[Slashdot-mailer] Slashdot Daily Report (11/29/2000)
David Jacoby
jacoby@ecn.purdue.edu
Wed, 29 Nov 2000 11:00:03 -0500 (EST)
Slashdot Daily Report ( http://slashdot.org/ )
News for Nerds. Stuff That Matters.
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>From Rambus to DDR:Memory Explained
A articles article from the "explaining-all-the-hype" department
sent by CmdrTaco
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/11/28/1352213
rosewood sent us linkage to an article that
explains memory and more. A fairly detailed story
talking about RAM in general, as well as
explaining Rambus, DDR (including 1.5 and 2). Well
written and worth the read. And it even features
lots of diagrams (although some of the tables seem
to have been designed by someone who is color
blind, using white text on very bright
backgrounds. Why do people do that?) Anyway,
highly recommended.
--------------------
Linus Torvalds Announces Autobiography
A articles article from the "aint-you-a-bit-young-for-that?" department
sent by CmdrTaco
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/11/28/1450210
Keith Whitsitt wrote in to say that Linus
Torvalds, the creator of Linux, is writing his
autobiography. Published by HarperCollins,
co-authored by David Diamond, entitled "Just for
Fun:The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary". The
article is pretty funny, talking about how it will
reflect Torvalds "Quirky irreverent personality"
as well as how it will be about business, Linus,
and Linux. Hell I'll read it, but isn't Linus a
bit young for the autobiography? I keep pitching
my epic space opera about alien robots who infest
our planet and live off celebrities dryer lint to
various publishers, but nobody wants to publish a
book written by a leader of mexican food, and
starring a hero named Litmus VanCenturfuge and his
sidekick Pipet Jerks. I keep telling them my
parents would buy copies. I bet Linus will sell
copies to people besides his parents.
--------------------
CGI Programming with Perl
A books article from the "of-wisdom" department
sent by timothy
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/10/24/1837202
In addition to all the other books he has
insightfully reviewed, chromatic has written this
review of CGI Programming With Perl. This books
sounds like a great resource for the builder of
dynamic Web sites with a Perl background. And
isn't it nice to see a book with "an unapologetic
Unix flavor"? [TABLE NOT SHOWN]
--------------------
ReplayTV Quits Hardware Biz, Licenses Technology
A articles article from the "forced-out-by-the-tivenator" department
sent by Hemos
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/11/28/166248
crazyj writes: "According to this article,
Digital Video Recorder maker ReplayTV is calling
it quits in the hardware business. Instead, they
plan to cut staff and license their technology.
Apparently, the competition from TiVo was too
much."
--------------------
Dave Barry Takes On Sony
A articles article from the "thumbing-your-nose-at-the-big-boys" department
sent by Hemos
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/11/28/1327228
Warrior writes: "Humor columnist Dave Barry
decided to tackle Sony in an editorial about the
hype surrounding the Playstation 2. And just in
time for the holidays! Children don't need the
latest toys anyway."
--------------------
Mutant Tetrachromat Females Found
A science article from the "i-can-see-amazing-colors!" department
sent by Hemos
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/11/28/1536204
Hydrophobe writes "Red Herring reports that at
least one living human female has four-color
(tetrachromat) vision. Apparently, genetics
dictates that all such tetrachromat mutants would
be female. Compared to them, the rest of us are
partly colorblind - they would be able to see
colors beyond the standard three-axis RGB scale."
--------------------
Applix Exits Linux Desktop
A articles article from the "continued-exits" department
sent by Hemos
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/11/28/2021217
The folks at Newsforge have got a story up
regarding Applix exiting the Linux desktop market.
Applix has been making ApplixWare for the desktop
market, but has found the competition from the
free office products to be too rough -- but they
are continuing to work on the server-side
versions. I've been contacted by VistaSource, the
company that is owned by Applix, doing Applixware
- they want to make it clear that while they are
focusing on serverware, they are not doing away
with the desktop completly - but that development
will continue on both desktop and server versions.
--------------------
Applix Exits Linux Desktop UPDATED
A articles article from the "continued-exits" department
sent by Hemos
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/11/28/2021217
The folks at Newsforge have got a story up
regarding Applix exiting the Linux desktop market.
Applix has been making ApplixWare for the desktop
market, but has found the competition from the
free office products to be too rough -- but they
are continuing to work on the server-side
versions. I've been contacted by VistaSource, the
company that is owned by Applix, doing Applixware
- they want to make it clear that while they are
focusing on serverware, they are not doing away
with the desktop completly - but that development
will continue on both desktop and server versions.
--------------------
Cyberspace Wins Free Speech Ruling
A yro article from the "winning-a-battle-losing-the-war" department
sent by michael
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/11/28/1438210
Prodigal yo-yo writes "Cyberspace Communications,
Inc., and several other plaintiffs won a favorable
ruling in the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals
recently in the Cyberspace v. Engler lawsuit to
overturn an unconstitutionally broad Internet
censorship law. The 2 page ruling affirms an
injunction against enforcement of the law while
the case is tried." It is good to keep in mind
that besides Federal censorship laws, many states
have passed such laws as well.
--------------------
Remote Telemetry With Your PC?
A askslashdot article from the "can-it-be-done?" department
sent by Cliff
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/11/28/228220
hyacinthus asks: "For some projects I'm working
on, I'd like a system for acquiring data (as from
the output of an instrumentation amplifier) from a
module that would be separate from a PC, a maximum
distance of perhaps several hundred feet at most,
and the use of cable or wire is not an option. My
bandwidth requirements are very small--perhaps a
hundred 12-bit samples per second would do it. I
would like the data acquisition module to be as
small as possible. And I'd like the possibility of
acquiring data from more than one module, rather
like a multiple-channel data acquisition system."
Are there any radio-based PC products that can be
adapted to suit this sort of task? "Commercial
data acquisition products for personal computers
all tend to be rather spendy, and none that I've
seen make any provision for wireless telemetry.
I've been considering designing and building
something, probably using one of the commercial
available USB development kits (see, for example,
ActiveWire's USB board). But I'm no electrical
engineer (a few digital design classes and some
self-teaching from Horowitz and Hill, and that's
it), so I'd like to ask if there's anything out
there which does what I want."
--------------------
Slashback: Bricks, Consoles, Projects
A articles article from the "blueberry-defeats-apple-film-at-11" department
sent by timothy
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/11/28/2324227
More Lego Sculptures! More game collections going
to the highest bidder! More ... P4 benchmarks.
Updates below to recent Slashdot stories, and a
few tangents not yet here explored. Go crazy!
Ma'am, I'm afraid that Ritalin by itself won't
help in this case. Somehow this email from Lego
madman (insomniac?) Eric Harshbarger ended up in
Hemos's hands, and it's hard to resist. Here he
confirms the suspicions of a number of Slashdot
readers who looked closely at his previous efforts
featured on these pages. Well, A few weeks ago
when I announced my LEGO Mona Lisa, a few folks
from Slashdot.org noticed the lower half of a
statue ... and some guessed what my next project
announcement would be. I've now finally completed
a statue of 'San' from the Japanese Animation film
Princess Mononoke. I wrote quite a lot about this
model ... and took many, many pictures, so I hope
you enjoy browsing. I also recently finished a
much smaller model of the BSD Daemon mascot.
cheers, eric Enough already! crizh writes "Anyone
interested in another arguement about the merits
of the P4 and whether Tom Pabst is biased against
Intel/AMD might want to check out the further
update he posted on P4/MPEG4 this morning."
Further submissions in this category must be
accompanied by sizeable bribes or at least juicy
blackmail. Let's see what people think of the P4
vs. whatever Athon variety is cool in 12 months
from now and talk about it again then;) Sore
thumbs, perhaps. An unnamed correspondent points
out this enormous videogame auction, venturing as
he does so: "Seems to be as big if not bigger than
the previous one posted." I dunno about that, but
it sure is a lot of games. Is everyone dumping
their consoles to spend the proceeds on exotic
vacations, or what? fuuzy math for a new era Erik
Inge Bolsų writes "Earlier this year, slashdot had
a scoop about a 1990 and 1995 study called fuzz,
which tested the quality of UNIX utilities. In
july this year, a followup study was published, in
which they did subject a collection of common apps
on Windows NT (and 2000) to the same tests. The
results are interesting... Full paper available
here." Brother, can you spare some time? swgill
writes "After reading about Microsoft's attempt to
reach beginner programmers with free copies of
Visual C++ for schools I thought about the main
problem that was found: Visual C++ and the related
teaching material is all based on the Windows API,
and algorithms are treated as secondary as best. I
am actually in college in England doing an A-level
in Computing where I can see the effects of this
educational policy (although we use VB6 instead of
VC++6). I have decided to found the libteach
project at sourceforge. The idea is to prevent
people learning to program in school from being
forced to relearn their skills when Micro$oft
switches focus again and to also give them an idea
of programming for another type of system
(RT-Linux anyone?)." Sounds like a worthy project,
albeit for now still in the planning stages. Of
course, it's helped by the fact that there are
several Open Source OSes chock full of programming
languages out there, but not by the lack of decent
IDEs available for them. Update The latest in our
Hellmouth Revisited series is now online .
--------------------
Playstation 2 Innards, Annotated
A articles article from the "the-guts-of-the-thing" department
sent by timothy
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/11/28/2147221
Kenneth writes: "Firingsquad.com just released a
really hefty technical article explaining exactly
how the PS2 works. It goes into detail about the
number of FMAC/FDIV units each PS2 processor
contains vs. other computing platforms, and
actually delves into more than just the graphics
capabilities of the machine." The article also
addresses some of the corporate / technological
history of how that cute blue box came to be
cooler than hula-hoops.
--------------------
What Happens When 99 Percent of the Net Crashes?
A articles article from the "takes-a-licking-and-keeps-on-ticking" department
sent by CmdrTaco
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/11/29/0129248
Sara Chan writes "The Internet remains connected
on a global scale even if a randomly chosen 99% of
its connection points break down. It is, however,
in danger if its most highly connected points are
selectively knocked out. Recent computer
simulations have shown that the Internet is fairly
resilient because it is scale free. The latest
work, published in Physical Review Letters
strengthens this conclusion. Two independent
groups of researchers applied percolation theory.
Percolation theory deals with systems containing
points ("sites") and connections between them, and
it analyzes the behavior of the system when some
of the sites or connections are removed (it was
developed by geophysicists for estimating how much
oil could be extracted from reservoirs in a porous
medium). Abstracts of the papers are available
here and here."
--------------------
IBM's OSS Code Morphing Code/or OSS vs Transmeta
A articles article from the "morphing-for-fun-and-profit" department
sent by Hemos
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/11/29/0246228
jjr writes: "It seems that IBM has a Open Source
Project called Daisy that does a lot of what
transmeta does. Their code-morphing technology
supports PowerPC, x86, and S/390, as well as the
Java Virtual Machine. They Morph the [code] into
VLWI just like transmeta but they still have some
issues to work out. Other issues dealt with in the
report include self-modifying code, precise
exceptions, and aggressive reordering of memory
references in the presence of strong MP
consistency and memory mapped I/O."
--------------------
New Device Could Overcome Low Vision
A articles article from the "gibsonian-artifacts" department
sent by timothy
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/11/29/0339247
Johan Jonasson cites a story at Wired which reads
in part: "Low vision can't be corrected with
medical procedures, glasses or contact lenses. But
a new product from Microvision that uses lasers to
'paint' rows of pixels directly onto the eye is
helping people with low-vision see clearly again."
"The device, called Nomad, consists of two pieces:
a small control module worn clipped on to a belt,
and the head-worn display. The control module
receives a video signal from a computer -- a
desktop, laptop or a wearable computer -- which
processes this signal to drive a low-power laser.
The light is then scanned by a small mirror to
create images." Essentially, it's the same type of
display that many wearables come with, but with
the image enhanced to compensate for the
low-vision user's greater needs.
--------------------
Finding Educational Materials For A Linux Class?
A askslashdot article from the "teaching-the-next-batch-of-users" department
sent by Cliff
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/11/29/0729208
Doug Carter asks: "I am a senior Linux
developer/system/network guy at a rapidly growing
startup. Part of my resonsibilities is to help
educate new aspiring Linux folks and otherwise
evanglize the use of Open Source within our
company. I thought a great way to do this would be
with informal brown bag sessions, once or twice a
week. The only thing I'm missing is some generic
Linux class education material that I can talk to.
I could write it myself, but I hate reinventing
the wheel and I'm sure there are some useful
materials out there already. I've been searching
the net for weeks now and the only stuff I've
found is online tutorials (that can't be
downloaded) and Linux materials that people are
actually charging for! In the wonderful world of
open source software, where are the open source
education materials?"
--------------------
Phone Numbers Instead of URLs?
A articles article from the "what-a-stupid-idea" department
sent by CmdrTaco
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/11/29/1411242
December writes "This story says Australian
company Nascomms claims to be the first in the
world to go online with numeric addressing
[CT:TCP/IP uses numbers too, just not ones with
area code ;)], in which telephone numbers are used
in replace of the ubiquitous dot-com address.
Interesting idea, but in the business case, I
could much more easily guess www.toyota.com then
figuring out their phone number."
--------------------
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?