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Stories · 3,462
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The Demise of Model Rocketry?
Mark Lytle writes "Due to restrictions imposed by the rather broad Homeland Security Act, the hobby I suspect many Slashdotters, being technology buffs, grew up with, the Estes Model Rocket is now firmly on the endangered species list. The little cardboard rockets I learned science with in high school are evidently suspected of being potential weapons of mass destruction. Go figure. Perhaps by getting involved, we can stop this sillyness... Anyway, i hope so...."
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Hosting Advice for Consumer Advocacy Websites?
rcthompson asks: "I host a web site with information about fraudulent career marketing companies, but over the past year it has been repeatedly deleted by a series of hosting companies after they received a threatening letter from the lawyer for one of the companies listed on the web site. Are there any hosting companies out there who are involved or interested in consumer advocacy and will not delete a web site just because they receive a threatening letter? Is it better to use overseas hosting companies? Is there any way to completely hide who your hosting company is so that the bad guys cannot figure out who to send the threatening letter to? One could host the web site on one's own server and use one's own nameservers, but the IP address will reveal your ISP who could possibly shut down your site. Any advice is appreciated. Thanks."
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The Ultimate Computer Desk?
Roonster asks: "I've just moved into a new house and I am now lucky enough to have a separate room to use as a computer room/office. I have been searching for a new computer desk but most of the standard offerings seem to be lacking in imagination and design. I also tend to sit in a reclined position with my feet up on the desk beside the monitor, this eliminates a lot of the corner and U shaped designs. Have any of you come up with unique yet functional desk setups? I remember seeing some really wild (and expensive) workstations a few years ago, but have been unable to locate them recently. Any Ideas?" This topic was last discussed some 2 years ago. I figured it was time for a rehash.
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Jack Valenti's Views On The Digital Age
ditogi writes "The Harvard Political Review did a quick interview with the lord of darkness himself, Jack Valenti. He gives his thoughts on government mandated copy prevention, fair use, and lobbying. In response to his famous 'VCR is [to the movie industry]...as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.' quote, he responds, 'I wasn't opposed to the VCR.' And what does he think of his current job? 'I think lobbying is really an honest profession.'" My favorite quote: "In the digital world, we don't need back-ups, because a digital copy never wears out. It is timeless." Update: 02/05 20:05 GMT by T : Derek Slater writes "I'm the author of the Valenti article you guys linked to. I've made some brief comments about it on my site, and figured I'd send them along."
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TiVo Video Extraction with Mac OS X
Arf4 writes "I recently published an article that describes extracting video from a TiVo Series 1 digital video recorder. I have been searching the boards for info on a Mac OS X solution, but came up blank. After experimenting with my iBook I figured out a way to do it. Using nothing more than a TiVo and Mac OS X (plus a few other free goodies), you can start backing up the latest Alias or Simpsons." Well, and a network card.
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16th IOCCC Winners Released
An anonymous submitter wrote: "A while ago the 16th IOCCC winners were announced. Apparently "releas[ing] the winning source by mid April 2002" actually means "within a year", but you can finally enjoy them here. Or, if you don't enjoy them, you can beat your head against the wall trying to figure out how these programs work ;-)"
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Improving Indoors Wi-Fi Reception?
VirtualUK asks: "I was given a WiFi base station and PCMCIA card for my laptop as a Christmas present so that I could read slashdot...urm I mean work, in any room in the house. When I read the manual it stated lofty figures of being able to work up to hundreds of feet inside office environments, so I felt that it would be more than capable of being able to allow me to stay connected in my tiny house. It seems however that the WiFi gods are against me as I tap this posting in the next room to the WiFi base station, a mere 20-30 feet away, just regular so-thin-I-can-hear-an-ant-fart walls, no kryptonite, no lead cladding and yet still I struggle to get a constant connection. I've found that shifting the laptop to face different directions sometimes helps, but as should it be this hard at such short range? Is there anything I can do to make my WiFi work better in a house environment?"
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Manipulating the Brain with Magnets
hackwrench points to this Boston Globe story, writing "Some guy has figured out how to use magnets to disable or enhance part of the brain." And this is on a part of the science spectrum not occupied by Alex Chiu.
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How Much Does it Cost to Produce a Recording?
An anonymous reader writes "How much does the average new album cost to produce? I have seen this cost estimated between $500,000 and $1,000,000, but some quick figuring does not support a cost this high. According to various sources (Ok, Slashdot stories...), somewhere around 27,000 albums are produced each year and 906.6 million albums are shipped. I would guess that the album retail (about $15 per album) is based on a 100% markup, so that these 906.6 million albums are sold at wholesale for about $7.50 apiece, which means that the revenue from wholesale sales is about $6.8 billion. This means that the actual production cost has to be less than $250,000 per album, otherwise the record industry is losing money. I have left out the cost of actually printing and copying the albums as I think that the average cost is probably less than $0.25 per copy."
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Six Sigma-fying Your IT Department?
Saqib Ali asks: "These days all the major corporations are looking at Six Sigma methodology to improve their processes. I am planning to take a Six Sigma Green/Brown belt class in March. I work for the IT department, I have a statistics background, and I've studied statistics in university as well. I can understand Six Sigma being used in Production/Manufacturing facilities, but it is hard for me to figure how to apply Six Sigma in IT. Are any other readers using Six Sigma methodology for IT? If so what are some of the things that it can be applied to? As part of the training class, I have to come up with an idea for a Six Sigma analysis project. Though the project doesn't have to be IT related, but I would like it to be, so that I can see its application in real life. Any ideas for the project?"
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Judge Decides X-Men Aren't Human
An anonymous reader points to this Wall Street Journal article, writing "According to the U.S. Court of International Trade, the X-Men (along with other figures from the Marvel universe) aren't human. The presiding judge subjected the figures to "comprehensive examinations" which included "the need to remove the clothes of the figure." Ironically, the X-Men, whose struggle for human acceptance has been a key theme in the series, were more easily classified as non-human than Kraven and Mole Man.
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HP Finally Reveals The Alpha Marvel
brejc8 writes "HP have revealed the new range of AlphaServer systems. The new EV7 processors show very reasonable performance figures. Revealed by the inquirer the 1GHz versions have very similar SPEC scores as the 1GHz Itanium 2 (INT_2000 of 875 and FP_2000 of 1,500). This is very intersting after HP were rumoured to ensure that "...no Alpha benchmark will be released until the Itanium platform(s) is/are faster"."
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MIT Spam Conference Conclusions
RT Alec writes "The 2003 Spam Conference has concluded, reports InfoWorld. (related read: abstracts of the conference discussions). I was unable to attend the conference, but it appears all that was discussed was filters (client and server). I think the key problem is ISPs that do not block egress traffic on port 25. If you need to send mail through a different SMTP server than provided by your ISP, the admin of that server ought to provide you with a means of using it with authentication on a port other than 25 (you do have permission to use that SMTP server, don't you?). It is not too tough to set up an SMTP server to require authentication, or at a minimum to run off a different port. I am suprised that this is never mentioned as a cure for spam. If just AOL blocked port 25, this could reduce spam by 50% (I base this figure on close examination of the headers of the spam I receive). I was pleased to see that Barry Shein, president of The World (a Boston based ISP) was included in the talks. I am not sure by the abstract (see link above) posted if he mentioned blocking port 25. In a recent interview he did not mention it."
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Learning a New OS... and Fast!?
Inexile2002 asks: "I've been asked to assist a consultant on a project using VMS and basically have four days to figure out enough that I'm actually of some use. (We're not doing development, just security reviews, so I'm not totally screwed.) Originally I was going to ask for advice on how to start teaching myself VMS from scratch including best books and support websites when I realized that there is a more generic issue here. What are people's thoughts on learning a new OS and learning it fast? Have people found optimal ways to pick things up quickly, get a familiarity with commands and underlying logic? How about learning the basics when you can't actually install and play with the OS in question?"
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Why Isn't X11 Thread-Safe?
blackcoot asks: "I've just spent a couple very frustrating days trying to figure out what 'unexpected async reply' means and fixing it. The problem is a result of the fact that X11 simply isn't designed to handle events from more than one thread at a time. Why? Given that more and more often, people are writing multi-threaded GUI applications, are there fundamental design decisions in X11 that make dealing with receiving events from multiple threads simultaneously, impossible? Or was the protocol never designed to handle concurrent updates? More to the point, is there an easy way in Qt (short of deriving a new widget for every widget and overriding it's paintEvent to lock the library first, paint, then unlock as Trolltech's docs seem to suggest) to make this problem go away?" I'm not sure if things have been done in recent revisions of XFree to fix this problem, but this message, from February of last year, might help some of you out that are suffering from this problem. Any ideas if this problem has been fixed in recent versions of XFree?
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Killing Others' Malicious Processes
Roland Piquepaille writes "This opinion is not mine, but the one of Tim Mullen, from SecurityFocus Online. In this story, he expresses some strong ideas regarding systems infected by worms. "I believe you should have the right to neutralize a worm process running on someone else's infected system, if it's relentlessly attacking your network. I've even written code to demonstrate the process. Though the initial news coverage of the concept was grossly inaccurate in conveying my ideas, it has stirred up a constructive dialog. I knew my idea was controversial, but I was wrong about something -- I figured everyone in the security biz would "get it" and that the hard part would be convincing everyone else that if they can't or won't secure their machines, we as the defenders would have the right to terminate the process attacking us. It has turned out to be the opposite." The author then looks at the criticisms about this strikeback idea raised by some security experts -- to dismiss them of course. Check this column for a summary or read the original story for more details."
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Star Wars Action Figures
An anonymous reader writes "Star Wars nostalgia buffs: X-E just added a fairly long feature detailing some of the many mail-away offers made by the Kenner company to keep kids interested in SW action figures in the 80s."
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Multiple Exposures Of The Sun
Stormbringer_X1 writes "This image holds many first. Called an analemma (a figure 8 loop), it is a multiple exposure of the sun, where one observes the sun at the same time of day, over the period of a year. The patience and dedication to pull this off are emphasized by the fact that there are so few in existence (7 total including the first in 1979). It is the first analemma imaged in a single calendar year, the first on the southern meridian, and the first in Greece. The author has other images from 2002 that will be available soon. So stay tuned. Here is an image from NASA archives"
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Estimating Software Development Costs?
Stu Lalison asks: "I'm an MBA student (but I'm not evil, I promise!) and am working on a business plan that involves having some custom software written for a handheld computer. I've done some research into estimating the costs involved in software production, but when estimating the time involved in writing the software, it usually says 'judge on past projects.' I'm not a programmer, so I don't have any past projects to judge on. I'm wondering if the Slashdot community can give me some ballpark figures on how long it takes a professional programmer to code different parts of a program. I've identified 3 needs of my application: a front-end user interface, a database w/ search function (of about 10 megabytes of data), and integration of both of these into a (currently existing) commercial mapping application. It seems like these aren't huge tasks, but getting (even a rough) handle on their actual complexity will help me greatly. Also, how much development time would be required to port an application like this from, say, a Palm OS device to a 3G handset? Thanks in advance!"
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Remote Booting Using a Wireless Network Card?
Eboneye asks: "I have been assigned to a project to figure out how to make a diskless portable workstation (laptop) boot through a wireless connection. The idea is to have a stateless client that stores no local data (for security purposes). The only totally network boot stuff I have found uses PXE extensions. I have seen nothing like this in a PCMCIA card, much less a -wireless- PCMCIA card. For the proof of concept, we'll boot from a read only device, but of course during the setup phase use media to create a boot image on a boot server. I am currently looking at a couple different products that will provide a booting service. Ultimately, the goal is a to have a wireless tablet that can use different PCMCIA wireless adapters to connect to different LANs. Because of the specialized concerns of tablet PCs the solution has to be Windows compatible (sorry, Linux). Has anyone seen or worked on remote boot through wireless? Any experiences, gotchas, or suggestions for ways to solve this are welcome."