Slashdot Mirror

beebware writes: "According to this article on C|Net, Tim Bray (co-inventor of XML) has launched Antarcti.ca which renders computer networks in 2 and 3D maps. It's currently running a demo off the ODP data. But will it take off? Will users really like 'country-maps' opposed to listings? (Incidentally Tim used to be vice-president of production at Yahoo! so I think we can tell what his money's on.)"

Let's start this off with some violence! BigBlockMopar answered the age-old question: what happens when a tank runs over a hard drive. NeoCode sent the The Illustrated Guide To Breaking Your Computer, and finally, matticus discovered The Overclockerz Store is selling burnt-up athlons/durons made into keychains. Now that we've got that out of our system, lets get some schoolin' by learning about the facts of life: spankweasel sent in the invisible condom. Now math: Jonathan Hayward sent us A four-dimensional maze. And some history: John Willemin sent us a nostalgia inducing Microsoft Ad from the days of yore. After a hard day of education, why not travel home on your lawn mower powered hoverboard at a cool 15mph? (thanks LenZ) Then we can play some dot-com monopoly (thanks to gmag3) and see what's on TV. MTO sent us Trailers for the Dune miniseries, and David Hume sent an abc article about Vinyl Video which attempts to generate images from your records. Finally, we better check the weather channel to find out what the weather is gonna be like ... on Mars (thanks noctis).

(eternal_software) writes: "Reuters is reporting that the world's first cybercrime treaty is being redrafted after Internet lobby groups assailed it as a threat to human rights that could have 'a chilling effect on the free flow of information and ideas.'" The Council of Europe has added new passages to clarify, according to Reuters, "that 'cracking' computer systems to test security is legal and that ISPs would only be asked to store specific data related to a suspected crime."

kupolu writes: "According to this article at Techweb, AMD announced last Friday that it is dropping its plans for the Mustang processor in favor of the new AMD-760 DDR-Enabled chipset. The Mustang was going to be AMD's entry into the server market, with it's amazing up-to 2MB L2 Cache." (Actually, from this article it's hard to tell if even AMD knows what's going on; tweezing apart the code names from the capabilities of particular products to be offered is complicated.) But on the coming-out instead of dropping-off front, proxima writes: "This story on Yahoo describes that Intel is releasing two new Celeron chips on Monday. One, a 733 Mhz model, will cost $112 per chip in bulk. A 766 Mhz model will cost $170 per chip."

kupolu writes: "According to this article at Techweb, AMD announced last Friday that it is dropping its plans for the Mustang processor in favor of the new AMD-760 DDR-Enabled chipset. The Mustang was going to be AMD's entry into the server market, with it's amazing up-to 2MB L2 Cache." (Actually, from this article it's hard to tell if even AMD knows what's going on; tweezing apart the code names from the capabilities of particular products to be offered is complicated.) But on the coming-out instead of dropping-off front, proxima writes: "This story on Yahoo describes that Intel is releasing two new Celeron chips on Monday. One, a 733 Mhz model, will cost $112 per chip in bulk. A 766 Mhz model will cost $170 per chip."

TSServo asks: "I started wondering about this the other day in one of my more dull moments at work. What was the USSR using for processors and an OS during the cold war and prior? I doubt that any US based company such as Intel had them on their mailing list. They developed some pretty darn sophisticated stuff and had to have been using something. Does anyone have any information on who the Soviet software and hardware tech leaders were, and moreso how this stuff stacked up against our products during that time?"

Eric Sun was among the first to point out that as of Thursday evening, VeriSign has begun accepting Chinese, Japanese and Korean domain names. "This increases the possible characters from 37 (26 letters, 10 numerals, and hyphen) to 40,282. Find more information [see this AP story]." snrsamy points to the same story as featured on C|Net . jamie suggests reading the technical lowdown at VeriSign.

Lothsahn was the first to write to us about the latest statement from Linus regarding the Linux 2.4 Kernel release date. His statement says that he knows of no major showstoppers, and that he's asking the major devel houses to deploy the test kernels internally and start bug testing. Early December, hopefully, for a release.

A reader sent us the press release that the Secure Digital Music Initiative folks have put regarding the hack SDMI challenge. They are stating that three out of the five were not cracked, contrary to earlier reports, and that of the two that were cracked, one was not a replicable event. Meanwhile, Salon has continued their coverage of the whole shebang.

CritterNYC asks: "Anyone know of a good NT Web host? I've had 3 different hosting providers over the last 3 years and had horrible experiences with all three: downtime, unpatched servers, e-mail problems, security issues, configuration issues. Even tried one of the 'top-rated' hosts and it was even worse. Most of my problems can be traced to poor support. (I've administered NT and know what it's capable of.) I have a client store written in ASP and SQL7 to take live soon and am having trouble figuring out where to put it. Any suggestions?"

YanceyAI writes "According to Yahoo!, a federal judge rejected the ACLU's lawsuit to force California authorities to allow Web sites aimed at so-called 'Nader-traders.' Read more here." Interesting. I hope the ACLU does pursue the case. On the one hand, the idea of vote-trading is silly, because there's absolutely no way to verify if the other party complied. But this very silliness means there shouldn't be any law against it - it's just speech.

YanceyAI writes "According to Yahoo!, a federal judge rejected the ACLU's lawsuit to force California authorities to allow Web sites aimed at so-called 'Nader-traders.' Read more here." Interesting. I hope the ACLU does pursue the case. On the one hand, the idea of vote-trading is silly, because there's absolutely no way to verify if the other party complied. But this very silliness means there shouldn't be any law against it - it's just speech.

A final pre-election assemblage of political news for voters, conscientious objectors, felons, minors, and non-U.S. citizens. Philom points to an interesting analysis of NaderTrading by UCB grad student Scott Aaronson. Cheshyre sent in an interesting tidbit that may affect the odds of George Bush sneaking north for some subsidized health care. Of course, if that's embarrassing, so is trading cigarettes for Gore Votes, as pointed out by photozz. flimpy points to another tech-centric voter's guide. Finally, Mike McCune allleges that "About 90% of the national elections use use a device called the 'Shouptronic' to count the votes. The Shouptronic is a closed system that isn't open for inspection. Several groups argue that it has been used to fix the vote in elections. This is a good argument to use an open system for election counting." He points to this wacky but intriguing book by the equally wacky but intriguing Collier family. I'm convinced.

tewl points to this Reuters article on Yahoo!, which explains briefly the capture of "a giant specimen of a strange, light-emitting, deep sea cephalopod" by Spanish fishermen. The article says "[t]he octopus-like creature, a taningia danae, weighs in at 275 pounds, measures seven feet and is easily the biggest of its type discovered." Not quite a coelacanth, maybe, but a 7-foot-long light-emitting sea-creature is something I'd like to see.

mcryptic writes "Cnet News has this story about how IBM now tops the top 500 list with the new ASCI White supercomputer. The machine has 8,192 CPUs, weighs 106 tons and takes up two basketball courts' worth of floor space." And it's for Seti@home...er...no.

KhaosSpawn asks: "Microsoft is back at the top of the TPC-C performance results and has all ten spots in the top ten by price category. But how many of you work for companies that own a ProLiant 8500-700-192P machine? Are there any results for 2 and 4 way machines? Are there any statistics which include Linux installations? Does this TPC figure mean anything in terms of real world deployment or is this just another number for the Microsoft Marketing Machine?"

debreuil writes: "A Reuters article reports a leading Japanese convenience store chain will install more than 15,000 IBM computers running Linux to allow for Web access in stores, in the largest commercial use of Linux to date. Great onigiri there too..." IBM, who sold the machines, is happy as can be, of course.

Manjit writes "Saw this Reuters story on yahoo. After reporting financial losses, Sega is announcing that they will be licensing the Dreamcast hardware design and shift their focus to software development. The interesting thing is the line about "including plans to provide game software for rival makers' consoles." Now that Sega will move away from the hardware business, we will be back to 3 major console makers this time next year, and the PS2 will have had a one year headstart. It does not bode well for Indrema trying to break into the console business."

Blond_buzzkill writes "Twin Galaxies has this article introducing the IES and comparing it to the other consoles. Most informative, however, is a chart comparing the Indrema's hardware to the Xbox and the Playstation 2. The article also says the IES will go on sale in Spring 2001, a bit ahead of either Gamecube or Xbox." I'm still pretty excited to see what comes of Indrema. I'm still waiting for the converged media box, and they've got as good of a shot as anyone.

An anonymous reader noted a press release talking about how NuSphere is planning on adding row level locking to a version of MySQL due out 1Q 2001. Anyone who's used MySQL for anything with more then a few hundred thousand records (like, say, Slashdot to pick an arbitrary example) knows that this is the biggest shortcoming MySQL has... you can work around replication and transactions, but when your whole DB freezes because of one piddley write, its more then just a little annoying.

An unnamed correspondent writes: "The Tech Report has posted a review of AMD's 760 chipset. This is the one that includes a 133 MHz DDR bus, with support for 133 MHz DDR (a.k.a. PC2100) SDRAM. Benchmarks were done using a 1.2 GHz Athlon, and include everything from memory bandwidth tests to a variety of Quake III scores; they even attempted Linux tests, but Linux and the 760 wouldn't play nice." For another point of view, Fr0child writes "Today is the day that AMD officially announces their DDR SDRAM supporting chipset, the AMD 760. They promise "Increasing Memory Data Rate by Up to 100 Percent," which is quite promising to say the least. Of course, who would sit back and believe what a manufacturer says without verification? Anandtech has taken an in depth look at all the performance and features of the AMD 760. Looks like the combination of DDR + Athlon easily topples the RDRAM + Intel platforms out there."

And on the other, other hand, romeomustdie writes: "According to this [Sharky Extreme] piece, AMD is finally debuting the 760 DDR capable chipset, which is, for the most part, an evolutionary step up from the 750 chipset which has been out for the past year. Boasting a faster system bus, support for DDR memory, and a brand new South Bridge, AMD has set themselves up to not only surpass their first-generation offering, but also the current performance Athlon chipset, VIA's KT133. DDR is finally here to stay."

JM_the_Great writes "Seems NASA is planning 6 new Mars Missions. They'll try to answer questions about Mars' past and the possibility of life there."

JM_the_Great writes "Seems NASA is planning 6 new Mars Missions. They'll try to answer questions about Mars' past and the possibility of life there."

nd writes: "Harry Browne has agreed to a roundtable discussion with everyone in a Kuro5hin Feature. He'll be responding to messages himself under his own account." It's been going on for a few days now, and is an amazing look at the future of political coverage. Reflecting a sentiment I hope is accurate, Jim Madison writes: "Despite the apathy, I think slashdot's members are actually quite well-informed, politically speaking. Our friends, however, are not. According to this article, 25% of citizens 18-24 cannot name both major party presidential candidates and 70% cannot name their running mates. Wow. This discussion at Quorum.org (disclaimer: a site I co-founded) questions whether online forums (like this one) can help make politics more accessible or whether it's going to take structural change in Washington before it gets any better. What's the point of the $200 mm spent on advertising if they can't even get unaided brand recall?" For whose pathologically opposed to the letter "W," CaptainZ asserts that "This guy [Jamin Raskin] over at MSN has a pretty good article about how Nader and Gore can both 'win.'" Finally, wallstrum writes with word of yet another worthy candidate (still, I'm more of a Quimby man).

bemis writes: "Techweb has an article about Acer's plans to bring PC and PSX gaming to DVD players in China next year (and hopefully domestically here in the U.S.) ..they are also ramping up a chipset for 266MHz DDR SDRAM for Athlon systems to bring the bus speed up from a paltry 200MHz." Not much detail is given about the hinted-at game / video boxes, but the project sounds pretty ambitious. At this rate, DVD players will pass the $100 mark soon.

Yaron Y. Goland asks: "Yahoo has a story that talks about Privista, a company that reviews your Equifax profile on a weekly basis to warn you of identity theft. Their service is free, they seem to make money by selling access to you in an environment where you control what soliciters know about you. It sounds great, but how much can you really trust Privista? Anyone have any facts about them?"

bemis sent us an article that talks about IPv6 and Wireless, and how the two seem to fit together pretty well. (Especially since at the rate we're going your home stereo is gonna need its own class C)

photozz writes: "Ya know it's rare when an article can get me angry, but this has managed. Cable provider Excite@Home claims that their users are 'relatively' free of attack from hackers due to DHCP, and say you should only be concerned if they are storing private information on their PC's. From the article:'The fear created in consumers' minds is actually greater than the risk that exists,' he said. 'If a customer operates the computer in a safe manner, there shouldn't be any problem.'" Perhaps not surprising that @Home would downplay the risk, but photozz is right -- the fear in broadband customers' minds ought actually be higher, not lower. BackOrifice, zombie attacks etc., ought to frighten the broadband providers into pushing at least simple firewall software themselves perhaps.

Lets start things off with a thing of beauty: ChazeFroy notes that Malin Space Science Systems has tons of really excellent images from the Mars Global Surveyor. Now something of evil: TsEA sends us HTML magic: a true guideline for HTML usage. 3 things that prove that The net Will destroy humanity: BlackNova sent us a Magic 8-ball powered by Lego Mindstorms, Cuban sent us the pantscam (which is exactly what it sounds like) and _martini_ noted an online thermostat where you can twiddle the temperature at some guys house. Its only a matter of time before technology fights back: NMerriam sent us the truth about what computers think of us in this weeks Onion. But let us not forget that science has given us many wonderful things, like for example, lunatik17 pointed us at a bit about shooting your lawn with lasers instead of mowing. However, science has also given us gmr2048's story about testicular implants for animals so I guess we're kinda even so far. I suspect the only way to defend ourselves from technology is to understand it, and who better to teach topics like ISDN then sent a great way to have celebreties like Alicia Silverstone. Or Mr. Rogers teaching the RS232 pinout, Tonya Harding explaining a Cisco 700, and best of all, Darva Conger on the configure register of Cisco routers (thanks Ex Machina who got it from Memepool) Ever want to be a female olympic marathon champ? Jaster this years winner believes hornet stomach juice is the secret, so get started! Of course, to much of that stuff could wind you up on sent us the the next Darwin Awards (from Gambit Thirty-Two) Ant sent us a pair of stories about poop! (what does this guy do with his time?) What happens when your space toilet doesn't flush? All I know is I hope that I have some custom printed toilet paper to keep things under control. Finally, many people noted that you should call 1-800-888-3999, and select option 7. No, really.

gizmo_mathboy writes: "It looks like the people that brought you Gnutella and Winamp, Nullsoft, are having fun hacking AOL code after AOL absorbed them. The story is here." One old idea this illustrates is that large, merger-ridden companies like AOL are hard to categorize simply -- they simply have too many parts, not all of which will ever be in complete concert. This kind of semi-allowed internal hacking could be the most valuable thing at AOL right now, though.

b0z writes "According to an article on Yahoo! the Russians are planning to dump Mir into the ocean in February. According to the article, the $40 million that MirCorp has raised is not enough to save Mir. Also, it is noted that Mir has been in use much longer than the engineers that made it intended." Of course, I'll believe this when I "see" it - the saga of Mir continues.

b0z writes "According to an article on Yahoo! the Russians are planning to dump Mir into the ocean in February. According to the article, the $40 million that MirCorp has raised is not enough to save Mir. Also, it is noted that Mir has been in use much longer than the engineers that made it intended." Of course, I'll believe this when I "see" it - the saga of Mir continues.

With the weekend comes many stories about the upcoming election. First, Herger sent us an article by Liberatarian Neal Boortz which is fairly humorous, and makes several good points, along with talking about Harry Browne. cmpgn sent in transcripts from a panel discussion on how GWB would govern. James Hills sent us Rolling Stone's Interview with Gore. Yohahn sent us filmmaker Michael Moore's article after being on the road with Nader. Finally, a few links of a more general nature: Duncan W. McQueen sent us a page that tries to match up your beliefs to a candidate, and LizJ sent us a site trying to be impartial and track the candidates' stance on the issues.

Still getting lopsided story submissions. We're trying to give links to several different candidates each time, but Gore and Nader are the only candidates that we're getting good submissions for. I'm voting for Quimby anyway ;)

With the weekend comes many stories about the upcoming election. First, Herger sent us an article by Liberatarian Neal Boortz which is fairly humorous, and makes several good points, along with talking about Harry Browne. cmpgn sent in transcripts from a panel discussion on how GWB would govern. James Hills sent us Rolling Stone's Interview with Gore. Yohahn sent us filmmaker Michael Moore's article after being on the road with Nader. Finally, a few links of a more general nature: Duncan W. McQueen sent us a page that tries to match up your beliefs to a candidate, and LizJ sent us a site trying to be impartial and track the candidates' stance on the issues.

Still getting lopsided story submissions. We're trying to give links to several different candidates each time, but Gore and Nader are the only candidates that we're getting good submissions for. I'm voting for Quimby anyway ;)

^ZuLu^ writes "The inventor of MP3 Karlheinz Brandenburg just received the German Futurereward and 500k DM (approx. $250000). He received that price at the Expo in Hannover by the German President Johannes Rau. Isn't that just the statement we we're all waiting for? A state which completely honours the invention of MP3 regardless of what the music industry is trying to make us believe? The story's available in german at Yahoo here." And the fish can aid in translation.

Mr.Newt writes "You may wonder why we're here. Britain's Astronomer Royal, Martin Rees, thinks he has it figured out. As a small part of a large multiverse, everything has to be perfect for life as we know it to exist. " Just reminds me of the Python song: "Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's..."

SirTimbly writes about QNX: "This little OS is making a big stir lately with big companies. The QNX operating system (pronounced Q-nux) has been rumored lately to be in favor of such companies as CISCO and Palm. This is an embedded OS currently used in Netpliance's i-Opener; it was developed by 3Com and is being used in their latest Internet appliance as well. Read more about this non open-source OS in a ZDNet story here."

QNX might not be new, but SirTimbly is right about it making a stir. Max von H. writes: "Audrey, the household net appliance from 3Com/ergo has been officially released, and there's even an official site on which you can smile at the design. The beast runs QNX/Neutrino, as stated in this ZDNet story. The sweet thing is it can sync with two PalmOS devices, which can make a geek couple's life much easier without having to fumble with a real PC. Say what you want, but Audrey could possibly be successful since anybody can use it, and 3Com has shown a simple system rules when it comes to do simple things."

And no mention of QNX is complete without a reference to the QNX demo disk, which packs a pretty amazing set of features onto a floppy. Here too, it's free, but not Free.

Reinnette Marek writes "Nanotechnology is no longer fiction; it is fact. Rick Smalley, Nobel laureate, has announced the formation of a company to commercialize the production of single wall carbon nanotubes. These nanotubes are 100 times stronger than steel, have the electrical conducticity of copper OR the semiconductivity of silicon, and the thermal conductivity of diamond. The technology promises to revolutionize flat panel displays, conductive polymers, molecular computers, biomedical devices, and ultra high capacity lithium ion batteries. See article in Science, http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/290/5490/246b."

Cruachan writes: "Reuters reports that scientists in the United States have revived a 250-million-year-old bacteria that is believed to be the oldest living creature ever discovered. (The story is no longer available on the Reuters Web site.) The bacterium that lived millions of years before the dinosaurs was in a state of suspended animation in an ancient salt crystal in an underground cavern near Carlsbad, New Mexico." This is one of the most amazing things I've heard in a long time. [Updated 19 Oct.14:00GMT by timothy:] Reuters has since pulled it; look below for more links :)

Links that work are tough to come by sometimes -- emmett sent one to to BBC Coverage (with pictures!), while several folks contributed others, including this unnamed correspondent, who writes: "An article in the L.A. Times has an interesting story about a revived microbe which might have been locked in a crystal of salt for 250 million years." Additionally, readers pointed to the Reuters story, hosted on yahoo! Thanks for the links, everyone.

kenhhk asks: "Hi, I'm interested in getting one of the Cirque touchpads in the *Cat line. Cirque tech support said they don't support Linux, but they think someone has written a driver somewhere for Linux. Would you guys know where I could reach them?"

We have a few stories relating to the candidates this morning: First up is this piece which lists techies endorsing Gore (including Vint Cerf) but notes that Bush still raised more campaign money. Second is a self-promotional piece from the Green Party on Nader's stance on Privacy.

Katydid writes "Got sunscreen? It's UV exposure season in Antarctica again, and for the first time a city in South America - Punta Arenas, in Chile - was directly under the area of missing atmosphere we know and love. At 11.4 million square miles, the hole is 'more than three times the size of the United States.'"

lsy writes "A group of University of Rochester students staged a protest during the university's Sesquicentennial weekend on the occasion of Jack Valenti's appearance to moderate a panel of Hollywood insiders. The students handed out pamphlets, wore DeCSS t-shirts donated by Copyleft, and demonstrated a DVD being played under linux. After the event, the group had a chance to speak with Valenti for over an hour. They've received some press from the Hollywood Insider [yahoo version], and the group's web site claims that it will have photographs online of the students with Valenti "soon"."

WPL510 asks: "I'm writing an article on how law impacts technology and vice versa, and would like to get the opinions of those who use technology every day. So- which laws have most affected your use of technology? Which have tried and failed? Does anyone else foresee any other possible, as yet unknown, problems posed by new technology (just as Diamond's Rio showed the holes in the AHRA)?"

Tuzanor writes: "Yahoo! is reporting that government officials are preparing to block the AOL-Time Warner deal if an agreement over Internet access isn't made in 2 weeks." I'd feel a lot better about this merger if local cable (like Time-Warner has such a big hand in) itself faced tougher competition than it does right now.

cybercuzco writes: "Lego has just released a new mindstorms add-on that lets you 'create a fully operational Imperial AT-AT walker.' Pictures and specs are available here. The price is rumored to be $99, so start saving your nickels."

photozz asks: "We are on a large network (1000+ nodes) with a mix of everything, Wintel, Unix, Linux and Mac. Lately, we have been getting broadcast storms that kill the network. Our solution is to subnet everything with routers, thus killing broadcast trafic. BUT, this will limit Windows browsing on the network to each segment. Installing Brouters will just give us the same packet storm problems we had before. How can we stop broadcast trafic while enabling Netbios resolution acros routers?"

Cy Guy was one of the legion who wrote with this news: "Dr. Robert Stickgold, a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School, released results of a study of amnesiacs who had played Tetris. Though they dreamed about playing the game (as is common), they failed to improve. Stickgold hypothesizes that dreaming uses the long-term memory area that the amnesiacs retained rather that the short-term memory areas of the brain that were damaged. More information on the study is available from this Reuters article, and Harvard Med School's Focus magazine." This is not what I dream about no matter how much tetris I've played.

mprudhom writes: "According to Yahoo!, Sun has today released the source to StarOffice, as promised. Go to www.openoffice.org and download it, or just grab it with:
cvs -d:pserver:anoncvs@anoncvs.openoffice.org:/cvs login
cvs -d:pserver:anoncvs@anoncvs.openoffice.org:/cvs co OpenOffice ". Okay, people can stop submitting this now.

nomadic asks: " Reuters recently published an article about how American scientists, as well as foreign-born scientists who work in America, tend to dominate the Nobel prizes in science; it attributes this mostly to the fact that the U.S. government tends to invest more in science research than its foreign counterparts (the National Science Foundation funded 78 U.S. winners before they got their Nobels), and private and corporate entities contribute large amounts as well. The article talks about the scientific and economic culture of the U.S.; young scientists exist in an extremely competitive environment, where they are encouraged to challenge traditional authority. But it only touches on education a little. Now I've seen some truly venomous attacks on the U.S. educational system on /. by people in other countries, but this article implies while the U.S. is behind in science and math education in elementary and high school, 'there is something that happens on the college level'. Does the U.S. 'catch up' at the college level? I'll be honest, the exchange students I've met from more math and science-savvy educational systems have been well-educated, but not on some higher plane of thought that the media would lead one to believe. It seems commonly accepted (though I'm not sure I agree) that a high school graduate from most countries in Europe is on the average better-educated than one from the U.S. How about a college graduate? Graduate school? Is the U.S. dominance in science only about financial investment in the U.S., or can the U.S. university system take some credit?"