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Slashback: Authors, Innards, Boson

Slashback brings you tonight updates and amplifications on the Treo portable drive, recent Higgs Boson findings, finding LDP documentation authors, and more. Author! Author! (Uhh ... author?) Providing a timely update to the Debian / LDP licensing snafu unmadindu writes: "The LDP requests people (even if they are not LDP authors)who are reading this message to forward it to their respective LUG mailing lists. Maybe some of the 'unreachable authors' are still in those LUG lists."

Yup. Sure looks prime to me, yessir. Cesaro writes: "BBC is reporting that the largest prime number yet found has been verified. This number is 4,053,946 digits and took them almost 2 years to find on the GIMPS distributed system. More information can be had here"

This punishment may have to be let out for certain crimes. A semi-anonymous reader wrote to point out that implications of the recent Windows virus Goner may have broader implications than were previously clear. "With word that the new 'Goner' email virus was quickly spreading across the globe, 41 U.S. states and six European countries today announced that anyone caught creating or purposefully distributing a computer virus will be prosecuted under hate crime statutes for intentionally targeting 'people of stupidity.'

The trouble with sounding too good to be true ... Greg Titus writes "As a followup to yesterday's story about the Treo MP3 player (touted as iPod competition) ... Check out the Treo web site this morning (http://www.treoplayer.com/): 'Due to issues beyond Hy-Tek Manufacturing and e.Digital Corporation's control, Hy-Tek has discontinued production of the current Treo design.'"

Getting at the guts of a Linn. thegadgetman, in a fit of "blatant bit of self-promotion" with some more information about the technology that runs the recently-featured (and incredible looking) Linn KiVOR.

"The Linn KiVOR is the first of an ever increasing number of companies adopting our XiVA software for powering the next-generation of media appliances. Built from the start to run on Linux (now running 2.4 series kernel) XiVA blends hard disk technology, advanced software design and embedded Internet technology to provide amazing features.

As well as OEMing our technology, we have our own range of hard-disk audio products - our SoundServers. The M1000 is a range that goes up to 16 outputs and 3 hard-disk, and our S1000 range includes intuitive TV interface and a range up to 3 outputs. All the current products feature professional quality audio cards from Midiman. All these feature the XiVA-Link protocol which has been adopted by many of the major Home Automation controllers (AMX, Crestron etc), and is used by our XiVA-Producer PC application for meta-data editing and MP3 transfer. We also have software for automatic generation of Pronto CCF files, and an application that turns a Visor (with IR booster) into a graphical remote control that contains a listing of all the albums on the server.

Our recently launched XiVA-Net portal is the exciting new Internet based entertainment service from Imerge! It is dedicated to delivering entertainment to the new wave of internet-connected AV products. It will enable you to find out more about the music and artists you love as well as thousands you have not yet had the chance to listen to. XiVA-Net will allow you to buy music, book concert tickets and get the latest music news and gossip from the comfort of your living room. see our web-sites (http://www.imerge.co.uk http://xiva-net.com and http://www.xiva.com) for full details"

Are there no sections? Can they not delve? Since many people have submitted this story, please note that an interesting story on the Higgs Boson, or, perhaps better said, on the lack of Higgs Boson ran in the science section, and is worth checking out.

4 of 116 comments (clear)

  1. Treo by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Let's see. A good 80% of the posters (not counting the iPod astroturfers) on that topic were unimpressed with the Treo. It has half the capacity, 1/10th the download speed, and a terrible UI.

    Is it any wonder that they discontinued it? Perhaps submitting the article to /. was their way of gauging customer response. The poor man's market research. :-)

  2. Some detective work... by corky6921 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    ...on TreoPlayer.com reveals some interesting facts:

    Check out the source code. Lovely ol' Frontpage inserted an author meta tag with the name "Jerzy Bilyk".

    Here is where it gets interesting. Run a Google search on "Jerzy Bilyk", and you come up with this page (Google cache used because the original doesn't exist anymore). It lists a "Bilyk, Jerzy" as having a supended license (among other crimes.) The police department is in Plano, IL.

    Now here's the really interesting part: a WHOIS on treoplayer.com shows a John Bastion as owning the domain. His address? Sugar Grove, IL: about 12 miles from Plano. (Mapquest proves it).

    I think, from this, we can safely declare one golden rule: if you're going to do a hoax and submit it to Slashdot, don't freakin' use Frontpage! :D

    P.S. I'm available as a consultant if anyone from Slashdot would like to hire an editor/story checker. ;)

  3. Re:No, not 'no Higgs boson' by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    New Scientist is gossipy and frequently wrong. In principle Higgs can have any mass, but for it to be useful to the SUSY (supersymmetry) theories it absolutely must be in the range about 100 - 200 GeV.

    Excluding up to 115 GeV (if you can rely on this result) does rule out many supersymmetric models. The long life of the proton (which is stable as far as we can tell) also ruled out many SUSY models. All SUSY models must have a Higgs with mass below 200 GeV, so this is the most efficient way to attack SUSY.

    If CDF does not find Higgs by the time LHC comes online, SUSY will look much more doubtful than it does now. If LHC does not find the Higgs, that will probably wrap it up for SUSY.

    (I am not for or against SUSY, I am just interested in efficiently learning about the universe we live in.)

  4. About the Hy-Tek Treo Site by timanderson · · Score: 1, Interesting

    That Treo homepage has been up for more than a year. It previously had information about the Treo and was linked to by other technology and music sites. Probably at least a month ago, the site posted the message you now see, which was no surprise because the Treo was scheduled to come out in Fall 2000. Obviously eDigital has decided to pick a different manufacturer than Hy-Tek and go ahead with the production of the Treo 10. Hy-Tek did claim to be based in Illinois on the old site and seem to be legitimate from all I've seen. Maybe they just picked a shady webmaster.