest objects ever detected beyond Neptune. Each lump of ice and rock is roughly the size of Philadelphia and orbits just beyond Neptune and Pluto, where they may have rested since the formation of the solar system 4.5 billion years ago. The objects reside in a ring-shaped region called the Kuiper Belt, which houses a swarm of icy rocks that are leftover building blocks, or "planetesimals," from the solar system's creation. The results of the search were announced by a group led by Gary Bernstein of the University of Pennsylvania at a meeting of NASA's Division of Planetary Sciences in Monterey, Calif."

linuxizer writes "I've been poking around in Penn's Library for most of my Freshman year, looking up copyright statistics. What I found is basically what many suspected all along: extending and strengthening copyright terms has little effect on actual innovation. Perhaps most fascinating is the strong 40-year upward trend in registrations which is sharply broken in 1991 with a precipitous decline. Also included are some interesting observations about the RIAA's data. The numerous graphics should be well-enough explained that you don't need to go to the data files, but they are included if needed."

linuxizer writes "I've been poking around in Penn's Library for most of my Freshman year, looking up copyright statistics. What I found is basically what many suspected all along: extending and strengthening copyright terms has little effect on actual innovation. Perhaps most fascinating is the strong 40-year upward trend in registrations which is sharply broken in 1991 with a precipitous decline. Also included are some interesting observations about the RIAA's data. The numerous graphics should be well-enough explained that you don't need to go to the data files, but they are included if needed."

Fluorophore writes "In a recent issue of the scientific journal Nature, scientists in the lab of Homme Hellinga at Duke University reported designing proteins using a cluster of 20 computers. These proteins were then tested in the lab and shown to bind their intended targets including TNT, serotonin and lactate. This is a tremendous step for computational biology, nicely reviewed in C&E News' top story. Designer proteins such as this can be developed for bioremediation of weapons dump sites (TNT) and sensitive sensors of drugs/contaminants that can easily be grown in bacteria."

Starrider writes "It seems the DARPA grant for OpenBSD and for University of Pennsylvania has been cancelled (?) immediately and without warning. See the full story in Theo's email and on deadly.org." Theo is left to only speculate why funding was suddenly pulled. One also has to wonder what this means for the University of Pennsylvania, since they were also in for a piece of the pie.

Starrider writes "It seems the DARPA grant for OpenBSD and for University of Pennsylvania has been cancelled (?) immediately and without warning. See the full story in Theo's email and on deadly.org." Theo is left to only speculate why funding was suddenly pulled. One also has to wonder what this means for the University of Pennsylvania, since they were also in for a piece of the pie.

prostoalex writes "Discover magazine provides an interesting insight into the future technologies that will emulate the human brain. While artificial intelligence supporters always considered direct emulation of brain functions too complex and preferred the top-down approach, some people are researching the ways human brain processes data. One of the interesting discoveries, mentioned in the article, is ability of the brain to re-architect the links as new information is added."

truthsearch writes "Lawrence Lessig's weblog points to 'a page by John Mark Ockerbloom at the University of Pennsylvania listing books that are in the public domain elsewhere but not, because of the Copyright Term Extension Act, in the United States. Check out the books you are not allowed to download.' Includes books like 'Animal Farm' and '1984'."

An anonymous reader writes "In a neverending effort to spread the word about free quality online programming books, here is a Python programming book. 'How to Think Like a Computer Scientist: Learning With Python', by Allen B. Downey, Chris Meyers, and Jeffrey Elkner is a copylefted work available in multiple formats at Green Tea Press: HTML , PDF, LaTeX. Compliments of the online books what's new page."

angst_ridden_hipster asks: "Like many people, I have a bunch of machines I use regularly. These include Linux machines, BSD machines, a Mac OS X machine, and a Windows machine. These machines are on a number of networks. All have internet connectivity. Some of them are always powered on. A few of them are not. Obviously, I have a bunch of accounts. And, it goes without saying, I have a bunch of data. What are the best approaches to sharing data? I want to be able to securely access my home data while at work, and from one machine to another, etc. Opening ssh terminals is the approach I have traditionally used, but I'm beginning to wonder if some mirroring software (e.g., Unison) might be in order. It'd provide the function of backups, as well as guaranteeing availability. Would it be wiser to tunnel nfs over ssh? Or is there some better option? Assuming I actually start mirroring data across multiple machines, I'll need to organize it in a portable taxonomy. This is almost easy, since I use cygwin on the Windows machines, so I can assume a standard Unix-ish directory structure. But this gets more complicated when there are scripts or other code involved. What about application/platform-specific data? How do other people organize their data, anyway? Are there any useful standards? I'm hoping people will describe their approaches, and why they think they're (not) the best."

Lots of people and institutions have apparently good claims on the invention of the digital computer, and many more when that's reduced to just a broader definition of "computer." Few, though, have a better claim to what we think of as a digital computer than John Mauchly. Not as famous as Turing or von Neuman, and with his name no longer on any current computers, it's likely you've never heard of Mauchly (rhymes with "broccoli") -- but you almost certainly have heard of his most famous machine, and the first general-purpose large-scale electronic computer: the ENIAC. Filmmaker Paul David sorted through decades of newsreel footage, old videotape from the vaults at UNISYS and photo archives, and shot hours of new interviews with many of the people who watched and participated in Mauchly's quest. The result is a documentary film which lets the players tell their own stories: it's put together so smoothly that no omniscient narrator appears, or needs to. If you're interested in the history of computing, technology in general, or even World War II, The Computer and the Skateboard is engrossing. (Read on for more.)

The skateboard? The Computer part of the title is easy: though there are a lot of computers and proto-computers mentioned in the film, the one at its core is the ENIAC, or Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, the number-crunching roomful of glowing tubes and toggle switches built at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical Engineering in 1944.

So where does the skateboard come in? One clue to the title is flashed on-screen at the beginning of the film, an intriguing snippet from the ill-fated Omni magazine, which asserts that both the computer and the skateboard are artifacts which "accidentally dispose a culture toward anarchy." While that's a intriguing, enigmatic idea, there's another more concrete reason why he put "skateboard" in the title.

Though it's recounted only skeptically by the film's living subjects, there's a story that Mauchly invented the skateboard -- wheels mounted on a plank, as classroom apparatus rather than recreational transport -- and this claim is part of what inspired the film. David says that he "began research for this documentary around 1995 when a longtime friend mentioned casually that his granddad built the first computer. A couple of weeks later he told me that he also constructed the first skateboard. The computer thing was kind of impressive but the skateboard --that's really something." Mauchly certainly wasn't riding halfpipes, but in an alternate universe, he'd probably be a good candidate.

Mauchly didn't create the ENIAC on his own, of course: academic collaborator and eventual business partner J. Presper Eckert (his name contributed half the name of their Mauchly-Eckert Computer Co.) was an electronic genius in his own right, and would be worthy of a documentary all to himself. An enthusiastic corps of programmers, engineers and others helped, too, as did generous Army funding for the project -- but the ENIAC's conception belongs to Mauchly.

Cast of Characters Since he began researching the film in 1995, David managed to meet with many of the key participants in the history of ENIAC, and each of them fills in some of the story.

• Joe Chapline, technical writer, Eckert-Mauchly Co. Chapline calls ENIAC "The second miracle of Philadelphia," and muses aloud whether the electronic computer or the forging of the United States Constitution has had the greatest impact. Chapline played a key role early in the development of what would become ENIAC by introducing the Army to his inventor friend Mauchly, and then later by writing the ENIAC's specification document (all from diagrams, and according to Chapline in a single burst of intellectual clarity) which allowed programmers to exploit its potential.

• John Mauchly's widowed wife Kay Mauchly. Kay Mauchly (introduced on-screen only as "programmer") is one of the stars of the film, describing matter-of-factly in several of the interview segments the steps which led her husband from early investigations in meteorology to the creation of ENIAC and the machines that followed. Mrs. Mauchly is no outsider looking in: she was one of the handful of women recruited by the to work on the Army's differential analyzer, soon to be supplanted by Mauchly's electronic analyzer. Once Mauchly and his brainchild became involved, she became one of the machine's first programmers, and this is how she met her eventual husband.

• Through the miracle of videotape, John Mauchly himself. Though Mauchly died more than 20 years ago, he's represented in the film with clips taken from a 1977 videotaped interview, as well as in newsreel footage from decades before.

• Mitchell Marcus, professor of artificial intelligence at Penn. Mitchell is one of the few subjects in the film who did not participate in ENIAC's creation, but his lucid explanations of Mauchly's machine architecture is a welcome addition.

• A number of other Mauchly friends and associates who tell stories about Mauchly's enthusiastic shepherding of his years-long project.

A timeline twisted by war. John Mauchly's research into weather patterns in the 1930s required some of his students (he was teaching at Ursinus College) to tediously enter logged weather data by hand, an error-prone process under the best of circumstances. Kay Mauchly describes the key insight that led to the development of the digital computer:

"He ran into a problem, and that was the students who were copying the data didn't always copy what they saw, and if they were using an adding machine they didn't always copy down the exact answers they got, they sometimes reversed the numbers and so on. So he thought, 'Gee there must be some way we can develop some kind of a computing machine' -- well, he didn't call it a computing machine -- 'but any kind of a machine where there would not be so much operator intervention.'

"At the same time, there were some of his student friends who had been students with him at Ursinus College, who had gone into nuclear physics. They were in the process of counting cosmic rays, which occur about one million per second. How were they doing this? They were doing this by little electronic counters which they made themselves, using electronic tubes. So John went to several of their laboratories and observed this going on, and his feeling was 'Hey, if you can count cosmic rays, then you can count anything. It doesn't make any difference what you put into the machine.'"

This insight led him to construct his own counting devices at Ursinus, also using vacuum tubes. On video, Mauchly recounts his thoughts:

"If you can count, [if you can] distinguish pulses which are occurring at rates which are sometimes as close together as a millionth of second ... If you can keep track of these things, it seemed obvious to me that those same abilities of vacuum tube circuits could be used for just the mere act of computation. Generate your own pulses your own way, not have them necessarily become the result of some measurement of nature's cosmic rays or nature's nuclear experiments. Just generate your pulses on purpose to represent numbers. and then you get these counting circuits, or scaling circuits as they called them, to operate on these numbers, get them to multiply and divide as well as add and subtract. Why not? And nobody had any answers to that 'Why not?'"

In the summer of 1941, Mauchly took an electronics course at University of Pennsylvania, which is where he met J. Presper Eckert, who was in charge of his electronics laboratory course. Because Mauchly had already learned on his own many of the things taught in the course, he and Eckert found themselves free to spend most of their class time talking computers and tinkering. The Moore School offered Mauchly a teaching position after that summer, and he accepted.

Like many other colleges and universities, the University of Pennsylvania shifted focus in the early 40s from pure academics to the war effort. An Army team from the Aberdeen Proving Grounds moved in to take over Penn's Differential Analyzer in June 1942, and things began to speed up. The Differential Analyzer was a huge mechanical calculator which the Army was using to do trajectory calculations, one by tedious one.

Kay Mauchly recounts: "When Mauchly saw what the Army was using the differential analyzer for, he thought 'Oh my goodness, that's the sort of thing they could use for my computer, if they could ever get it built."

Prompted by his friend (and then-boarder) Joe Chapline, in 1942 Mauchly proposed applying his expertise with electronics to speed up the calculations being done by the Army -- an analyzer built with tubes would be far faster than any mechanically operated one. The proposal was accepted by Lt. Herman Goldstine, who headed the Aberdeen team. Mauchly and Eckert set to work, and the result was the ENIAC, a massively parallel computer that could manipulate numbers faster than any alternatives then available.

Patent Fight In 1946, the war over, the Army decided to publicize their electronic marvel, and institutions all over the world began to inquire whether they could build ENIACs of their own -- and the Moore school was suddenly famous. Looking beyond academic uses, the University of Pennsylvania saw the commercial possibilities of electronic computers. Irven Travis, a professor who had returned from his wartime service in the Navy to resume his position overseeing all patents at the University, pressed the two to sign over the commercial patent rights.

Given 10 days to sign away their rights to commercial production of similar machines, Eckert and Mauchly balked. The Moore school fired the pair -- and though they had no jobs to go to, they soon created jobs by forming their own company in a building on Philadelphia's Walnut street. Eckert and Mauchly's decision to go off on their own ended up clearing much of the department, because many of the brightest faculty decided to go with them. Even with uncertain prospects, they knew that Mauchly and Eckert were onto something.

Professor Mitchell describes the firing and subsequent departmental losses as "as fundamental error that we're still recovering from." The details of this fight are reason enough to seek out this movie for their insight into the value (and difficulty) of preserving the rights to one's own work.

The rest of the story. The company that the two stubborn Penn professors founded was called Electronic Controls Company, and in 1948 renamed Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation (EMCC). Among other things, the company introduced the world's first magnetic (rather than punchcard) computer storage. No matter how innovate, though, business was thin -- not surprising in a world where digital computers were still more curiosity than necessity -- and was sold in 1950 to Remington-Rand. Rather than ENIAC, the machines the company made now were called UNIVAC.

Mauchly left the company to form yet another (Mauchly Associates), and to head two more companies (Dynatrend and Marketrend) before his death after surgery in 1980.

This isn't Wargames. The Computer and the Skateboard is not a fancy movie in content or presentation. The story is laid out plainly, not padded with teases -- the drama is mostly in the background. The actual actors may not be universally humble, but they seem too down-to-earth to make a big deal about contributing to the Allies' victory in World War II, or changing nearly every aspect of the modern world.

There also aren't many special effects, outside of a funky sci-fi sounding background audio track; transitions between scenes are simple, and most of the interviews are quite static; the viewer is left to interpret the subjects' words on his own, with no Leonard Nimoy intoning conclusions or trying to smooth together different aspects of the narrative. David is obviously limited in parts by the quality of the original sources he was able to track down (especially the audio), and it's to his credit that he let these segments stand, because they add historical glances which might otherwise remain locked in company vaults.

The style and subject matter taken together mean that (no surprise) this film has a niche audience. I doubt my sister would much enjoy it, but my electrical-engineer father sure got a kick out of it. Watching this movie is like watching an intelligent professor tell a story without overtelling it -- your concentration will be rewarded.

The film is available for institutional viewing at $295 and at a lower price for home video. The title is also available in university libraries and repertory video stores. Readers interested in the ENIAC's history may also want to look at this excellent collection of documents available from IBM, one of the many good online resources available.

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?"

not_you asks: "Clinton, Giuliani, Bloomberg, and even Martha Stewart are rumored to only get only 4 hours of sleep on a normal night. Being a student without enough time for all the socializing (and studying) I'd like to do and lacking the ability to dream lucidly, I'd like to get the minimal amount of sleep necessary to function effectively. However, I tend to make up for anything less than about 7 hours by dozing off in class! Aside from taking espressos intravenously, how I can function effectively with less sleep?" There are several factors that affect how much sleep one can away with on a given day. Diet, activity level, and other factors all will affect how long and how well one rests. I've always heard that "nothing beats a full night of rest" and to me, that always means close to 8 hours of sleep. Of course, like most things Your Mileage May Vary, still, it would be interesting to know how much sleep some of you can get by on, and what conditions you have to maintain to keep it up. Comments?

Artifice_Eternity writes: "This NY Times article describes a new gene therapy technique, built from two of the most feared diseases known to humankind. The Ebola and HIV virii each possess qualities that are useful in getting new genes into the body, to replace defective ones. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania's Institute for Human Gene Therapy have snipped out bits from each virus, and successfully used their hybrid virus to deliver a marker gene to mice, by spraying it into their respiratory tracts. This could prove useful in treating cystic fibrosis and other genetically-caused lung diseases. Here's the IHGT's own page on the project. But: here's a Washington Post article from March on the same topic, featuring skeptical comments from Dr. Robert Gallo, co-discoverer of HIV. Gallo fears that such a hybrid could potentially combine with 'wild HIV' to produce a new contagion (airborne HIV, anyone? *cough*)."

Artifice_Eternity writes: "This NY Times article describes a new gene therapy technique, built from two of the most feared diseases known to humankind. The Ebola and HIV virii each possess qualities that are useful in getting new genes into the body, to replace defective ones. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania's Institute for Human Gene Therapy have snipped out bits from each virus, and successfully used their hybrid virus to deliver a marker gene to mice, by spraying it into their respiratory tracts. This could prove useful in treating cystic fibrosis and other genetically-caused lung diseases. Here's the IHGT's own page on the project. But: here's a Washington Post article from March on the same topic, featuring skeptical comments from Dr. Robert Gallo, co-discoverer of HIV. Gallo fears that such a hybrid could potentially combine with 'wild HIV' to produce a new contagion (airborne HIV, anyone? *cough*)."

Mr. Slippery writes: "While catching up on the RISKS Digest (ought to be mandatory reading), I leaned about the new Union for Representative International Internet Cooperation and Analysis, started by Peter G. Neumann, Lauren Weinstein, and David J. Farber, names of some significance. Their goal: "The Internet should be dedicated to the needs and well-being of people all over the world, in a truly representative and fair manner.""

dopplex writes: "Over here at Linux Today, Eric S. Raymond has written an amusing piece in which A.) He analyzes the way in which we use the word freedom, B.) Examines the point of view of both O'Reilly and the FSF on 'freedom' and C.) Coins the term 'flerbage,' which I hereby suggest be put into immediate use, just because it's a really cool word." It's cheesy but it is a good way for people to understand the difference between Open Source and Free Software. (Oh, and I figured I'd just mention that I'll never use that F word since I think its stupid)

Slyfox writes: "Do we over-value our stock options? How highly do you value your stock options? UPenn's Wharton School recently published an article based on findings from a survey of employees about stock options. They find that many employees over-value their options and often don't fully understand how their stock options work. Are companies using stock options to trick their employees into working for less compensation?"

Andy Tai writes "According to this InfoWorld column, a coalition, AFFECT, has been formed to fight UCITA (the Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act). UCITA was passed in Virginia and Maryland and is beginning to move through other state legislatures, and oppositions are needed to halt UCITA's passage. AFFECT is composed of a variety of organizations, including, from the ACM, EFF to several big companies outside the computer industry. They are calling for action and support in each state of the US. UCITA's background can be found here and how it can impact Free Software is described here."

Professor David J. Farber, a true Internet pioneer, has been featured on many of the "100 most important people online" and "visionaries to watch" lists that trendwatchers like to put out, started the famous Interesting-People e-mail list, and was an expert witness in the Microsoft antitrust trial. In real life, he's a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, but since January 2000 he has served as the FCC's Chief Technologist, a position that usually carries a one-year tenure, which means he may be leaving (literally) at any moment. What to ask? Up to you. Take a look at the linked pages first, then post questions below (one per post, please). We'll send 10 of the highest-moderated ones tomorrow, and publish Prof. Farber's answers as soon as he gets them back to us.

Professor David J. Farber, a true Internet pioneer, has been featured on many of the "100 most important people online" and "visionaries to watch" lists that trendwatchers like to put out, started the famous Interesting-People e-mail list, and was an expert witness in the Microsoft antitrust trial. In real life, he's a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, but since January 2000 he has served as the FCC's Chief Technologist, a position that usually carries a one-year tenure, which means he may be leaving (literally) at any moment. What to ask? Up to you. Take a look at the linked pages first, then post questions below (one per post, please). We'll send 10 of the highest-moderated ones tomorrow, and publish Prof. Farber's answers as soon as he gets them back to us.

Last week I came out in favor of electronic voting. Over the weekend, it turned out that its opponents' worst fears came true. Not only was some computer software buggy, but it actually threw a state election the wrong way. And though not very likely, it's even possible that this state will determine our next president! Have I changed my mind about electronic voting?

No, because the punchline is: New Mexico still uses dead trees. The bug was in the software that counts paper ballots.

New Mexico was given to Gore on election night by 6,800 votes because of buggy computer software. That software "failed to read" straight-party votes (oops!), and worse, it "also chose at least one candidate from another party."

If computer flaws had thrown an electronic-vote election, you'd be reading about it on the front page of every newspaper across the country, and pundits would be telling us (sometimes in ways very funny) how foolish we were to trust our votes to those nasty computers.

How many presidential elections does our 19th-century technology have to nearly destroy before the alternatives get serious consideration?

A friend in Sweden tells me that the U.S.A. is now being referred to as the B.R.A., the Banana Republic of America. Maybe by the 21st century we can have 20th-century voting machines installed at our polling places, what do you think?

(New Mexico could decide the election if Florida's votes are thrown out, Oregon goes to Bush, and one or two more improbabilities occur.)

Voting, right here in River(side) County Riverside County, California, used touch-screen voting in this last election. This is very different from internet voting since there was no network to the outside world. I think this is an important step and certainly should be done first.

ABC News's report describes Riverside's system and shows a photo. Randall Gardner points out that the local paper has a great story with an overview of the system and reactions from voters -- glitches, yes; late tally, yes; but all in all it sounded like a positive experience.

With a capital V and that rhymes with C and that stands for Canberra Dracophile points out an article from the Fairfax IT News website, which:

reports that voters in the Australian Capital Territory (in which our nation's capital, Canberra, lies) "could be the first in the nation to trial electronic voting at next year's territory election", according to the territory's Chief Minister, Gary Humphries. They're hoping to pass legislation next month to bring this about. Sounds cool, but the article goes on to quote Humphries as saying, "You might as well be doing it from your own home." Is it just me, or does this raise the possibility of voters being coerced into a particular vote where this sort of thing can't be seen? I'd prefer to see electronic voting available only from polling booths.

No grunge typefaces please User-interface wonks should enjoy this pure-and-simple design contest. Web Memes, Inc. is asking you to design a ballot, preferably one as unconfusing as possible while still using (spit) paper. You also get to make up your own candidates and issues.

(If the competition were digital, instead of paper, it would be a tough call between Amazon.com's new user interface and AmIPresidentOrNot.)

Busily coding your next election... ...is Jason Kitcat, who says "I'm working really hard on the next release and haven't given it the PR time it deserves." Allow me.

FREE is "Free Referenda & Elections Electronically," "the first open source system for conducting electronic votes." We're now jumping from mere electronic tallying of votes in polling places to actual internet voting, so please keep your hands inside the browser at all times.

Originally an academic thesis, FREE is now GPL'd, written in Java, and its design background is available in whitepapers. I haven't tried running it. Someone let us know if the project could be useful.

See also thebell.net, which comments:

...the majority of paper punching systems used in the U.S. do not produce repeatable results when ballots are tallied more than once, which means that election officials lack the means to objectively distinguish between fraud and error under these circumstances. ...we should in fact be looking to Internet voting systems in order to try to reduce those faults and thus provide for more security than what is available today -- not less security.

The seriously skeptical view Let's end on a sobering note. Scoffing at The Bell's claim to have tackled the subject a mere six months ago, Rebecca Mercuri points out (on Dave Farber's IP list) that others have been thinking about internet voting for over a decade. She writes:

Internet systems indeed DO promise FAR LESS in the way of auditability (recounts) and anonymity (privacy) than do the paper and other manual systems presently in place. To promote the belief that Internet voting, in any way provides a SAFE VOTE, is wholly erroneous.

She has an intimidating collection of links to (mostly) academic papers on the subject on her Electronic Voting page.

And in conclusion The only viable form of government is perl-based: we need a bicamel legislature with an eclectoral college. Thank you and good night!

And now for something completely the same! A note from timothy: The next piece in our continuing Hellmouth Revisited series is online. Feel free to go read it.

Rohan Amin asks: "What are people's thoughts on new operating systems such as NewDeal that claim to run on older machines such as 286's? Is this a powerful solution to help bring technology to those who can't afford it, especially in developing countries? NewDeal, for example, claims to have developed an operating system and office suite that will allow organizations to resurrect a large supply of unused 286/386 machines and to deploy them in international locations. Is this a sound approach? Many complain about the complexities of Linux and are turning to solutions such as this."

computer_chacham writes: "Telemann has introduced the first available PCI card for $400 that shows full HDTV resolution on your computer. It also is able to directly take the MPEG-2 HDTV signal, and store it directly on your hard drive. (About 7.7 Gigs/hour, but still ...) It is also able to output to a TV. They have a press release, and a product page. And e-town has a description too." Ready-or-not, if you watch the boob tube, you'll soon be watching HDTV -- compared to buying a new TV set, a card like this seems like a smart idea, especially at the cost of storage today and tomorrow. What are the odds it'll ship with support for any Free OSes?

Adam Turman asks: "The school where I do tech work in the summers just received a 4-processor SGI Challenge XL Irix machine. As it is a public magnet school serving eight of the poorest counties in Virginia, we have very little money to pay someone to support the machine, and none of us who work here know any Unix past 'cd' and 'ls'. As far as I know, we would not receive any money from the sale of the machine. So, I have to ask: What is this computer best suited doing? Would it be better to hire someone who knows IRIX or learn it ourselves? How much would we need to pay a good systems administrator? Forgive my ignorance of UNIX and related subjects, but I feel that Slashdot is the best place to get ideas for what to do with this system." Any admins nearby looking to donate some time to a worthy cause?

"Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue." No, that's for a wedding. For Slashback, try something more like "Something about Intel, something about Mattel, something about TiVO,something about England." Much less romantic, but quite a bit more fun to read.

Alright mister, I'll see your accusatory bluster and raise you a page of cogent explanation. Our own Jamie McCarthy points out: "[Matthew Scala, one] of the authors of cphack has written a very extensive FAQ about the program and his settlement with Cyber Patrol/Mattel." Here's the link to the Cyber Patrol break FAQ.

This just in from Georgetown: Pat Ramsey, omniscient Mac-support guru at Southwestern University (The original University of Texas) participated in the recent ResNet 2000 conference, and wrote with some clarification about the recent Slashdot story on Simson Garfinkle's recommendations on ftp, telnet and other common protocols.

I submitted a blurb on Sunday about Simson Garfinkle keynoting the Resnet 2000 Symposium in Philadelphia. Being there at the conference, I can say that Rob's take on the Chronicle article is a little off. Garfinkle gave a presentation intended to raise awareness of how insecure most campuses are.Telnet and ftp protocols are just two examples of services that use clear-text passwords. He believes that that practice should be banned. Clear-text passwords are too easily sniffed.

But telnet and ftp were just two examples of things that campuses should look at. Even bigger, and the article didn't convey this with it's somewhat sensational headline, is the lack of policies that say in writing what is done with data that is inconspicuously gathered. Search engine queries, cookies, packet sniffs, Cisco Netflow logs, tcpdumps, etc.

This seemed to be of more importance then eliminating telnet and ftp.

Especially good for anyone who didn't read the full text of the article linked to; ftp and telnet may be great protocols, but Garfinkel is arguing they're less suitable than their more secure counterparts. Thanks, Pat!

14 hours ought to be enough for -- oh, nevermind. undef24 writes: "A followup to a slashdot story posted earlier this week. They've published a way to upgrade a 14-hour Tivo to 52 hours on the AVS Forum." The directions are thorough, but these guys make no bones about what TiVO will think of your mucking about in the guts of your previously-sealed machine. And it raises the inevitable, recurrent question: how close is an off-the-shelf Linux hobbyist version that has the same function?

For once, technical information is slightly flashier than the product name. Maro Shim writes "What's Up With Willamette? (Part 1, Part2), a two-part article, is a good one for understanding Willamette, (i.e. Pentium 4) architecture, which is the next generation x86 processor design from Intel. It includes a description of the development roots of Willamette and the basics of how its organization and operation differs from earlier P6 generation processors. In Part 2, he examines the new technology and features of Willamette in more detail and speculate on its implementation, operational characteristics, and performance. This is a must read for CPU enthusiast."

Flashes of Doh from the other side of the pond. Builder writes "Hi. A while back I used the stand.org.uk service to fax my MP. Today I got a reply back. Some things scare me about the reply. It is almost as if my MP refuses to believe the things we and other large groups of people (ISP's, Consumer groups, etc.) have been saying. ... I've posted the letter, as well as a quick disection about why this whole thing (The bill, my reply and the attitude in general) scares me so much. It can be found at http://www.penguinpowered.org.uk/stand/index.html

If you haven't got involved yet, please do so now! Lobby your MP. Make a noise! Remember, the squeaky wheel gets the grease..."

Tell me this wasn't inevitable. nutty writes pointing out that the Connectix lawsuit dropped by Sony has been refiled. Legal maneuvering? War of attrition against those who dare oppose the marketing might of the PlayStation behemoth? Sony!? I wish this one were tougher to believe.

If you're a regular Slashdot reader, you've heard about UCITA by now. You have probably also gathered that many prominent spokespeople for the open source and free software communities, most notably Richard Stallman, don't like it. UCITA already passed in Virginia, but the governor hasn't yet signed it into law. Here in Maryland, where I live, UCITA is still under consideration. I'm working hard to block it, and I'm not alone. But this story is not as much about Virginia and Maryland as it is about the way UCITA is being "sold" to state legislatures all over the U.S. and how you can work effectively in your state to keep it from becoming the Law of the Land.

Let's start with Virginia. There, UCITA has been passed by the Legislature and is awaiting signature by Governor Jim Gilmore. But all is not yet lost. Skip Lockwood of 4cite.org says, "It is very important that the Governor, the Speaker of the House and the President of the Senate all hear from dissatisfied consumers. Virginia has really put the 'horse before the cart' with the passage of this law. Call, e-mail and fax so that legislators know what a mistake they have made." And UCITA isn't scheduled to go into force in Virginia until next year, so there may be time to undo the damage. It's worth a try, certainly, even though UCITA is backed heavily both by Microsoft and Virginia's own "star" online business, AOL.

In Maryland, UCITA is is by no means a done deal. As House Bill #19 and Senate Bill #142, it is still being considered by legislative committees. This means UCITA could conceivably still be stopped in Maryland even before it came to a vote, although the forces working to push it through are both mighty and well-financed. One state senator told me this was the first time he'd ever seen actual lobbyists from Microsoft, in person, in Annapolis (Maryland's state capital). Many highly-paid "local" lobbyists are also cruising the legislative halls, busily telling the politicians why UCITA is a must-pass piece of legislation.

But apparently the lobbyists and their masters never told Maryland legislators exactly what UCITA was all about. I called the offices of all 13 members of the House of Delegates who are co-sponsoring Maryland UCITA, House Bill 19, and not one of them or any of their staff members to whom I spoke could tell me honestly that they had read the whole thing. All most of them seem to have read was this synopsis:

Adopting the Maryland Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act; establishing provisions of law applicable to agreements to create, modify, transfer, or distribute computer software, computer data and databases, Internet and online information, and computer information and products; establishing provisions of law applicable to licensing of computer information; etc.

But the bill goes just a little bit beyond this. If you have time (it's about 85 printed pages), here's the entire UCITA text.

Quite a difference, eh? If you actually read all the way through the document, you now know more than most of the Maryland legislators who are tasked with deciding whether or not it should be made into law.

The way things work here in Maryland - and in many other states - is that the heaviest political leaders call lesser politicians to whose campaigns they have donated or for whom they have done other favors and say, "I'm sending you a bill I want passed." If the lesser politician knows what's good for him or her, he or she salutes and follows orders, especially on somthing like UCITA, which is not an issue most ordinary citizens either understand or care about.

In my opinion, the single most politically powerful elected official in the State of Maryland is Casper R. Taylor, Jr., speaker of the House of Delegates. He consistently has one of the largest campaign fund "war chests" in the state and freely shares lucre from it with other legislators who support him. Mr. Taylor has personally assured me that the large sums of money he solicits - and gets - from assorted industry groups and other big donors do not influence his votes or buy his support. (I did not laugh out loud when he said this only because I am a professional journalist and have developed the ability to listen to almost any kind of outrageous statement without showing emotion. Please don't try this at home.)

Wherever you live in the U.S. (or almost anywhere else) there is a primary power broker like Taylor, and it is this person upon whom the Microsofts and AOLs and the Business Software Alliance and the rest of the big-money crowd will concentrate their efforts (and lavish funds). But don't think that people like Taylor are evil. They usually aren't, down deep inside, and if they get enough reasonable citizen input that opposes the lobbyists' desires, they can often be persuaded to do the right thing.

Guys like Casper Taylor actually like hearing from citizens; if they weren't basically gregarious and outgoing they wouldn't have gone into politics in the first place. If you don't believe me, give Casper a friendly call. His office phone number is 410-841-3800. If you don't live in Maryland, consider this a practice call for the UCITA fight that is likely to take place in your state sometime in the next year or two.

There are several things to bear in mind when calling a politician to express your opinion. The first is that yelling and acting nutsy gets you nowhere. Be sane and have *real reasons* handy for your opinion - and no, "because Richard Stallman doesn't like it" is not a good reason, because RMS is not widely-known in political circles. You need facts like the ones on this page. The second is to make sure you don't just say "UCITA." You need to refer to the correct bill number, in this case House Bill 19. Even if you speak to the lowest of Casper's underlings, and they only give you the chance to say, "I just want to ask Speaker Taylor to please withdraw his support for House Bill 19 because it is bad for consumers and will inhibit open source software development," you have done a good and valuable thing. A hundred brief calls can be worth more than $1000 in Microsoft lobbying money even if you feel like you haven't done much or that you were barely listened to.

Note that I mention phone calls, not e-mail. Politicians are generally more receptive to calls than to e-mails. They also like faxes (Taylor's fax number is 410-841-1138), but e-mail is still valid, as long as you only send one or two polite ones to each elected official you want to reach. (If you want to use Casper for a practice e-mail, send it to casper_taylor@house.state.md.us.)

So we've contacted the most powerful guy. Fine. But there are other leaders who should also hear from you. In Maryland, in this case, some of the most important are Governor Parris Glendening, Senate President Mike Miller (to whom you should mention Senate Bill 142, not House Bill 19), and Comptroller William Donald Schaefer. All of them have complete contact information on their Web pages, as do almost all public officials everywhere.

If you live in Maryland, besides these people, you'll want to contact the representatives from your district. Find them here. If you live in another state and want to find out if UCITA is about to become a burning issue there, check this page. And, no matter where you live in the U.S., here's a list of state and local government Web sites that can not only help you fight UCITA, but help you find out what your elected officials are up to in general, and who to contact if you have a beef or want to get something done.

Dealing with politics and politicians can often make you feel like you're pushing into a wall of warm fuzz, especially if you spend most of your time dealing with machine-style logic where each specific cause has a specific effect. And I don't know about you, but reading the lawyer jargon in which most proposed laws are written gives me a headache.

But if you and I and a bunch of other people don't take the trouble to go through this headache over UCITA and other legislative actions that directly affect our lives and livings, rest assured that Microsoft and the other companies and industry groups on "the other side" will keep slogging along, making sure their views get heard as loudly and strongly and often as possible.

And when your legislators hear from the industry groups and lobbyists over and over, and hear nothing from you, they will not only pass UCITA and other laws you don't like, but they'll be perfectly justified when they smugly say, afterwards, "Almost everyone I heard from about this matter was in favor of it!"

Telecommunications coder since the 1960s, outspoken professor, and testifier in the Microsoft trial David J. Farber has been named the chief technologist at the FCC. Currently at U-Penn he is working on high-speed networking and distributed computing. Those on his "Interesting People" mailing list know him to be on the cutting edge of the tech memepool. I'll rest a little easier knowing he's "on the inside."

Anoop Sarkar writes "Interesting article in Gaming news about how Sony and Toshiba are likely to compete with Wintel in the near future (not just for the gaming market). I heard about it first on the Marketplace morning report on NPR. The actual release is sometime today so more news should be on its way. We need a Linux port to Playstation 2!" In related news, Intel is working on Pentium III only sites which will not only use KNI, but also that... cough! Serial Number.