Slashdot Mirror

gibson_81 asks: "I'm writing a device driver for a really ugly piece of hardware: it needs me to read in firmware from a file before I can initialize it. For now, I force the user-program to read the entire file into memory and pass that memory buffer as an IOCTL argument, but that's even uglier than the hardware. None of the documents on writing kernel device drivers have mentioned how to access files from the kernel, but some source-grepping led me to sys_open ... which was not exported to modules :( So, I ask you, the Slashdot community: do you know what functions I can use to do this, or is it a no-no?"

adubey writes: "Forget Qwerty, forget Dvorak; the best keyboard for palmtops may well be the Fitaly One-Finger Keyboard. " Kinda nifty idea actually, I'm wondering if we'll see one that would work for a wearable PC (like maybe this guy from IBM).

Keepiru writes "AOL is the target of a class action lawsuit that accuses it of violating federal privacy laws." Basically it says that the SmartDownload feature in communicator is dumping back user download information to big brother, and this violates the Electronic Communications Privacy Act and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

psycona asks: "This may seem kind of a nonsensical question, but it has been bugging me for some time now. When does a window manager become a desktop environment? Where's the point of transition? I've been a big fan of Window Maker for some time now, and here's the thing; it has wmfinder, FSViewer and a few other file managers, it has postilion and Aileron and probably other email clients, it has a ton of dockapps to do most desktop, filesystem, LAN, ppp etc. monitoring and even admin work and gawdknowswhatelse. It even has scripts to change screen resolution and colour on the fly. So can it start calling itself a desktop environment like kde,gnome,cde and xfce? And if not, what else is needed?" A simple answer might be: 'when it does more than manage windows', but that would describe most of our current crop WMs, wouldn't it?

camworld writes "O'ReillyNet has a short article from the Alphanumerica guys about building a classic arcade game using Mozilla: In a way, this is like connecting a DSL line to a Commodore 64 computer. We're working on rewriting an arcade game from the early 80s using Mozilla technologies. By combining two different technologies from two very different times, we hope to be able to learn something new from in a new way."

gillbates writes: "A French prosecutor is conducting an investigation into the workings of the Echelon system. The article is here, and it details how France is concerned that Echelon is being used for invading its citizens' privacy. France lost a contract with Saudi Arabia due to Echelon, and knows it. How much else will they learn? My question is: What's going to happen to U.S./European relations when they find out the truth about Echelon?" SWroclawski [Updated 6 July 2000 by timothy: sorry 'bout the spelling, Serge! :) ] points out this link to BBC Coverage, noting "France's laws on privacy are very strict and in a world where one's rights of privacy are being challenged all the time, it's good to see one country taking a stand."

sredding writes: "The Stanford Poynter Project has some interesting conclusions after a study of Internet news readers. 'Two years ago Stanford University and The Poynter Institute researchers began collaborating to learn how frequent Internet news readers went about perusing news online.' It's an interesting read for Web designers." Cool info and interesting statistics, especially the one about how people jump for text first, not pictures. Take that, Mosaic! Lynx forever! ;)

Silas writes "According to a new study by the American Association of University Women, highlighted in this AP article, 'Girls have the ability to learn and use computers, but they are turned off by technical careers that they view as full of geeky guys'. The study blames the general sentiment on a gender imbalance in access to computers, and on social pressures that steer girls away from technology. What say you, women of the Slashdot population?" Stand up and shout on this one, ladies. I think that it takes a special breed of person to be attracted to this line of work, not necessarily a specific gender. Tell us what you think.

Chris Buskirk asks: "I have been working with Macs most of my life. I have since expanded my view to Unix, and Linix. I also do NT for Pain and Profit. I have been a part of the Slashdot community for the past year now, and I have become convinced that open source is the best way to produce software. This week open-source software advocate Eric S. Raymond kicked off the 15th annual MacHack conference. Mac Week is covering the keynote address , and almost all of the responce to the article is negative. Surprisingly this is a departure from the recent mood among the Mac community which has been changing with the advent of OSX. So the question becomes, How do I convince a Mac geek to become an Open Source Mac geek?" I hope that OSX is the spark to ignite the fires of Open Source on the Mac. Or at least bring it the visibility it deserves.

" Most people view Mac users as idiots. There has always been a constant myth that there are no programs for the Mac. However I dispute that claim as I have always been able to get any type of program I have wanted for the Mac, and usually for free. The Mac has always had a large and talented freeware/shareware communtiy, and I would think that this community would be very prone to embrace the open source movement. Once this base of programmers is secured, I would think larger companies would start to follow suit to one degree or another."

mobiux wrote in about the resurrection of Packard Bell PC's. michael.creasy told us about Darth Vader's MBE. An anonymous coward wrote in to tell us about the GameSpy interview of Martin Feldhausen, inventor of the 'extra life.' Thanks for helping me get through all those games! mcryptic shared the link to an online gallery of mousepad art. payneinthe told us that Randal Schwartz uploaded pictures from the Perl Whirl. Another anonymous coward told us about someone's visual response to the loss of Paul Steed at id. HerrNewton noted the symphony written primarily for dot matrix printers, and rasterbator told us about a web site for the distribution of free GNU and Open Source related artwork. Ant sent in the link to Star Wars Origins, and illumina mentioned RSA en/decryption in JavaScript. Have a good weekend, everyone!

Gorbie asks: "It seems that there is a never ending battle between me and my company over software licensing. Whether I agree with the current laws pertaining to licenses, I adhere to them. My company is often unwilling to spend the necessary capital for the proper amount of licenses, and I get put in the position to either do what I am asked or risk major friction with my boss and the ownership of the company. Are there some licenses that I should worry less about? Client access licenses? Fonts? What are my risks?" When placed between the licensing and your boss, how do you handle your software?

ghoul writes: "I just came across this article in which the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) has announced plans for a moon mission. Considering that till now India has only launched geo-synchronous satellites, that's a big leap. But ISRO scientists claim by using a lightweight orbital vehicle they can use their existing PSLV (which launches 1-tonne missions into polar orbit) to send an orbiter to the moon. The full article is available at India Today ." (No, not a manned mission, at least not yet.)

Star Wars Episode II has started shooting in Australia. Comments on it being filmed fully digitally. Mentions that Jar Jar will be back (along with McGregor, Jackson and Portman). Millions of fans hold their breath and hope this one is good (it'd be tough to go downhill, that's for sure).

Boone^ writes "Yahoo! has an article from ZDNet News that details how Compaq and Dell are shying away from Crusoe notebooks 'for now.' " Basically it says that the performance isn't so hot, and consumers are gonna be burned by the hype of the first generation of Transmeta based laptops. But then again ... the battery life sure ain't a bad thing. Mentions that Hitachi notebooks might be shipping as early as October. Update: 06/28 09:37 by CT : here's some pictures of transmeta laptops.

Boone^ writes "Yahoo! has an article from ZDNet News that details how Compaq and Dell are shying away from Crusoe notebooks 'for now.' " Basically it says that the performance isn't so hot, and consumers are gonna be burned by the hype of the first generation of Transmeta based laptops. But then again ... the battery life sure ain't a bad thing. Mentions that Hitachi notebooks might be shipping as early as October. Update: 06/28 09:37 by CT : here's some pictures of transmeta laptops.

Bryan Mattern was the first of hundreds to note that MySQL is being released under the GPL, as well as forming a partnership with VA Linux (which of course now owns Andover). This means nice things like it can move out of non-free in debian, and that the postgress/MySQL debate can now be argued in terms of features instead of license. MySQL's license was definitely a hurdle for the FAISC ^[?] so I'm really glad to see this happen.

SlickJim asks: "Baan, up until recently a major name in the Enterprise Resource Planning [ERP] Market, is in trouble -- last time I checked market capitalization was down from a high around $8 billion to something around $0.5 billion. as shown in this company profile. Possibly it will be bought out by one of the usual "strip 'em milk 'em" suspects -- CA, Geac or some other big business software vendor. A buyer would have to make an enormous investment, in technology and marketing, to restore confidence in the product. This investment would probably wipe out any likelihood of making a profit by selling licenses. So what would happen if Baan released the code for their ERP platform under an Open Source licence?"

Yoje writes: "Someone's probably already submitted this, but it looks like sometime in the next 30 days Yahoo! will switch from inktomi to Google for search requests. More attention for Google is always good. :)" I'm not sure Google strictly needs attention, but capsteve and others pointed out Google's own press release which says Google has now indexed over a billion pages. (Note: around half of these are not fully indexed.)

The Chef writes: "Tweak3D.net has yet another excellent article for nerds -- err, I mean, guys looking to fill their brain with technical know-how. This time it's on holographic storage for PCs. Yeah, that's right -- storing files using holography! Go here for the story." This is something that gets mentioned in passing frequently but it's nice to have the technology explained nicely. Thanks for the overview!

gumbo writes: "President Clinton gave his first Internet Address to the Nation today, in RealVideo, RealAudio, and Sun .au (!) formats. He also announced a government-wide search engine that should be up by fall, with no funding from tax dollars. Personally, I run several government Web sites and haven't heard of this, so they must be planning on spidering *.gov without checking with us first. :)" It may be a e-bucketful of hype, a content-impaired pandering gesture, but some president would make the first such address, so why not Bill? As Internet connections become ever more ubiquitous, though, just how ubiquitous do we want the promised e-government to be?

Toy companies sending data (no matter how innocuous) from your hard drive out into the wide world might not be such a hot idea, and it looks like that realization has spread. Virginia and D.C. residents (and truthfully, many others as well) may be ubterested in upcoming UCITA action. AT&T has won another round in the regulation / deregulation scuffle, and there's a suprize bit of tasty news to top to wash those down with.

Don't worry, Ma'am, we're from the Toy Company. You can trust us. Kip writes: "The Associated Press is reporting that Mattel Interactive will provide a tool to remove software that was surreptitiously placed on customers' computers and is designed to transmit and receive information to and from Mattel. An uninstall program will be available late Monday for Windows 98, others to follow later in the week. This is a followup to last week's story."

Victory is in the eye of the beholder. Ant writes: " SAN FRANCISCO -- AT&T Corp., the No. 1 U.S. telephone and cable television company, claimed victory in a battle over high-speed Internet access Thursday when a federal appeals court ruled that local authorities cannot require it to open broadband access to rivals. In a unanimous decision, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals concluded that Portland, Ore., could not regulate AT&T's Excite@Home (Nasdaq: ATHM) cable broadband infrastructure using laws designed to govern traditional cable services."

This will please some people (who'd rather not see network control handled by fiat) but there are quite a few places where your only 'choice' in network connectivity is along the lines of "any color so long as it's black."

Yes Virginia, there really is a legislature. Ristoril passed on on this press advisory which may be of interest to anyone following the passage of UCITA in its various state incarnations.

Richmond, VA--The Joint Commission on Technology and Science's Advisory Committee 5, which is charged with studying the impact of the Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act (UCITA) on Virginia's business, libraries, and consumers, will hold its first meeting on Thursday, June 29, 2000, 10:00 a.m. in House Room D of the General Assembly Building. This meeting will be for organizational purposes.

Although this meeting is not a public hearing, the Commission has set aside one hour so that members of the public can address the Advisory Committee. A sign up sheet will be available at 9:30 a.m. at the meeting location. Due to time constraints, only ten persons will be able to present their comments for five minutes each. If you wish to address the Advisory Committee, please sign up at the day of the meeting. You may not sign up prior to this date and time. In addition, please be prepared to submit a written transcript of your oral comments to the Commission. Even if you do not address the Advisory Committee at the meeting, you may always submit written comments. Written comments may be submitted to:

John S. Jung, Staff Attorney
910 Capitol Street, 2nd Floor
Richmond, VA 23219
E-mail: JJung@leg.state.va.us
Fax: 804-371-0169

Other opportunities for the public to address the Commission and/or the Advisory Committee will be scheduled in the future.

The proposed agenda for this meeting is available on the Commission's website http://jcots.state.va.us, under "Meeting Information.""

Note that the full commission is meeting Tuesday July 25, 2000 at 10:00 A.M. in the same location noted above.

Another trickle of palatable news. natpoor writes "The fan who had ironchef.com has brought it back to life as ironsteph.com to avoid trademark issues. She has trimmed away possibly objectionable copyrighted material, and linked to the fair use clause on the home page. It is clearly for educational purposes, and doesn't have any large copies of television footage. Slashdot covered the initial cease-and-desist letter from FujiTV, let's see what happens."

waldoj writes: "Intel has announced their "Dot.Station," a Red Hat-powered Internet appliance. With a price around $500, I think I'll just buy an eMachine..." I wonder how much the marketroids were paid to come up with the name... the article is fairly skeptical, and I don't see enough non-vapor to know for sure.

PerlDiver writes: "Free speech online scored a major win Wednesday. A federal judge ruled that ISPs are not responsible (under Section 230 of the CDA) for the content of Web sites hosted using their services. This goes a long way to removing the incentive for service providers to proactively censor such sites. (Interestingly enough, the case in question involved sites selling tapes of nude college athletes, shot in locker rooms without their knowledge.)" We've seen a number of cases like this, where an offended party tries to target the deep pockets of the ISP rather than the actual offender - that section of the CDA seems to be working as designed, however, to prevent these.

A lot of people wrote in with the news blurb from Yahoo! regarding the announcement of a ciruit that supposedly acts in a manner resembling human brain activity. Details in the blurb are pretty sketchy though - post links below if ya got 'em. One of the interesting points that they say though is that the brain does both digital and analog - but that's pretty much all they say about it.

Feign Ram wrote in to tell us about cool Gnome screen shots for PDAs and mobile phones. An Anonymous Coward wrote in with a webpage devoted to the rules of Shotgun. atomic212 shared the news about Claudia Schiffer's Palm Pilot." JohndaBuddhist wrote in about Eric Idle's tour, where he sings hits from the Monty Python days. I went to this, and it ruled. Dungeon Dweller told us about Search Bastard. jpbelang wrote in about the scientific destruction of a Magic 8-Ball. Scott shared a good article called Deciphering Anime over at Mediajunkies. thegrommit told us about the Star Wars telnet client for Windows. Anonymous Squonk told us about SearchSpell, a typo search database. Another Anonymous Coward wrote in about a Hoverboard at Future Horizons. I'm still waiting for my flux capacitor. Neuroprophet gave us a link to Mike "Head writer of MST3K" Nelson's article for The Philanthropy Roundtable.

Lucius Lucanius writes "A smart gene that helps mice learn faster has been discovered. This follows recent discoveries about neuron generation in monkeys and the creation of doogie the smart mouse. Excitement abounds in the "smart pet" industry, but will it ever be applied to humans?"

Lucius Lucanius writes "A smart gene that helps mice learn faster has been discovered. This follows recent discoveries about neuron generation in monkeys and the creation of doogie the smart mouse. Excitement abounds in the "smart pet" industry, but will it ever be applied to humans?"

[Xorian] us a coverage on c|net (and here's a AP story on Yahoo) saying that Jackson has referred the Microsoft Case to the Supreme Court, skipping the appellate courts. 'Course, the Supreme Court doesn't have to take it if they don't want it, and since it's close to the end of the term, they might not get to it this term even if they did take it.

JimRay writes: "A company called powerlogix has announced that they are offering a G-3 upgrade for those fruity iMacs. For a mere US$500, you can have an iMac running at 500mhz with 1mb of backside cache. Throw linuxPPC on that thing and you're ready to rock and roll. The press release is here and the specs are here."

javac asks: "I am working at a doctor's office for the summer. With all the regulations of HMO's and PPO's and stuff we spend more time filling out forms than seeing patients. Do you know of any good software for automatically filling out forms. It should be able to connect to a database (which we already have) and completely fill out the basic info from a name or SSN. Anyway, I am sure many other business people find forms a pain too. The software doesn't have to be for Linux, but it is always a plus." I suspect that, depending on the forms involved, that this might have to be a custom application. Does anyone know of any software that's designed to assist in the completion of generic forms?

Blastercbi1 asks: "I have an e-mail account with Hotmail and use it for all my personal e-mails and some business e-mails. The last time I was able to Log in was last Thursday. I waited two days (got used to the frequent short outages that Hotmail had) and still nothing. Finally I decided to contact Hotmail support. Well... I just couldn't. They just had one phone line which was down. And a bunch of automated e-mail support. I just would like to know if someone else had this problem and how they dealt with it. The only information I could find on this topic was at: news.cnet.com . And from what I read, I have a feeling I'm in for a bad surprise! (First thing I'll do when and if I get my account back is backup all my stuff and get an account with Yahoo!!)" Sounds like a good idea. Anyone have any more news about recent Hotmail outages?

IntelliTubbie writes: "In an 'unorthodox form of brand sponsorship,' RadioShack is teaming up with LunaCorp, a Virginia-based space exploration startup. The goal: put a robotic rover on the moon featuring the RadioShack logo. Artist's renderings of the monstrosity can be seen at LunaCorp's web site. We're one step closer to the eerie predictions in 'Fight Club': The IBM Stellar Sphere. Planet Starbucks. Yikes." Unfortunately the robot will be powered by a TRS-80 ModelII, requiring 14 extra tons of propellant (grin). More coverage can be found at Yahoo! and discovery.com; CMU is creating the H₂O-seeking robot for the mission. (More.)

And on a related note for anyone interested in going to the moon in the relatively near future, MrScience writes: "I just received a link for this job in my mailbox from Guru.com, a pretty decent headhunter website. They are looking for a Financial Analyst to evaluate the NASA Academy, and "The end result will be a recommendation that the program either *is* or *is not* beneficial, and the specific reasons to justify such a conclusion. This report will then go before the NASA Administrator to justify the existence (or removal) of the program." I grew up dreaming of going to this, who wouldn't after seeing SpaceCamp?" Pound foolish, anyone?

piggy writes: "Seven inventors, including Steve Wozniak, the inventor of the Apple I and Apple II, were added to the National Inventors Hall of Fame. Yahoo has the article." This is great to hear -- Woz has always been one of my heroes, and it's great to see him recognized for the incredible work he has done for the industry. According to the article, the Hall of Fame was created in 1973 by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and the National Council of Intellectual Property Attorneys.

bulgroz0 writes: "`They have been evolving for more than 300 million years. So they have got it right. They have been around a lot longer than we have,' said Davidowitz. Please see the Yahoo! News story."

John asks: "I'm designing a system where 10,000 applet based clients can view prices for a bunch of products. A requirement is that when a price changes, the clients see the new price within a few seconds. Basically, I'd like to push content to them. But a lot of them are behind firewalls, so a socket-based solution won't always work. OTOH, if they poll the server every couple of seconds using HTTP, that's 5,000 requests per second, which will require a server farm and multiple T1 lines. Does anyone know a more elegant way? I considered using HTTP requests that block in the server until a response is ready, but then I need to support 10,000 blocked threads and concurrent connections - another server farm. There's got to be a better way..."

ChrisBennett writes: "ICANN has just suggested a policy for introducing new Top Level Domains. This policy will be considered at the ICANN meeting on July 15-16, 2000 in Yokohama, Japan. I guess we'll be seeing the .rob and .dot TLDs that CmdrTaco wanted after all."

Jason W writes: "In a legal victory for Microsoft, the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed to hear the case. This was before Judge Penfield Jackson could hear the governement's request to bypass the lower courts and take the case to the Supreme Court."

RenQuanta asks: "Last August I graduated with my Masters and entered the work force with a very sweet technology job. Since then I've had great success in the projects I've been assigned too and as a consequence, my manager is pushing me into a project leadership role. That's fine, I enjoy the challenge and opportunity, but as time has gone on, I find myself doing more and more "management stuff" and less coding and hacking. That is, I'm spending too much time managing people, planning projects, dealing with customers and vendors. I don't want to spend my career as a manager, but as a technologist. Yet after only nine months in the industry, I realize that anyone with significant technological skill will end up as (at least) a project leader, with people under his/her authority. How do I keep from sliding too far down the path which will lead me to endless administration, financials, monthly letters, and too little technology in my day?"

M@W asks: "I currently run a Linux box (Slackware) in the office to handle e-mail, Web serving, SQL serving, dialup, print and fileserving, and it is connected netwise via a permanent modem. We're shortly opening another office a few kilometres away, and will need network connectivity. Since ISDN is so costly, I was planning on running two or more 33.6k modems at each site. To distribute the network traffic properly between the links do I need to be running something like EQL or EQL-plus? Since both ends will be our private networks, can I just assign IP's to all modems and set up the routing tables to use all links? Has anyone else done something like this? (Another option would be to use cable modems and a Virtual Private Network link, as they're only $59AUD per month (flat rate), but they don't allocate static IP's)"

The Chef writes: "Tweak3D has a pretty good article explaining how bump mapping works with 3D accelerated video cards. They cover all the basics of bump mapping and the advantages and disadvantages of several methods. Now if someone asks me how per-pixel shading or environment mapped bump mapping works, I'll have an answer (but I'm not sure if that's a good thing)." With the introduction of the new graphics cards, this is some interesting reading.

/ writes "The Massachusetts-based company Benthos has developed a way for submarines to send e-mail underwater at distances of up to 3 miles (to a relay buouy) at 2,400 bps, using sound waves. Military and commercial applications abound."

datarealm writes "In a story on yahoo, Intel badgered Harvard into covering all iMac kiosks during an Intel sponsored event. Apparently the Intel provided covers trapped heat, forcing the machines to not only be covered, but also powered down." How much of is this happening in donations to education, and what questions need to be asked when companies sponsor these kind of things?

MikeFM writes: "It looks like IBM is set to release Linux Thinkpads! This is great news to my ears. I am just holding out for a Transmeta powered Linux Thinkpad and then I can be happy. I do hope these Thinkpads are compatible with other versions of Linux though. I always use either Debian or Mandrake. Being that these would have limited use as a server I'd probably go w/ Mandrake." Question is, why so long? Thinkpads have been running Linux for a long time, after all.

brian writes "'Great algorithms are the poetry of computation,' says Francis Sullivan of the Institute for Defense Analyses' Center for Computing Sciences in Bowie, Maryland. He and Jack Dongarra of the University of Tennessee and Oak Ridge National Laboratory have put together a sampling that might have made Robert Frost beam with pride--had the poet been a computer jock. Their list of 10 algorithms having 'the greatest influence on the development and practice of science and engineering in the 20th century' appears in the January/February issue of Computing in Science & Engineering. If you use a computer, some of these algorithms are no doubt crunching your data as you read this."

3107813 asks: "Are large IDE drives a good alternative to tapes for backing up a server? I have a server with about 40GB of storage that I backup nightly. I have a tape rotation and end up saving the monthly tapes in case someone comes back and wants a file they messed up. Could I replace the tape system with large cheap ide drives?" The thing that makes tape popular as a backup medium is due to the fact that they are portable. Now that IDE drives are becoming cheaper and smaller, would something like this be practical?

Silas writes: "Well folks, Congress is moving along with attempts to make digital signatures legally binding for online transactions, public and private." Many pros and cons if this goes through, but I'm definitely looking forward to reducing my mail.

chrisd sent us the press release and says "Now, it is completely okay to blame every percieved failing of Slashdot on VA. I'd like to say that VA understands that Slashdot only has value so long as it is left free." My comment is the same as always: our editorial independance is legally guaranteed under no matter who owns us. Slashdot will suck just as much as always, and there's nothing anybody can do about it! Seriously, VA has a bunch of good guys, but the editorial staff is looking forward to not really having much to do with them *grin*.

Wolfe writes: "We knew it was only a matter of time before something like this happened ... I can't wait until our lives and households are completly wired and some jerk sends a virus to my toaster or hacks the coffee machine." Similarly, crovax writes: "A new virus that spams mobile phone users is out. Checkout the story here. This virus that has only been reported in Spain infects a computer then starts generating random mobile phone numbers." I'd hate to be on the Washington Beltway when this hits the D.C. area!

Jett sent us something interesting about Titans AE (a film that looks so cool, I just hope it doesn't suck). Apparently they are transmitting it digitally over the Internet from the studio to an early screening at a tradeshow. It will never touch film, and it'll mark the first time that a hollywood movie will be shown in a real theater, transmitted over the net, and never touching film. Not real time, tho -- it's getting downloaded first: 800x faster then a modem, 4 hour download time, so that's what, a terabyte?

Moderator writes: "Wouldn't it be nice if Microsoft ported Internet Explorer to FreeBSD? Apparently, someone else thinks so, and set up a petition for Microsoft to port IE to FreeBSD. Hey, I'm no Microsoft lover, but IE is better than Netscape." Hmm. Personally, I'm more of a "xterm -geometry =120x50 -e w3m" man, but to each his own I suppose.