Slashdot Mirror

Ender, Duke_of_URL writes: "Genomeweb reports that scientists are gearing up for the Sept 1 boycott of science publishers, because only two publishers (Genome Biology and PubMedCenteral) have met the demands of open and copyright free access to science articles. As part of this process they're developing a means to publish their own journal articles." If you missed the history of this showdown, slashdot has published a few previous stories. Great news for science if they succeed - awful news if they fail.

rw2 writes: "It's not going to replace the rock that your girl demands for her finger anytime soon, but a new material - cubic boron nitride (cBN) - is being compressed into a cubic structure with properties similar too, but in some ways better than, those of a girls best friend. Read about it in The Cern Courier"

Several people sent in notes about this:"IBM research announced that it developed a wireless security auditor running on a Compaq iPAQ with Linux. The pictures on the IBM web page are much more revealing than the press release. Apparently the auditor can handle GPS input (correlate access points with GPS coordinates?) and associate with access points on demand." The main product webpage has more information about the capabilities, and notes that IBM hasn't decided yet whether to release it as a commercial product or a free tool.

j7953 writes: "German news service heise online reports that Adobe wants to settle the KIllustrator case. According to the article (here's Google's translation), they demand that KIllustrator gets a new name, but don't want to stop its distribution or development. They also promise that the author won't have to pay anything."

DreamerFi writes: "It's going to cost about $30k. Working from a digital file, it can print, bind, and trim a book of any size in a matter of minutes. Having finished with one title, it can proceed to another and another, as long as the machine is kept supplied with ink, toner, and paper-the same regular copy paper you might buy at Staples. It's called the PerfectBook Machine. How soon before your local book store has one?"

Moritz Moeller - Her writes: "Evidently Adobe -- yes the Adobe that has not ported a single application apart from its PDF Reader to Linux -- sees a threat in KDE. They claim that the Koffice vector based drawing program Killustrator violates their trademark for Adobe Illustrator. Here is the mail on koffice-devel. The company demands 2500 EUR from the developer, maybe someone can help with the legal expenses here? The web site for Killuistrator has been put down for the moment. Shouldn't generic descriptive terms like 'explorer,' 'illustrator' 'word' and 'paint' be free for all to use? Nobody called the program Kadobe! I think it is time for some pressure on Adobe ... "

cyberkreiger was among many to submit that Slackware 8.0, the distribution that just won't die, has just been released. I'm sure many people here started w/ Slackware back in the day and I'm glad to see it keep moving. You can read the Changelog or the Freshmeat project page. It'll probably be awhile before enough mirrors have caught up to settle demand, so please be patient. And congrats to Patrick and the rest. If it wasn't for your work back in the day, I may never have started using Linux.

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.

mmaddox asks: "Who ELSE is following, or has invested in, the awful release of the MMOG (Massively Multiplayer Online Game), World War 2 Online? Plagued with server problems, switch configuration issues, poor client performance (less than 5 FPS on some systems, with 8-10 commonly reported), and a growing list of angry users returning software to the store, it looks like this much-heralded game may well be tolling its own death knells. The final outcome is still to be seen. Are releases like this to be expected? Should a game buyer be patient and wait for the system to be repaired, or is the buyer justified in demanding results for hard-earned money?" I've noticed that there have been several MMOG's that have been looking to get off of the ground over the past year and a half, however not many of them have (of course, for reasons of my own, I'm hoping Neverwinter Nights succeeds). What MMOG's, currently under development, have you all been following and do any of them look to be progressing the way they should?

Kengineer asks: "I've heard a lot of hype about techies with MBA's being in high demand. I'm an Engineer who does validation for a Voice over IP company, and before that I coded software projects for a controls automation company. I am considering returning to school to seek an MBA, so I'd like to hear from those of you 'dotters who already have buisness degrees, and your post-MBA experiences."

William Kucharski sent us a story about the next generation of PVR (Tivo) device. This time there will be no hard drives. Instead the content will be stored at your cable company and streamed in real time to the reader. The upside is that this effectively removes many of the limitations of existing PVRs and could make all media available on demand all the time... eliminating the concept of "Channels" entirely. The main downside is that control is moved out of your home, returning PVR users to the dark ages where they had to watch commercials.

EccentricAnomaly writes: "David Cash has some interesting pictures of the International Space Station made with a Celestron telescope and webcam. This makes me want to get back into amateur astronomy ... in part, as a fun way to learn image processing." The resolution Cash achieved with consumer-grade equipment (Celestron Ultima 9.25 telescope and Philips Vesta Pro camera) is amazing. Demanding a slightly more visceral approach to space is "Rocket Guy" Brian Walker, who plans in the near future to launch himself to around 30 miles up in a home-brewed rocket. An unnamed reader points out the current feature on Walker over at space.com.

hetfield writes: "Cruising around today, I found this. Run by Electronics Boutique, EB1 allows you to rent PC/Windows games on demand. Five bucks gets you 72 hours with a few fairly new titles, which are streamed to your hard drive using a client called IntoPlayer. If you decide to buy the boxed game later, you can copy the save files over and continue right where you left off, according to the FAQ. These are FULL games, not demos. Modem users need not apply for the service, however."

Scooter[AMMO] writes: "I thought people might be interested in this IPv6 overview currently on O'Reillynet. It touches on what a lot of us already know, like a larger addressable space, security, and mobility, but it also goes into some detail that others may not know yet. It gives information on how addresses are divided between host bits and network bits, address creation, NDP, name resolution, multicasting, localnets, and localsites. It also has RFC references for the more demanding researchers among us."

Joel Rowbottom writes: "The Council of the European Union (the 15 EU governments) is about to back the demands of EU "law enforcement agencies" for full access to all telecommunications data to be written into all Community legislation in the future, and for existing laws to be re-examined - a move that is even more far-reaching than the decision to sign up to the FBI plan for the interception of telecommunications. At the centre is the issue of a seven-year period of data retention. There's a lot more about it at statewatch.org including an up-to-date store of relevant documents." The BBC and the Register have articles about this. Both news articles mention this seven-year data retention period, but I don't see it in any of the recent documents, which only discuss general "requirements" for law enforcement, such as tapping and access to calling records. From what I'm reading, law enforcement seems to be concerned about getting rid of the requirements to erase data about communications traffic (under the EU privacy laws) rather than creating affirmative requirements to store such data.

tadghin pointed out this Newsweek article on bioinformatics, and also notes: "At O'Reilly, we just published our first bioinformatics book last week, Learning Bioinformatics Computer Skills, by Cynthia Gibas and Per Jambeck, and it immediately rocketed to the top of the Amazon Computer bestseller list. This definitely appears to be a new area for the computer industry that's just starting to hit people's radar big time. I've also made the point to VCs looking at distributed computation startups that what I see on sites like slashdot is a lot of movement by hackers towards new and interesting problems. And science looks a lot more interesting than some of the business computing that's been front and center the past couple of years. And the Biological Open Source Computing Conference I spoke at last year was definitely popping with ideas and excitement. Unfortunately, this year's conference is in Copenhagen, right before the O'Reilly open source convention, but I definitely urge slashdotters to check out this area. Demand for perl expertise is especially high."

LogicalRealism writes: "In a preemptive move to keep itself from sharing Napster's fate, Aimster has filed for a declaratory judgement to say that its service does not violate U.S. copyright law. The Recording Industry Association of America sent a letter to Aimster, requesting them to begin filtering the files shared on the service. Aimster contends that to filter files shared privately between its users would be inappropriate. C|Net has the story."

Andreas(R) would like answers to this query: "I imagine that creating PC-games would be an exciting and creative profession. Obviously, it takes a lot of programming skills to put together most advanved games with realtime 3D, AI etc. What is the best way to aquire the neccecary skills to get these kinds of jobs (such as game designer at Westwood, Sierra, Epic)? Is a CS-degree the best way? Does one learn useful things in relation to games (such as programming for Direct 3D, or Direct-Rendering with Linux)? Given how the computing-industry has suffered economically recently; will there still be a demand for programmers/game designers in the future?" If there are any readers out there currently in the gaming industry, how did you get your first break?

To break into the gaming industry, like most IT jobs, one needs experience. Sure, Computer Science degrees will help in the application process, but you may need to focus a bit more on the math and logic side of things. The best thing one can do when trying to obtain a gaming job, is to make your own game. But before going for the 3D-realtime-60fps-shooter, think about starting small. Having the experience that comes from writing a 2D platform game or a couple of 3D demos under your belt will be worth more, to a game company seeking new talent, than any set of degrees.

john_locke writes: "'On the evening of Saturday, April 21, a day which saw tens of thousands demonstrate against the FTAA in the streets of Quebec City, the Independent Media Center in Seattle was served with a sealed court order by two FBI agents and an agent of the US Secret Service.' indymedia.org is a news center where anyone can be journalist, and a lot of leftist discussions about anti-globalization, etc, take place. The Agents were serving a court order demanding the IP addresses of visitors of the site, and indymedia.org was given a gag order forbidding them to talk about this." John points to the informative release at IndyMedia's front page as well, which serves to dispel some rumors. Note that contrary to early reports, there was not an FBI "raid" on the center. (Now: Where have you connected in the last 30 days, by what means? Was it from a static IP? What other sites did you visit? How long were you connected? This is a quiz, test to follow.)

An anonymous submitter sent in this: "This isn't exactly a news item, but it seems appropriate in light of the current debate over copyrights. TechTV has a useful story on their site about how to respond to a notification from your ISP that someone is claiming you're infringing on their copyright. Basically, it's a do-it-yourself letter that you can use to make the person or organization alleging infringement properly document their claim, as required under the DMCA. This isn't going to save anyone who's actually infringing, but it might prevent you from being railroaded by an aggressive complainant and/or a nervous ISP. And you might still get screwed in the end, but at least you can make everyone follow the correct procedures, even if they're incredibly biased at the moment." Under the DMCA, the copyright holder sends a notice to you/your ISP and states, basically, that you are posting some of their copyrighted material and demanding that the ISP take it down. We've seen many instances where this is a false or bogus claim. Dave Touretzky, whose name ought to be familiar to slashdot readers from the DeCSS cases, made up this guide to writing a response letter demanding that your ISP reinstate the materials. Very useful, well worth bookmarking.