[Slashdot-mailer] Slashdot Daily Report (11/26/2000)
David Jacoby
jacoby@ecn.purdue.edu
Sun, 26 Nov 2000 11:00:02 -0500 (EST)
Slashdot Daily Report ( http://slashdot.org/ )
News for Nerds. Stuff That Matters.
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3DFX Not Quitting Video Card Business
A articles article from the "i'm-not-dead-yet" department
sent by Hemos
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/11/25/1444222
CitizenC writes "According to this GameCenter.Com
story, at the Comdex trade show in Las Vegas on
Wednesday, Wolford told Gamecenter that the
Voodoo5 6000 has not been cancelled, that 3dfx
will not start selling current chipset technology
to third parties such as Creative Labs and ELSA,
that Voodoo products, including current graphics
and TV cards, will continue to be manufactured,
and that the company isn't going belly-up any time
soon."
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Linux Sin Demo
A articles article from the "qui-tollis-peccata-mundi" department
sent by michael
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/11/25/1510228
Jacek Fedorynski writes: "A playable demo of Sin,
the first person shooter originally by Ritual, has
been released by Hyperion Entertainment. It weighs
about 40 MB." It looks good. I haven't gotten the
mouse working yet, but I've only been futzing with
it for a few minutes, so it's probably just me.
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Tracking The Status Of Popular Websites?
A askslashdot article from the "is-it-up-or-down" department
sent by Cliff
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/11/24/2247251
An Unnamed Correspondent asks: "I am one of those
that decided, a long time ago, to use a @yahoo.com
free mail account as a permanent address, since I
move from one ISP to another all the time. Last
week, I was having huge problems with my free
account, the SMTP servers for Yahoo! were down. I
didn't know if this was a problem local to me or
if it was Yahoo!'s fault. I sent them an e-mail
asking about this, but I received no reply. I have
been browsing all of Yahoo! to see if they have
some kind of net status, to no avail. The other
day CNN.com was not working for me. Maybe it was
overloaded because of the elections, but I didn't
know, and I couldn't find out. Is there some kind
of Web page giving news about the status of the
more popular Web services?" An interesting idea
... would something like this be possible to pull
off in an effective way (and what would one do if
the monitoring service itself is unavailable?)
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Geomagnetic Storm To Begin Tonight
A articles article from the "cuddle-up-and-watch-the-storm" department
sent by timothy
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/11/25/1755208
Kiel Oleson writes: "According to the Kansas City
Star and the Space Environment Center, there is an
80% chance that a series of five geomagnetic
storms will disrupt communications and power
systems. These storms will hit the earth beginning
at 5 PM CST today and ending at 5 PM CST tommorow.
There is a 40% chance of there being severe or
major disruptions in satellite orbits, electrical
grids, and radio. The good side? Some of us may be
able to see the Aurora! Get those UPS's charged!"
Everyone's cell phone working OK?
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Interview with Larry Wall
A articles article from the "words-from-the-master" department
sent by michael
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/11/25/1315231
Alfred Bacon writes "There will be an interview
with Larry Wall on The Paula Gordon Show available
on Saturday at 3:00 pm EST. It is an hour long in
RealAudo format broken up into 10 minute segments.
Mr. Wall will be discussing Perl, Free Software
and the Open Source movement. It should be worth
listening to."
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HP To Pay German Antipiracy Fee For CD Burners
A articles article from the "what-about-for-xerography?" department
sent by timothy
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/11/25/1855205
RiotXIX writes points to this USA Today story
which reads in part: "Hewlett-Packard has become
the first company to be snagged by a German law
requiring firms to pay fees for making CD burners
that are being used to illegally lift the latest
hits off the World Wide Web. The case sets the
stage for other European countries to possibly
adopt similar rules to stem an epidemic that cost
the music industry an estimated $5 billion last
year." He adds, "DeCSS was attacked partly because
the courts felt the creation of LiViD was not it's
primary intention. Is this therefore insinuating
that computer CD-writers were initially created to
ruin the music industry?"
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Cornell Nanohelicopters Achieve 8rps
A articles article from the "soon-we'll-use-them-to-beat-eggs" department
sent by timothy
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/11/25/2232202
Logic Bomb points to "[a] New York Times article
[free reg req] detailing this rather incredible
bit of technological progress. From the article:
'This is the first true nano machine,' said Dr.
Carlo D. Montemagno, professor of biological
engineering at Cornell and senior author of the
Science paper.' Nuff said." Well, perhaps not --
surely it's not the first tiny mechanical device.
Stuff That Matters links to this brief ZDNet
coverage of the same thing, a bit more breathless.
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Pentium 4 Re-evaluated, Again (Again)
A articles article from the "just-like-altivec-wins-benchmarks" department
sent by timothy
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/11/26/0426229
An unnamed correspondent writes: "It looks like
Tom's Hardware Guide has been busy with the P4.
This time a re-compiled version of the MPEG
encoder (the same one they benchmarked with in the
last article) shows the P4 doing really well. Also
interesting is the performance boost that even the
PIII and Athlon procs get from the Intel compiler.
Take a look at the article here." Seems that as
usual, benchmarks are what you make of them. The
P4 apparently can perform much better than initial
tests have shown. Tom Pabst makes some good (if
fawning) points about the complexity and fairness
of benchmarking in general, too.
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Nvidia's NV20
A articles article from the "meaningless-statistics" department
sent by michael
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/11/26/131259
Bilz writes "ZD Net UK has posted an article on
Nvidia's upcoming NV20 video chip. According to
them, they state that during complex 3D scenes the
card performs up to 7 times faster than a GeForce
2 Ultra."
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What's The Best Way To Retain Trained Employees?
A askslashdot article from the "keeping-the-good-ones" department
sent by Cliff
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/11/25/0325237
Johnny Mnemonic asks: "I work for a small company
that is considering spending a large chunk of
resources on developing/training the team. This
training will have the side effect of making us
worth two to three times as much as we are paid
now--and the honchos are afraid, reasonably, that
after they spend the money on dev we will all jump
ship. The fact that if we don't receive this
training our company will be dead in two years
escapes their notice. What do other places do to
retain their help after a development/training
cycle? Do they require the employees to learn it
on their own hook, pay for it and then have the
employees sign contracts for a period of time, or
bite the bullet and pay for the training and
either sweeten the share or expect some loss?"
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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?