Slashdot Mirror

generic-man writes "According to PVRBlog, TiVo's new operating system update enables content protection flags on a per-show basis. On some programs, notably syndicated shows, a red flag appears to indicate that the copyright holder has requested that TiVo devices not save a program past a certain date and that the program may not be copied to a PC using TiVo to Go. TiVo users were told to expect this style of flag only on pay-per-view and video on demand programming, and as such are upset that TiVo has restricted the capabilities of the receivers they bought and subscribed to use. The TiVo Community boards have some screen shots and firsthand accounts."

generic-man writes "According to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Carnegie Mellon University has announced this year's inductees for the Robot Hall of Fame. On October 11, the Hall welcomes Robby the Robot from Forbidden Planet, Astroboy, C3PO, Honda's ASIMO, and a 'pioneering mobile robot called Shakey.' They join R2D2. the Mars Pathfinder rover, and other robots from the class of 2003."

Thanks to Gamesindustry.biz for their article discussing the latest Japanese console hardware sales, in which it's revealed that the GameCube marginally outsold the PlayStation 2 this week, by 35,600 units to 35,300 units, largely "thanks to the release of Namco's RPG Tales of Symphonia", whose success we mentioned a couple of days back. Unfortunately, the third major console fared less well: "The picture was a little less bright for the Xbox, which slipped behind the PSone in the rankings again - selling 650 units to the PSone's 960. In market share terms, it was only one tenth of a percentage point ahead of Bandai's SwanCrystal. Ouch."

generic-man writes "Hot off the heels of buying Altavista, Overture today announced it would buy Fast Search. Fast Search, a Norwegian company which manages AllTheWeb.com, will get $70 million in cash with up to $30 million in performance bonuses over the next three years. The deal is expected to close by April."

Jason Weill asks: "After finishing up school, I'm transitioning away from my school-run IMAP e-mail account. During my time, I managed to save thousands of messages in dozens of subfolders in my 'Inbox' hierarchy. Pine lets me save an entire folder to a file easily. Mozilla creates a folder tree when I drag 'Inbox' into a local repository, but none of the messages in the subfolders are downloaded. Opera M2 assimilates all those messages into my collection, but it flattens them all into one giant mess. Are there any scripts or programs that can easily export an entire folder tree to files or import it into a local repository for an e-mail program?"

Jason Weill writes "MSNBC has a slightly premature review of Palm's brand-new Tungsten models. These models, currently (as of 11:10 PM EST Sunday) unavailable on Palm's own web site, are the Tungsten T and Tungsten W. The Tungsten T includes a fold-out Graffiti area, new cross-key keypad, 144 MHz ARM processor, Palm OS 5, a 320x320 full-color screen, and 16 MB of on-board RAM. At $499, it's more expensive than most handhelds currently on the market. The Tungsten W replaces the Graffiti area with a thumb keyboard and includes GSM/GPRS phone capabilities. Unlike the Handspring Treo devices, the Tungsten W only works with a handset -- you can't put it up to your ear. The Tungsten W will cost $549, although most American service providers will subsidize at least part of the cost. These models will officially be unveiled Monday, October 28."

Slashback with more on ridiculously equipped PCs, Telstra's ambivalent stance on equipping its thousands of desktops, California's state-sponsored Oracle oversell, and more -- read on for the details.

Your school or mine? Francis Esmonde-White writes "Dr. Joe Schwarcz (aka 'Dr. Joe' on the discovery channel & Montreal radio station CJAD), Dr. Ariel Fenster, and Dr. David Harpp at McGill have been running the OCS (Office for Chemistry and Society) for some time now. Their view is that it is academia's responsibility to communicate science to the public. One such facet of this has been to put up a series of lectures available freely through the internet.

I thought this may be interesting in light of MIT's OpenCourseWare, and that there are other major online university education projects around... even if they aren't on the same scale. In any case, here is your chance to learn about all the neat stuff you were interested in, but never learned in your introductory chem class. My first class (world of chemistry) with 'Dr. Joe' included topics like medications, plastics, explosives and pollution, so it isn't the boring chemistry you may have been tortured with in high school!"

Put this in your drive and smoke it. Linuxfr.org says (translated from French):

' GNU Generation, a student association at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology of Lausanne, proudly announces the release of GNUWin-II, a collection of free and open source software for Windows, which luckily contains most of the software that was proposed some days ago on slashdot.'

It comes on a CD with more than 50 applications, articles, and a four-language (yes it's Swiss) html based interface to help newcomers discover Free Software. The complete GNUWin-II can be browsed online. The ISO image of the CD can be downloaded here or better on Swiss SunSITE mirror ftp or http.

But who can fit the most soundcards in one machine? An anonymous reader writes "As a follow up to the 37 operating systems, 1 PC you should check out this site http://fileserver.coleskingdom.com 24 hard drives in one PC. And he managed it under Windows 95."

Maybe it was the Zip factor. generic-man writes "Dataplay, a company built around creating a new miniature optical disc format, has announced that all employees have been put on leave as the company tries to come up with the $50 million it needs to stay afloat. The future of Dataplay is still up in the air."

Recursive trailers. A lot of readers were disappointed in the viewing options for the Two Towers trailer posted yesterday anakin876 writes "The TTT Hi-Res trailer is out, but still semi-hidden. The Apple Quicktime Page doesn't have the trailer listed (yet) but it does exist."

Harm, foul. Boone^ writes "You'll remember when California signed a huge deal with state consultant and Oracle reseller Logicon Inc. only to have it blow up in their face [1,2,3]. Gov. Gray Davis finally signed legislation ending the exemption for the state's information technology purchases from California's conflict-of-interest laws. Similar bills have come across the Governor's desk, but Pete Wilson and Davis both vetoed them in the past. Apparently the policy of 'no harm, no foul' reigns out west, since it takes a fiasco to produce change."

That many licenses must be worth some jetlag. In August, we mentioned the possibility (floated by Telstra itself) that the Australian phone company was considering rolling out Linux on as many as 45,000 desktops; an anonymous reader notes that Microsoft is not sitting by for that, and has dispatched Steve Ballmer to convince Telstra otherwise.

generic-man writes "In a follow-up to a controversial 1998 study linking Internet use to worsened depression and social difficulties, Carnegie Mellon University professor Robert Kraut now says that the symptoms of depression started to recede after a while. The New York Times (free registration required) has the story in today's Circuits section." We covered this way back in the day as well.

generic-man writes: "As part of the Earthware Symposium on the next 50 years of technology, Carnegie Mellon researchers invited many people prominent in technology to speak about what lies ahead. They created a Synthetic Interview with Bill Joy -- ask it a question, and you'll get the most appropriate answer out of the many that were provided. Questions about the future of technology are the most appropriate things to ask him."