Slashback: Grammy, Sirius, Levies

Slashback this evening with another round of clarifications and additional links regarding recent Slashdot stories. Steve Job's Grammy acceptance speech, details on the proposed higher levy on CD-Rs in Canada, more on the claimed clash between satellite radio and 802.11 devices, and more.

After the bowling ball, the mouse. jonny writes: "Most people here know the story of the Mac and the growth of the GUI. Most of you probably don't know the whole story though, namely you probably don't know the story of the mouse, important as it is... Interesting too."

Additional reading material for the math-inclined. Bruce Schneier dropped a note with some good reading material for anyone interested in the recent Slashdot posts on factoring and SNMP. "I've written essays on the Bernstein factoring paper and SNMP SNMP vulnerability."

Americans shouldn't be too smug about this stuff. An Anonymous Coward writes, in response to the proposed increase in levies on various recordable media in Canada: "An excellent FAQ including information on how manufacturers, importers, and consumers can avoid the levies on CDRs and CDRWs"

It's not all sweetness and light. Lord Omlette writes: "Ok, I know ya'll ran the story on Apple winning a grammy. But! The acceptance speech got cut for time reasons & stuff, so Dr. Dobb's Journal put a transcript of the speech online for posterity & stuff. I didn't see it in the previous Slashdot story or the Apple press release, so I thought you might be interested."

Uncle, uncle, make him give me his toy! Sabalon writes "NetStumbler is running an article about Intersil and Motorola's response to Sirius and XM's appeal to the FCC to restrict the 2.4Ghz band. Intersil points out some interesting points, such as why the frequencies directly surrounding those that Sirius uses is not an issue, and Motorola believes the source of the interference is not 2.4Ghz, but probably engine and ignition noise."

How to save some very expensive seconds. In case a 23-second kernel compile is too long to bear, perhaps you just need to upgrade a bit. An Anonymous Coward writes: "Linux Weekly News reports that a kernel was compiled in 7.5 seconds on a Power4 with 6 GB of RAM."

Finally, it has come to this. Another reader points out: "Be, Inc., the company that developed and marketed the loved Be operating system, has announced sale of the be.com domain.

This would be a great time for someone to sweep it up. ;) *cough*OpenBeOS*cough*"

Comments

Re:"Only a stupid country could do this" (CD-R Tax

[tb3]

Of course, Carroll has read the FAQ, and hasn't the slight clue what he's talking about. You can import recordable media for your own use, and you won't get charged the levy because you are the importer and you are not reselling the media. Only sale of blank media by the importer or manufacturer triggers the levy.

Also, the levy on MP3 players can be bypassed by including some music on the device. Therefore, it is not 'blank' media. Apple already includes a ton of tunes on machines shipped with iTunes, so this wouldn't be too hard.

Maybe the iPod ships with sample tunes already. Are there any iPod owners out there who can comment?

NOT 6 GB RAM

[TJamieson]

Headline quotes the PPC as 6 GB RAM - here's directly lifted:
hardware: 32 way logical partition, 1.1GHz POWER4, 60G RAM

Who's Steve Job?

[jbayes]

I know about Steve Jobs' acceptance speech, but I didn't know that Steve Job won too.