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SanLouBlues writes: "This story has the scoop on Dennis Tito in space. He is up there now and will be for the next 6 days "with his video camera and CD player." whee." trolebus contributes links to coverage on CNN and on Reuters. It's been a long, strange story -- the optimisic Tito was originally planning on going to Mir, but looks like he got an upgrade. I hope he's savoring this trip for $20 million worth of memories. Don't forget, there is a cheaper version of space tourism on the horizon, too.

Anonymous Coward writes "Chris Faulhaber, one of the TrustedBSD developers, announced on the trustedbsd-discuss mailing list that Samba's POSIX.1e ACL support is now working on FreeBSD 5.0-CURRENT, and even has a screen shot. This has been a high-demand feature, apparently, and could be a big selling point for sites currently running Windows NT as their enterprise operating system.

Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2001 19:17:52 -0400
From: Chris Faulhaber <jedgar@fxp.org>
To: trustedbsd-discuss@TrustedBSD.org
Subject: Native ACL support for Samba

With the release of Samba 2.2.0, samba offers ACL support to remote clients. I just committed the changes to the FreeBSD CVS tree required to allow Samba to access the FreeBSD ACLs. With an updated -current system and samba-devel port (define WITH_ACL_SUPPORT), Windows NT 4.0 and 2000 clients can now remotely manipulate ACLs. Testing and comments are appreciated.

In addition, the ACL utilities, getfacl and setfacl, have been updated to fully make use of the ACL editing library. They should compile on most ACL-enabled systems (tested on Linux + ACL patches) with little or no change."

Snowfox writes: "Crosley Bendix, Director Of Stylistic Premonitions, U.M.N., has this excellent article explaining Squant, the fourth primary color. He managed to get his hands on a new Apple Quicktake 1500sq, in advance of the US release, to snap some photos. You can view them with the plugins available on the site. -- Sorry, no Linux plugins. :( -- Seeing a new color jumping off your screen is a real head trip though. Just try and imagine a color you may well have never seen before." While it's true that no Linux plugins exist yet, a GIMP plug-in can't be far away. Considering Squant's olfactory characteristics, that might not be the greatest idea, though.

tired.cranky writes: "An article on LinuxDevices.com sez that Transmeta is about to ship a quasi-distro slash embedded development toolkit featuring Linus' new super-efficient cramfs and ramfs filesystems. Apparently, a reasonably normal Linux system can be shoehorned into 8MB of storage, with zlib decompression-on-demand and such. It sounds like it could push a fair few hobbyists and embedded developers in Transmeta's general direction, too... and reads nicely next to a Register piece on Transmeta's leaked server initiative. Does one end of Transmeta know where the other is pointed?"

zero asks: "Looking over at the MS Web site, a lot of the ideas behind .NET remind me of Java - and so does the hype around it. I remember when it was said that Java would revolutionize the way things work by having applications loaded on-demand off the network (for example)... sound familiar? It would be interesting to hear what the Slashdot community thinks of what MS is doing better (or what they think they're doing better) in their plans for .NET, and how much potential they have."

Ryan Mack asks: "My dorm is looking to build a small (4-8 user) Web-based video-on-demand system. Basically, we'd want to be able to schedule MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 streams to be decoded and sent over our building's unused cable TV distribution system. There are many PCI MPEG decoder cards, but few advertise Linux driver support, and none mention if multiple cards can be run in a single box. We've also looked at external MPEG decoding devices, but these require ATM, T1/E1, or high speed RS422 connections, which also raise Linux compatability concerns. Anybody done this before? Can anybody recommend a MPEG decoding card or a RS422 controller capable of 5 Mbps transfer?"

John Murdoch writes "Tens of thousands of programmers, database specialists, and other technical workers come to the United States each year on "H1B" visas--temporary visas for workers with in-demand technical skills. The key word in that sentence is temporary. Congress began the program six years ago, and the H1B visas have a six-year time limit--meaning that thousands of H1B holders are reaching the end of their visas, and they do not have any hope of getting permanent resident status. The Washington Post has an excellent story about the problem (click here for story as posted on MSNBC). These H1B residents have invested six years of their lives here--they have homes, families, and careers here. There is a generally acknowledged (or perhaps, generally alleged) shortage of programmers and other tech workers in the U.S. The federal government is presently working with Congress to approve legislation increasing the number of H1B workers that can come to the U.S.--while simultaneously sending currently-employed workers home. "

In his copious free time, Jason Bennett must do other things, but for now he's managed to pound out yet another book review, this time of Gene Kranz' Failure Is Not An Option, about as straight-from-the-horse's-mouth as a book about NASA can be. Kranz is an interesting storyteller, and he certainly doesn't lack for material -- he helped send people to the moon!

Failure Is Not An Option author Gene Kranz pages 415 publisher Simon & Schuster rating 9 reviewer Jason Bennett ISBN 0-7432-0079-9 summary The story of the early days of NASA from its most famous flight director.

The Scenario

Space, the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship "United States of America." Their 10-year mission: to explore strange new satellites; to seek out new knowledge and new challenges; to boldly go where no human has gone before.

Ok, ok, so it's a little trite. Nevertheless, this is the story of the men (and women) who lived John Kennedy's dream of space exploration and conquered the moon. Gene Kranz, for those who didn't see Apollo 13, was one of NASA's main flight controllers. His story extends well before that fateful mission, of course, to the very beginning of the space program. Gene takes us from his days of joining the program through the early Mercury and Gemini missions and on to the moon landing and the end of the Apollo program. Along the way a fascinating story emerges of a team closely united in a common purpose, such as has rarely been seen. That statement might seen overly melodramatic, but the race to the moon, in front of the entire world, remains unique in human history. The details we learn along the way give an amazing amount of insight into the inner workings of the space program: many missions came closer to disaster than I had realized; the loss of Apollo 1 and NASA's subsequent recovery serve as an interesting counterpoint to the post-Challenger era; the aimlessness of NASA after the moon landings that has continued to this day. Krantz' story is a fascinating and inspiring account of a true team that worked tirelessly to reach the unreachable.

What's Good?

I think I've covered that. :-) Gene has a unique perspective and position from which to tell this story, and he does an excellent job. When he didn't remember or witness an event, he went back to his former colleagues at NASA to fill in the details. The storytelling is coherent and understandable. This isn't an engineering book, so there isn't a lot of technical gibberish thrown in. This is, above all, a book about people, and about an organizational effort that any software project would do well to emulate.

What's Bad?

Gene isn't a professional author, and it shows through in places. The cuts and flashbacks are not always in the best places, and sometimes distract the reader from the overall story. The main problem, however, is that the cast of characters is enormous and ever-shifting. A character listing would have been a nice addition, as I had trouble keeping everyone (and their nicknames) straight at times. Neither of these problems was major, though.

I would like to see Gene's perspective on the post-Apollo era. He does editorialize on this at the end, but I would love to see how he handled the post-Challenger time from his management position, and what he tried to do to jump-start NASA. It would be another excellent read.

So What's In It For Me?

It's a cool story, dangit! What more do you want? :-)

Table of Contents

1. The Four-Inch Flight
2. "Liftoff; the Clock is Running
3. "God Speed, John Glenn"
4. The Brotherhood
5. The Making of a Rocket Man
6. Gemini -- The Twins
7. White Flight
8. The Spirit of 76
9. The Angry Alligator
10. A Fire on the Pad
11. Out of the Ashes
12. The X Mission
13. The Christmas Story
14. 1969 -- The Year of Apollo
15. SimSup Wins the Final Round
16. We Copy You Down, Eagle
17. "What the Hell Was That?"
18. The Age of Aquarius
19. Coming Home
20. Shepard's Return
21. What Do You Do After the Moon?
22. The Last Liftoff

• Epilogue
• Where They Are
• Acknowledgments
• Appendix: Foundations of Mission Control
• Glossary of Terms
• Index

Buy this book at Fatbrain.

Over the last few weeks I've been playing with a piece of consumer electronics that has the potential to alter the way that we think of television. Its step between the inevitable future of on-demand television, and todays "ya better be home sunday at 8pm tuned in to channel 11 or you'll miss The Simpsons. Although you'd never guess it (except from the diffs on the website) it runs Linux. The device is the TiVo, and you can click below to read my review of whats good and whats bad about this thing. What is it?

The TiVo is supposed to be a Digital VCR. Instead of inserting tapes and programming your box to capture channel 11 from 9-10, you say program it to 'Record the X-Files'. And if you opt for a "Season Pass", the device will record The X-Files whenever its on: syndication on FX? The official sunday night show on Fox? It doesn't matter: the TiVo allows you to forget what channel you're watching and what time your show is on.

I'm a fairly busy person, and to me this sounded like a godsend: I could tape shows that aired while I was at work or away on business or asleep, and stockpile them... then I could watch them (fast forwarding through commercials and deleting the rerunrs) when it fit my schedule. No more channel surfing. No more reruns. Less wasted time. I must say its pretty amazing to turn on your TV and see "Whats On" and see a half dozen shows I wanted to see from the last few days, but missed.

As you use the TiVo it gets smarter. It remembers what you've recorded (and with a simple 'Thumbs Up/Thumbs Down' option on the remote, you can tell it what you like and don't like) and attempts to guess what programming you might enjoy. I don't have any comments on how well this works, but since I had selected DragonBall Z and The Simpsons, it was essentially taping virtually any piece of animated crap being broadcasted on nickelodean (No offense to Rocko, Ren & Stimpy, and Angry Beavers, all of which are excellent) . Supposedly it'll get smarter with usage.

Its also pretty useful for watching TV in real time: the device is always recording whatever you are watching. You can pause/slo-mo/or rewind whatever you're watching. This allowed my girlfriend to catch a joke she missed during the Simpsons while running upstairs for a glass of water. And it allows me to slow-mo the gratuitous Sculley Cleavage from this weeks X-Files.

<RANTA>Anyone who bought a Dish knows that the consumer is being royally screwed by the FCC and the powerful television lobbyists who are fighting to keep broadcast TV off the dish. If I want local programming, I'll get it, but I don't, so why do I have to have to install cable just to watch the handful of network programs that don't suck? I don't want local news or weather, so why should I be forced to have 2 sets of wires. 2 Bills. 2 User Interfaces. 2 Boxes. It makes me want to go Goku on somebody. This is being resolved in larger markets, but it'll never get out to me in the middle of nowhere. </RANT> As a very nice side bonus, the TiVo tuner encapsulates both the Dish and the Cable's tuner functionality into a single interface: no need to change devices and interfaces simply to flash between FOX and Comedy Central.

Cost/Installation/Privacy

Installation is easy, although somewhat time consuming. In my case I plugged it in, feeding an input from the DirecTV box (RCA jacks) and the cable (Coax) One output into my receiver and the other into the VCR (for "Archiving"). Also a cable connects to the DirecTV's serial port input which allows the TiVo to tune the dish. Power. Phone Jack. Done.

After that the box makes a few phone calls and indexes programming. This takes several hours. Plus, if you have a dish, it thinks you have every single channel! I had to go through 999 channels and turn off hundreds of pay-per-view channels (to say nothing of the sports channels and crap I'll never watch).

You purchase a box based on the amount of video you want to store. (15 or 30 hour version: I paid $699 for the 30) The hours is at the lowest compression. High quality gets me 9 hours out of the 30 hour box. Thats enough except when I leave town for a week. It is definitely pricey: A high end VCR would cost half this, but it seems pretty reasonable considering what it all does.

You also pay for a subscription so the unit can download TV listings. from each night. The fee ranges from like $10 a month to $200 for a "Lifetime Subscription". I'm kinda curious if I can use 1 subscription on 2 TiVo's if I chose to hook one up to a second TV.

The documentation and the tivo website both have extensive commentary on privacy. They basically say all the right things. I have no reason to believe that they're lying, but just the same, my tivo knows what I watch, when I watched it. The service subscription knows my units serial number and my name. Putting 2 and 2 together wouldn't be that difficult. They claim this will never be an issue.

I have no problem with them using information and making a truckload of money off it. A million TiVo's are gonna generate excellent, accurate ratings someday. And relationships between programs and viewing habits: "People who like The Simpsons don't like Veronica's Closet" type information. Hopefully someday this will mean that the TiVo will be capable of more accurately guessing programming choices tailored to me. The big scary question is will this be done anonymously. I don't want to start getting FOX spam because Philips sold my email address to FOX because I watch The Simpsons every sunday.

And now the problems... Technical Stuffs

First off, my unit was screwed. It crashes regularly. It goes anywhere from 5 minutes to 5 hours, but it always freezes up: it made it for like 6 hours on saturday, but crashed twice during the X-Files on sunday. I called TiVo tech support and a very nice representative named Kendra was quite helpful (this was thursday). On friday I got another call to confirm some problems from another techie. I was told that I might get a third call from a top level specialist, or else a guy to coordinate the replacement of my defective unit.

It quite clearly was a bad harddrive. I assumed that after the second or third time it happened. It took a bit of time to get it replaced, but they did it. They shipped me a spare unit, and although it obviously forgot my preferences, I was back up and running.

Interface/Problems/Suggestions

As a whole, it works great. It is very intuitive. I didn't need to look in the manual to get anything done, however it was very slow at times. I suspect that this might have had something to do with the hardware problems, but on several occasions, generating menus would take 5 minutes or more: particularly long ones like the 'Whats on Live TV' but occasionally in the menu where you search for programs to record. A status indicator would be nice any time its gonna take more than a few seconds to do something, however I figure this was pretty abnormal since most of the time these thigns all happened instantly.

The Powerpuff Girls Problem Powerpuff girls have an eratic schedule. Because of this, it overlaps frequently with other programs. The "Season Pass" feature refuses to ever allow 2 season passes to overlap... therefore, if any episode of The Powerpuff girls overlaps with anything else I want to record, I have to choose one or the other. The Simpsons Problem The Simpsons airs every day twice on fox in my area. It also airs a "New" episode sunday evenings. Selecting a "Season Pass" treats all 11 episodes identically. I select all 11 showings as a unit, even though they most definitely aren't. I can tell it to record only The Simpsons on sunday, but it should be able to tell syndication from the prime-time showing. The South Park Problem South Park airs several times a week: during a week, the episode is the same. By selecting a Season Pass, it records each and every showing: so I get 4 copies of the same episode. A simple scan of the plot summaries would be helpful. Dragonball Z suffers from the same problem: 5:30 and 12:30 are both the same episode. I get both. The TiVo should save plot summaries (when available. Its gonna be tougher when no summary is available. It seems like at least an episode number should be possible tho) of shows it records, and have a user definable time frame during which 'reruns' should not be taped. That way I could say "Don't tape the same episode of south park for 30 days" and be much happier. Precedence Basically there needs to be a set of rules that allows me to select a precedence for overlapping programs. Rules like "I've seen this episode in the last 30 days" or "This is prime time" or "This is syndication" need to be defined in order to help clarify what should and shouldn't be recorded. Then again, when these things can hold 200 hours of footage, it won't be as big of a deal.

The future will be interesting: it would be cool if I could email shows to a friend. Obviously today bandwidth is to restricted, but if this thing was hooked up to say a cable modem instead of a phone line, it would be reasonably feasible. Its pretty obvious that in the future programming will be stored on mammoth servers and streamed to viewers rather then mass broadcasted and then stored locally. Then we could effectively pass the equivalent of URLs about instead of the actual streams, although in the future, a gig or so for a television program won't be the end of the world. Just don't expect that one tomorrow.

Summary

I got a bum unit, but despite that and a few significant problems, its clear that this thing is gonna change the way people watch TV. This version still has shortcomings, in hardware, service, and software. And there is definitely a looming possibility of some sort of security problem. But with all that aside, until the internet has the bandwidth to allow us to watch programming on demand, this is best thing out there. If you're tight on time, it will make television more enjoyable and more efficient.

The strangest part is the realization that you're not watching TV: you can pause whenever you want. You can fastforward through commercials, or if the phone rings, you can back up to where you left off. But I still found myself thinking "I need a commercial so I can go to the bathroom". Some things never change.

GregGardner writes, "According to this press release, RedHat and Real Networks are teaming together to bring Real products to Linux. RealServer 7.0 and RealPlayer 7.0 will be physically bundled with RedHat and that RealPlayer 7 will be released for Linux within 30 days on Real's Web site. "

Floydian Slip pointed us to a news.com story that talks about some researchers who have successfully sent HDTV over I2. Sort of a proof of concept thing for using the new network for broadcasting TV. It'll still be an ungodly amount of time before its practical, but I'm convinced on-demand media (music is already happening, TV will come) is the future. I love the idea of not dedicating a whole bookcase to VCRs, CDs, and DVDs, so I'm excited to see it.

schnucki writes "A new, innocuous-looking consumer electronic device known as a personal video recorder is not much different in nature from the video cassette recorder, and very few of them have been sold to date. And yet, an increasing number of executives at television networks and advertising agencies have their ears nervously on alert, ... " Its the NYT so you need a free account, but its decent piece talking about the impact of ReplayTV and Tivo on TV industry. Personally I think this is an intermediate step before we get to full, on-demand broadcasting over the net, but its a great step. RIP Network TV.

BOredAtWork writes "CNN.com is running a special on mp3 and digital music. A new article on Rio is here, and an interesting one about groups getting started with mp3 here, to point out two of the newest articles. "

Here's an interesting question from Beijing AeroStrong who would like to know the following: "I need a simple programme which can produce a BUS Error-Core dump (the simpler the better). I will demostrate it for educational use. The platform is Solaris 2.6."

Hetz Ben Amo sent this link my way and daywalker also wrote "It appears that Dan Shaffer of "Project Heresy" fame will be covering be covering Linux news once a week in their CNET Radio webcast... Check out the good stuff "We'll be covering Linux news & views every Thursday in CNET Radio's 1:00 p.m. PT webcast, starting September 3. You can also catch each episode on-demand from this page." "

nurb writes "It seems the recording industry is taking note of MPEG audio layer 3, and they don't like what they see. Calling portable MP3 players a "hybrid of personal use and piracy" seems a bit extreme to me. "

As AMD and Intel report disappointing earnings, the price of computers continues its downwards spiral. Intel certainly did not anticipate the success of the sub-$1000 category, but AMD and Cyrix have failed to capitalize on the opportunity. The problem is that a bitter war of attrition will hurt the smaller players just entering the field. But then, perhaps they will address the lack of new features to excite one enough to buy a new PC. Or perhaps, they will find a solution to the root cause of high computer cost: bloatware.

An anonymous reader quotes Reuters: Richard Liu, the founder of Chinese e-commerce giant JD.com Inc, has weighed in on an ongoing debate about the Chinese tech industry's grueling overtime work culture, lamenting that years of growth had increased the number of "slackers" in his firm who are not his "brothers...." Liu, who started the company that would become JD.com in 1998, in the note spoke about how in the firm's earliest days he would set his alarm clock to wake him up every two hours to ensure he could offer his customers 24-hour service -- a step he said was crucial to JD's success...

The '996' work schedule, which refers to a 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. workday, six days a week, has in particular become the target of online debate and protests on some coding platforms, where workers have swapped examples of excessive overtime demands at some firms. Liu said JD did not force its staff to work the "996" or even a "995" overtime schedule. "But every person must have the desire to push oneself to the limit!" he said.
JD disputed reports that the company would be cutting up to 8% of its workforce, but did say "We're getting back to those roots as we seek, develop and reward staff who share the same hunger and values... JD.com is a competitive workplace that rewards initiative and hard work, which is consistent with our entrepreneurial roots."

JD's investors include Walmart and Google.

Alibaba founder and billionaire Jack Ma has defended the grueling overtime work culture at many of China's tech companies, calling it a "huge blessing" for young workers. Reuters reports: The e-commerce magnate weighed into a debate about work-life balance and the overtime hours demanded by some companies as the sector slows after years of breakneck growth. In a speech to Alibaba employees, Ma defended the industry's "996" work schedule, which refers to the 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. workday, six days a week. "I personally think that being able to work 996 is a huge blessing," he said in remarks posted on the company's WeChat account. "Many companies and many people don't have the opportunity to work 996," Ma said. "If you don't work 996 when you are young, when can you ever work 996?"

"In this world, everyone wants success, wants a nice life, wants to be respected," Ma said. "Let me ask everyone, if you don't put out more time and energy than others, how can you achieve the success you want?" Ma referred to the tech industry today where some people are without jobs, or working at companies in search of revenue or facing closure. "Compared to them, up to this day, I still feel lucky, I don't regret (working 12 hour days), I would never change this part of me," he said. On Thursday, an unnamed author published an opinion piece in a state newspaper, arguing that 996 violates China's Labor Law, which stipulates that average work hours cannot exceed 40 hours a week. "Creating a corporate culture of 'encouraged overtime' will not only not help a business' core competitiveness, it might inhibit and damage a company's ability to innovate," the author wrote.

Mike Masnick, reporting for TechDirt: We've been trying to explain for the past few months just how absolutely insane the new EU Terrorist Content Regulation will be for the internet. Among many other bad provisions, the big one is that it would require content removal within one hour as long as any "competent authority" within the EU sends a notice of content being designated as "terrorist" content. The law is set for a vote in the EU Parliament just next week. And as if they were attempting to show just how absolutely insane the law would be for the internet, multiple European agencies (we can debate if they're "competent") decided to send over 500 totally bogus takedown demands to the Internet Archive last week, claiming it was hosting terrorist propaganda content. [...] And just in case you think that maybe the requests are somehow legit, they are so obviously bogus that anyone with a browser would know they are bogus. Included in the list of takedown demands are a bunch of the Archive's "collection pages" including the entire Project Gutenberg page of public domain texts, it's collection of over 15 million freely downloadable texts, the famed Prelinger Archive of public domain films and the Archive's massive Grateful Dead collection. Oh yeah, also a page of CSPAN recordings. So much terrorist content!