Slashdot Mirror

GrokSoup writes: "Seagram Chairman Edward Bronfman declared war on online piracy in a speech in San Jose on Friday. While many of his arguments are hard to dispute -- Napster-like music-sharing services have turned a blind eye to theft -- he makes others that are tougher to support. For example, Bronfman said that anonymity isn't privacy, arguing that we have a right to the latter, but not the former: '[online anonymity] is nothing more than the digital equivalent of putting on a ski mask when you rob a bank.'"Apparently some folks have a hard time figuring out that the stuff in quotes and italisced is a quote from the submittor. That's not me writing above - that's GrokSoup.

nilrake writes "A bit on NY Times talks about new homes are that being built Internet-Ready. " Hmm...I always figured a good drill, several hundred feet of cable and I had an Internet-ready house *grin*.

Greg Lindahl sent in this story last September about a massive Alpha Linux cluster that's being built by HPTi for the NOAA's Forecast Systems Laboratories. What Greg forgot to mention when he submitted the original story is that he's the project's chief designer. What with all the Beowulf (and Alpha) interest around here, we figured he'd make a great interview guest, especially now that the project is well under way. Please post your questions below. Answers to 10 - 15 of the highest-moderated ones should appear within the next week.

Rob Gibson asks: "I have heard stories of people using free ISPs under Linux to connect to the internet, and was hoping to do so myself. Many of them have slow connection speeds or bad support. Almost all have ad banners. The one that I love under Windows is Worldspy.net, which offers fast access and good coverage with no banner ads. However, I am digressing. I called Worldspy's tech support number, and they are not giving out any information as to how I could connect in Linux. Has anyone had success using Worldspy's access? Any free ISP using the MicroPortal technology? One thing that would be helpful in my attempts to figure this out is some software that would passively monitor the modem/COM port for incoming and outgoing data while in use with another program. Does anyone have suggestions for Linux or DOS/Win?"

hated asks: "I work for the government, and because of our stringent policy on not allowing 'personal' use from work computers we have been given a requirement from management to restrict certain types of Web pages...mainly porn. Now I am opposed to censor-ware as the next guy, but I don't make policy, just figure out how to implement it. I would really rather not use commercial URL filtering because of the price and because of the secretive blocked lists. Is there any sort of module that would work with squid? I am looking for a proxy based tools as opposed to host based...obviously far easier to implement. I hope /. readers can provide some insight."

Some useful stuff: An anonymous reader noted that AltaVista has opened Raging.Com which is a super fast minimal search engine without all that bloated portal crap. gi_wrighty noted that the winneers of the 5k HTML Contest have Been announced. Impressive minimalism. Soeren Staun-Pedersen noted that a new The Gimp User Group has come along. j1mmy pointed us to pictures of the new Lara Croft Model from E3. Yaruar sent us a story about Lego Filmsets that come with cameras for you do-it-yourselfers. If you don't want to make your own films, how about your own Mars Polar Lander Site? (Thanks Biff Studly). antiwesley sent us interesting insight into a typical geek cube. Speaking of things found in geek Cubes, BenTheDewpendent sent us a page that tracks tons of info on Mountain Dew and bob_jordan found pictures of upcoming Futurama Bender Action Figures (Not as cool as Nate's Picolo tho) Baloo Ursidae sent us a story about electricity generating shoes. Gorphrim sent us some Duron Parodies Finally some Slashdot references: DrFun (one of the original net comics) mentioned us in a recent strip, Someone noted that Geek Culture is selling First Post T-Shirts. QuasEye noted that someone registered hotgrits.org and ironically enough, is running Slashcode. And the WashPost ran an article on us which is mostly accurate. And to wrap things up, maxxon showed us the way to Crank Dot Net, which has stuff on all sorts of conspiracy theories and urban myths and other crazy stuffs on the net. Stuff like UFOs, the face on mars, Creationism, Scientology, antigravity, and perpetual motion and more.

MasterK asks "I am wondering if anyone out there has found themselves to a situation similar to mine? Last month I went to a Web site I frequent and it was gone. Upon looking into it for a whole day I discovered that the domain was available from Network Solutions. I figured they had gone out of business or something so I bought it. That was Monday. On Friday I finally get a call from someone at the company that USED to own the domain accusing me of stealing it, not "a mistake was made can we have our domain back". Just accusations right off the bat. Well, the last thing I wanted was a legal battle, I'm not a domain squatter, but I didn't do anything wrong and I am out $70 plus setting up DNS and so forth. Oh and for the record I could not find any record of them trademarking the name (so I am). Just wondering if anyone has any advice, legal or otherwise." (Read on...)

As far as I can see this guy at least deserves a refund of the $70 he spent in good faith registering his domain. Network Solutions made the mistake (as usual) why don't they take steps to fix it without screwing people over? Is there anything a dissatisfied Network Solution's customer can do to force them? Again, I think it's high time folks looked into alternative registrars since it seems Network Solutions is rapidly losing what limited respect it had among the Internet Community.

Comments?

Losing my love of PERL asks: "OK, here's the skinny: I've been trying to figure this out for quite a while now, and nothing is working. I need to send a proper e-mail attachment (i.e. something that will show up as a paper clip in Outlook) from an NT command line to be called by a PERL script (or better yet, just sent by the script). I've tried several modules and programs, including Blat, Mail::Sender, Mail::Sendmail, but every time the attachment is just shoved into the body of the e-mail. Does anyone have a solution to my problems?"

mrgrumpy asks: "I run Debian (unstable, woody) kernel 2.2.14 with everything dangerously up to date, and I also run a Solaris7 (Sparc not Intel). I've had NFS working (not with autofs, just mount and share) between the two boxes fine for a few weeks since I set them up. I recently applied a patch cluster from SunSolve to the Sun box, and lo and behold, NFS stopped working. In the patch list there were quite a few NFS fixes with the kernel patch 106541-10. I have the home directories, and a development directory from the Sun box (which serves NIS, NFS, and just about everything) mounted on the Linux box. Most of the time nothing goes wrong. But, when I run the distributed.net client on the Linux box, which needs to read and write files that are mounted across from the Sun box, it locks up and I get messages such as 'Apr 17 14:20:31 boink kernel: nfs: task 1473 can't get a request slot...' in the logs." Can anyone figure out what's going wrong here? (Read more)

"My machines are: boink (GNU/Linux 2.2.14 kernel), and splat (Solaris7 [Sparc]). If I run snoop on the Sun box I get:

root@splat$ snoop splat and boink rpc nfs
boink.home.cyber4.org -> splat.home.cyber4.org NFS C LOOKUP2 FH=009B_lJAQ.boink
splat.home.cyber4.org -> boink.home.cyber4.org NFS R LOOKUP2 OK FH=9668
boink.home.cyber4.org -> splat.home.cyber4.org NFS C LOOKUP2 FH=009B root.lock
splat.home.cyber4.org -> boink.home.cyber4.org NFS R LOOKUP2 OK FH=9E2D
boink.home.cyber4.org -> splat.home.cyber4.org NFS C REMOVE2 FH=009B_lJAQ.boink
splat.home.cyber4.org -> boink.home.cyber4.org NFS R REMOVE2 OK
boink.home.cyber4.org -> splat.home.cyber4.org NFS C LOOKUP2 FH=009B root.lock
splat.home.cyber4.org -> boink.home.cyber4.org NFS R LOOKUP2 OK FH=9E2D
boink.home.cyber4.org -> splat.home.cyber4.org NFS C WRITE2 FH=79D9 at0 for 4096 (retransmit)
boink.home.cyber4.org -> splat.home.cyber4.org NFS C CREATE2 FH=009B_yGAQ.boink
splat.home.cyber4.org -> boink.home.cyber4.org NFS R CREATE2 OK FH=AA9B
boink.home.cyber4.org -> splat.home.cyber4.org NFS C WRITE2 FH=AA9B at0 for 1

all throughout the logs. I had read that locking for nfs on Linux is not great, and I am using knfsd with NFS compiled in the kernel

Usually the errors cascade down a spiral of death until I reboot the Linux box. in.lockd on Linux doesn't have a debug mode (Solaris does, restart it with -d3) and I don't seem to be able to find any other way of debugging it."

So at this point, grumpy either needs a solution method or a way to debug in.lockd. Are there any methods that may prove useful in attempting to recover from an NFS "spiral of death"?

ptb asks: "Since I am sure that someone in the Slashdot community at large has developed a solution to this question I figured I would ask. I am trying to get the company I work for to abandon a fax solution vendor for an in-house developed solution. I've managed to implement hylafax and faxing PDFs from a Web page works flawlessly. (I am embarrassed I didn't have to do more, but hey... ;) My question is: has anyone ever developed a Phone Tree under Unix? What I'm hoping to do is have customers call a number, have my Linux box answer and the customer presses '1' to order a document or '2' to order an index... You get the idea. If they order document '23532' then my perl script will fax them the doc. I've found ACS and Quicknet but I suspect that someone has traveled this road before me. Any suggestions?"

woolfish asks: "So the U.S. is the nation of 4-wheeled cubicles, bitching and moaning about $2/gal gas when Europe's doing >$2/liter. But with all talks of high-tech aside, a car still has only 3 boolean data channels (R/L blinkers, horn), 4 if you count the finger. Is someone gonna get off their ass and figure out a way to work inter-car communication, or are we going to stay pissed off and silent during rush hour for the rest of our lives? What do you folks think, are there any solutions in the works, do you have any good ones, or is silence really golden here?" Sounds cool, and there are several areas where such a thing might be really useful. But are you -really- sure you want to listen to the flurry of foul epithets that must certainly issue out of drivers mouths daily during the long morning and evening commutes?

Several folks, all anonymous, have been asking about Darwin and Linux drivers, so I figure I should send this out before I'm drowned by more requests: "A discussion has been going on recently on the Darwin Developers mailing list about porting Linux drivers to use the DriverKit on Darwin, due to the wide number of Linux hardware drivers currently available. The problem is that many Linux drivers are under the GPL. My reading of the GPL, especially section 2, is that since the Darwin kernel and the drivers are under separate, incompatible licenses, that they may not be distributed together unless the complete work (the kernel) is licensed under the GPL. Could someone clarify if this is correct, what the options are, and if this applies to distributing a GPL'd dynamically loadable kernel module for the APSL'd kernel (which I read the GPL to say is OK)? "

Dave Waller asks: "I have been considering this for a while but do not know where to start researching it. I live in a smaller community that has only one telco and it does not offer any advanced services and the ones they do offer are quite expensive. Apparently it is quite possible to become your own phone company and the costs of doing so are dropping. Where can a person start finding out what it takes to become a CLEC? What hardware is involved? What training options are there?" This is an interesting thought. I would have figured there would have been loads of paperwork involved in this more than the technical issues. Can anyone shed more light on the subject?

rm-r writes: "The BBC is running a story here about Microsoft hiring Ralph Reed, one of George W. Bush's senior consultants and a big figure in the Christian Coalition, to lobby against their anti-trust case." Think MS knows that many people consider them the Great Satan??

Viking Coder and Rares Marian sent in submissions asking about recommendations on systems for high quality video editing. They have concerns about the hardware and the software necessary for such tasks. I figure all of you folks out there who have some experience in this area should be able to help them out. (Read More)

Viking Coder asks: "Hello, I'd like to get involved with Digital Video recording and editing, and I was wondering what other people were using. The iMac at first seems a good option, until you see the limited hard drive and editing capabilities. Are there any pre-packaged solutions that would make for a better system? How about Linux or W2K compatibility / support? Any Open Source solutions to what would be obvious roadblocks?"

"So, I've been looking to build an eMonster 550R from eMachines, with a $500 DVRaptor from Canopus, also loading in a 30G EIDE (UDMA) HD, and Adobe Premiere 5.1, running everything from my (company's) Sony DCR-TRV103.

Am I in for a rude shock, or am I going to love what I can do? Are there other options I should be aware of? Will uLead's Media Builder (?) blow me away, or is Adobe the way to go? Is there an obvious winner card that makes the DVRaptor look silly? Is a 30G UDMA enough? Any caveats? (Like, 7,200 RPM for instance?)"

And from Rares Marian: "What tools, OSes, platforms, and hardware do I need to put a good machine together? I'm currently considering the following:

• Platform: Athlon 700, Alpha, G4, SGI
• OSes: Linux, Windows, AmigaOS, BSD (are they there yet?)
• Tools: Broadcast 2000, Premiere
• Systems: PC, Amiga, Mac, Alpha, SGI
• Hardware: Linux Multimedia Labs LML33, VideoToaster

I've had some quotes from $2000 for an Amiga3K setup (hey they used it on Babylon 5, Jurassic Park, and many TV stations still use it) to an $8000 Windows Athlon based machine. Any ideas? Hint: Small Budget No Limits. (From home video to full blown Internet based publishing)"

BluSkreen asks: "We've been approached by someone that is interested in buying our five-year-old site. Using the metrics from the Andover purchase of /. and Freshmeat (from the Andover 10Q filing), and scaled to our traffic level (about 1.5 million page/month), I've come up with a value of about US$250,000 or so. They were shocked when I mentioned this figure. We figure we have at least US$60,000 in costs over the last five years, (not counting hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of labor) and gross about US$20,000 in banner ads a year, though I've 'pitched' nearly US$100k in banner sales in the last year. How does one go about determining the value of a site?"

DaveHowe writes, "According to the 3com press release they are spinning off their US Robotics modem line into a new company, shared jointly between them, Accton and NatSteel Electronics. It is also farming off its LAN router customers to Extreme Networks but will be keeping support for them as part of a "strategic alliance". " Hmmm...perhaps they had such a nice team with the PalmPilot IPO that they figure, hey why not do it with everything?

Mike Lockwood writes: "I haven't seen a formal announcement yet, but the Releases page on the NetBSD Web site says, "The latest patch release, NetBSD 1.4.2, was released on March 19, 2000." Now that I have already downloaded a copy of the mac68k port and installed it on my Quadra 700, I figured it is safe to tell the rest of the world."

Hoss Man writes "It seems like a few techno-heads out there have figured out how to make a 10Gig harddrive out of a roll of Scotch Tape. It would be cooler if it was Duct Tape, but I guess we can't really complain. " Alright, I'm not sure whether I believe it or not, but it looks pretty darn cool.

The NYTimes is running a good recap of the iCraveTV situation. The U.S. broadcast industry shut down the operation because it redistributed programming over the internet... to U.S. citizens (assuming you could figure out a Canadian area code to enter into their website). Discusses the Digital Millennium Copyright Act extensively.