Slashdot Mirror

dki writes "Steve Wozniak's WozNet is covered in an article at the New York Times today. His company Wheels of Zeus, mentioned previously on Slashdot last year, plans to create wireless networks that use GPS to track clusters of electronic tags within a 1- or 2-mile radius of a base station. The tags "will be able to generate alerts, notifying the owner by phone or e-mail message when a child arrives at school, a dog leaves the yard or a car leaves the parking lot.""

EccentricAnomaly writes "Steve Wozniak (co-founder of the Wheels of Zeus start-up) is coming back to MacWorld after a six-year absence, and will be speaking as part of a panel discussion of Mac OS X. This is Woz's first speaking engagement at MacWorld in 10 years."

Several readers noted that Woz has a startup called Wheels of Zeus. He's come out of "Semi Retirement" to work on a new wireless handheld sort of thing. Not a lot of details, but it certainly could shape up to be interesting. Specifically mentions GPS. Supposedly Woz.com will have data eventually, but currently is just really slow and redirecting to Woz's personal page.

Updates on Tom's detective work, Kevin's touchy look-but-don't touch semi-citizen status, and last but not least a word from the elusive printman, here folded, spindled and mutilated for your edification.

Danke sehr, Herr Doktor Pabst! The sighs -- nay, screams! -- of disappointment rose like the wail of a cat in heat following the announcement that AMD's new chips would be clock-locked, nullifying the advantages of Abit's ultra-overclockable motherboard. Jonathan Dabian writes: "This is probably a little late for me to get the name postage on the front page, but Tom's Hardware posted a new story that is an update to the Monday Blurb where they revealed that the new AMD processors would be multiplier locked. In this new story, Tom Pabst reveals the information he has since pieced together about the connections on the top of the processor, and ideas on how to alter those laser etched connections. Overclocking on the Duron and Thunderbird isn't dead. All that's needed is an easy way to alter those connections."

How do you like your quasi-futuristic clothing, Mr. Mitnick? One of the many following the bizarre turns of the Kevin Mitnick saga, RadarRider writes: "According to the following article on MSNBC:' Reversing a previous decision, Kevin Mitnick?s probation officer has given the notorious computer intruder permission to lecture on hacking and cracking, work as a security consultant and write a column for a soon-to-be-launched e-commerce site.'"

Disallowing use of computers unless specially granted seems a fairly over-the-top punishment -- everything has embedded processors. I wonder if Kevin has to ask permission to use an infrared-type automatic toilet, or a programmable thermostat. Where's King Solomon when you need him?

Unca Steve, Unca Steve! Tell us a bedtime story, OK? Speaking of *ashback, gwernol writes: "There's a fascinating letter from Woz - one of the co-founders of Apple on his web page at woz.org. Its a candid glimpse into the early days of the computer world, including tales of hacking the world's first video games -Pong and Breakout - at Atari. See inside the mind of one of the truly great ones. Some interesting perspective on Steve Jobs, too."

(Hint: some of the same words you can't say on television are off-limits to mass-market video games, too!)

Now I can print up dozens of tasty eclaires under Linux! If you followed the recent story about modernizing UNIX printing standards, you may have caught the news that CUPS 1.1 has been released. Here's some more information from the horse's mouth. printman writes: "Nine months after the CUPS 1.0 release, we are proud the announce the birth of CUPS 1.1, with documentation nearly 500 pages long and distributions weighing in at around 4MB.

"What is CUPS", you ask? The Common UNIX Printing System ("CUPS") is an IPP-based printing system developed by Easy Software Products as a replacement for the aging and clunky Berkeley (LPD) and System V printing systems. CUPS provides all of the modern printing ammenities, including support for user-defined printers and options, non-PostScript printers, color management, and page accounting.

CUPS 1.1 continues our commitment to an open-sourced, IPP-based printing system for all UNIX's. The new release contains many of the functional enhancements that have been requested by our users, including:

1. New USB backend and backend device discovery.
2. Banner page support
3. Digest authentication
4. Directory service enhancements, including polling, relaying, and access control
5. Directory structure changes to conform to the FHS 2.0 standard used by most Linux distributions.
6. Documentation improvements and additions
7. Drivers for EPSON printers
8. Filters - new PostScript RIP based on GNU Ghostscript 5.50 core, new PDF filter based on Xpdf, new text filter supporting Unicode and bidirectional text
9. IPP/1.1 support
10. Job persistence & history
11. Licensing change - the CUPS API is now provided under the GNU LGPL
12. LPD client support
13. User-defined printers and options
14. Web administration interface

In addition we have contributed more new code to the SAMBA team to support CUPS printing "natively" via IPP, providing a faster, more reliable Windows printing experience.

Others have also been busy at work adding to CUPS. Besides our ESP Print Pro software, two new graphical interfaces have appeared for CUPS - KUPS is a KDE-based interface for CUPS, and XPP is a FLTK-based interface for CUPS.

On the driver front, Grant Taylor has come up with CUPS-o-matic, a PPD file generator and filter script for existing Ghostscript printer drivers, and the GIMP print plug-in developers are working towards "universal" drivers for GIMP, Ghostscript, and CUPS.

Finally, many Linux distributions are including (or planning to include) CUPS or ESP Print Pro. This should provide the final push to get printer manufacturers to support their printers under Linux and *BSD.

For more information on CUPS, go to: www.cups.org

And for bonus points ... Katsu Jin Ken writes: "Indrema has posted a new picture of their upcoming console on their front page." It's looking a lot svelter and sleeker than the old look, and like the finest computers everywhere, features a blue LED. (On the other hand, beware the rude no-exit site design.) Please, Indrema, make it so!

Since you're reading Slashdot, there's approximately a 100% chance that you know who Steve Wozniak is and why so many of us consider him to be a Geek God in whose shadow all others dwell. Before you start asking him questions, though, please take a look at his personal Web site, which already answers most of the obvious stuff. Then ask away. All questions must be asked and moderated by noon (EST) Tuesday. Woz's answers to the selected questions will appear Friday.