Slashdot Mirror

real gumby writes "Shades of E.E. "Doc" Smith! Thomas Gee has made an 802.11 antenna from an old floppy disk and a paper clip. He credits this site for the inspiration (featuring an antenna from an old ice cream spoon). As MacPlus comments: "It's stylish, effective, and doesn't detract from that `everything computing' ambience in your home."" Warning: French. Update: 06/07 18:27 GMT by T : (Not Fremch ;))

mrpuffypants writes "Reported in the Austin-American Statesman: The University of Texas' security was compromised over the weekend, leaking out nearly 60,000 records on students, staff, and faculty. Official word from the school can be found here. Most troubling of all is that, like most schools, UT still uses SSNs for student ID numbers, and that was part of the information taken from them in the attack."

mrpuffypants writes "Reported in the Austin-American Statesman: The University of Texas' security was compromised over the weekend, leaking out nearly 60,000 records on students, staff, and faculty. Official word from the school can be found here. Most troubling of all is that, like most schools, UT still uses SSNs for student ID numbers, and that was part of the information taken from them in the attack."

Mike Siekkinen writes "This optical camouflage project is pretty interesting. It contains three videos demonstrating it in action. Basically they overlay a video projection of what the background behind the object to be camouflaged looks like. So if you were standing in front of a book shelf an image of the portion of the bookshelf you are blocking would be projected on to you. The results are probably better than you would expect."

Mike Siekkinen writes "For those that have ever wondered how many different subatomic particles are currently classified, here is your answer. It provides a well organized Flash chart of fundamental particles and interactions, as well as printable JPEGs and PDFs. Now you can keep your fermions and your bosons straight. The site also has another chart depicting the history of the universe, highlighting the evolution of the subatomic world."

ender's_shadow writes "Here are notes taken by myself and a fellow UT law school student during the File Sharing Symposium at the University of Texas, mentioned recently on Slashdot. The first set of notes is here, and the second is here. The first set of notes is more summary-based, while the second is a pretty good transcription of the statements of the panel. Happy reading!" (OpenOffice is a good way to open these RTF documents.)

ender's_shadow writes "Here are notes taken by myself and a fellow UT law school student during the File Sharing Symposium at the University of Texas, mentioned recently on Slashdot. The first set of notes is here, and the second is here. The first set of notes is more summary-based, while the second is a pretty good transcription of the statements of the panel. Happy reading!" (OpenOffice is a good way to open these RTF documents.)

Gary Chapman at the University of Texas writes "Congressman Lamar Smith of the 21st Congressional District in Texas, which takes in San Antonio and part of Austin, has assembled a remarkable panel of influential speakers to address the issue of file-sharing on college and university campuses. The event will be Friday, October 11, from 9 a.m until 10:30 at the Bass Lecture Hall in the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin." Read on below for more details, especially if you're one of the thousands of UT students in the dorms.

"The panelists will be:

• Steve Griffin, Chairman and CEO of StreamCast Networks
  
• Robert Holleyman, President and CEO of the Business Software Alliance
  
• Douglas Lowenstein, President of the Interactive Digital Software Association
  
• Michael Merhej, President of Audiogalaxy.com
  
• Cary Sherman, President of the Recording Industry Association of America
  
• Gigi Sohn, President of Public Knowledge
  
• Daniel A. Updergrove, Vice President for Information Technology, University of Texas
  
• Jonathan Zuck, President of the Association for Competitive Technology

I will be the moderator for this event. For more information or to RSVP, send mail to jessica.marfurt@mail.house.gov.

Here is a map to the LBJ School at the University of Texas in Austin. The Bass Lecture Hall is in the basement of the building."

Order writes "Edsger Wybe Dijkstra, one of the founding fathers of computer science and the author of the famous "Go To Considered Harmful", has died on Aug. 6, 2002 after a long struggle with cancer."

orn writes "Rep. Lampson introduced a bill (pdf) (H.R. 4742) to the House on May 16th for a human space exploration initiative. I haven't heard a peep about it from the popular press, just a few articles on various space sites: SpaceRef's, the Planetary Society's, the Mars Society's. If you're interested in the sort of thing (and you live in the U.S.), contact your representative and let them know! While you're at it, figure out how to get the popular press aware of this..." On a related note is a story dicussing the controversy over whether the Moon should be developed, which seems a little premature to me.

jonerik writes "Following up on today's story on the Soviet Union's massive N1 rocket are these two articles on the latest US and Russian rocket designs. Space.com covers the American side of things, with a story on Lockheed Martin's Atlas 5 and Boeing's Delta 4 boosters. The Associated Press has this article on the Russians' Rokot booster, originally built in the '70s as the SS-19 ICBM and converted to civilian use in the mid-'90s. The Rokot was in the news this past weekend when it successfully launched a pair of US-German satellites - dubbed Tom and Jerry - into orbit to map the Earth's gravitational field and 'chart large-scale movements of water around Earth.'"

James Evans writes: "NASA has successfully launched GRACE (http://www.csr.utexas.edu/grace/). The Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment uses 2 satellites, which communicate via a microwave ranging system, in an effort to map the Earth's gravity fields with amazing accuracy." Update: 03/18 02:37 GMT by T : secondsun points to this CNN story on the project as well.

James Evans writes: "NASA has successfully launched GRACE (http://www.csr.utexas.edu/grace/). The Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment uses 2 satellites, which communicate via a microwave ranging system, in an effort to map the Earth's gravity fields with amazing accuracy." Update: 03/18 02:37 GMT by T : secondsun points to this CNN story on the project as well.

texatut asks: "With the computer industry in a slump, many college CS students nearing graduation are looking at pretty meek prospects. While 'formally' educated, few actually have concrete experience dealing with development of software. Many would like to have something concrete to put down on their resume or application to graduate school. However, starting their own project is a hard and time-consuming task. Obviously, the Open Source community is a perfect place for us to get our hands dirty. My question is, are there any resources that can help people with varying levels of experience connect with development teams in a way that would benefit both the project and the students?"

Emery Berger asks: "I'm a PhD. student at the University of Texas and the author of Hoard, an open source memory allocator for multiprocessors. After posting information about the latest pre-release to the Hoard mailing list, I received a cease-and-desist letter from Microquill, Inc., which markets memory management software, calling for me to stop distributing Hoard. They are claiming that my latest version of Hoard, which does DLL patching when running on Windows, infringes on their patent (which actually dynamically rewrites arbitrary executables). Because DLL patching is prior art and my technique is quite different from theirs, I think I'm in the clear. However, if anyone knows of systems from 1996 or earlier based on DLL patching (or any dynamic rewriting of a running executable), especially to change the memory allocator, that would really help."

Emery Berger asks: "I'm a PhD. student at the University of Texas and the author of Hoard, an open source memory allocator for multiprocessors. After posting information about the latest pre-release to the Hoard mailing list, I received a cease-and-desist letter from Microquill, Inc., which markets memory management software, calling for me to stop distributing Hoard. They are claiming that my latest version of Hoard, which does DLL patching when running on Windows, infringes on their patent (which actually dynamically rewrites arbitrary executables). Because DLL patching is prior art and my technique is quite different from theirs, I think I'm in the clear. However, if anyone knows of systems from 1996 or earlier based on DLL patching (or any dynamic rewriting of a running executable), especially to change the memory allocator, that would really help."

overThruster writes: "No, you don't need to drink the water... Gravity is less strong in India--enough so that you weigh almost 1% less there. See BBC story about NASA's gravity map." Here's another story about the mission, and the GRACE home page (or NASA's less-informative page).

Markgor writes: "There is an article in Wired News today about a group of students at the University of Alabama (Huntsville) who entered into the 2001 ASCE/MBT National Concrete Canoe Competition with a canoe that was built to achieve forward propulsion through matching natural resonance."

"Normally, if two objects share an exact natural resonance, the excited vibrations would usually lead the weaker object to fall apart, much like the Tacoma Narrows Bridge did when the equal frequencies of the wind and the structure of the bridge matched. However, since the canoe was designed with a special mix of concrete, it was flexible enough to withstand the vibrations and harnessed it into forward propulsion. They're now talking about its possible use in space, such as interplanetary probes using natural resonance to propel itself."

jonabbey writes: "After five and a half years of development, we have just released Ganymede 1.0. Ganymede is a GPL'ed metadirectory system, that allows you to put an NDS or Active Directory style concurrent GUI in front of your network's NIS, LDAP, Windows NT PDC, Samba, and even DNS directory services. Ganymede 1.0 comes with a userKit to support password synchronization to UNIX, Windows NT, and Samba. The Ganymede clients work anywhere Java does, and have been tested on Linux, BSD, Solaris, Windows NT, Mac OS, and OS/2."

Lightborn writes: "From the Web site: "Eidola is a representation-independent, object-oriented, visual programming language. Eidola is an experiment which takes a wild new approach to the structure and representation of programming languages. Traditional programming languages are heavily tied to their representation as textual source code, which is unfortunate -- text is a very poor notation system for the concepts of a high-level language. An Eidola program, however, exists independent of any representation; its "fundamental" form is as a set of carefully defined mathematical abstractions."" We're confused, yet intrigued.

Stranger4U writes "NASA and the Texas Space Grant Consortium have this program which gives undergraduate college students a chance to design a zero-g experiment and then fly it on their special KC-135 "Vomit Comet." The Vomit Comet is flown in thirty parabolic loops, each loop having a thirty-second period of near zero gravity."

Lightborn writes: "The Big Ball of Mud Development Model examines exactly why so many projects (software and otherwise) end up looking like a bowl of spaghetti. A good list of things not to do when developing a project."

laborit writes: "U.S. News & World Report is running a piece on nanotech computing. It's surprising to see such a serious treatment in a major publication. And such an optimistic one -- Hybrid-nano computers in 15 months! (for more on this, see the interview at Earthfiles.

laborit writes "FNwire has posted an interview with Jeeves of ask.com. Evidently that "unique natural language engine with a proprietary knowledgebase isn't too great for questions like "bees? I don't understand." " Check out the archived pdf of this for more information.

phlako66 asks: "I am one of the creators of a large tutorial created for a university to teach undergraduates 'information literacy' skills. Recently we have received a lot of interest from other institutions about licensing our tutorial for use on their campuses. From its inception the creators have been determined to keep the content free to students from any institution. Current interest in the tutorial though has forced us to investigate further issues of copyright and intellectual property. We are considering making the content of the tutorial available under the Open Content Licence. I think that the Open Content License is perfect for an academic setting and can actually aid the further growth and proliferation of intellectual content. However, I'm not sure what the university is going to say about this, and was wondering if anyone had any similar experience with academic institutions and such licenses, or could foresee any potential problems with this type of licensing for large Web sites?"

Hacksworth writes "LinuxPPC, Inc. has released their first boxed product of their distribution of Linux for PowerPC computers. " Congrats to the guys working there. A lot of hard work has been put in over at LinuxPPC and it's nice to see the progress.

jblackman asks: "I'm a big user of ICQ, AIM, and their ilk, but it recently occured to me that they're probably completely insecure. I'd like to continue using messaging programs, but I'd hope to have at least the option of encrypting my communication. Are there any ideas on how to accomplish this? "

SEWilco writes "Lunar Prospector survived dead batteries caused by eclipse. Shoemaker will hit the moon at 09:51 GMT [05:51 EDT], July 31 1999. At least 21 telescopes will be watching for a water or dust plume. Amateur astronomers see lunarimpact.com. "

Finally a chance to break in my cheesy little "Quickies" icon *grin*. First up is Miguel "Mr GNOME" de Icaza who wrote in to point us at Open Resources which looks like a pretty nice site. NiceGuy wrote in to say that Propaganda 6 is out if you happen to be sick of your desktop- some of the finest textures I've seen yet. Rob Biggs wrote in to say that Transmetta has opened up their website. *cough*. Aurik sent us linkage to some geek toys like a plasma fire saber and mass drivers and rail guns Jowey wrote in to say that ReBoot has been bought by the cartoon network and will be re-aired. Now I gotta get a dish. broken sent us a link to the Pig Dance. Is anyone else really sick of these? Brian Fair sent us linkage to a sticker that I guess you could put on your big truck if you have one. Those things amuse me. I've seen them with Ford Logos and stuff, I guess it was only a matter of time. Ah well, thats it for me. I'm gonna wail on some badly tuned power chords, watch Futurama and just take it easy for a bit.

ABC wrote in to say that Matt Drudge has article saying that 60 Minutes will have a sneak preview for Star Wars, the Phantom Menace on Sunday with some new clips. Not nearly as scary as the rumors floating around that some company in Amsterdam has a bootleg 5 1/2 hour unedited cut of the flick and will be airing it soon. Anyone have info that isn't in dutch?

Snoop Baron writes " The Java Lobby is holding a poll on their front page along with a discussion thread on the question: Should Sun make Java open source? Expect a lot of Java stories next week as the Java Business Expo starts on Monday. Of particular interest are the Java World awards, where many products that run on Linux are finalists: IBM Research's Jikes, Tower J's fast commercial native Java compiler, the GPL'd Kaffe VM, Metroworks' IDE (soon), JDK 1.2 (soon). It's interesting how stong IBM's showing is with 7 entries beating Sun's 5.

teletron has this seasonal question to pose to you all: "Greetings. Are there any really good places on the net to buy goods ranging from home appliances to boomerangs? I'd like to try to do all my X-mas shopping online, or at least compare, this year and need a few places to start. Anyone got any ideas?" The short answer: there are several! Which ones are the best?

Wesley Felter writes "Sun has released a draft of their Jini(TM) Technology Public License (JTPL). I'm not sure if it meets the Open Source(TM) Definition or not. Also, Sun's Alan Baratz says that even though Java is not Open Source, it is open enough, because any company with piles of money can suggest changes. RMS is qutoed as as saying that it's too late for Sun to fix their mistake." You know, I fear the whole NPL/MPL deal has brought about a new dillemma - a plethora of different but similar identical licenses that all meet the Debian Free Software Guidlines (DFSG) definition (also the Open Source guidlines).

Brett Watson writes "Opensource.org have updated their web pages. Most of it isn't new to Slashdot readers, except perhaps a link to a White Paper on UNIX vs NT by an MS Certified NT Professional that I haven't seen referred to anywhere else. Sample quote: "Why Windows NT Server 4.0 continues to exist in the enterprise would be a topic appropriate for an investigative report in the field of psychology or marketing, not an article on information technology. Technically, Windows NT Server 4.0 is no match for any UNIX operating system, not even the non-commercial BSDs or Linux." Ouch. "

Snoop Baron writes " Sun has put up an article in honor of Java's 3rd official Birthday (May 23, 1998). It gives a brief history of the technology up till today. I think it's definetly worth a read. "

Snoop Baron wrote in to tell us that W3C has released a working draft for a system to let web sites more cleanly collect personal info, without forcing visitors into coughing up personal details that they don't want to share. You can read more here.

Snoop Baron wrote in to tell us that Project Heresey now has round 3 of their series on Linux online. I haven't listened to it yet (I'll do it tomorrow on the T1 at the office :) For those of you who live on the Dark Side of the Moon, PH is Builder.com's test to see if normal users can function purely in Linux. You can see PH3 on news.com