Slashdot Mirror

TwoSticks writes "This NY Times article (CT:required annoying but free registration) and one at Yahoo talk about the Enron corporation working to set up a market for bandwidth, similar to the existing markets for buying and selling gas and electricity, but with transaction times in seconds. They claim this is essential for next generation network management, and I'm inclined to agree. "

afniv writes "Time.com as a short article about Linux. The reviewer talks briefly about Linux install troubles and will have future installments. "

Darkfell writes "The first Palm computer able to connect directly to the Internet will be unveiled in New York on May 24, according to people familiar with the company's plans. Along with the new device, Palm will debut its Palm.net wireless Internet service. "

jmtpi writes "Hackers at MIT turned the top of the Great Dome in the center of campus into R2D2 yesterday. See story in Yahoo News. " Anyone have more pics? If so, label accordingly and make a submission - I'll be sure to link them. Update: 05/18 07:06 by J : An article at Wired.Update: 05/18 07:42 by J : Shot 1, Shot 2, and Shot 3. Thanks to Aidan Low. More pics from tcs.

prevost writes "Three bank machines using retina-scans were turned on in Texas yesterday. Cool because it's harder for me to lose my eyes than my ATM card. Scary because eyes're harder to replace after you're mugged. Read more about it "

We break the week barrier, and tons of people email to gloat that they've seen screenings. The rest of us will have to settle for massive media hype including mantid's note from harper's that proclaims that Reagan's Star Wars project costed $4.166 billion, but Star Wars merchandise costed $4.5 billion. mattdm noted that Moviefone blew up under the ticket demand yesterday. ZD-Net has a report. DH1 sent us a really top notch interview at Salon with Empire Director Irvin Kershner- kinda nice to read something cool about the original movies after all this gas over the new one. Lastly Jethro73 sent us a George Lucas's take on piracy of Star Wars. Basically, he will be very angry and fight very hard (big surprise) against pirates. Update: 05/14 01:59 by CT : My ticket plans haven't happened, so if anyone has bright ideas on getting tickets for the Slashdot crew while we're at LinuxExpo, lemme know...

Rude Turnip writes "Motorola is selling its semiconductor components unit to privately-held Texas Pacific Group. Motorola hopes to concentrate on the high-end semiconductor business that provides embedded chips, while keeping some interest in the components business. "

MrCynical sent us a press release over at Yahoo proclaiming that IBM has invented Denser Hard Drives. While still 3 years away from manufacturing, they claim 2.5 billion bytes per square inch (the release also says this is 3 times more than IBMs current offerings). As would be expected, the first to benefit would be portable PCs.

AOL announced today it is teaming up with NCI, as software partner, to build a range of AOL set-top boxes. NCI uses FreeBSD suggesting AOL may be shipping FreeBSD based boxes. The devices will use MediaGX chips from National/Cyrix. Update: 05/12 04:07 by S : Paul Wain of NCI wrote in to tell me in an unofficial capacity that their "Corporate" Machines use a NetBSD derivative but the consumer ones use other OSes. Some of our server products use FreeBSD but not the "Consumer" ones.

cluening writes "I was shocked to see that one of the best poetry writers, Shel Silverstein, had died. Although not really technical in nature, I am sure his poems and drawings were enjoyed by a whole lot of the Slashdot community... " I've enjoyed several of his coffee tables books over the past winter-it's sad to see people like this go. Update: 05/11 04:25 by H :Thanks to Jesse Berney for sending us the Washington Post write-up about Shel.

An anonymous reader wrote in to say "It seems that there's a new company out there called Fast Search and Transfer which is competing with Inktomi. They have a demo online at www.alltheweb.com and their engine seems to be ultra-fast. News about this is available here. Try out the demo, it is awesome what these guys have done." It is fast, but so far I've not had as good luck searching as with other engines. And the speed is probably largely due to the sparse HTML. But its not bad.

Harlequin writes "These three articles from Yahoo center around RealNetwork's decision to support the MP3 format. In an interview between Rob Glaser (founder of RealNetworks) and ZDNet, Rob discusses what mp3s mean to RealNetworks and the industry. MP3 -- it has to change or die is a brief mainstream article about downloadable music and it's future. This article concerns the new product, RealJukebox, that was just released. Of course there's no mention of a Linux port... "

Harlequin writes "These three articles from Yahoo center around RealNetwork's decision to support the MP3 format. In an interview between Rob Glaser (founder of RealNetworks) and ZDNet, Rob discusses what mp3s mean to RealNetworks and the industry. MP3 -- it has to change or die is a brief mainstream article about downloadable music and it's future. This article concerns the new product, RealJukebox, that was just released. Of course there's no mention of a Linux port... "

Harlequin writes "These three articles from Yahoo center around RealNetwork's decision to support the MP3 format. In an interview between Rob Glaser (founder of RealNetworks) and ZDNet, Rob discusses what mp3s mean to RealNetworks and the industry. MP3 -- it has to change or die is a brief mainstream article about downloadable music and it's future. This article concerns the new product, RealJukebox, that was just released. Of course there's no mention of a Linux port... "

The Dude wrote in to send us This Press Release that says there will be an MTV Music Video Premiere for John Williams 'Duel of the Fates' track from the Prequels and performed by the LSO. The video will feature as yet unseen footage from the film. They're pre ordering the CD over at CDNOW for shipment also on May 3. Yummy.

An anonymous reader wrote in to say that "At the AMD shareholder's meeting today, AMD and KyroTech demonstrated a K7 system running at a cool 1 GHz! " Update: 04/29 10:26 by J : An article at news.com discusses AMD's plans for the chip, including pricing and initial speeds.

Peter Hernberg writes "We, it looks like someone has found another exploit to get your PIII ID. The new story is here.. " Cyrix and AMD are looking shinier each day.

Tomas wrote over to remind us about Dell's announcement that they will be doing factory-installation of RH 6.0 on select "Red-Hat" certified configurations of PowerEdge Severs, Precision Workstations and OptiPlex desktop machines. Dell has been flirting with a while-this looks like an engagement ring.

malacai writes " IBM has announced that ViaVoice will be available for Linux." Excellent-IBM does another good thing. Anyone played around with ViaVoice much? I'm interested in potentially using it-once my wrists fall apart.

Hari writes " Here's a story I got linked to from the RISKS forum. Don't just fear "Big Government", fear the "Big Stupid Corporation" too. "Yes, apparently just having cable modem service, and not cable is not something America is ready to handle-maybe the absence of consumption confuses them? Mmm...I love starting my Monday morning with a big dollop of stupidity-it's like Bailey's in the coffee!

superchiken writes " Get your tickets one week prior to the movie's May 19th opening day." Thank god Lucas is letting up on this- I will see this movie, or I'll just skip LinuxExpo for a few days to wait in Line *grin*

brent_clements writes "With the recent shootings in colorado, and other recent shootings around the country, I have been seeing articles such as this one, touting that these kids used the "internet", played games such as DOOM or Duke Nukem and were general geeks who were picked on in school. The articles that I am reading give me the impression that by using the internet or playing these games the kids were somehow provoked by them. " I'm overstepping my usual bounds a bit, posting what's sort of an AskSlashdot, but given the constant coverage, here in the US of the Colorado Massacre, and the fact that the murderers are being styled as geeks and hardcore Internet people, I'm wondering what everyone thinks. Is the perception of this prevasive? Or, more honestly, does the Internet make things like this easier for people? What about socialization of people? Let 'er rip folks-because geeks are getting blasted out there right now.

Richard Finney wrote in to send us a Yahoo/ZD article entitled Linux hamstrung by lack of standards? It mostly revolves around the Comdex stuff from monday, but it has a few choice quotes, especially Larry Augustin predicting that Linux will supplant NT in the server market this year, comments about how Linux is growing in the corporate world, and a little bit about the standards thing. Its odd that they chose that title when the artice really doesn't spend much time on the subject.

datazone asks: "I have a particular network device, that is currently not supported, however the manufacturer gave me a precompiled module from a 2.0.33 system. They have no plans of releasing the source or creating new modules, it was only by numerous messages that I got my hands on these. The only problem is that i use the 2.2.4 kernel and it will not allow me to load these modules. I was wondering if anyone knew a way around this. I need to get these modules loaded, without having to use an old kernel. Anyone have any information on this?"

tomsky sent us more good news from the world of Commercial Support for Linux. Hewlett-Packard Company today announced the availability of HP Linux support services. Another source of 24/7 support for Linux, from another long term player no less.

tomas sent us a press release on yahoo talking about Linux and Supercomputers. Talks about Beowulf and clusters as well as Albuquerque High Performance Computing Center's 128 P2/450 cluster. I'd like one of those, but I don't have $400k, or a building to put it in. (who am I kidding! I couldn't pay the electricity bill to run 128 P2s!)

tomas writes ""Addressing an audience of information technology professionals in Houston, Gates said there was clearly a market for free software but this was mainly confined to relatively simple applications such as word processing and spreadsheets". Get the full story and read the full comments. Geez-someone wrap him in asbestos, methinks.

BonesBro writes "Netgem is releasing a new set-top internet appliance (remember WebTV?) with a twist...this baby runs on Linux. Among other things, it claims to support 640x480 resolution with no onscreen deformation. Shipdate is give as Q4, but no price was listed. Check out the press release. "

Today's idiotic lawsuit...parents are suing Hollywood and some porn websites because some kid shot a bunch of his classmates. Here is an exceptionally choice quote: "The lawsuit claims that confessed shooter Michael Carneal, a 14-year-old freshman at Heath High School at the time of the Dec. 1, 1997, shootings, was influenced by the violence in ``The Basketball Diaries'' and by several violent computer games such as ``Doom,'' ``Quake,'' and ``Mortal Combat.''" The Mortal Combat techno track does make me want to kill whoever produced it, and I've never been fond of DiCaprio, but wow. What a great country we live in. Update: 04/13 02:11 by CT : several people sent us this story which says that 14 game companies will be sued. Guess who is among them?

Troy Larsen sent us a link to a yahoo press release proclaiming a company selling a Linux Based Router. Up to 40 gigs per second and up to 128 100mb ports. Yum.

Troy Larsen sent us a link to a yahoo press release proclaiming a company selling a Linux Based Router. Up to 40 gigs per second and up to 128 100mb ports. Yum.

Lampropeltis Alterna wrote in to tell us that Dell has bought equity in Red Hat. Another hat has been thrown into the ring. I've always thought of Dell as completely in bed with Microsoft, it'll be interesting to see how they follow this up.

phil reed writes "CNN is running a special section on "hacking" called Insurgency on the Internet. I read part of it and winced, but other parts aren't bad. They have a dualing interview, featering Emmanuel Goldstein (Editor of 2600 Magazine) on the 'pro' side, and he gives a pretty good accounting of himself. On the other hand, there is some pretty lame stuff. "

preed-man writes "I don't know what's up in Mountain View, but it's not good: AOL has laid off about 430 Netscape employees; in addition to this, a "key Mozilla.org figure" has resigned as well. It's a somber time in Mountain View. " CT : Sorry about the lag in story postings. Reformatted and reinstalled, but I now have a nice shiny new Debian box.

MBrod sent us a link to a story about the business plan of the new AOL/Sun/Netscape holy trinity. I'm keeping my eye on this one. The plan is nice and vague, but it does look like they will be working fairly closely.

F2F sent us linkage to a bit written by ESR called How to Become a Hacker. The best quote is "being able to break security doesn't make you a hacker more than being able to hotwire cars makes you an automotive engineer. "

Taz writes "The NAiAM CD-MP seems to be vaporware, but MP3.COM has just posted an article listing a whole slew of new MP3 players for the car and home, some of them are even shipping right now. "

TDO writes "A new encryption bill has passed a sub committee. Next it will go to the main Judiciary Panel. It may also have to go through up to four more Panels before it goes to the floor. The bill would loosen restrictions on encyption that could be exported. Read the article here. "

Chris Calabrese writes "CMP TechWeb just posted a story on a new wearable monitor technology that promisses low power consumption and high performance. Still kind of expensive, but it would be nice to have one anyway. " $2500-$5k? Ah well, I can dream.

An anonymous reader sent us a link to a story where you can read about Anonymous Posters being Sued for slanderous comments made on forums at Yahoo. This ain't good people: I've been trying to keep ACs here for a long time to make it possible for people to speek openly, but the abuses put the whole system at risk. Slashdot couldn't afford to be sued- and we've been threatened several times. I'll be watching this one carefully,

Pudding Yeti writes "O'Reilly is running an article entitled Whence the Source: Untangling the Open Source/Free Software Debate, which seeks to, well, untangle the free/open debate. It even seems balanced. I liked it. Maybe others will, too. "

behhl writes "Newsbytes says that Creative has announced a "Project Nomad" range of portable MP3 players. No actual machines are specified, and the Creative site has no news. " Cool-Creative helped bring PC sound out of the pre-Stone Age-the more the merrier.

behhl writes "Newsbytes says that Creative has announced a "Project Nomad" range of portable MP3 players. No actual machines are specified, and the Creative site has no news. " Cool-Creative helped bring PC sound out of the pre-Stone Age-the more the merrier.

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.

somebody else writes "According to this AP article on Yahoo!, a British firm has developed a loudspeaker that can be heard, but not seen. It uses glass or plexiglass panels that emit sound through subtle vibrations. See-through speakers should enable better sound on laptop computers, and use a car windshield/windscreen to double as a stereo speaker"

KaHa writes sent us a link to an article over at Yahoo saying that Intel is investing in VA. Larry Augustin is quoted as saying "I can't confirm or deny anything" in the little blurb. It also says that this will officially be announced tomorrow.

Xmas writes "Early breaking news? British officials report the seizing of a "military" satellite and a subsequent demand for money. At least the British government can admit to being cracked... and blackmailed...even if it took them two weeks to release the story. " The news story has no comment from the British Ministry of Defense, while Police refused to comment because of the sensitivty at this stage of the game. What is known is that the Brits have 4 such satellites, and the crackers reportedly "altered its course". I'll be watching to see if anything more develops with this-like more then an anonymous cow...er-source is cited.

Scott writes "It sounds like standard offline retailers weren't very happy with being consistently undersold by online-only retailers, and asked Compaq to fix it. Well, they did. For the next 90 days Compaq has suspended sales of it's boxes to companies who only sell through the web. Compaq also ordered Ingram Micro, who wholesale everything imaginable to retailers to halt sales to their online-only customers. "

homebrewer writes "This quick little blurb on www.yahoo.com tells about IBM teaming up with Red Hat to sell Linux." Someone else submitted some bits about IBM providing Think Pads to hackers to make sure that Linux runs properly? IBM is doing a lot of the right things. I hear we should expect big things from them at LinuxWorld too. Update: 02/18 08:43 by CT : here's a related story. Similiar stuff, litte more detailed.

mrlament wishes to know about the following: "I've been a long time Linux user, but I keep finding myself having to switch over to my Windows box in order to view videos. I've tried xanim, and have yet had it properly handle a single video, aside from the real player, I cannot seem to find a single decent player for MOVs, AVIs and MPGs. Does anyone know of any, or are there just not any out there?" I posted this up here because I get a lot of this from people outside of Ask Slashdot, so I figure there are people out there that want this information. Hit the link for more. In all honesty, I don't think Linux is going to get very far beyond Indeo Video 3.2 support since IV4, IV5 and the I263 codecs are VERY proprietary and (so I've heard) it costs a lot of money just to become a developer. I would love support for AVIs under more than just Windows, but it's been a couple of years since IV4 was released and I just haven't seen support for it materialize anywhere else (if I'm wrong, someone PLEASE correct me!).

I'm surprised that there ISN'T more visible QuickTime support, but that's Apple's bailiwick. Intel and Apple have also begun to crosslicense technology as Apple now gets Intel Video 4.4 support for QuickTime. Of course as far as I can tell, QuickTime is still only available for Macs, 95/98 and NT.

MPG video files are more crossplatform than any of the others. I expect this format is supported under more platforms than any other, however I don't have any information on a LINUX player. If someone has a helpful link, please post it.

As an aside, MainConcept has one of the best movie players I have seen and supports a wide range of formats. It's been the mainstay viewer under OS/2 for a while, and it looks like they've taken an interest in Linux as they are attempting to port their Video Editor over.

Update: 02/13 01:16 by C : I've started a discussion, and someone has already answered my question regarding IV4 and IV5 on Linux. It appears that the only people who can offer support on these codecs is Intel themselves. With their support of Linux in recent times, who knows, this might actually happen. A cordial letter writing campaign might be in order to see if we can get them to port these codecs sooner rather than later?