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.

Comments

I'm not Stupid

[darrad]

"I am not a victim of a hate crime because I am not stupid," said Smith. "I got an email with an attachment from my buddy in Phoenix, so naturally, I opened it. What's so stupid about that?"

What, Smith was asked, did the email say?

"It said, 'I_love_you.' Why?"

In the words of the great Homer Simpson....Doh!

This is the most informative and acurate article I have seen posted in a very long time. Too bad people think it's a joke.....

the LDP has AUTHORS??!?!!!

[swordgeek]

I thought that most of the articles came from random word generators. They certainly read like it.

Now before some moderator with an itchy finger mods me down as flamebait, I want to explain my (only somewhat) facetious comment there.

(WARNING: The following has little to do with tonight's slashback, and is mostly a rant)

Three years ago or so, the LDP looked to be the ultimate collaborative project to complement the coming victory of open source software.

Unfortunately, something got lost along the way. There are "current" documents in the LDP that haven't been looked at since 1998. The articles are taken as submitted, and not even proofread for accuracy, let alone timliness, relevance, grammar, or spelling.

Furthermore, when I last offered to help, I got ignored. While I don't consider myself knowledgeable enough to write HOWTOs or the like, I would have been quite happy to do those annoying jobs--proofreading, editing, and the like. The responses I got were: "," "Thanks but no thanks--we don't need editors" and, "Editing would introduce technical errors."

Maybe things have changed recently, but for quite a few years the LDP was one of the biggest hinderances to Linux getting better accepted.

Now as far as the licensing issue goes, who CARES??? All of these stupid little fights over which license is better, how we can avoid infringing that license, etc. etc., are pointless and damaging. If someone infringes license "x", then it's up to the owner/creator of the license to prosecute. If there's no desire to prosecute and/or if there's no clearly no deliberate abuse, then there is no need to make any issue of this at all. The LDP authors don't need to be bothered. Period.