Slashback: Equivalence, Toilets, Hundredth

Screenshots of the recently released OpenOffice, another appeal for old Usenet archives, a possibly true account of the One True Conspiracy, and Yes, a way for you to send messages of (sympathy? rage? hope?) to sojourners at MIT while they study for exams. All below in tonight's episode of Slashback.

Screenshots to show the boss. Jim Hall writes: "The other day, I downloaded OpenOffice build 628C for Linux and for Windows. I use Red Hat Linux (7.1) at home, and I already use StarOffice (5.2) for my regular office needs. It works great. I think my main complaint with OpenOffice is the silly desktop. Other than that, I consider it a fully functional office suite that can replace my MS Office needs anytime.

I didn't see any cool OpenOffice screenshots, so I made my own of the text document program. I didn't do any (yet?) of the spreadsheet program, or presentation software. These were really captured for the benefit of my brother, but I'm posting them here so that others can see them."

When I was a boy, we didn't have "archives" ... jbrw writes "Occasionally complaints will pop up that the archives at groups.google.com aren't complete enough. Well, here's your chance to help. Google is conducting an archive hunt to find some CDs from the "NetNews CD Series" pre-dating 1995, to help fill out their archive. I'm sure there's a whole heap of useful information hidden away in there, so it would be nice if it was available for all. Google says they will pay a spotter's fee for any of the CDs they don't have yet. I imagine the /. crowd would be more impressed with some sort of custom t-shirt, but there you go..."

We've mentioned this before, but it looks like they're still looking, or at least haven't updated the page.

Pinch your salt well, folks. Sir_Real writes "The RIAA wants to re-establish the CPRM standard. It is also lobbying lawmakers to make the ISP responsible for content shared by the people they provide for. Sound Cards are being targetted also. If Ms. Rosen has her way, "Watermarked" content will not be rippable because of hardware protection implemented in the new cards. The Register has the full story."

My advice would be to take this one more as a thought experiment than anything else, though it would be interesting if some sort of substantiation emerges.

The site named after a game show noise hits a milestone. Zanthrax writes: "ZZZ Online just got their 100th edition out ! You should go see this site if you allready haven't. Lots of cool stuff on the site gets submitted to /. , Like their ornithopter story which was on a lot sooner than here on /."

Just good, clean, vicarious bathroom fun. random-nerds writes: "Following a suggestion from a Slashdot reader, we built and installed a display in our bathroom so all you crazy Int0rnet junkies can send us messages while we're in our bathroom. Now the MIT Bathroom Server is fun for the whole family. Check it out at http://neurosis.mit.edu/foo/"

There's something wrong there.

Comments

Re:So. . .

[Jason Earl]

My favorite quote:

Steve Heckler: "Once consumers can no longer get free music, they will have to buy the music in the formats we choose to put out."

Or alternatively, consumers may simply start listening to bands from alternative labels that do most of their promoting with free music samples over the Internet. The fact of the matter is that the record labels are not nearly as useful as they were when distributing music meant putting vinyl records on shelves, and promoting it required convincing radio stations to give it air time.

I personally have steered clear of this whole MP3 craze. So I couldn't care less what happens. But history and simple economics would suggest that the time is ripe for alternatives to the current music distribution scheme.

Re:An actual picture

[ekrout]

Here's a log file!

Re:The RIAA is very misguided

[Surak]

The lines haven't crossed for photographies, but I'm sure that won't take too long.

Really? So I take it you've never heard of a scanner? Companies like have developed technologies like "digital watermarking" which makes embeds copyright information into photographs in such a way that they are not visible to the naked eye, but scanners and other copying devices will pick them up. Put into an application like Photoshop, this copyright information can be read, and information about the copyright owner can be displayed. If all image editing and viewing applications supported such technology, it would be possible to prevent copying and modifying these copyrighted images.