Slashdot Mirror

Akamai is introducing FreeFlow, a dynamic mirroring technology that mirrors pages to servers closer to the source of demand. Unlike similar proxies, like Janet's in the UK, the service does not improve access speed to all sites, only to those sites that pay a fee. Interestingly FreeFlow is Linux based. Link found on LWN.

emptybody was the first of you to write in with this PC Week story that Compaq is about to ship RedHat 5.2 bundled on some of its servers, and provide 24-by-7 support for them. This apparently will save time for them, since they currently pre-load Linux by hand. If this is becoming a problem, it suggests demand for Linux Servers is increasing. Gateway also expects to deliver such servers by the end of the year. Kim Brown, an analyst at Dataquest Inc, says this means Compaq is walking away from SCO, and that Linux is starting to be acknowledged as the low-end Unix alternative.

At the moment there's a high demand for programmers in the US, especially female ones (why would an employer pay a higher recruiter's fee for a woman? Is this a "team-work thing"?) And with only 25-30 thousand new BSc's a year in IT, it may last. However, I wonder how much of the demand is temporary, related to fixing Y2K or in Europe the conversion from national currencies to the Euro. What do you think?

Dengue writes "So, I was just checking my mail and this was in... "Corel is pleased to announce that the Corel WordPerfect 8 for Linux free download will be available [today] exclusively from CNET. When we started this project, we anticipated that there was a strong demand by the Linux community for powerful applications like Corel WordPerfect; the overwhelming response-over 60,000 Linux users preregistered for the free download-reaffirms that belief." " I'm itching to hammer on this thing- it's just in time. My last exam is today, I'll never need to write a paper again. That's alright- I've been using vim, writing HTML and printing from Netscape most of the time anyway *grin*.

R. Inq. writes " Upside has an article about ageism and the high-tech industry. What's particularly interesting is that if this practice continues, and future students catch on, the number of students who choose computer science as a major will decrease, more than it is already, since a career in programming has a short lifespan. " What irritates me about the industry is that college age interns are underpaid, over worked, and in general just screwed over. And then the 30 somethings aren't in demand any more. We should all just work at McDonalds instead. Would you like Fries with that?

Paul Crowley writes "Back in April, I proposed to Slashdot that there should be a book that shows our "Road Ahead" to lay readers. I just saw that O'Reilly are listing the book that came out of that discussion, now called Open Sources , in their "upcoming books" list, to be out February! Too bad it's too late for Christmas. The star-studded list of contributors includes Linus Torvalds, Eric Raymond, and Richard Stallman. I can't wait to get a copy. " Its by Chris DiBona and Sam Ockman. Pretty sweet- I demand

An interesting article is running, with comments from a MCI Vice President that pricing for Broadband access may have to come with long-distance style price tags. The VP points to the usage rates, the massive costs off laying bandwidth, coupled with the ever-increasing demands. However, another analyst points to the flat-rate US-style of pricing as a reason for the substantial growth of the Internet within the US. H: I personally hope they don't implement this-the consequences would be huge. What do you folks think?

An anonymous reader wrote in to say "The 3D shooter Quake was one of the first games to allow the recording of a "demo" - ie, a game could be recorded for later perusal. Especially demos of the pros in action have been much in demand. Of course first you had to download the often large demo files - and of course you had to wait untill the game was finished. This may all change with the release of " FleetSpy", a streaming demo viewer. " Now if only there could be super bowl calibre commercial breaks for mind boggling special effects and fetching of snacks, we'd have something.

Stephen Birch writes "I have just been informed by Intuit support that they will consider a port of QuickBooks and Quicken to Linux if there is sufficient demand for the product on that platform. They told me that if I leave a suggestion, they WILL get back to me to discuss the suggestion. Sounds like the slashdot effect may be put to good use to request a Linux port of these popular products? " Normally, we try not to post pointers to polls and things like this, but I think there is a legit desire/market here. Quicken is, without a doubt, the most frequontly mentioned app I hear people wishing would run under WINE. But think long and hard before putting a request in the suggestion box.

Toshiba and Sony will present papers at the ISSCC about what Techweb believes will be the CPU of the next Playstation. Interestingly this design places more processing demands on the CPU, a growing trend throughout the low-cost industry. Cyrix' MediaGX parts reduce cost by providing on-board video and audio, where most of the complexity is put in software, with hardware assist only where it is justified. Transmeta's patent and EPIC similarly reduce hardware complexity by moving it into software.

My eagerly awaited copy of C'T has arrived, and in it there is a short interview with Martin Sieler, multimedia software lead at the Fraunhofer Institute. The topic was Fraunhofer's demand for patent license fees on free MP3 encoders. In it Sieler disputes that the encoders were free because the internet sites distributing them made money on the banner advertisements. He also discusses the newest MPEG standard (MPEG-2 Advanced Audio Coding -- also to be in MPEG-4): a refinement of the MPEG-1 layer 3 technology (MP3), it will provide even higher compression rates for the same audio quality. As with MP3 unlicensed encoders will be illegal, but unlike MP3 no free decoders will be tolerated... S: I find the ISO's current trend of accepting standards which cannot be implemented without violating patents worrisome. While I agree with some readers that a lot of work goes into this type of research I disagree that the key elements are inventions: they are discoveries about how human perception works. As a result, an unrestricted alternative (like gzip was to pkzip) should not only be possible, but encouraged. What do you think? I've corrected MPEG-3 to MPEG-1 Layer 3. Thanks manuka for your correction. I've also corrected the "like gzip" statement to "like gzip was to pkzip" since it seems to be causing some confusion. Finally thanks to Christian who pointed out I forgot the u in Fraunhofer. Oops.

Recently many people have been asking for a port of Coldfusion to Linux. Allaire has just announced it will do just that. Thanks Jeremy! There is no definite release date yet since Coldfusion relies on third party products which will have to be ported or replaced. Note that this port came about because of user demand. You have a voice: use it! Thanks to Svartalf, James Morris, M1m3R, and xtra.

Kevin writes "The Diamond Rio is being put on hold due to a court order. I really don't understand how it is even possible. If this is successful can they outlaw CD players and VCR's just because they can play illegally copied material? " Personally, I'm willing to buy one of those Rio's just to make a statement against the RIAA goobers who are making this messy. Note to RIAA:The way you do business is going to die. The Rio is just the first step- wait until Radio moves to the Internet. Why would I listen to WXYZ when wxyz.com will play my exact choice of music? Why would I buy a physical object at all? The future is gonna be great: on demand media will make accessing music better for the everyone. Stop trying to protect your ass with lawsuits and instead try to win the new game by offering consumers what we want. Release all your music as MP3 and figure out a better way to profit then the existing distribution system that rips off the artists, and makes things unecessarily expensive and difficult for consumers. Soapbox mode off.

Linux' support of EDA is improving as Avant! Corp. prepares to port its Polaris Verilog simulator and Design Acceleration Inc.'s recent port of SignalScan (a debugging environment), Verilog simulation is marching toward the forefront of the Linux EDA movement. Other vendors, such as Fintronic USA are reporting a sudden upsurge in demand for Linux versions of their products. Other vendors such as Novas Software are rethinking their plans given Engineers' preference for Linux. One of the main interests appears to be simulation farms on PCs running Linux which fits better than NT into Unix networks. Indeed even Wellspring whose "decision to drop Linux support" was big news last week revealed that this decision was taken over 2 years ago.

fantumn writes "I was wondering what the demand for regular Debianized snapshots of the Gnome-CVS would be. It is a project that I am thinking very seriously about taking on, but I would like to know what the interest for something like this would be. The snapshots would be taken regularly, weekly, bi-daily, daily, depending on how many people decide to help out, and made into Debian packages. They would include everything in the Gnome-CVS that is compiled successfully for that particular day. Right now, I need both people to volunteer to package some of the CVS regularly, and people to host the packages themselves--perhaps even a website. If you are interested in helping out, or just want to give feedback, email me. More info will be posted in the near future."

OctobrX hinted at it, but here's the deal. Slashdot, Freshmeat, and Themes.org are going to be going to the Atlanta Linux Showcase at the end of October. Hemos and Myself will be representing Slashdot, along with OctobrX and Scoop from Themes & FM respectively. We'll have a booth and some VA Research machines to run web sites on. The whole adventure is being sponsored by VA and Cyclic Software. If there is demand I can bring shirts for folks. We're still working out what we're going to do with the booth- the nude interpretive dance idea seems to be a popular choice though.

Sean wrote in to send us this link to a response from Adobe about a Linux port of Photoshop. They say exactly what you would expect (not enough demand to justify a port) and something you wouldn't (they suggest looking at the Gimp).

InterBase Software Corporation, a subsidiary of Inprise Corporation (FKA Borland), has announced it will release the next Linux version of its database, Interbase 5, on August 14, 1998. According to Jim Weil, president of Interbase, there has been a tremendous demand for their recent freeware offering of Interbase 4.2. InterBase 5 features InterClient, an all-Java JDBC driver that allows applications created with Java to access data stored in InterBase databases. For further details, check out the press release.

Back in March, we reported that Microsoft was demanding the recall of the March edition of PC Welt, after claiming that the magazine incited its readers to commit acts of piracy. Well, Microsoft lost its case, since it could not find anyone who had been incited.

Alex Prestin sent us an article about a new crypto bill. This one has the distinct advantage of not including the key-recovery abilities that the FBI and others have been demanding. Let's hope they can keep their heads straight on this one.