[Slashdot-mailer] Slashdot Daily Report (11/13/2000)
David Jacoby
jacoby@ecn.purdue.edu
Mon, 13 Nov 2000 11:00:02 -0500 (EST)
Slashdot Daily Report ( http://slashdot.org/ )
News for Nerds. Stuff That Matters.
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W3 Releases Amaya 4.0
A articles article from the "never-heard-of-it?" department
sent by timothy
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/11/12/1414239
Death of Rats writes: "The World Wide Web
Consortium has just released Amaya 4.0. Its a
browser/development tool that is designed to test
the functionality of new specs in a practical
environment. Essentially, it is the client-side
counterpart to Jigsaw. The new version should be
pretty good, and there are binaries for Unix and
Win32." I've been trying Amaya once in a while for
a long time. For all the hype about Mozilla,
konqueror and many others, it's interesting that
the W3C's effort should get so little attention.
One notable feature is that it completely
integrates the page creation and page viewing
aspects, though you might not see a lot of the
Flashy features you'd like in a browser -- Amaya
is stubbornly (or appropriately) "correct" in its
adherence to W3C standards.
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"Red Planet": Stay Here
A articles article from the "would-that-be-*mike*-doonesbury?" department
sent by timothy
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/11/12/0131215
Reader and raconteur doonesbury passed on this
review of Red Planet, which he viewed in what can
only be termed a noble experiment. As a survivor
of both Mars Attacks and Battlefield Earth, I know
how deadly movie trauma can be. Thanks,
doonesbury. (Oh, and nothing below sounds like a
serious spoiler, but YMMV.)
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TrollTech Releases Embedded Qt PDA environment
A articles article from the "is-that-a-troll-in-your-pocket?" department
sent by CmdrTaco
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/11/12/159248
Justin Davies writes: "TrollTech will be making
the embedded Qt environment for PDA systems on
Monday available under a commercial and GPL
license on monday. The environment will contain an
application launcher, window manager and input
methods including a virtual keyboard. This
provides the first common Linux enironment for PDA
systems allowing an easy porting system from the
desktop to the PDA."
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Neither .Kids Nor .Porn For ICANN
A articles article from the "and-no-dot-rob-either" department
sent by timothy
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/11/12/1617249
JeffMagnus writes: "This CNET article talks about
the possibility of extending the number of
non-country-code top level domains. According to
the article of the 47 submissions for top level
domains, ICANN is only going to take 24 seriously.
Among the TLDs, ICANN doesn't like are .xxx and
.kids. The article then goes on to mention a
company named Economic Solutions which has filed
an injunction to prevent the creation of top-level
domains that resemble the Belize country code
.bz." I'm surprised by the reaction to .kids a lot
more than .xxx, both of which sound like great
ideas to me. Will this stuff come to a
Net-splitting head?
--------------------
On The CopyLeft Of DTDs
A askslashdot article from the "creating-more-free-document-types" department
sent by Cliff
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/11/02/1938249
Makila writes: "I'm working on a project to
digitize all the company marketing content,
enabling us to re-use data for paper publishing,
CD-rom, and Web publishing. The idea beyond that,
as we are distributors, is to make suppliers
contibute electronically their product
descriptions, including technical specs and
pictures, all elements that would be edited by us
afterwards." To make a long story a bit shorter,
Makila is looking for opinions on putting his
company's DTD[?] under a free license. What
pitfalls and advantages are involved in doing
this?
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Custom Handheld Atari 2600
A articles article from the "now-thats-what-I'm-talking-about" department
sent by CmdrTaco
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/11/13/017233
Krimsen sent in linkage to what has got to be the
coolest hack I've seen in months. He built a
portable atari 2600. Looks like a game boy, but it
plays the old carts, and even features the old
wood grain. Absolutely stunning. Someone's gotta
sell these things.
--------------------
The Last Multics System Decommissioned
A articles article from the "era-ending-stuff" department
sent by timothy
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/11/13/066228
Bell Would? writes: "A key feature of the brief
news item, 'The end of the Multics era,' in the
latest issue of the The Risks Digest is the 'list
of goals' Multics had fulfilled which, as the
author describes them, are as relevant today as
they were 35 years ago." Odd -- I assumed these
were all long since junked or put into museums,
since my first exposure to the name Multics was in
books which spoke mostly in the past tense. That
list of goals is one that I hope architecture
designers consult frequently.
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Chip News To Crunch On
A articles article from the "why-thank-you-mr.-moore" department
sent by timothy
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/11/13/0624204
kupolu writes: "According to this article at
Techweb, AMD announced last Friday that it is
dropping its plans for the Mustang processor in
favor of the new AMD-760 DDR-Enabled chipset. The
Mustang was going to be AMD's entry into the
server market, with it's amazing up-to 2MB L2
Cache." (Actually, from this article it's hard to
tell if even AMD knows what's going on; tweezing
apart the code names from the capabilities of
particular products to be offered is complicated.)
But on the coming-out instead of dropping-off
front, proxima writes: "This story on Yahoo
describes that Intel is releasing two new Celeron
chips on Monday. One, a 733 Mhz model, will cost
$112 per chip in bulk. A 766 Mhz model will cost
$170 per chip."
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What's the Best Cell Phone Calling Plan?
A askslashdot article from the "stuff-to-talk-about" department
sent by Cliff
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/11/11/1815250
ChazeFroy asks: "I just got a new job that
requires much travel throughout the United States,
and this company is giving me $50 per month to put
toward a cell phone bill. Although I found this
discussion helpful, it didn't talk about cell
phone calling plans. Things that are important to
me are the company offering the plan, coverage (I
will need nationwide coverage, most likely),
number of minutes per month, the possibility of
free incoming calls, and the price per month. What
do you guys have, and what are your experiences?"
--------------------
Custom Handheld Atari 2600
A articles article from the "now-that's-what-I'm-talking-about" department
sent by CmdrTaco
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/11/13/017233
Krimsen sent in linkage to what has got to be the
coolest hack I've seen in months. He built a
portable atari 2600. Looks like a game boy, but it
plays the old carts, and even features the old
wood grain. Absolutely stunning. Someone's gotta
sell these things.
--------------------
What's The Best Cell Phone Calling Plan?
A askslashdot article from the "stuff-to-talk-about" department
sent by Cliff
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/11/11/1815250
ChazeFroy asks: "I just got a new job that
requires much travel throughout the United States,
and this company is giving me $50 per month to put
toward a cell phone bill. Although I found this
discussion helpful, it didn't talk about cell
phone calling plans. Things that are important to
me are the company offering the plan, coverage (I
will need nationwide coverage, most likely),
number of minutes per month, the possibility of
free incoming calls, and the price per month. What
do you guys have, and what are your experiences?"
--------------------
Open Source Databases Revisited
A articles article from the "stuff-to-think-about" department
sent by CmdrTaco
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/11/13/1342208
pusakat writes "If you've been following
performance comparisons of the different Open
Source databases, Tim Perdue revisits PostgreSQL
v. MySQL with production data from SourceForge and
comes up with interesting results. This may be
fodder for yet another 'my database is better than
your database' exchange from both camps but the
results are interesting anyway."
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The info is Rob Malda's
The code is mine
MOTD: -----------------------------------
I am no longer associated with Purdue, except for being a former
student, former employee, and active member of the Linux Users Group.
As such, I'll either be moving this service to another server or
killing it entirely. Your input is requested as to what you'd like.
Then again, when was the last time I changed the MOTD? And when was
last time it was read?