Slashdot Mirror

Kris_J writes "Electronic Media Online have an article about PVRs and their effect on viewing habits. Specifically it says that owners watch more TV, less ads and have less of an idea what channels they're watching. I like the last line; "The [senior advertising] executive said he had never heard of PVRs, and moreover, he wasn't interested in learning more." Good." Having owned a TiVo for about six months now, I can confirm this - my TV watching has gone up, a bit, I watch barely any ads - but I usually have a good idea which channel I'm on. CartoonNetwork has some great network promoting ads.

djchristensen sent us a link to a yahoo article detailing those obnoxious pop up ads from souless marketroids whose mothers don't love them any more. I own a ton of X10 stuff, but I'll never purchase another item from them. And thank god that the modern web browsers have helpful options like 'disable window.open for this domain' rendering this sort of torture harmless.

joestump98 writes: "Yahoo! has this story about Lucy Lawless joining the cast of X-Files. Her part is being tightly guarded, but I can imagine it will make for some great stories. She's only signed up for two episodes as of now."

joestump98 writes: "Yahoo! has this story about Lucy Lawless joining the cast of X-Files. Her part is being tightly guarded, but I can imagine it will make for some great stories. She's only signed up for two episodes as of now."

joestump98 writes: "Yahoo! has this story about Lucy Lawless joining the cast of X-Files. Her part is being tightly guarded, but I can imagine it will make for some great stories. She's only signed up for two episodes as of now."

joestump98 writes: "Yahoo! has this story about Lucy Lawless joining the cast of X-Files. Her part is being tightly guarded, but I can imagine it will make for some great stories. She's only signed up for two episodes as of now."

An Anonymous Coward writes: "U.S. software and services company Red Hat and Britain's closely held 3G Lab said on Monday they will develop a 'Linux for the wireless world' as they team up to write an operating system for Web phones." The hypothetical "cell phone running Linux" might not stay hypothetical very long.

cloudscout writes: "The Business Software Alliance has been sending out threatening letters to companies across the US hinting that they may be audited for licensing compliance. This article on Yahoo, tells the complete story. First, the letters are really just a marketing tool to sell more software. The BSA has no intention of following through with their threats. Second, and possibly even more importantly, the tactics are often resulting in a switch to open source software. It seems that nobody likes a bully. Play hardball and people will start taking their business elsewhere." My mom was genuinely frightened when she got The Letter, precisely because of the threatening tone this article discusses.

mkasei writes: "High in the arctic polar desert sits the Mars Society's Flashline Mars Arctic Research Station. Its first year of operations started about 5 weeks ago. There have been numerous technical difficualties but everything seems to be working now. Today they turned on 2 of 3 webcams so people can spy in on them. The habitat as it is called has two decks. There is a webcam on each deck. A third is to be placed outside facing the hab as "astronauts" egress out of the hab for EVA's in simulated space suits. They are working in collaboration with NASA's Haughton-Mars Project and other organizations to learn what it will be like to live and work on Mars. In the next few weeks they plan on testing out several small rovers and a prototype Mars suit."

Jay writes: "This article is really helpful if you're new to Linux, or even if you're not-so-new. It helps Windows users transition to Linux, but those converting from other operating systems will find useful information here as well." Personally, I'd think that learning a new OS would be worth the cost of a book (which I note is out of print - does that mean a new edition is on the way?), but if you're too cheap to buy a book, well, here's a pretty decent guide to getting started with GNU/Linux.

sarchasm writes: "Apparently George Lucas is suing medical intsrument company Minrad for calling some of its new laser-based surgical devices Light Sabers. According to the suit: "Any deficiencies or faults in the quality of the defendant's goods are likely to reflect negatively upon, tarnish and seriously injure the reputation which Lucasfilm has established for goods and services marketed under its Light Saber mark. This confusion is likely to result in loss of revenues to Lucasfilm and damage to its reputation."" I know that I myself have on occasion confused surgical cutting implements and little-plastic-flashlights-with-plastic-cones. If you go into surgery, and the surgeon has one of these, he's made the same mistake, and you'd better let him know!

jwales writes: "Larry Sanger, editor-in-chief of the Nupedia and Wikipedia sister projects, has written a fabulous response on k5 to Britannica's decision to start charging fees for access. It's all about freedom (in the sense of free speech), but there are implications for freedom (in the sense of free beer)."

mkasei writes "SpaceRef has an early press release with image from Brown University which reports evidence of recent liquid water near the surface of mars. What's important about this find is that it is near the equator making it more readily accessable for a mission, be it robotic or manned." Update: 07/25 09:49 PM by M : There's also a BBC story about water on Mars as well, and a brief Nature article about the possibility of water on Callisto.

ChelleyBean writes "A group of security experts have put together an elaborate simulation that lawmakers viewed on Monday. The goal was to show one possible scenario should the US be hit with a bioterrorist attack. What purpose the exercise was to serve is not mentioned, but one would assume either someone wants more money to beef up defense or someone is looking for a new scare tactic for the next election. " I firmly belive this scenario is far more compelling and dangerous then rogue nuclear missiles - check out my review of Living Terrors for more information.

davemie writes: "Looks like everyone is out to get the virus writers now!. But it sure is funny when a friend double-clicks on that latest virus and sends everyone in the company a copy. You get to slag him/her off for the rest of the week :-) 'Virus writers are the lowest form of life. AnchorDesk's David Coursey says we should put them out of their misery with a quick, permanent solution. Why waste time and money with due process?' I spent a total of an hour and forty minutes on hold making two different calls to the ISP which serves my mail. Both times the polite phone reps I eventually reached were shocked to find that there was an Outlook-borne nastiness filling up customers' mailboxes.

Darkmeat writes: "Saw this on ZDNet. Looks like SQL Server was causing some problems in nuclear databases in Russia." Another similar story at Yahoo. This is a followup to this story detailing the problems.

gmr2048 writes: "Our local Fox affiliate is reporting a compact-car size metior may have hit north central PA Monday evening. CNN story here. Too bad I missed it :("

The loyal fjordboy writes: "At about 6:30 EST this evening, many meteors broke apart and headed south coming from Canada. I was able to witness the meteor flying overhead in Trout Run, PA and it was spectacular. There was an incredible bright flash and then a meteor with an incredible tail. A few minutes after it had left, a sound shook the ground and buildings in the vicinity. It even set off some car alarms in the parking lot." Anyone else out there see this in person?

More information below to update recent stories about MandrakeSoft's IPO, CDs designed to thwart the evil and insidious practices of convenient listening and fair use, and He-Man's favorite GNU/Linux distribution.

This has nothing to do with "slacking." Xpilot writes "The Slack people have decided to discontinue support for the SPARC architecture (boo hoo), read about it here."

In other words, they're putting their efforts elsewhere -- which is not to say that someone else can't build on the GPL'd SPARC codebase already assembled up to now. I've never heard a Slackware user complaining, so Patrick and company clearly know what they're about.

Even for you U.S. persons! From the announcement I posted on Mandrake's upcoming IPO on a French stock exchange (and from the announcement it pointed to), many people got the impression that Americans were legally excluded from buying shares in the offering. Actually, it's MandrakeSoft which is not allowed to advertise the offering outside of France.

As one correspondent points out, "Everybody can use an online broker that accepts orders for European markets from U.S. people ( for instance) or use their broker if they can take orders for 'Euronext Marche Libre.'" Your regular broker may be able to handle this.

This isn't investment advice, though. Buy (or do not) at your own risk and pleasure, and pay attention to the various complications and liabilities ;) Either way, you may be interested in an informative article at Freezer-Burn about the process.

Additionally, a semi-anonymous reader wrote with a few figures about the offering: "After the IPO there will be a total of 3 395 269 shares. Which will do a valuation (market capitalization) after IPO of 21 millions Euros (18,3 millions USD). Redhat is currently at 577 Millions USD - so it's 1/30th Redhat size, about 3% of Redhat."

Too bad Adobe isn't a music publisher. You read recently about the quiet introduction of rip-resistant CDs into U.S. stores; now fadden writes: "I've posted an update to the CD-Recordable FAQ that explains my understanding of how (and, more importantly, why) the Macrovision technology works, why it won't prevent you from playing CDs in your car or on your computer, why it will be effective at making it difficult to "rip" or copy CDs, and where hopes lie for defeating it."

1millionmhz writes: "NewsForge is reporting that Alan Cox has resigned from his position on the USENIX ALS committee in protest of Dimitry Sklyarov's arrest in Las Vegas. He is also urging non-US programmers to boycott American computing conferences until the DMCA is overturned." Boy, aren't you glad that the DMCA now has nine special units to prosecute hacking and copyright violations? At least it will help keep the country safe from programmers. Update: 07/22 01:05 AM by T : Yup, it's a dupe. Mea culpa -- I missed it the first time. Worth dwelling on, though ;)

joestump98 writes: "In an effort much like Ralph Nader's effort to increase safety standards for the car industry, The Center for Internet Security plans to pressure software vendors into shipping products with the 'highest security settings available, making them less vulnerable to viruses and hacking ...' Some of its members include Intel and Stanford. The best part is they will be releasing testing tools for all of the major operating systems, including Linux."

camusflage writes: "As if to try to prove that Napster doesn't suck, the 9th Circuit Appeals Court overturned Marilyn Patel's July 11th order that Napster remain down. Now they've got the green light to turn it back on, blocking "only" 99% of copyrighted songs, instead of the full 100% Judge Patel required of them. Full details here."

Paintthemoon writes: "Naval salvage experts raised the 30-ton steam engine from the Civil War ship Monitor from the bottom of the Atlantic on Monday. The ship had sunk in 1862 while being towed about 16 miles off of Cape Hatteras." The hull of the Monitor, it turns out, is unrecoverable because it's had depth charges and an anchor dropped on it (unrelated incidents), but there are plenty of other pieces still to be brought up and studied.

Randy Rathbun submitted a Reuters article about the arrest of Dmitri Sklyarov. Cryptome has collected the press release and criminal complaint filed against Sklyarov by the United States, at the urging of Adobe Corporation. The complaint specifically mentions the ROT-13 "encryption" used by at least one "protected ebook" company, so the jokes made about the DMCA before are now true: crack ROT-13, go to jail. Sklyarov is currently imprisoned without bail. We've received a note that another Russian developer who was at the conference with Sklyarov has posted more information about the arrest - can someone provide a translation in the comments? Update: 07/18 10:57 PM by S : This Las Vegas Sun Article provides more interesting details (Thanks to possible for the link).

Kagato writes: "CNN reports here that Sony and WB have come to an agreements for Digital Content Control via cable. Even worse, Fox and Disney are making the rounds to get Content Control into over-the-air broadcasts. "...a controversial notion, since over-the-air is, by its literal definition, free and clear." It should be noted 80% of US households use cable/DBS." So when AOL/Time-Warner says you can record a show, you can. I'm sure we can all be happy with that much freedom.

simong writes "As reported in The Register Napster is to abandon the MP3 format for a proprietary .nap format being developed with Bertelsmann. " As Cliff pointed out "dirt.nap is about what Napster amounts to these days anyway." You can get more more information from Yahoo's Reuters feed.

schauba writes: "Cipherwar has an article describing Sandia National Laboratories' new 10-foot by 13-foot, 20-million-pixel screen. The screen was created to allow scientists to view extremely complicated systems without sacrificing detail. The images are created through a parallel imaging system using 64 computers to generate the output. This makes my 17" monitor suddenly seem so inadequate." You can also view the same text with pretty pictures on Sandia's site.

drbrain writes: "They seem to have succeeded again, their Helios is their first success of a remotely, solar self powered aircraft. Looks kinda weird. They plan to use it for research and the military." Meanwhile, Guppy06 and many others sent in stories about a successful test of the Star Wars missile defense system, which will protect us from all those ballistic missiles that foreign nations don't have and would be silly to use, when you can just drive down from Canada with a suitcase nuke.

aristotle2000 writes: "Suprisingly, the Taliban has prohibited the use of the Internet in Afghanistan. Apparently, the Internet can deliver un-Islamic, immoral, or lewd material. Who can believe that a country that has such an open attitude towards women, minorities, religions, and the press would object to the Internet?" I guess I'm unclear on the concept here: if the government is also forswearing the internet, who is going to monitor to make sure the peons aren't secretly dialing up to AOL? On the plus side, .af domains should be real cheap.

jeffy124 writes: "Metallica and Dr Dre have settled their lawsuits against Napster. Lars Ulrich says the terms of settlement allow Metallica to have final say over what songs of their's are permitted to be traded over the Napster service." It's pretty easy to settle when you're completely shut down anyway.

J Shumate writes: " NIST has built a better clock, which, no doubt, will lead to a better mouse trap." According to the article, "The new all-optical atomic clock -- so named because of its reliance on laser technology -- measures the shortest intervals of time ever recorded. In fact, those intervals are 100,000 times shorter than those observed by the best current clocks."

iammichael writes "Scientists scouring the Atlantic Ocean have found huge towers of stone (the tallest ever) that they've named the "The Lost City" since they are located on a seafloor mountain named Atlantis Massif. Read about it on Yahoo news or CNN"

jhartnagle asks: "For VNC (Virtual Network Computing) we are trying to determine what the minimal bandwith would be on a network and still have a functional experience for the user (no or very little lag/latency). Information on any type of network connection would be useful, 10/100Mbps, cable/DSL, and modems. What are some of the setup parameters for the machine that would be the VNC server, x number of bits for color for example. Are there any white papers about VNC, bandwidth requirements and usability? Also, is there similar information about telnet? How low of baud rate can you go before it stops being functional? We would be interested in any academic and practical information. Thanks!" So does anyone have any rules of thumb or words of caution in allocating enough bandwidth here? Better yet, are there any good hints in accomplishing VNC over relatively low bandwidth networks?

paladino writes: "The LA County Tax Collectors office wants to collect property taxes from Huges Electronics for the value of their satellites orbiting the earth. They say 'satellites are no different from other movable personal property that he has authority to tax.'" Perhaps LA will need to open a lot for satellites confiscated for non-payment, too. See also The Man Who Owned the Moon by Robert A. Heinlein. Update: 07/11 02:02 PM by J : OK, OK, it's The Man Who Sold the Moon - blame me for this one. Timothy foolishly trusted my brain. /me runs memtest86 on his cranium

budcub writes "IT Recruitermag has a informative column, on How to deal with Prima Donna programmers from a management point of view." Put on the asebestos -- but I will say that a number of people that I've worked with, or talked to, have complained about working with people like this before.

quakeaddict writes: "The SOAP 1.2 spec is out in draft. Get it while it's hot!"

JoeGee writes "And it's not the Russian Space Agency. According to the Associated Press, as reported on Yahoo, NASA is looking at 4 billion US dollars worth of budget over-runs through 2006. This isn't surprising, considering the lack of budget increases, and the continued financial pressure.

JoeGee writes "And it's not the Russian Space Agency. According to the Associated Press, as reported on Yahoo, NASA is looking at 4 billion US dollars worth of budget over-runs through 2006. This isn't surprising, considering the lack of budget increases, and the continued financial pressure.

krugdm writes: "NASA will be sending up a robotic spacecraft named "Genesis" which will bring back specks of solar wind in order to study what the solar system may have been like when it was first forming." According to the article, this will be the "first U.S. spacecraft since the Apollo moon ships to return samples from outer space," and the planned recovery involves a Hollywood-sounding helicopter catch of the reentry pod.

Alowishus writes: "Looks like it's the end of the road for Webvan. Their website appears to be down, and Oakland local news reported employees clearing out their possessions from the company's warehouse. A press conference is scheduled for Monday." First kozmo.com, now this -- I'm giving up hope on ultra-cheap delivery by web as a business model to support my retirement fund. Perhaps Peapod can buck the trend, though.

ctg1701 noticed that daemonews was running "a story today about openpackages for *BSD," and says "I am a big fan of the freebsd and openbsd operating systems and having a seamless way of creating packages on these and other platforms would be great. It seems they are also working on porting this over to HPUX and Mac OSX. Very cool stuff. Check it out at http://www.openpackages.org."

bac_mit writes: "I guess we all saw this coming with the dismal sales, but Apple has finally decided to stop making the cube. There's an article about it here. It's always sad to see a beautifully designed product die." A year ago, the Cube was being hyped like crazy. What happened?

iceT sent us a link to an article about Microsoft banning the GPL from be used w/ their Mobile Internet Tools beta. It's kinda tricky, but the article is really interesting (except I still don't really know what code I would get w/ the mobile internet tools beta). They specifically ban several Open Source licenses from being used with the toolkit. Update 1.5h later by J : Yes, we know we ran this a little while back but there are good quotes from NuSphere and Ximian in today's piece. C'mon, don't you want to read them?

complex writes "Jim Ellis, one of the cofounders of Usenet, has passed away. Usenet is considered the first large information sharing service, predating the WWW by years." He was 45 years old, and died after battling non-Hodgkins lymphoma for 2 years. Usenet of course began in 1979, and is the 2nd of the 3 most important applications on the net (the first being email, and the third being the web). Truly a man who changed the world.

Siloh writes "Ace's hardware has posted a Floating-Point Compiler Performance Analysis which, in a nutshell, tests Intel's most important claim about the Pentium 4. "It does not reach its full potential with today's software, but with future software (including SSE-2 optimizations) it will outclass the competition". They test with Floating point benchmarks which have been recompiled on the latest Intel and MS compilers." Basically, another iteration of the question: Can the P4 dethrone the Athlon?

yknott writes "It seems that Seagate just released a virtually silent hard drive. It emits only 2.0 bels while spinning and 2.4 bels while seeking; the human ear can't hear sounds below 2.5 bels. No more grinding sounds! It features Fluid Dynamic Bearings, and has an internal transfer rate of 69.3 Megabytes per second. " I'm currently questing to build a quieter computer - and while I'd love to test this, I will definitely say that Silent Drives I recently bought from New England Digital is awesome - but is rated to only work with 5400 rpms drives.

Everyone and their brother sent in this unsurprising news: the Appeals Court handling the Microsoft anti-trust case has overturned the break-up decision. A few story URLs: CNet, BBC, ABC, AP, Reuters, MSNBC. The decision is available in .pdf format. A brief summary: the Findings of Fact (Microsoft's conduct, etc.) are still in place, but Judge Jackson's evaluation of those facts and the penalty he imposed are thrown out. A new District Judge will examine the case, starting from the Findings of Fact. Update 2h later by J : Dan Gillmor's analysis is good. So is this Washington Post column, which is insightful except it doesn't go far enough. It also shows MS CEO Steve Ballmer's attitude even before today's ruling: "Is there any limit to what you think you can put into the operating system at all?" "...as a matter of law, no, I don't think so..."

The subject pretty much says it. You can read the announcement over at Yahoo, but the short and long of it is that VA, the company that owns OSDN which owns Slashdot, Freshmeat, and assorted other Linux web sites, has announced that it is leaving the Hardware Business to focus on SourceForge OnSite, OSDN, and Linux development and consulting. Slashdot should be unaffected.Update: 06/27 08:43 PM by H :It's also relevant to point out this statement from Richard French, the General Manager of OSDN, which is a message to the Community.

More inspiration tonight for anyone planning a low-key entry to space, eyeball feed to celebrate Quake's semi-decennial, and a bit more on Scott McCloud's comic arguments.

Alternate title: Natural Born Fraggers JamesColburn writes: "I just noticed your article on the 5th anniversary of Quake. I spent much of last year with a couple of friends making a 40 min documentary on the game, the gamers and pro game playing ... Broke my bank. But it was worth it."

Are there prizes for other letters, too? gagganator writes: "If you thought that American aiming for space was headed for the darwin awards, check out this brit who seems destined to beat him (to the darwin awards, that is)."

The ten-million dollar X-prize is a pretty good incentive for early adopters, but I might wait until Boeing has done a few test flights, introduced frequent flyer miles, etc, rather than just sit among four strapped-together rocket engines.

If you must draw conclusions, draw them like this. Sudderth writes: "Scott McCloud has posted a reaction to the 'backlash' against his online comic about micropayments."

McCloud wrote and drew what is probably the best explanation of and argument for micropayments as applied to comics (in two parts -- here are the slashdot posts about the first and second parts) that I've ever seen. Seems like not everyone agrees.

Homer Simpson writes: "IBM will announce on Monday that it has developed the world's fastest silicon transistor. They claim to have refined their silicon-germanium chip-manufacturing technology to produce transistors that are far thinner than existing ones. This will allow information to travel faster while using a lot less power. The new transistor can operate at 210Ghz (yikes!) using a measly milliamp of electrical current (80% faster than todays technology while using half the power)." Reader Geheimnis points out an announcement on IBM's site about this as well.

Robot writes "Midway Games on friday, reported it is exiting the coin-operated video-game market in order to focus its business exclusively on games for the rapidly growing home video-game market. The Chicago-based company said it made its decision based on the "ongoing declining demand in the coin-operated arcade video game market". Midway said its game development efforts will now be focused on games for next generation platforms including the Xbox, PS2 and Gamecube. More information can be found at FunXbox." Another nail in the coffin of the arcade.