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Cpt_Kirks writes "The creator of the Sinclair ^[?] computers in the UK is now working on a cheap, portable Linux box." Nifty seeing this on wired with some comments about the inventor himself.

Rounding at a full week of stern reviews, stern takes a look at Andrew Leonard's new book Bots: The Origin of New Species. You may recognize Leonard's name from Wired and Salon. Click below to get the natural selection on his new book. Bots: The Origin of New Species author Andrew Leonard pages publisher HardWired Books rating 5/10 reviewer Stern ISBN summary

Define "bot" as any long-lived software process which runs with little or no human input. Andrew Leonard tries to make them exciting.

The Scenario

Andrew Leonard is yet another Wired reporter who has written a book about the computer software that will take you into the next millennium. He discusses bots, long-lived software processes with some decision-making capability, in their native habitats of IRC, usenet, MOOs and the web.

What's Bad?

While it is safe to guess that bots, under the guise of autonomous software agents, will be major players in the computing world, in order to get a book's worth of material, Leonard had to define the class very broadly. As a result virtually anything from IRC eggdrop bots to that little dancing paperclip in Microsoft Word qualifies. The stretch becomes particularly visible when he reaches back into history to discuss the origin of bots and comes up with early backup software and 'Eliza' [Note to younger readers: Eliza was a program which faked human conversation, badly. It has been implemented in every programming language you can imagine]. In chapter 4, Leonard actually describes the Wumpus of "Hunt the Wumpus" as a bot, about as ludicrous an argument as you could imagine. [Note to younger readers: Hunt the Wumpus was a very simple, very stupid game that was played on university mainframes and the early home computers of the 1970s. You wandered (textually) through a finite network of caves. Each time you moved, the wumpus moved too, randomly. You could shoot arrows into adjoining rooms. If you hit the wumpus, you won. If you wandered into the wumpus, you lost. Look, Doom wouldn't be invented for another 20 years.]

Once he's defined 'bot' so broadly, Leonard has to contend with the universe of daemons and faceless applications which infest any modern operating system. Unfortunately, most of these are not very exciting and Leonard focusses on software which is more visible, and ideally anthropomorphic. This means that all his modern bots fall into a small number of classes: usenet monitoring programs (including cancelbots), IRC bots, MUD and MOO bots, and web spiders. This puts him in an awkward position -- this book is clearly intended for the mass market, but the vast majority of the discussion regards systems which his readers will never use.

Leonard very much wants to draw trends and lessons from the evolution of bots in these areas. Unfortunately for him, the universe of bots he chooses to discuss has been so short-lived that he can draw only the most banal conclusions. "Poorly tested bots can get into infinitely recursive conversations with each other." "AI bots do a poor job of mimicking human beings." "When evil bots are programmed, good bots are usually created to fight them. Both groups are then reprogrammed repeatedly in attempts to outsmart each other."

This book avoids the typical Wired error of quoting a bunch of "friends of Wired" as experts on whatever topic is at hand. However, it does slip into the magazine's absurd typography. Many paragraphs (selected randomly, as far as I can tell) start with an initial letter which is dramatically larger than the surrounding text, rotated sideways, and rendered in a different font. How hip.

What's Good?

The book is delightfully cerebral, drawing from Plato and Darwin, Gibson and Asimov. [Note to younger readers: Plato for his moral "demon", Darwin for the theory of evolution by natural selection (which, if you ask me, clearly does not apply), Gibson for the AIs in Neuromancer, and Asimov for the "Three Laws of Robotics"] The research is admirable, and Leonard tracks down the authors of an awful lot of the software he describes. I used MUDs a few times back in 1990 or so (and honestly never saw the point). Chapters 1 and 5 describe in amusing detail the troubles caused by bots at various MOOs, including an extended discussion of "The Barney Problem," or the 1993 swamping of Point MOOt by sloppily programmed Barney Bots singing the "I love you" song.

The discussion of Bot politics on IRC was instructive. I've been on EFnet for almost ten years now, but have always tried to avoid the undying politics of IRC-abuse and server control. As a result, I missed the inside scoop on why Alternet formed and why Nickserv went away, and so forth. Leonard fills in the gaps. Would this be as interesting to somebody who doesn't use IRC, or who uses it so much that they already know the stories? Probably not.

The material in chapter 3 on the failure of AI could form the core of its own book, a book about why AI looked so promising in 1980, the brilliant people who devoted their careers to it, and why it failed nonetheless.

"In part, the AI community doomed itself. Its own bold promises and early success led to a breathless boom period in the 1980s. Corporations rushed to adopt so-called expert systems -- programs that specialized in particular domains of knowledge and were supposed to represent the accumulated wisdom of hundreds of human experts. Unfortunately, most expert systems ended up requiring even more human resources than they replaced, and they often failed to work as promised" [stern: give me examples! juicy ones!]

"A sorry record of broken promises and the demise of the cold war dried up most AI funding and sent the artificial intelligence community reeling. Attendance at the premier artificial intelligence conferences declined. Morale sank to its lowest point when aspiring AI workers discovered that just putting the words artificial intelligence in a grant application guaranteed the kiss of death."

Those two paragraphs, on page 45, could be the first two paragraphs of a book about the past failure of AI and new methods being tried today, especially on the web. That book would probably be better than the one which Leonard has written.

Two Additional Notes

1. Curiously, Amazon.com placed this book at the top of my personalized 'recommended books' list for months. Since this list is generated by the Netperceptions affinity engine, I can only imagine that it would not have made the list unless it was selling pretty well. This makes me perplexed about how it was marketed, since its true audience seems so small.
2. One of the blurbs on the back (you know, the ones which normally say things like "A brilliant work of technical writing which I will treasure forever" -- Sylvester Stallone) reads, in its entirety,
   "Bot is short for robot, which is cooler than program."
   IRC hacker, John Leth-Nissen
   That seems rather random, doesn't it?

So What's In It For Me?

Leonard writes well, and his research can not be faulted. I look forward to reading his future books. This particular book should be of interest to people already familiar with (and curious about) robo-moderators on USENET, web spiders, IRC or MUDs/MOOs. If you do not fall into one of those categories, don't waste your time here.

If you're into this, pick up the book at Amazon.

Table of Contents

1. A Plague of Barneys
2. Daemons and Darwin
3. One Big Turing Test
4. The Bot Way of Being
5. War
6. Raising the Stakes
7. On the Brink
8. The Technodialectic

Josh Baugher wrote a line to point us over to this Wired article. Sun has backed off the original plan to have Java submitted as an open standard to the Internation Standards Organization. Sun and the ISO have been arguing over things, because the ISO is a bit less then happy with having one company retain control of the technology.

Things have been a bit crazy: server troubles, spent some quality time in the ER after the gf got in accident (she's fine), and unusually stressful 'biz stuff (note:in utopia everyone pays their bills ontime instead of leaving us with a nearly empty checking account, a massive looming bandwidth bill, and all these unpaid invoices? I seem to be balding at an accelerated rate :) As for the images on port 81 of flotsam, I'm sorry about that- those of you behind firewalls will be glad to know that the new server will be in soon and hopefully the dust can settle. Allright, some quickies already: Toddius Maximus wrote in to tell us that Performance Computing has started a bi-monthly Linux Section Anthony Fuentes sent us an Interview with John Carmack webslacker sent us a nice little article on Pixar if you're curious what Steve Jobs' other company is up to. Wouldn't be quickies without Star Wars: James McP sent us linkage to a wired story about a Star Wars fan site featuring toy based mini movies, webslacker noted the new 12" Star Wars figures, and Dave Lowe sent us Star Wars Parody Music More cool movie stuff: patowic noted that Bruce Cambell (of Army of Darkness/Evil Dead fame) has his own web page, which features a sound bite archive And some Slashdot media sightings: Duke of URL noted that the recent Katz/Littleton stories got a mention on Suck. RKemp noted that The Economist noticed too. nene noted that an article about Slashdot appeared in Der Standard (although, with a name like that, its no surprise that it ain't English :)

Ant wrote in to sent us a Wired story about engineers forsale on ebay. The summary is that 16 guys are willing to quit their jobs at a major valley ISP and work for you. And the bidding starts at over $3 million. It looks interesting, and with techies in demand these days, it might work, although I don't think thats how I would try to get a job (well, maybe if you guys started bidding like crazy *grin*)

Dmitri Evseev writes "Wired has an article called Open Source in Open Court, describing an effort by Lawrence Lessig, former Special Master in the DOJ suit against Microsoft, to apply an Open Source-type model to crafting legal arguments. The idea is to open a side's legal strategy for public input and participation in order to present a better argument in court. More information on this project is available on here "

Fizgig writes "At Wired is a story about how Blockbuster is going to start renting computer games with a Divx scheme, charging $6 for the CD and 72 hours to play it, more for additional hours. I don't know that I like the business-guy's use of the phrase "one-to-one marketing" Well, at least it all seems interesting. "

binarydreams writes "Wired News has a pretty good article about Adam Beberg leaving Distributed.net. It provides more details about the disparate goals of Beberg and Distributed. Provides much of the background lacking in the two emails sent to the distributed announce list. "

Doodhwala wrote in to send us a wired story on the updated Apple License for Open Source code. Talks about various fixes that have made an appearance in this revision, following the criticism they took last time around.

PsychoSpunk writes "Even more frightening than the original Furby... Found this story at Wired. Kind of frightening to think about if you've ever had the chance to actually meet a Furby face to face. It's enough to drive a man insane. Furby + Yoda = Dark Side of the Force? "

_alpha_ wrote in to send us an article about Detectives in a digital age which makes the most blatant Hacker/Cracker error I've seen lately... "Hackers are dumb" . Read the article, its obviously about crackers. I think that the media can just s/hacker/Script Kiddie/gi; and call it good.

According to an article in Wired, cable companies are starting to deliver set top boxes that track what you view on television. These boxes are already being rolled out in suburban detroit. Treasure your privacy while you still have it, folks.

According to an article in Wired, cable companies are starting to deliver set top boxes that track what you view on television. These boxes are already being rolled out in suburban detroit. Treasure your privacy while you still have it, folks.

Several folks have wrote in to send us the wired story on S/WAN which strives to allow secure TCP connections between any 2 points on the internet. Written in Canada so it isn't affected by Uncle Sam's braindead encryption export policies. The article refers to the software as freeware, dunno what the license is. You can also just go straight to the software if you like. Update: 04/15 08:01 by CT : Johnathan Nightingale that it is apparently under the GPL where it can be. Just read it.

Kaa writes Sent us this wired story about AltaVista wanting to serve advertisements as search results. For words with more than 100,000 hits, they will sell the number one result, indistinguishable from a normal match. Here's a great quote "They will likely implement this very quietly," the letter says. "One point to remember is that AltaVista is still a popular search engine among 'old time' Internet users who might react vocally to this change once they know about it." " I dunno how vocal I'll be. But AltaVista was my primary search engine. Update: 04/15 01:21 by CT : Wired retracted the comment that we posted here saying that it was unconfirmable.

Pont writes "Sony failed to get an injunction against Bleem, a Playstation emulator for the PC. " This is a nice step in the right direction for an industry struggling to come to grips with annoying little problems like emulation. Way to go Bleem. Now how about a Linux Port?

chrisd writes "Anyone folowing the blowtorches being wielded lately in the Linux community might want to check out this saturday Wired News article featuring some commentary on the latest from Eric and Bruce."

MikeDartt writes "Wired reports that Compaq has just joined IBM and SCO in Project Monterey, which is an attempt to get a single UNIX distro that will run on Merced. Perhaps I'm naive, but why get behind a new *NIX as well as Linux, esp. when the latter is both more open and more fashionable? "

boinger writes "Wired is reporting about some high school kid who made a wearable PC with webcam as a school project. The designed was blessed by MIT, and it brodcasts the captured images via wireless LAN which are then published to a web site. It runs Linux, too, but sadly runs Win98 as well." Imagine what this will do for those obnoxious "Worlds Funniest" TV shows that churn my stomach as I dive for the remote.

caferace writes "More news about Salon... In what looks to me like a sharp bid to continue their move up the 'Net food-chain, Salon today announced they are purchasing The Well , the renowned Bay area BBS/Web community that started some 14 years ago. Wired has a story here. "

Trepidity writes "Wired is reporting that IBM is working with at least three other companies about the possible use of their ~350MB microdrive in portable MP3 players. Sure beats having only 32MB on a flash card. "

The Prognosticator writes "Here's a Wired article about Netscape's Mozilla project at it's first birthday today, 1.Apr.1999. It covers where Mozilla's been and where it's going in a short interview with a Mozilla PR guy and a Communicator Project Manager. "

Em writes "Wired News spotted these guys and their cool idea for making real turntables scratch and mix MP3s. Plug your Technics into your BeOS machine and scratch with their special vinyl. They map the 'record' to your MP3 file. I reckon I'd buy BeOS for this. " Jeez-combine this with the audio equipment we got yesterday, and Rob and I might cut a record. There's a disturbing thought. Someone alert DJ Shadow to this-I want the new album to come out soon.

An anonymous reader linked us up with a wired story that talks about Russian Crackers taking down whitehouse.gov. A Russian Newspaper has claimed that it was anti-NATO folk, and the Whitehouse is claiming it was a hardware failure.

Zab gave us the the story about the latest fun over at Kipling. Kipling acknowledged being cracked, but I don't think they quite knew what they were asking for. Probably having Mooby share the password, and having their site down for a few days wasn't quite the plan. But they did get their publicity, I s'pose. Check out the work at Kipling.

AMK writes "You'll probably all remember the late February announcement that the upcoming season of "Mystery Science Theatre 3000" will be its last. Some recent news: this Wired article talks about the mounting fan campaigns to save MST3K from cancellation. Time to use the /. effect for good instead of evil, so write some polite letters of support, and increase the ratings by recruiting more people to watch the show. " I wish MediaOne wasn't the crappiest cable company on the planet earth. I don't get SciFi, Comedy Central, or the Cartoon Network. I don't even get a preview channel. But I do get several religion channels, shopping channels, and news channels that I never watch. I gotta get a dish. Maybe I'll Ask Slashdot about that *grin*. God I loved MST3k.

The Dodger writes "The Kipling 'Hacker' luggage debacle gets coverage in Wired, along with slightly derogatory references to the Slashdotters' ability (or rather lack of it) to 'crack the site'... " Strange. Someone sent me the winning login & password (way to go MoobY!). I vow to never pay for this kipling crap though. Terrible article though: its one thing to confuse hacker & cracker, its completely different to be cocky about your misuse. It seems quite apparent that we aren't the target audience. What I would like to know, is who is? We're trendy now guys. We still don't get to marry supermodels tho...

Greg Roelofs, author of PNG: The Definitive Guide, has written a feature on the PNG graphic format. The format has many technical advantages, yet it still isn't gaining acceptance. Personally, I just want a real alpha channel on web pages (well, and anti-aliased fonts, but lets cross one bridge at a time), Anyway, read what Greg has to say on the subject of PNG:

I hadn't intended to write anything up so soon, but lately there's been a lot of FUD and some general cluelessness about the Portable Network Graphics (PNG) image format, so here's an update from somebody who knows a tiny bit about it.

First of all, PNG is certainly not dead, although it obviously has not taken the Widely Webbed World completely by storm (which, in the eyes of the esteemed Mr. Veen, amounts to the same thing). For better or for worse, Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer pretty much define what counts as acceptable Web technology, and they only began supporting PNG natively in the autumn of 1997 (versions 4.04 and 4.0, respectively). As various Slashdotters have noted, neither one really supports PNG well yet, at least with respect to alpha transparency and gamma correction, but that's coming; let me return to that issue in a moment.

PNG has been making steady progress, however, particularly in non-Web applications. It has advanced from being a newsworthy ``extra'' to being an expected, standard component of image applications; in other words, a viewer or editor that ships without PNG support is considered deficient by both consumers and the trade press. That's a moderately subtle point--it doesn't necessarily leap right out at you and scream, PNG has arrived, dammit!, but it's nevertheless quite a significant milestone for any new technology. Mundane can be good. (By the way, I maintain the PNG home site and list known PNG-supporting applications of various persuasions on half a dozen pages; stop by if you're in need of something, and please let me know if I've missed any!)

But that's just one data point. Everybody's favorite technical publisher, O'Reilly and Associates, not only includes PNG chapters in a number of its books (including Web Design in a Nutshell and the soon-to-be-released Programming Web Graphics with Perl & GNU Software ), they also agreed to publish an entire 700-page book completely devoted to the Portable Network Graphics format: PNG: The Definitive Guide . It consists of around 300 pages of main text, 100 pages of program listings (both Unix/X and 32-bit Windows, under a BSDish license, freely downloadable soon), 250 pages of specifications, some fairly cool color figures, and assorted odds and ends; I happen to know because I wrote it. :-) (It just went into production on Monday, so it should hit the shelves in a few months, plug plug. I'll be updating the web page with dates and whatnot as soon as I find out myself.)

In addition, PNG has been published as an informational Internet RFC and a a W3C Recommendation (the very first one), and it's now wending its way through the slowly grinding gears of joint ISO/IEC standardization. That will all help ensure its longevity, but it's also fairly boring to most of you, I'm sure.

So getting back to the Web issue, let me briefly summarize PNG's basic capabilities:

• palette-based support (1, 2, 4, 8-bit), like GIF
• grayscale support (1, 2, 4, 8, 16-bit)
• truecolor support (24, 48-bit), like TIFF or (sort of) JPEG
• binary transparency, like GIF (except including grayscale and RGB modes, not just palette-based)
• alpha transparency (256 or 65536 levels of partial transparency), like TIFF
• alpha-palette transparency (that is, palette has RGBA entries, not just RGB), unlike anything else on the planet
• direct support for gamma correction and color correction
• lossless, unpatented compression
• 2D interlacing, somewhat like progressive JPEG
• no animation (but a closely related format called MNG)

The patent issue is largely history, except to shareware and freeware authors, for whom it's still quite real--Unisys lawyers continue their apparent crusade to kill all low-cost GIF-supporting software. What really matters to Web developers, however, is PNG's support for palette images (no, they don't all have to be really fat, 24-bit monsters); its support for alpha transparency even in palette images; its support for gamma and color correction; and the fact that its compression is lossless (which is why 24-bit PNG images are so fat, especially compared to lossy JPEG). In other words, for the same number of bytes as a binary-transparency GIF image, you can have a lovely alpha-palette PNG image that, thanks to gamma correction, will not look too light on Macs or too dark on PCs. The alpha support means it can be anti-aliased or drop-shadowed to look good against any background, not just a single, flat color. Note that MSIE 4.0 already supports gamma correction, and 5.0 is supposed to do full alpha transparency; we'll find out next month, I guess. Mozilla/Netscape 5.0 will also support both alpha and gamma, or else--I'm the nominal ``owner'' of Mozilla's PNG support, and now that the book is done, I intend to do some serious hacking. (Apologies for the 10-month delay!)

Since PNG pushes the envelope on a lot of image-related stuff--alpha transparency (no other Web formats), RGBA-palette images (no other format, period), gamma and color correction (almost no other formats), and even compression/filtering (it has a bunch of free parameters that one can tweak)--many of the current applications are somewhat behind in supporting some of the features. Be patient; things are steadily improving. I won't point fingers at any underperformers here, but I will note that the GIMP is quite strong in compression and 32-bit RGBA and should have fully working gamma code in the next release after 1.0.2; and Fireworks 1.0 is already partway there with RGBA-palette support and should be completely spiffy by version 2.1 or 3.0. (I didn't quite get my feedback in on time for it to affect the 2.0 release. If only they'd had a Linux version to try...)

I'm hopeful the book will help many of the others--it includes a lot of material aimed at helping programmers to improve their code, but also a lot of stuff to help users avoid problems and make the best of what options they've got. And if I have time while I'm working on Mozilla, I plan to release a free, automatic 32-bit to 8-bit (RGBA to RGBA-palette) converter to handle what seems to be the hardest PNG feature to support. Such conversion literally gives you a factor-of-four reduction in file size with essentially no visible loss (no more than normal RGB-to-palette conversion with nice dithering, anyway).

So...that, in a largish nutshell, is the past, present and future status of PNG. As for new competition, well, let's just say that there have been lots and lots and lots of fantastically improved, incredibly stupendous image formats that have come and gone over the years; ``WI'' is merely the latest, and SVG and JPEG2000/JPEG-LS are right around the corner. Anybody remember Johnson-Grace/AOL's ART format? How about Iterated Systems' fractal format (FIF)? Or some of the quadtree-based ones, or SPIHT, or FlashPix, or JPiG, or CMP, or ePIC, or HARC-C? Heck, even JPEG with arithmetic compression is considerably better than standard DCT-Huffman JPEG, but does anybody actually use it? No. Proprietary standards are simply not tolerated very well on the Web. Even free, open standards like PNG (with free, open-source, non-GPL'd reference libraries) have a huge barrier to climb. It took ``standard'' JPEG four years to catch on; it's taken PNG four years to catch on (yes, it's really been that long, and 2.5 years since the W3C Recommendation); and, barring largish miracles--e.g., Netscape and Microsoft cooperating--it will take any other new image format just as long.

There you have it. There's lots more info on the web site, and there are a couple of mailing lists for folks who really want to get gnarly with PNG. Oh, and please buy the book. ;-)

Skeezix sent us a San Jose Mercury article that reports on a $299 PC being sold by Microworkz. For the first time I guess, PCs cost about as much as TV. The computer in every home dream is getting closer to reality. " Update: 03/16 03:29 by S : In related news, PC Free is to ship Linux-based computers for $40 a month including Internet-Access, initially as a trial run. Link from LinuxToday

Palmer Halvorson writes "A Wired story reports that Apple will annouce a partial open source OS strategy tomorrow during an "Apple Event" from their Cupertino Headquarters. "

Erik has written in with a nice little commentary on the personalities behind the free software movement. Mostly about RMS and Linus, but its worth reading.

The following was written by Slashdot Reader Erik

The Personalities Behind Linux

The varied personalities of Linux definitely show the many facets that make up our favorite OS. I was reading the Wired article that had an interview with RMS, and I've seen quite a few interviews with Linus. IMHO, Stallman represents quite a bit of what Linux and it's users is all about, but Torvalds is more a way to market it.

Obviously both Torvalds and Stallman were and are central to the OS. As we all know, the kernel mainly the product of Linus, but most of the tools, and the very license under which Linux was placed is the result of Stallman's GNU. But, these two men don't seem to get along quite as well as the software they wrote. Linux is a coder, but RMS is a zealot.

Stallman's fire, passion, and concern for politics are essential for Linux users. Many people criticize Richard for being overly paranoid, but that paranoia is necessary, especially in the upcoming months and years. As Linux gains mainstream support, there will undoubtedly be blatant violations of the GPL. Slashdot has recently posted at least one story of a new distro that violates the GPL. It's a huge asset to have RMS and similar enthusiasts to vigorously defend the freedom that our "rebel" OS has come to represent.

As a result, I love having RMS go everywhere he can, reminding people of the free nature of Linux. Excuse me, GNU/Linux.

Remind people that Linus didn't write the whole kernel, and owns a very small percentage of the code in any Linux distro. Torvalds will be the first to admit that. And Stallman reminds us that Linux is more about hackers and free code than about the OS itself. It's about making decisions for ourselves, not having to accept a crappy OS.

But as much credit as RMS deserves, he shouldn't necessarily be the spokesman for Linux. While

Stallman looks like a fanatic, Linus is like the penguins; cute, maybe a little plump, but over all, someone who's very likeable. Plus he has a "normal" job, and is making money from Linux (not directly, but through his Transmeta job, speaking, etc.)

As a result, though Stallman deserves tons of credit, he shouldn't necessarily be on the cover of the magazines. He's done a great job, as has Linus, but as Linux gets marketed to a more mainstream audience, we need to look at our figurehead. Stallman ranting to Wired is great, it gets everyone to stop, think, and be more aware of the politics. But let's think twice before flaming CNN/Fortune if their latest Newstand didn't mention RMS. We all know of his contribution, and all geeks appreciate it. We need him to help lead the movement, but not necessarily to be our public leader. Let CNN snub him, and let the other mags ignore him. He has a great product to be proud of. But as great as he is, he's often inflammatory, nearly always an extremist, and not necessarily who the business community wants to put it's trust in.

An anonymous reader sent us a link to a priceless wired article where you can read about presidential hopeful Al Gore's claims that he created the internet. I for one thank him. Without the hardware he designed, the protocols he defined, and the software he coded, think where the internet would be today. Good think he didn't have my vote, or he woulda lost it.

wtpooh writes "Wired has an article about a company developing a wind-up power source for computers. Apple is reportedly interested. " The company is also talking about its use in things like sub-notebooks. Man, if they made this (solar panels will probably be included), and if I got Iridium, I could go outside and still post. Seriously though, for people working the field, and less developed nations, things like this could really help the spread of computers.

mr.fish writes "wired news has an interview/story with Richard Stallman about how he thinks Linus shouldnt be getting all the glory he does." There's actually several interesting bits in there- Good article.

Later today, Slashdot will be giving out its awards for the LinuxWorld Expo- brace yourself. To help tide you over, we have several stories about the show. The first is from FWMiller who sent us a Salon Article about the event. TheMystic sent us a yahoo headline page from the show. and Mtn_Dewd sent us a CNN Story and a wired story.

Splatta was the first one to write in about the Linux-powered car MP3 player. The cool thing is that unlike the Rio, this thing will also let you web browse, check e-mail, and store addresses and dates. Heck, who needs an office anymore? Thanks to the folks at Empeq.

I'm still here from the floor (Thanks again to LinuxWorld for giving us a booth and Linux-HW for flying us out here). Its crazy. It's absolutely gigantic relative to ALS. The mega-stars are here in full force- Caldera, Compaq, LinuxCare, Red Hat, and VA Research each have absolutely huge booths. I've been snapping pictures and trying to talk to keep up with the email and stories from here, but keeping up is proving near impossible. In the meantime, its entertaining to note that the press room is compaq boxes... running windows. And Shayde from Freshmeat is posting updates. Wired has a bit too, complete with a terribly out of context quote from me. Anyway, soon things will calm down and I can hopefully post pictures and write up a real report... hang in there.

VA Research had their little press conference today. They talked about their Linux.com acquisition and their intel investment- they also are reporting that they are going to offer 24/7 on-site service through DecisionOne. Most interesting, is that as part of their intel deal, they'll be porting Linux to Merced (under NDA) and are targetting a complete GPL source release of the port upon the release of the chip. Update: 03/02 06:31 by CT : theGEEK wrote in to link to a wired article that talks about the cost of linux.com. The article basically says less than the top bid of $5 million, but more than a million.

There appears to have been some confusion about what the FCC actually said... AgentOrangeJuice also submitted a detailed MacObserver Correction Wired also states that internet access by 7-digit number will remain a local call.

volkris writes "Here's an article about the Russian chip, the E2K. It's the first I had ever heard about it, though later I went back and checked the article earlier this week about the Merced, the G4, and the E2K. This is just an overview of the chip. Looks interesting."

seizer writes "For a while now, the assumption has been that ISPs get "common carrier" status, although it isn't enshrined in law. That is, like telephone companies, they are not liable for the uses to which the network is put. So check out this Wired story, where Mr Laurence Godfrey wants to take on UK ISP Demon over a spoofed Usenet posting in his name." I got a phone call from Bill Clinton yesterday that I think was a hoax. I wanna sue Ameritech. Wonder how long this will last?

CerebusUS was the first to send specs for Sony's unveiled Playstation 2. Currently, Wired is also carrying some interesting information regarding the new machine as well. Some of the more tasty highlights include a confirmed 55 million polys/second, 128-bit CPU, along with a FPU and two floating point vector units. Total: 5 billion floating-point calcs per second. 500 mips with compiler optimization. /me wipes drool from face.

There are lots of stories about Windows Refund Day. As I predicted, nobody got refunds, as referenced in this ZDNet Story. Chris is quoted near the end. Here's a Nando Times story, a wired story, an MSNBC Story, a San Jose Mercury Story, and a Washington Post story. (All sent in by anonymous readers). Macerick sent us A front Pager from the NY times. And finally, Marc Merlin sent us his own report which features the Story and Pictures.

An anonymous reader pointed us a a wired news article where you can read that the authors of the UltraHLE N64 emulator has had its source code released. The article talks about Nintendo considering Legal Action against the authors of the emulator, as well as the Sony/Connectix suit and the fact that another company is working on a Playstation emulator for windows. Update: 02/12 03:51 by CT : My bad. The source code wasn't actually released by the authors- the code is a disasembled bit posted by someone else. It doesn't compile. Will the real UltraHLE authors take the hint? Update: 02/13 03:04 by S : The code has been removed, although anyone could make it again with REC. In the mean time, Dextrose has an UltraHLE-on-Linux Howto which reveals that the combination of UltraHLE-Wine-Linux is faster than the original UltraHLE-Win98: with Zelda running at 21.3 fps under Linux versus 19.6 under Win98.

Jason told me about this extraordinary story of a guy who took 15 years to solve a problem in his free time, only to find that his employer for 2 years (DSC now part of Alcatel) is suing him for the idea. While this story started a long time ago, it's still plodding on. Although I was sceptical, Time, Wired, and others back his story. What's his idea? A method to convert machine code back to a high level language. Would it help him to GPL it? That would make it available to DSC, but would allow him to come up with the best implementation before they do. Since the idea would be out of the bag, DSC couldn't do very much about it, right? Update: 02/11 12:45 by S : Evan pointed out to me that if he GPL'd the idea, he'd be in contempt of court and stuck in jail.

Vertigo1 writes "The Grateful Dead are releasing their next album in MP3 Format" Not surprising considering they actually encourage bootlegging. But more importantly, another group (albeit a somewhat defunct one) hobbing on the bandwagon. A little bit more intertia to help push the industry towards the inevitable.

mikey writes "Wired has an article stating that Microsoft employees are highly suspect of making phony statements in internet forums. Difficult to prove, but an independnt analyst concures on page 2 of the article." Makes me wish I logged anonymous coward activity so that I could find out how much is coming from tide*.microsoft.com.

Smack writes "Ebay didn't pick up their Cool Site of the Year award (just like Slashdot). So someone else picked it up for them, and now they're auctioning it off on Ebay itself! The price is already up to $130.00. What beautiful irony..." God bless the Internet. Now I'm beginning to wonder where my CSoTY trophy ended up... Update: 02/03 03:34 by CT : Wired picked up the story a little bit ago. They don't know where our trophy is either *grin*

Phil Gross writes "InfoWorld's Robert X. Cringely is reporting that the US Air Force is considering adding Linux to the list of potential standard military operating systems. It seems the U.S. Air Force has recognized the significance of the momentum behind Linux, according to one reader. Apparently it is asking developers and users if they would be interested in a Defense Information Infrastructure-Common Open Environment (DII COE) segment for Linux. If there is enough interest, Linux would become an "official" operating system for military computers.' I'd love to get more details on this. "
In related news, Wired is reporting the Navy is reconsidering its use of NT: " the Navy said that while Windows NT was specified in the Statement of Work as the operating system for the workstations in question, other components of a coming upgrade will primarily utilize Unix-based systems. The source said. "I don't think that Unix or NT were ever really evaluated -- it was just somebody thinking this was good, with no knowledge"". Thanks to brentbent

Branden Robinson writes " Scott McNealy told a group of reporters that consumer privacy issues are a "red herring." "You have zero privacy anyway," "Get over it."" Wonder if he's been getting out recently, or heard how quickly Intel back-pedaled on the unique CPU id?