Slashback: Membership, Quarkiness, Audioggogy

Slashback this fine tax-day evening (you did remember, right?) brings you updates on Gentoo Linux, Mike Myer's brush with the Humor Police, Microsoft's spin on the waning Hailstorm, and more. Read on for the details.

A tornado's worth of spin control. telstar writes "The Code Report is reporting that last week's story from the New York Times concerning the death of Hailstorm was not entirely accurate. A Microsoft spokesperson has stated that Microsoft is shifting from a model in which MSN was the sole operator to a model where the operation of these services is available to multiple operators."

Onan Meets Midas. daoine writes: "Reversing the outcome of an earlier argument, boston.com is reporting that MGM and New Line Cinema have reached an agreement that permits New Line to continue with the Goldmember name. It also stipulates that further satirical names must be approved by MGM."

Does dishes, saves gas, freshens your breath, cleans your pets ... Apparently, Gentoo Linux is contagious. JigSaw writes: "OSNews features an interesting review of Gentoo Linux 1.0 and they call it 'the fastest loading, fastest-operating Linux distribution to date.' Gentoo may be the fastest Linux for a workstation today, but according to the review, it still has some problems, most notably, annoying bugs. However, it still manages to score a glowing 8.2 out of 10 overall."

Reader sckevyn also points to the Gentoo PowerPC page for those equipped different.

First steps always seem small. camusflage writes "Yahoo has a story from ZDNet about TheKompany's recent release of tkcPlayer for the Zaurus, which is being billed as the first portable Ogg Vorbis player. A player for a format not many people are using on a platform even fewer people are using. Admirable, but not likely to be a commercial success."

Honey, your quark is showing. ngrier writes "As a quick follow-up to the story posted here a few days ago regarding the potential quark star, the NASA APOD today is a picture of the aforementioned star."

Comments

.NET

[Supa Mentat]

When I first read about .NET and MS's philosophy with it (i.e. what hailstorm was supposed to be and what it's acceptance would accomplish) it terrified me. Now hailstorm is dead as we knew it and the threat it posed is (seemingly) gone. My question is: now that Hailstorm is not a factor, are there still any risks for the internet and software communities(both open and closed) assossiated with taking up the .NET framework (barring the fact that it _is_ MS we're talking about here, obviously they've screwed people before)? I think that the idea behind the framework of .NET and what it's effects on the way things are coded (from a purely programming point of view) could be very interesting and improve software; I am also very suspiscious of any big "ideas" coming out of MS. Any thoughts?

Portable(ish) flac

[srichman]

...which is being billed as the first portable Ogg Vorbis player.

Yeah, but these guys had flac support two months ago.

Re:Errr, what happened to the law?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wouldn't the same logic be applied as it was for this guy, or is there a variable I'm not considering?

Yes, two:

• Expense of lawsuit.
• Inter-corporate relations.

The suit had no real merit in law but it would have cost New Line money both for the lawyers and for the delay in release of the movie. The latter was probably the larger incentive for MGM to file suit and for New Line to give in. As reading articles on Slashdot for the past few years can teach you, lawsuits (from patent, copyright, et al) are a powerful weapon regardless of their merit. Also, entertainment corporations generally like to maintain some semblance of good relations with each other in case of future collaboration.

Re:Gentooizing Debian?

[Anonymous Coward]

I too installed Gentoo as of a week ago. I think it's pretty good but it could use a more automated installation option. The "by hand" way is cool once ... but I definately wouldn't look forward to installing it on several machines.

Personally I can't say I noticed any speed improvements over my Debian 2.2r5/3.0 unstable system. And yes I compiled everything including the bootstrap and yes I optimized it for my CPU. I like the "emerge" system. It seems to be more advanced than apt-get. That's just my opinion though.

As the last guy pointed out, the packages are very up to date. Whether or not that is important is a matter of opinion.

Over all I think it is a good distro that does NOT fall into the "Yet another borring distribution" category. My only gripe is that it protects "su" by default and I can't figure out how to allow my "normal" user account to su over to root. :) So I have to ALT+F2 to another terminal to logon as root which I find quite annoying.

Interstellar ping

[Lupus Rufus]

This supposed quark star is 450 light years away, and ultracompact, which according to NASA's site would allow light to orbit. So here's an idea: Concoct a message for future human societies (probably not too different from the messages now designed for extraterrestrial civilizations), and send it in a wad towards RX J185635-375, so that it might get there, orbit a few times, then come shooting back to earth 900 years from now to be picked up by whatever remnants of our civilization are still around.

Of course, the chances of this working are a million to one, and the arrival date might be off by a few hundred years, but if it did work I think it would be an great archeological find for the 4th millenium or so.

btw, anyone else read Interstellar Pig back in the day? William Sleator is a GOD.

New Hailstorm nothing but damage control.

[Alsee]

Another case of over eager media looking to see the worst in tech companies. Or maybe just the worst in Microsoft.

Nope, Hailstorm is dead dead dead. A key feature of Hailstorm was that Microsoft wants to be the "gatekeeper" of the internet. In order collect a toll requires a monopoly. People are NOT going to pay at a toll booth when there's a free street to the same place.

The "new and improved" version of hailstorm is nothing but a glorified version of a standard username/password database. I doubt many companies are going to buy the software, and even if they do the proffits of selling the software are nothing compared to OWNING the identity of everyone on the net and selling the service.

The "new and improved" hailstorm is a desperate attempt to keep a colossal failure from sinking .NET with it. Hailstorm was .NET's flag-ship product. Saying "Hailstorm is alive and well" is nothing but a damage control spin.

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My delusion that lawyers are rational human beings

[Alsee]

MGM was negotiating to place an ad for the upcoming Bond adventure "Die Another Day" before the "Austin Powers" film

That really sums up the value of MGM's case against Goldmember. If they genuinely felt that the name tarnished their James Bond property then why the hell would they want to use it to advertize a Bond film?!

It also stipulates that further satirical names must be approved by MGM.

Ok, maybe I'm having delusions that lawyers are actually rational human beings, but you *could* read that to mean MGM realized it was a frivolous lawsuit and to avoid a countersuit they stipulated they would approve any and all satirical names in the future. :)

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