Slashdot Mirror

Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Ryan Vogt writes in the Mercury News that Shakespeare described death as 'the undiscovere'd country, from whose bourn no traveller returns.' Did you know there is a the miraculous way to resuscitate tabs sent to the 'undiscovere'd country,' a sort of Ctrl-Z for the entire Internet, that means 'no more called-out cusswords, no more wishing the back button had you covered when, aiming to click on a tab, you accidentally hit the little X on the tab's starboard.' For Macs: Command [plus] shift [plus] t reopens the last tab. For PCs: Ctrl [plus] Shift [plus] T. 'Try it right now. Close this tab and bring it back. I dare ya.' Melia Robinson's trick [described for Chrome] works in Firefox and Internet Explorer, too, so clumsy mousing won't send the the E*Trade tab you mistakenly closed all cued up to sell those 10,000 shares of stock or your long political post on your uncle's Facebook page on a one-way trip to the undiscovere'd country in those browsers, either." No guarantees on the stock trading.

palegray.net noted a wired story about an industry trend towards watermarking and away from DRM. It says "With all of the Big Four record labels now jettisoning digital rights management, music fans have every reason to rejoice. But consumer advocates are singing a note of caution, as the music industry experiments with digital-watermarking technology as a DRM substitute. Watermarking offers copyright protection by letting a company track music that finds its way to illegal peer-to-peer networks. At its most precise, a watermark could encode a unique serial number that a music company could match to the original purchaser. So far, though, labels say they won't do that: Warner and EMI have not embraced watermarking at all, while Sony's and Universal's DRM-free lineups contain "anonymous" watermarks that won't trace to an individual." Here is a Technical discussion on AudioBox and PSU.edu's Abstract Index

neutralino writes "The Associated Press is reporting that Google has agreed to censor results in China. According to the article, 'Google officials characterized the censorship concessions in China as an excruciating decision for a company that adopted "don't be evil" as a motto. But management believes it's a worthwhile sacrifice.'"

dr. loser writes "The CERN newsletter reports that a new paper by scientists at the University of Victoria has demonstrated that one of the prime observational justifications for the existence of dark matter can be explained without any dark matter at all, by a proper use of general relativity! What does this imply for cosmology and particle physics, both of which have been worrying about other aspects of dark matter?"

ehb asks: "With all the (r)evolutions going on in networking (IPv6), video (MPEG4/H.264) and audio (MPEG4 AAC), I was wondering what happened to that big image compression promise of some years ago: JPEG2000. According to the official JPEG2000 page, although the entire standard not is completed, the important parts are, which would allow JPEG2000 to function as a still-image replacement for the old JPEG! I have seen lists of software programs that implement (parts?) of the JPEG2000 specification, but missed the important ones (web browsers, etc). There even exists an Open source implementation of the codec, so what is holding everything back? The benefits over normal JPEGs are huge, so can someone shed some light on the hold-up?" Back in April of 2002, JPEG2000 was "coming soon", and it was touted as being the "the future of imaging", but after that the hype seems to have dried up. What happened to this promising specification? Did another format surpass it (PNG, perhaps)?

Wynken de Word writes "An article in Canada's Globe and Mail says 'vineyard owner Don King is coaxing 30,000 plants to grow grapes of exactly the right colour, size and sweetness to produce great ice wine and other fine vintages...with the help of judicious watering, a knowledge of the age-old art of viniculture -- and electronic sensing devices linked together in a wireless network.' Using an Intel-based TinyOS and TinyDB, multiple sensing devices monitor grape micro climates and help determine irrigation and frost patterns."

trotski writes "In its day, Ultima 7 was one of the most complex and detailed RPG's ever made. Lets put it this way, in 1992 it required 20 mb of hard drive space and a 386 processor; cutting edge equipment that at the time retailed at well over $2000. Unfortunatly, until now getting Utlima 7 to run properly under win9X or worse, win2K or XP was heart-breaking. Fortunatly, someone has designed a utility that allows you to run this program under all versions of Windows as well as Linux! Very exciting for people out there who want to play this classic." Actually, Linux support seems to be only hypothetical at this point; along with the link to download the code is a note that says "Anyone who wishes to study the source code, or to port it to Linux or any other OS, is welcome to download this file."

trotski writes "The Globe and Mail is running an article about the discovery of a magnetar star by Canadian astronomers. The star, named SGR 1806-20, is located 40,000 light-years from earth. This neutron star is one of only four magnetars ever discovered. Magnetars are characterized by their huge magnetic fields, billions of times stronger than any magnets on Earth. Apparently, if this star was located as far away as the moon, it could demag floppy disks and suck change right out of your pocket."

thepooleboy writes: "The Globe and Mail has an article about a Toronto area company that has perfected 'Unbreakable Encryption' using the Vernam Cipher." The idea is to use as a one-time pad a large number generated by equations sent with an initial (proprietary) exchange which takes place when users connect to an equipped server. Since real one-time pads' numbers are by definition random and known in advance to both sender and receiver, though, the company seems to be playing fast-and-loose with their terms.

Mycroft writes: "There's a new entrant into the open source DVD legal battle: Dolby Laboratories. The NetBSD Project received this letter demanding that links to the open source ac3dec package be removed. What's next?" Probably what's next are yet more letters sent to every other project which enables decoding of content on platforms unsupported by the format licensors. Remember, you don't buy anything anymore -- you license it.

Losing my love of PERL asks: "OK, here's the skinny: I've been trying to figure this out for quite a while now, and nothing is working. I need to send a proper e-mail attachment (i.e. something that will show up as a paper clip in Outlook) from an NT command line to be called by a PERL script (or better yet, just sent by the script). I've tried several modules and programs, including Blat, Mail::Sender, Mail::Sendmail, but every time the attachment is just shoved into the body of the e-mail. Does anyone have a solution to my problems?"

richard writes "CNN has an interesting article on companies racing to support Linux. " Talks about HP, IBM, LinuxCare and a few other odds and ends. Slanted somewhat oddly, but it ends on an (again mixed) high note.

The Laughing Fool wrote in to tell us that the GGI project is currently considering moving to BSD as the primary platform. (GGI is a fast library of functions for video and sound. Sorta like DirectX) TLF sent in this link where he talks about this. There are a lot of hard feelings here, and a lot of bruised egos. And there is some cool ideas that need a home. No matter what happens, I hope both BSD and Linux get GGI.

The Laughing Fool wrote in to tell us that the GGI project is currently considering moving to BSD as the primary platform. (GGI is a fast library of functions for video and sound. Sorta like DirectX) TLF sent in this link where he talks about this. There are a lot of hard feelings here, and a lot of bruised egos. And there is some cool ideas that need a home. No matter what happens, I hope both BSD and Linux get GGI.