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Stories · 615
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Is W3C's P3P Good Privacy?
nileshch asks: "A very important development in recent times with regards to website users' privacy has happened with the W3C introducing the Platform for Privacy Preferences(P3P). P3P allows websites to create and maintain XML-based privacy policies for the entire website or sub sections of the site. These machine readable policies document what information is collected from users and how it is going to be used. Today, a few browsers like Mozilla/Netscape & Internet Explorer are committed to giving support for P3P (Mozilla here, IE here) . Although that support seems only skin-deep. I also find very few big sites adopting P3P seriously. Isn't it like the classic chicken-and-egg situation? Websites wait for full P3P support on browsers, browsers go slow on development because there isn't much feature demand happening on this front. Do you have P3P policies for your website? If not, what stops you from creating one? We all create hoopla over tiny privacy issues, user profiling and doubleclick.net . Then why isn't there much enthusiasm for P3P support in browsers?"
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Vapochilled Pentium 4 System At 3.3GHz
SpinnerBait writes "Overclocking the Personal Computer has gotten considerably more elegant over the past few years and there is now an entire industry dedicated to it. One of the latest innovations is super cooling processors down to sub zero temperatures with standard vapor phase refrigeration, in an effort to allow clock speeds to crank far beyond manufacturer specifications. This article takes a look at the Asetek Vapochill, a Vapor Phase Refrigerated PC Case, that chilled a 2.8GHz Pentium 4 down to -7C and allows it to run stable in a workstation environment at 3.3GHz and beyond."
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Pictures Leaked of 3 new Palm handhelds
ahecht writes "On Thursday, Palm's Solutions Group's CEO Todd Bradley announced that 3 new handhelds will be released in October. Within 24 hours, pictures of all three handhelds have leaked out on the web. The first to be released, the sub-$100 Zire, can be seen here. The second handheld, previously known as Oslo, now has the name Tungsten T, and features OS 5 and built in bluetooth (pictured here). The third handheld is the Tungsten W, pictured here, which is a GPRS smartphone (although it does not have a built-in speaker or microphone). Zire will be released October 7th, while both Tungsten models will be released on October 28th." Could just be rumors or fakes, but it seems reasonable.
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Animated Ads in a Subway Near You
prostoalex writes "A company called Sub Media claims a successful launch of motion-picture ads in New York subway. The ad agency, created by a PhD in Astrophysics, prints ads on Kodak transparencies, so that when the train speeds up, the resulting images create a full-blown motion picture. The first ever ad of this was run for Target in NY, and there is another one planned for Discovery Channel."
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Cheap KVM Over IP?
An anonymous reader asks: "I've been looking for a cost effective (ie, cheap) way to remotely administer several servers running a variety of OS's, and would like to have a solution that would allow for monitoring of the bios on startup, etc (ie, not VNC). The most appealing solution is KVM over IP, which really just means a souped up KVM switch with something like VNC running on it, unfortunately all of the solutions I've been able to find are more expensive than I can justify spending. I've played around a bit with making my own Poor man's KVM over IP; I did this by purchasing a cheap (sub $50) VGA-to-NTSC convertor, then feeding it into a video card with NTSC input (the ATI All-In-Wonder Radion), and then by logging into a machine running Windows Terminal Services I'm able to watch the reboot process. Of course, this doesn't address the mouse/keyboard issue, and the quality isn't all that great. What I'm hoping is that someone else might have a suggestion on how to do this, preferably using Linux and the least hardware necessary. Does anyone have any suggestions or insights on ways to do this?" There are pre-existing solutions, but it seems they are all kind of pricey. Can any of you suggest cheap solutions (at or below $500USD) that could handle a farm of 5-10 machines?
"Here are the three approaches I found:
ViewProxy: They make the most economical for administration of multiple machines (by one person). Their ProxyView device plugs into your KVM just like it was a monitor/mouse/keyboard, and then does all the packetizing magic. Price is about $6k from what I can tell.
eRIC: These are the same guys who make the Rolf (Reboot on Lan), which is pretty cool. They make a card called Eric which replaces your normal video card with their card, which has a built in ethernet connection and allows remote control. The cheapest solution at about $700 but only would allow control of the machine it's installed in.
Avocent: I think the first to introduce the whole KVM over IP solution, they have KVM's with this sort of functionality integrated. Some of their products allow multiple users to multiple machine, which is a neat feature but not needed for my applications. Their units run from $4k on up." -
Low Frequency Active Sonar Gains US Gov. Approval
burntout writes "According to bbc online the US government has finally approved the use of low frequency active sonar. Apparently the navy has been granted an exemption from the marine mammal protection act for this, which is apparently 'necessary because of new superquiet Chinese, Russian, and German subs'."
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Russian Sub Launches European Inflatable Space Vehicle
QueueEhGuy writes "From the 'Red Planet' meets 'Hunt for Red October' department: CNN is reporting in this article that the Russian navy launched an inflatable space reentry vehicle atop a standard ICBM. Although this one was evidently only 2.5 ft in diameter, they evidently plan on making larger versions to act as life rafts or carrier pigeons from space back to Earth. Apparently, neither Val Kilmer or Sean Connery were involved in the test."
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Balancing Memory Usage vs Performance?
TwistedTR writes "I work for a company currently developing an application to run in an environment with a very small sum of available memory (sub 6 megs). My boss and I are in disagreement over speed vs memory overhead. He feels that speed is 100% key reguardless of the memory overhead required to meet it. The application is very math intensive so the more lookup tables we pre-generate at load time the faster the overall application runs. However, my boss is having me take us dangerously to the point where our target environment is going to run out of memory. The application makes use of user inputted data, and if the user so chooses it can be a WHOLE lot of data, which also uses a decent chunk of memory. My boss will not fold on my request to sacrifice some speed to prevent a possible fatal memory fill up. Has anyone out there had experience in dealing with developing in a simmilar situation, and if so do you have any ideas of how to balance performance vs memory on such a restrictive environment?"
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Cray SX-6 Installed in Alaska
Dhrakar writes: "Now, I know that normally press releases are imediately round-filed, however, as this is the first NEC^H^H^HCray SX-6 to be installed in the U.S. it is newsworthy. The 8cpu, 64Gb system has been installed at the Arctic Region Supercomputing Center for benchmarking and other testing. See either ARSC or the NY Times (sub. required. Yada, yada) article."
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Your Own Luxury Submarine!
cheapo writes "Not exactly computer related, but fun none-the-less. Someone on my boating mailing list turned me onto this website for your own personal luxury submarine. For a mere $78 million, you can make all the other folks at the marina jealous with a 213 foot toy." That 78 million dollar price tag might seem steep until you discover that it comes with its own docking mini sub. Now thats a bargain!
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Nuclear Mutant Flies Are Good For Africa?
D\monix writes "According to this article in Reuters, the International Atomic Energy Agency is going to start releasing massive numbers of tsetse flies "sterilized by a burst of radiation" into sub Saharan Africa in order to outnumber and thus eradicate the local fly population. My favorite quote? "The impact of the fly is difficult to exaggerate." You're damn right it is. Anyone else out there think pumping large numbers of mutant insects into the environment might be a bad idea?"
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Beginning Astronomy?
AnalogBoy asks: "I figure, with the diverse backgrounds offered here on Slashdot, at least 1(,000) of you would have an astronomy background, in some way, shape, or form. I've always had a passing interest in all things space, in particular, i've always been captivated by whats 'out there'. I was wondering if any of youse guys had suggestions on books, programs (Windows or Unix), and especially GOOD telescopes (Sub-$500-range). I've looked through Google, etc - but I want a community opinion! "
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Consumer-Grade Audio Input Options for the Mac?
hypnos asks: "With the recent release of the Creative Labs Extigy, I'm wondering if there are any remotely similar options for Mac users. What I really want is a way to get several audio inputs, a mic pre-amp, and MIDI-IN all in one box, and attached to some protocol (USB, FireWire) that'll let me use it on my desktop or my laptop. Does anyone know of such a device? And barring that, are there sub-$500 PCI-type options that will allow the same things (without the notebook portability, obviously)?"
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Defusing The Kursk
BdosError writes: "The Kursk (the Russian nuclear sub that sank 14 months ago) has finally surfaced, in its dry dock. New Scientist has the story. It's minus the nose/torpedo section, which was left on the sea floor as a safety precaution. Now, they have to remove the cruise missiles and defuel the nuclear reactors so that they can begin their investigation. The nose section will have to be raised later to complete the investigation."
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Hackable Christmas Presents?
An Anonymous Coward asks what many of you may start thinking about in another month...if you already haven't: "While sitting thru various classes..I started wondering today what I'll drop hints to people with money for what to get me for Christmas..I want something to hack on and with..but preferably in the sub $300 dollar category. Remember the fun of hacking things like the C64 or Spectrum or whatever? A fun home machine to hack on.. preferably not a PC (though I know you can get them in that price range) but something a little different. A cheap ARM or Mips based machine or something. Suggestions from anyone?"
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Raising the Kursk
imrdkl writes: "Theres a conglomeration of Euro companies, from Euro countries renowned for their sea-prowess, who are working together with the Russians to raise their stricken sub. This will be some happy news, when they get it finished. Hopefully before winter gets bad up there in the "circle". A pretty good article, with a nifty flash animation which gives some notion of the scope of this engineering feat is to be found at USA Today."
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Municipal Networks as Alternative to Commercial Broadband?
kenny asks: "There was a front page Wall Street Journal article last month (Aug. 17--sub. required) about local municipalities like Tacoma, Wash. and Coldwater, Mich. building out public fiber-optic networks through tax-free bond issues and run like local utilities. My question is what's been people's experience with municipal broadband networks? It seems like it's made people happy, and if the internet is like a public utility and if companies are dragging their feet about providing service, why shouldn't municipalities take it upon themselves to deliver service for their constituents?"
"Universally, it seems, people get better service and prices when such networks are implemented. It also forces telecom companies operating in the area to offer better service and prices as well, in short, to compete. But it's also increased companies' lobbying efforts against such municipal activity and it's not hard to see why such companies like AT&T Broadband, Charter Communications (controlled by Microsoft), and Qwest don't like it."
Not many municipalities are saavy enough to think about deploying this sort of infrastructure, however. For those in that situation, what kind of lobbying efforts must a municipality put together before village/town/city officials will take notice? If the government does notice, what kind of arguments should be made to convince them that it might be worthwhile to make such an undertaking?
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Super Hard Steel
Sub_Dude writes: "Seems the folks at a Dept. of Energy lab have come up with a way to coat steel to make it harder. The process might be interesting to mechanical engineers out there, and because the article mentions nanotechnology, Hemos will like it. The press release is here, and an award for being "one of this year's top 100 technological achievements" is here."
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Avalon Framework 4.0 Released
osi writes "The Avalon team is proud to A HREF="http://jakarta.apache.org/avalon/">announce the 4.0 final release of the Avalon Framework. The Avalon project is Apache's Java Server Framework. It is separated into six sub projects: Framework, Excalibur, LogKit, Cornerstone, Phoenix, and Testlet. Its purpose is to simplify server side programming for Java based projects. It formalizes serveral best of breed practices and patterns for server side programming."
ChangeLog for Avalon Framework 4.0
- Added new method to Component Manager and Selector for discovering if a Component exists inside or not. Also augmented the default versions with the basic implementation to discover them. [BL]
- Added stylesheet to convert Stylebook markup to DocBook markup. [BL]
- Changed the documentation build process to use Cocoon to build the site. [BL]
- Added new "Developing with Avalon" book in DocBook format. [BL]
- Added Executable interface to activity package. [PD]
- Updated Resolvable interface to allow a ContextException to be thrown on failure. [PD]
- Add a makeReadOnly() method to the default implementations of Configuration, Context and ComponentManager. Calling this method after the respective object has been filled will make the object read-only. This is a safety precaution to stop code performing unwanted operations. [PD]
- Updated the javadocs of many of the classes. [PD]
- Update documentation so that it is more accurate and descriptive. [BL]
Downloads for Avalon Framework 4.0 available at http://jakarta.apache.org/builds/jakarta-avalon/re lease/framework/latest
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Mandrake For PowerPC Is Coming
Nikato Muirhead writes: "Need I say more?" and points to this page at LinuxToday which says that Mandrake is preparing a beta -- for PPC. Considering the price of a used-but-decent G3, this sounds fun to get in on. (E-mailing sympa@linux-mandrake.com with "SUB cooker-ppc" in the body will start you on the road to beta-testerhood.)
