Contents

1. Boiling Down Books, Algorithmically
2. First Commodore 64 LAN Party
3. Best DNS Naming Scheme For Small/Medium Businesses?
4. LegalTorrents Offers CC Works Via BitTorrent
5. Keeping an Eye Out When Sites Go Down
6. 550 Metric Tons of Uranium Removed From Iraq
7. Congress Tries To Strip Power From Anti-Wiretap Judge
8. The Internationalization of Malware
9. Scaling Large Projects With Erlang
10. US Justice Dept. Sued For Cellular Tracking Information
11. Bletchley Park Faces Financial Rescue
12. AVG Backs Down From Flooding the Internet
13. Your Computer As Your Singing Coach
14. New Pictures of White Knight Two and SpaceshipTwo
15. KDE 4.1 Beta 2 – Two Steps Forward, One Step Back?
16. Digitizing Old Magazines?
17. Finding Fault With Google’s Privacy Policy
18. In Japan, a 900 Gigabyte Upload Cap, Downloads Uncapped

I’ll believe it when I see it - by clarkkent09 (Score: 4, Insightful) Thread
I am skeptical that analyzing the content of the books can lead to good recommendations, let alone “infallible”. Two books can be very similar in subject matter and writing style and yet one can be great and the other one awful. The difference is just too subtle for an algorithm to figure out, though I hope I am wrong and it turns out that it works, it would be very useful. Same applies to movies and music as well. I always found “Customers who purchased this book also purchased…” section on amazon to be more valuable than my personalized recommendations

If you already read, you don’t need this… - by thereofone (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

…and if you do not read, you won’t want this.

Newspeak - by RDW (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

I love how the prototype version in the link gives a 98% match between George Orwell’s ‘1984’ and the text of the USA Patriot Act!

Re:Newspeak - by log1385 (Score: 4, Informative) Thread
From the FAQ:  
“Does 1984 really match the U.S. Patriot Act?  
No, that is an easter-egg. A bit of a joke on our part.”

Re:Newspeak - by drinkypoo (Score: 4, Funny) Thread
They’re still working out that last 2% margin of error.

Alternative to Vista? - by stevedmc (Score: 5, Funny) Thread
Vista must be pretty bad if people are switching to C64.

Wish I Would Have Been There - by fyrie (Score: 4, Interesting) Thread

I have one of those rrnet ethernet devices for the C64. They are great fun. I tried to make a post to a phpBB and it took me about 40 minutes to navigate to the thread I wanted to post in, then it crashed. O sweet glory.

btw, http://www.c64web.com/ is hosted on a c64.

So… - by Xest (Score: 4, Funny) Thread

Is that site painfully slow because it’s been Slashdotted or because it’s running on a C64 ;) ?

More importantly, what happens when a C64 gets Slashdotted, does it start chewing up tapes or melt or anything?

Re:Wish I Would Have Been There - by mnemocynic (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

And after posting that on /., there is now one less functioning c64 in the world.

Re:Yes but - by amccaf1 (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

Oh, hush. I’m sure it’s just an homage to Amok Time: 
http://img384.imageshack.us/my.php?image=16845670dh4.png

Moons of Saturn - by carou (Score: 2) Thread

I don’t run the policy at work, but all my home computers recently I’ve named after moons of Saturn (which would scale up to a network of 60).

My PowerMac G5? The biggest case I’ve ever owned - that was called Titan. (Incidentally, my iPod which connects to it is called Huygens.)

When I get the new iMac? Black on one side, white on the other - that will be Iapetus.

My first Intel-based Mac was a laptop which I called Pandora, mostly because I suspected that the thing inside would turn out to be evil.

can’t stand themes - by v1 (Score: 3, Insightful) Thread

We used to use theme-based naming schemes

oh god please no.

Our machines were named based on themes, and that’s the WORST idea on the planet. If you are going to give things names, things that need to be immediately recognized for what they are. If you have too many to give them logical names, then name them as radically different as possible so you can tell them apart in a heartbeat. The whole point of naming them is to avoid confusion, or we’d just number them wouldn’t we?

Name them Orange, Peanut, Chrysler, Diamond, and Dolphin. Pick names that are not easily confused. Stay away from names that identify people or places, to avoid other communications issues. “Tom has that” should not leave you wondering if Tom is a server you don’t usually work with, or is someone named Tom. Same for “Where’s that database? Detroit?”

I have to deal with one group of servers that are all named by Star Trek (TNG) ship names. And at another location they are all weather phenomena. BAD IDEA. I don’t deal with the trek machines much and they just can’t understand why I can’t remember the difference between Enterprise and Intrepid. Sure if you deal with them daily you’ll get the hang of it, but picking similar names is a nightmare for anyone unfamiliar with the system. If we only had one space ship for a server I could associate that uniqueness with its purpose. But no, I’m thinking “OK the firewall runs on the spaceship… oh ya that’s right we have SEVEN of those… was it DS9 because it’s a station? Maybe Defiant because it’s defying the hackers? OK where’d that list go?”

NO THEMES

And if you’re tempted to use a different theme for each location, just DON’T. What’s more important to you, being able to tell what a machine does, or knowing where it’s at? If you do theme by location, all you’re going to clarify is where it’s at.

Theme based schemes do scale beyond 60 hosts… - by bartjan (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

Where I currently work, we manage 550+ AIX (and a few Linux) systems. I’m told there are also about 800 or so Windows images. They all have theme based names. Most AIX systems do have biological names, but a few are named after lakes and chemical elements. Windows I’m told uses car names.

Similar servers do get related names. For example, all chemical elements are Siebel systems, Oracle runs on snakes and TSM on nuts (main site) and monkeys (the backup site). IMHO, this works well, as it makes it easier to remember what server(s) demand your attention, and harder to confuse systems with too similar looking names.

Cheeses - by grizdog (Score: 3, Funny) Thread

The University of Wisconsin CS Dept. used cheeses. Never seemed to have a problem with running out, although they named two machines kraft-slices and velveeta, and the lawyers moved in and made them change.

Incidentally, included among the cheeses were puff, whiz, and head (the latter is also a popular Wisconsin food product, so it’s all good).

Pubs - by ngunton (Score: 3, Insightful) Thread

When I was at the University of Edinburgh back in the 1980’s, I seem to remember the CS workstations being named after pubs in the city. That worked since there are so many pubs in Edinburgh - practically one on every street corner. It worked pretty well because the names were distinctive and recognizable, and it was at least a little humorous. I think it’s better to use a set names that people already recognize, since the brain is really good at recognition. Abstract names are not so great, since they require conscious effort to memorize.

Bad name - by Eudial (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

The name of the tracker indirectly spreads the notion that other torrents are inherently less legal. It’s a content distribution platform. Much like with firearms, it’s the people that use it that commit or don’t commit crimes. Not the tools they use.

Other trackers are full of CC and open source contents as well. Just do a search for gentoo, ubuntu, slackware or some such on the pirate bay and you’ll see what I mean.

Re:Bad name - by McGiraf (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

“The name of the tracker indirectly spreads the notion that other torrents are inherently less legal”

What about the name of the piratebay? does name of the piratebay indirectly spreads the notion that other torrents are inherently less piraty?

So wait… - by Darkness404 (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
So wait, you donate money to the bands but LegalTorrents takes money off of there for what? Yes, servers are expensive and hosting isn’t free, but really, it isn’t your bandwidth, or anything. It is like saying you have to pay $15 to host your files on TPB. Just another reason to support the artist by going to the artist’s website and donating or buying CDs/going to concerts. Seriously, LegalTorrents makes money off of what? Making a logo?

Re:So wait… - by rm999 (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

If we REFUSE to give any money to the people who put effort into publicizing artists, music might as well as be dead. I don’t buy the record studio’s argument that we need them, but in their absence the grassroots movement needs some funding.

If you are too cheap to tack 15% on top of your donation, just go to the artist’s page and donate directly.

Re:So wait… - by MightyYar (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

15% isn’t all that outrageous when you consider that the credit card and banking fees are included in that total. They are providing a value-added convenience… you don’t have to track down the artist’s site, the artist doesn’t have to contract with a payment service, etc.

Plus, since it isn’t mandatory, I’d say this is a perfect example of the free market at work. Unlike, say, the record company system where the only way to compensate the artists is through their record company. May the best distribution model win! If people don’t like this, it will go away :)

Slashdot uncertainty principle - by CrazyJim1 (Score: 5, Funny) Thread
We’re not sure if the sites are already dead, or if the observers changed the outcome.

The twitter factor - by ximenes (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

Twitter’s infrastructure is notoriously poorly thought out, and I sort of doubt they employed any systems administrators (or service engineers, or operations engineers, or whatever) up until recently.

I think the barrier to entry from an engineering standpoint has been lowered such that you can more easily make a site that appears to be pretty decent and attracts an audience. What is often missing is the behind-the-scenes work which ensures that the service is:

- Deployed properly, with testing and staging environments that actually mirror production. 
- Fault-tolerant at every practical level. This gets expensive, so you see datacenter failures take down large swaths of sites who don’t have multiple locations. 
- Constantly monitored, including performance metrics, to find issues quickly or ever before they happen.

This is the kind of work that always seems to take a back seat to development due to resource constraints, but it really needs to occur in tandem with the development process.

If you don’t design a site from the ground up to be redundant and highly performing, its pretty difficult to flip a switch and make it that way later. Which is basically what Twitter has found out. Whether or not this mentality is taking over the Interworld is another story though.

Re:The twitter factor - by jnovek (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

“If you don’t design a site from the ground up to be redundant and highly performing, its pretty difficult to flip a switch and make it that way later. Which is basically what Twitter has found out.”

And really, that’s OK.

Sites like Twitter are popping up precisely because the bar is very low to get your idea out on the ‘net and compete. Sure, the cost in dollars and person hours is much higher to refactor for stability later, but would Twitter have even come into existence if that was a requirement from the start? Would its founders have considered it a worthwhile risk?

Jason

Re:no… - by Nick Fel (Score: 5, Funny) Thread
I’ve seen Google down. Not completely unreachable, but not working. It was terrifying.

Re:Short version… - by arth1 (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

I think monopolization plays a role too. 
Back when people jumped between Altavista, Hotbot, Jeeves and other engines, one of them going down wasn’t so bad — you just used another, and a day later, you wouldn’t even remember that one of them had been down. But these days, everyone and his dog uses Google, and if Google goes down, people won’t know what to do. Similar for other sites and hubs — they’ve become too big, and users have become too reliant on them.

So even if uptime has increased, the impact of downtime has become larger, in part due to the larger reliance on single systems.

The Iraqi nuclear program in the 1980s. - by Animats (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

Yes, Iraq did have a nuclear program, back in the 1970s and 1980s. It didn’t go well. They couldn’t get any of the separation processes to work. A mid-level physicist in the program defected to the US and wrote a book about it, which gives a view of the strange world of working for Saddam Hussein. If he was annoyed at a manager, he sent them to a torture camp to be tortured for a while, then put them back to work. If they did well, he gave them one of his ex-mistresses.

Iraq tried to build calutrons, which do isotope separation in one or two steps but can process only tiny amounts of material. So it’s necessary to build a large number of them to enrich enough uranium for a weapon. The US built some sizable calutron plants during WWII, but they were too slow to be useful when fed with natural uranium. They were used as a final upgrade step for uranium partially enriched in the gaseous diffusion plants. None of the other nuclear powers ever bothered much with calutrons, except little research-sized units. Iraq never actually built enough calutron capacity to accomplish much.

Iraq’s yellowcake (uranium oxide, unenriched) is left over from that era. Extraction of yellowcake from raw ore is an ordinary chemical process, usually performed somewhere near the mine. It’s the first and easiest step of the process, and that’s as far as Iraq got.

What the FUCK! - by DragonTHC (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

so now we’re led to believe that CANADA is pursuing nuclear weapons?

They just purchased 550 Metric tonnes of yellowcake uranium from a supposed Terrorist state and we’re just letting them do it?

Canada is a ticking bomb here people!

We need to attack Ontario now!

Why isn’t bush willing to protect us from these terrorists?

RTFA - by TheLink (Score: 5, Informative) Thread
RTFA: “Israeli warplanes bombed a reactor project at the site in 1981. Later, U.N. inspectors documented and safeguarded the yellowcake, which had been stored in aging drums and containers since before the 1991 Gulf War. There was no evidence of any yellowcake dating from after 1991, the official said.” 
 
But I guess many stupid/ignorant people will read the headlines and “understand” it the same way you did. 
 
No wonder Bush got re-elected.

It’s about time… - by stebalo (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

It is gratifying to hear we’ve disassembled the last remnants of Iraq’s non-existent WMD program.

Re:It’s about time… - by brunes69 (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

Its easier to make WMD out of oil (napalm) than it is to make them out of yellowcake.

This stuff was most certainly never going to be used in any kinds of weapons program. Iraw never had the facilities to process this stuff at the levels required, and even if they did it would probably be cheaper and easier to just buy black market soviet stuff en masse.

Lets be clear on content - by freedom_india (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

Lee Iacocca in his autobiography stated that people are more interested in reading headlines rather than content or Opinion. 
Before any of you slashdotters start venting foam from your mouths, let us be clear on content: 
1. The Congress is NOT trying to strip THIS judge from power to do anything. 
2. The Congress/Senate votes on July 8th to provide immunity to Telecoms who allegedly violated law. 
3. If such immunity is provided, then, and only then will this judge lose his power to apply the law to Telecoms on spying. 
If the vote stalls, (any senator can bring in a “Hold”) the judge can proceed on existing laws and there is absolutely NOTHING the Congress or president can do to stop him, short of impeaching him (which will invite the wrath of even Scalia and probably result in arrest of President). 
The title is wrong, misleading and similar to what FOX news or Karl Rove would have done. 
Shame on you s’dotters, i thought you were more intelligent and accurate than FOX News.

Re:People wonder why I don’t vote… - by dreamchaser (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

How is Bush different than Saddam?

He doesn’t feed people feet first into plastic shredders. He doesn’t use chemical weapons against citizens of his country. He doesn’t have women raped and children tortured in front of their parents. He’s going to be out of office via the normal process come next January.

There is a much longer list. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not a fan at all. I think he’s made numerous blunders and our country is weaker for it. Rampant spending, ill advised military operations that are governed by the State Department more than the Pentagon (if you’re going to fight a war, fight it to win). That list goes on and on as well, but to compare him to Saddam is disingenuous at best.

Re:People wonder why I don’t vote… - by copponex (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

Instead, he authorizes war and they’re blown up, crushed, finished off by treatable diseases, or flee their homes to live in squalor in refugee camps. He only presided the capture of 80,000 suspected terrorists, and only 150 have officially died in custody.

The same members of his current administration authorized the sale of those weapons knowing full well what they’d be used for.

The lawyer (John Yoo) in charge of formally defining torture said that crushing a child’s testicles or raping an infant shouldn’t be illegal when trying to extract information from terrorists. They haven’t, to public knowledge, done that yet, but they think they should be able to.

Hopefully he won’t start a war with Iran before he’s finally removed from power, whether directly or through our client state, Israel.

No. Our government supported Saddam Hussein, with money and weapons, during the worst of his atrocities when his father was vice president. The same group of people oversaw the war in the gulf, and returned for round three to complete the destruction of Iraqi society in order to establish control over the resources of that area.

When virtually the same administration supports a tyrant and then accuses him of being a tyrant as an excuse to decimate an entire country, there’s no reason not to make the comparison. Were it not for American support of Saddam in the 80s, the Shah from 1953 to 1979, and our continuing support of Saudi Arabia, there may have been freedom in the middle east long ago.

Saddam simply did our dirty work for us, namely, suppressing the Shia minority and keeping Iran in check and Saudi Arabia less worried about an uprising in their own state. Now we’re employing the same tactics in Baghdad for the surge, where one hundred thousand mercenaries, including Sunnis no longer allied with al Qaeda, have been given free reign to “establish order.”

Republicans and Democrats… - by Anonymous Coward (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

Republicans and Democrats have done more to strip America of her civil liberties than terrorists ever could.

He is the government - by debrain (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

It is misleading to say that he ruled against the government. He represents a branch of the government, an independent judiciary, and he made a decision contrary to that of other branches of government. He has lived up to his role (nigh duty) and provided the checks and balances that keep the government as a whole in check.

Different cultures indeed - by 4D6963 (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

What is considered malware in the US may be commonly accepted in China or Japan […] These anti-cheating rootkits would hook into the kernel space in a very invasive way, and have the behavioral characteristics of malware such as hooking into the keyboard driver

Indeed. And if you look back in history, you will find documented examples in medieval Japan of samurais making alliances with kernel-space rootkit developers to repel Mongol invasions. But it actually goes back to the roots of Zen Buddhism which de-emphasized the attachment to privacy and instead favoured experimental realisation, including with various sorts of early meditation-space thought-loggers.

I’m sure it’s true within countries, too - by grizdog (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

While most people probably don’t consider them malware, a lot of people find internet ads intrusive and obnoxious and we install popup blockers to get away from some of them. But the advertisers wouldn’t pay for them if someone wasn’t reading them and clicking on them.

More to the point, there is a huge difference in what people care about regarding their computers. Many of my friends think I “put up” with a lot because I use Linux and install things relatively methodically, always keeping control of my system. I think they “put up” with a lot, because they have no idea what is running on their computers and what the machines might be doing with their information.

It concerns me that the anti-privacy people have time on their side, because after a few more years, they will just point out how so many people haven’t been enjoying much privacy anyway, so what’s the big deal?

Up front, or covert? - by petes_PoV (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
The main differentiator between an invasive monitor and malware is whether the author (or organisation employing it) uses it covertly, or if they make the user aware of what will happen.

If a piece of software makes it clear, before you purchase it, that it will install monitoring software on your machine and/or it would phone home then that’s one thing. You have the option of not buying it.

If this situation only becomes apparent after the package has been installed, then (IMHO) that’s not an acceptance practice.

Considered to be invasive…bla bla bla - by sakdoctor (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

Or is it lack of awareness. Add south Korea to that list because is currently seems acceptable to have about 10 useless browser bars attempting to take over and uninstall the competitors bar in internet explorer.

Awareness didn’t come overnight in North American or European either.

Re:Define it - by Bieeanda (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread
Are Bad Things intentional effects, or can they include weird, destructive side effects as well?

I installed NCSoft’s ‘Exteel’, a localized version of a Korean game, complete with the Game Guard nanny app that’s nigh-ubiquitous when it comes to Korean games. While it probably wasn’t intentional, Game Guard did disable the interface for my uninterruptible power supply when it ran, and wouldn’t allow the service to reactivate until after it shut itself down.

“Cloud computing” is an Xmas artifact - by Animats (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

The enthusiasm for “cloud computing” may evaporate when Xmas rolls around.

I went to a talk at Stanford by the architect of Amazon’s web services. It came out in questioning that the real motivation between Amazon’s low-priced web services is that their load in the Xmas shopping season is about 4x the load for the rest of the year. Their infrastructure is sized for the November-December peak, so for ten months of the year they have vast excess capacity. That’s why Amazon’s web services are so cheap.

Don’t expect good response time during the shopping season. Although this Xmas might be OK, due to the recession.

no new language needed - by speedtux (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

Erlang is a language that has all the right properties and mechanisms in place to do what utility computing requires.

Well, except that it’s darned inconvenient to actually write the applications in it.

Google Gears is using Erlang-style concurrency, and the list goes on.”

Yup, and it makes more sense to add “Erlang-style concurrency” to existing languages than to throw out everything and switch to Erlang.

Stupid article - by IamTheRealMike (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

Wow, it’s not often I strongly criticise articles around here, but that was total garbage.

For the smart ones that didn’t RTFA, here’s a quick summary:

• I like Erlang.
• Big companies like Google and Amazon make things fast by using concurrency.
• Erlang supports (one type of) concurrency.
• Thus Google and Amazon are [probably] using Erlang.
• Thus everyone should learn Erlang.

For the record, I work for Google and we don’t use Erlang anywhere in the codebase. Google Gears restricts you to message passing between threads because JavaScript interpreters are not thread-safe, so it’s the only way that can work. Visual Basic threading works the same way for similar reasons. It’s not because eliminating shared state is somehow noble and pure, regardless of what the article would have you believe, and in fact systems like BigTable use both shared-state concurrency and message passing based concurrency.

The article says this:

Architects (but also university-professors for that matter) still think they can build current and future industrial-grade and internet-grade systems with the same technologies as they did 10-15 years ago. 

But in fact the Google search engine, which is one of the larger “industrial-grade, internet-grade” systems I know of, is written entirely in C++. A language which is much the same as it was 10-15 years ago. Thus the central point of his argument seems flawed to me.

Seeing as the article is merely an advert for Erlang, I’ll engage in some advocacy myself. If you have an interest in programming languages, feel free to check out Erlang, but be aware that such languages are taking options away from you, not giving you more. A multi-paradigm language like version two of D is a better way to go imho - it supports primitives needed to write in a functional style like transitive invariance, as well as a simple lambda syntax, easy closures and first class support for lazyness.

However it also compiles down to self-contained native code in an intuitive way, or at least, a way that’s intuitive to the 99.9% of programmers used to imperative languages, unlike Erlang or Haskell. It provides garbage collection but doesn’t force you to use it, unlike Java. It doesn’t rely on a VM or JIT, unlike C#. It provides some measure of C and C++ interopability, unlike most other languages. And it has lots of time-saving and safety-enhancing features done in a clean way too.

Gibberish - by SpinyNorman (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

If you want to build computing into a utility, you need large real-time systems running as sufficiently as possible.

But if you want to build sprockets into a weasel you need small batch-mode systems running as necessarily as possible.

If the poster had anything interesting to say (I’d guess not, but who knows!), it was totally obscured by his lack of grasp of the English language.

Re:Deceptive - by IamTheRealMike (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

Actually, Gears doesn’t use Erlang either. What he means is that Gears threading doesn’t allow for shared state (is it really threading then?). Instead threads communicate back to the browser by message passing.

It’s remarkably deceptive indeed to even imply that Gears and Erlang are connected. Message passing based concurrency isn’t exactly new or limited to Erlang, and can be implemented in any language.

I’m not sure what the point of this piece is. I’ve looked at Erlang and didn’t see much of anything to get me excited. It’s a functional language, which like most of them have unnecessarily weird syntax and force immutable state. I don’t really see what this buys you over a language like D 2 (or hell, even C++) in which you can write in a functional message passing style if you like, but then still use imperative shared state whenever useful, convenient or performant.

You can’t track people - by LM741N (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

with the cellphone turned off. Witness the long times that phones take to turn on / reboot the uP, and you know that nothing is going on inside there unless someone physically gets a hold of your phone and installs some electronics in it. But working in the handset industry for years I can tell you there is not enough room in the phones for anything extra, no matter how compact.

This isn’t about GPS. - by argent (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

You don’t need GPS to locate the phone. The phone continually handshakes with multiple cells to support handoff between cells, and the phone company can use that information to locate and track you.

Open Phone Firmware solves this… - by mwilliamson (Score: 4, Interesting) Thread
This is exactly why we need phones with open firmwares running fully-published and open peer-reviewed code. I hope the openmoko comes close.

Ever get the feeling… - by kaliann (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

That somewhere in the Justice Dept. there’s someone throwing a temper tantrum because someone took away their totally illegal advantage?

“Court decisions indicate that USAOs claim not to need probable cause to obtain real-time tracking information. News reports further suggest that some field offices are violating a Department of Justice ‘internal recomendation’ that ‘federal procecutors seek warrants based on probable cause to obtain precise location data in private areas.’”

Don’t make us get probable cause! Probable cause is for losers! And put the bumpers back into my bowling lanes!

I love it when my rights are seen as an inconvenience. (Though it’s nice that someone has RECOMMENDED that probable cause be found.)

Seriously, they’re law enforcement: finding probable cause IS THEIR JOB.

Re:Ever get the feeling… - by value_added (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

Don’t make us get probable cause! Probable cause is for losers! And put the bumpers back into my bowling lanes!

I’m a big fan of sarcasm, but instead of going the bumper-sticker advocacy route, I’d suggest visiting the ACLU and clicking the Donate Now button. That way when someone slams you with a “What are you? A pinko liberal card-carrying member of the ACLU?”, they’d be at least partially correct for a change.

Similarly, you can visit the EFF website and become a member. Don’t know if they give you a card to carry, but the free T-shirt could be worn by any geek with pride.

While I expect some of the more egregious abuses of the current administration may end when it packs up its bags and heads out the door, I don’t expect to see the trend they represent to subside, or that in the future, there will fewer stories on Slashdot and in the mainstream press where the ACLU, the EFF and similar groups aren’t forced to take yet another action to protect our rights.

Cryptonomicon - by FilterMapReduce (Score: 4, Informative) Thread
Most Slashdotters probably don’t need to be told this, but anyone interested in historical fiction about Bletchley Park shouldn’t miss Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson. It’s entertaining and rich in technical detail.

Alan Turing: The Enigma - by Kupfernigk (Score: 5, Informative) Thread
Most Slashdotters probably don’t need to be told this, but anyone interested in historical fact about Bletchley Park shouldn’t miss Alan Turing: The Enigma by Andrew Hodges. It’s entertaining, rich in technical detail and, wait for it, true.

doesn’t solve all the problems - by thermian (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

This won’t solve the one big issue facing Bletchley, that of the site having very low appeal to visitors.

As much as they might wish it to be otherwise, a collection of huts (one of which is now a tea room, ah yes, nice treatment of history there guys…), a house, some vintage cars and a few cluttered rooms of junk that pass for ‘exhibits’ just doesn’t appeal to people these days.

And yes, they really do look like rooms full of junk for the most part, sad to say, the presentation of their exhibits is not good at all.

Oh, and the reconstructed Collossus? It’s just there, in the middle of a room, with barely any information top help kids or the otherwise uninformed relate to it.

Not that the site isn’t ok to visit. If you’re into WW2 stuff then its probably worth a look, but if you’ve got kids they will be bored out of their tiny minds all day.

Re:doesn’t solve all the problems - by Anonymous Coward (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

Are we talking about the same place? My wife and I went last week and ended up going on two consecutive days. It was absolutely brilliant - Colossus was up and running and we were given a talk through it by one of the re-build team. We also talked to them about the Tunny machine they are working on and the Heath Robinson they’re also re-building despite the fact it never actually worked. There are also working bomb machines and very knowledgeable staff all other the site. I would have liked more technical detail then was easily available but I really did think it was excellent. Do a tour if you go and/or get an audio wand.

Faces? - by Halo1 (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

I wish I has to face getting a lot of money from the lottery…

Re:Whirlpool and WebCentral - by Now15 (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

As the owner of Whirlpool, please moderate the parent as uninformed.

While I’m not in a position to provide an unbiased opinion of WebCentral, they do cater to a very important market — people who need a premium quality service. If my experience with the $0 service they provide Whirlpool is any indication, WebCentral are not just technically excellent, their support system is outstanding and reactive. I can only imagine how much better they treat the customers who pay them.

Just because you only want the bargain service, doesn’t mean everyone does.

And the only reason Whirlpool isn’t blazing fast, is because we’re running with a bunch of WebCentral’s spare hardware. We’re a community service, not a business.

Cheers 
Simon Wright

Re:So is AVG still a good AV prog? - by onefriedrice (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
Here is a secret for you: You do not need AV software.  
 
Actually, let me clarify that statement. You might need AV software if you are a very uninformed user who likes to open email attachments from unknown people or download lots of useless software from questionable sources. However, if that person I described is not you, then you do not need AV software, and it is just taking system (and apparently network) resources. 
 
The reason you don’t need AV software is because there are only two ways to get virus on your computer: 1) Network-related software you use is exploited. 2) You willingly (although accidentally) run the bad software yourself. Yes, I’m simplifying things, but it is hardly any more complicated than this. Since you are an informed user, you have learned not to run bad software, so #2 doesn’t apply to you; and since you patch your system regularly (right?), #1 is very unlikely. 
 
However, there may be a tiny window between the time that an exploit is found and the patch being made available where you could potentially be vulnerable. Theoretically, AV software can ‘protect’ you in this scenario since virus definitions are made available sooner than patches. The solution here is, again, to be an informed user. If a piece of software you use becomes vulnerable to a new exploit, you should know about it and take the necessary precautions yourself during the time before a patch is released, in order to protect your system. This will protect you much better than any AV software will, and it’s not difficult since there are not many pieces of software which could even be exploited (the main ones are your browser and other internet-related apps). 
 
Now, I’m a user and developer of Mac OS X, Linux, BSD, and Windows. I have been running Vista for almost a year without a hitch by being an informed user. Actually, I also usually install patches long after they are available because I turned off the automatic download/install feature (I like to know what’s using my internet connection), and for some reason it doesn’t even notify me of the availability of patches so I often forget. Nevertheless, I’ve never been compromised mainly because I don’t run questionable software or read unknown emails, and the security of the software (and patches) has been good enough. 
 
In my opinion, AV software is a scam. It might be useful for grandmas and other clueless users who open email attachments indiscriminately, but I cannot see how anyone informed enough to be on /. cannot also manage his own security. Not that /. users are at the pinnacle of being-informed-edness, but I should think that you should be informed enough to be able to live without AV software quite easily. Bottom line: run a firewall (preferably a hardware firewall), patch often, be informed, and ditch the AV software.

Re:So is AVG still a good AV prog? - by Anonymous Coward (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

This is about the same amount of protection as pulling out is a form of birth control.

Are you telling me:

1. You never open links in search results to sites you have never been to? 
- If you are running windows using Firefox or IE there have been many cases of 0 day exploits

2. Do you not use any USB storage devices? 
- Just this Christmas I purchases a digital photo frame for a family member that had built in storage. low and behold when I went to preload it with photos it was already infected with a virus that was set to use auto play to install.

3. You 100% trust EVERY thing your friends or family send you? Document infections are still somewhat common. I suppose using Open office would get you around macro infections but you also might not be able to open company documents then.

I would also imagine that ANYONE who is on slashdot and manages security also believes in the layered approach. Inbound only filtering from your firewall and using your gut to know what is safe or not is an easy one to work around.. Well unless you are a hermit that never gets any email.

Re:So is AVG still a good AV prog? - by FilterMapReduce (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

I second your question. I used AVG Free for a long time and uninstalled it very quickly when I heard the news. But I’m having choosing a replacement cost-free anti-virus program for Windows. Here’s are the factors I’ve been considering…

AVG Free Pro: seems pretty effective and runs inobtrusively (at least locally). Con: has DDoS’d websites in the past and perhaps still shouldn’t be trusted.

Avira Pro: no track record of DDoS’ing websites. Con: obnoxious pop-ups “reminding” me about the premium version; apparently got some poor reviews for infection treatment.

Avast Pro: no track record of DDoS’ing websites. Con: requires manual re-registration.

I’m using Avira now but I’m considering switching again because of the pop-ups. Any advice? (And yes, I already run Linux but still need Windows for some things, and no, I’m not interested in paying for anti-virus software, since 99% of virus protection is common sense.)

Re:So is AVG still a good AV prog? - by i.of.the.storm (Score: 5, Informative) Thread
I dunno, I use Avast, it’s pretty good and free as well. I like the UI a bit better and it seems to get definition updates pretty frequently. Much less of a resource hog than Norton/McAfee too, although so is AVG.

Truly impressive - by javaman235 (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

…every programmer should work with something like this at least once. I did some audio programming work in college, and its a totally different world than the regular web dev stuff I have done, because you’re working with the convergence of acoustics and physics with programming. In true signal processing apps, what you are doing has to happen FAST as well, which makes the guys who work in it true wizards, and that’s without even considering the subjective recognition stuff that these researchers had to do. Kudos to them.

Re:Truly impressive - by jonaskoelker (Score: 3, Interesting) Thread

Agreed. My pet project of this sort is a wiimote hack, whereby you can play music with the wiimote. And no, it isn’t just playing loops, it’s indicating a tone with the angle of the wiimote (and nunchuck).

So, it’s really simple, right? 
- You steal the code that gives you the vertical angle of the wiimote from wmgui, 
- quantize it to [-12, 12], 
- raises the twelfth root of two to that power (or do a lookup into a temperament table), 
- multiply it onto the base frequency (say, 441 Hz), 
- generate a wave of that frequency, 
- copy it to the sound card (or the wiimote speaker, if your library supports it).

Right.

+ Now add two more tones generated similarly; how do you mix them without sounding like shit? 
+ Also, when making a wave, you want to start at the last seen elongation to avoid clicky noises. 
+ When stopping a wave, you want to cheat and continue the wave with constant frequency until the elongation hits zero, again to avoid clicky noises. 
+ And this is assuming that the transfer delay from the wiimote to your code (and from there to the sound card) is essentially zero. Now make some good use of the timestamp value on wiimote events; say, having a fixed small delay on everything. 
+ Oh, and minimize battery usage please ;)

It’s an interesting project, to say the least. So far I’ve learned that I know and remember the necessary bits of physics and music theory; I haven’t the faintest clue about the psychology of auditory perception and what would be a reasonable delay, but I can use myself as a test subject.

I’d recommend doing something like this to everyone who has a wiimote and a bluetooth interface on their box. And if you don’t have a wii, buy a wiimote anyways: it’s great fun playing tetris, kobo deluxe, mu-cade and other arcade’ish games with a game controller. Especially on the university’s big projector screens. Instead of studying.

Re:Machine vs. Human - by Anonymous Coward (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

I have to say, you’re stepping into a high-expertise field armed with a perilous lack of technical knowledge.

There are already numerous types of acoustical analysis and biofeedback in use in many places for the training of elite vocalists - by that I mean high-level classical singers. These include spectography which can be used to examine tonal balance factors, legato, vowel differentiation and modification, and so on; the electro-glottal graph which is a device that measures vocal fold closure and displays the individual cycles which can be used to evaluate pressed vs. breathy phonation; a device which measures the relative expansion and contraction of the chest and abdomen during breathing and singing and graphs them.

Contrary to your assertion, vibrato is a very important pedagogical tool. Vibrato rates that are too rapid (above 7.5 cycles per second or so), too slow (below 4 cycles), or too wide all indicate specific types of technical deficiency.

Vibrato is an important element of vocal technique as well, because the achievement of consistently vibrant sound through the range, and through different vowels, is an important goal in the training of singers. Vibrato is generally not related to muscle control factors except largely to the extent that through muscle tension or ‘holding’ the presence of vibrato can be reduced or eliminated. This is called “straight toning.”

A tool that can help to measure quantitative vibrato factors: rate, consistency, pitch excursion, changes in dynamic, etc., could be very helpful in the training of singers. These are all subject to acoustical analysis and there’s no reason to think that this machine wouldn’t be able to do it.

As a matter of style, for both historical reasons and modern aesthetic reasons, I believe Handel should be sung with a fully vibrant sound. The tenor for whom Handel wrote Messiah and many of his other works was a full dramatic tenor whose large voice bore little resemblance to the light, lyric tenors who generally perform that music today for reasons of “historical accuracy.”

I also find it somewhat odd that Shakira is held up as a model for good vibrato. She has a bleating vibrato which varies not only in pitch but in dynamic as well, which in another singer would be considered a serious technical deficiency.

Re:Machine vs. Human - by 192939495969798999 (Score: 3, Funny) Thread

Yeah, but Shakira makes up in lack of singing talent with huge… tracts of land.

Re:Machine vs. Human - by omeomi (Score: 3, Informative) Thread
OK Mr. Literal. But what they’re working towards being able to quantify with a machine, is someone’s singing voice.  
 
I’m not sure that’s necessarily true. The summary says they’re using “biofeedback to help singers improve their technique”. Based on that, it would seem they’re more interested in it as an educational tool rather than a tool for critics. There are a number of other technologies to help musicians improve their technique, so it’s not like this is the first. For instance, many wind musicians will practice playing long tones with a digital tuner to improve their overall intonation. There are also systems that schools use that track the notes that you’ve played, compare them with the notes you were supposed to have played, and tell you what you’ve done wrong.

So you’ve won a trip into space - by CrazyJim1 (Score: 5, Funny) Thread
Do you want to keep your space vacation or trade it for what is in the box?

It is weight… - by (H)elix1 (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

Those boxes are weight… About 15 years back I helped build a very ez (Rutan’s design too, btw). Construction was ‘composite’ materials - a bit of a radical chance from the way folks traditional built aircraft. You cut a lot of foam and put fiberglass and resin on it. The real work was making the jigs to get the right camber on the wings. You had to put weight on stuff to make sure it warped at the correct angle. With some parts, you had to do large chunks in one laying (is that even the right word?) of resin since it makes a stronger bond.

Re:What’s in the box? - by macshome (Score: 5, Funny) Thread
Obviously the cake is in the box.

A little messy. - by geekoid (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

I’ve been lucky enough to see Military aircraft being put together, space ships, and big commercial craft. 
By comparison, that place looks like a freaking disaster area.

Seriously - the box - by Wapiti-eater (Score: 5, Informative) Thread
Is just a clamping weight. Used to hold pieces together while adhesives cure or to prevent warping. Normal technique used in composite construction. 
 
See the other one at the other end of the wing box? 
 
See all the other, smaller weights? 
 
Now tell me - you really couldn’t figure this out for yourself? 
 
You need to get out more.

Short Term and Long Term - by dlevitan (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

KDE shot itself in the foot by making the KDE 3.x so polished. KDE 3.5 is essentially 9 years of evolutionary development from KDE 1.0. Unfortunately, its impossible to recreate 9 years of development and polish in only 3. I think that the long term prospects for KDE 4.x are great, but short term I’ll continue to use 3.5. 
I’ve tried the first beta of 4.1 and while its much more functional than 4.0, its still not there and probably won’t be for a few more releases. On the other hand, I remember that KDE 3.0 was, while more functional than 4.0, also much rougher than 3.5, so I can’t complain too much.

Not enough magic ponys yet? - by zahl2 (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

4 is almost a complete rewrite. It seems people have the impression that the reason all of the 3.5 desktop features weren’t completed in 4.1 is because of a conscious choice. When actually, it is was just limited time. Feature freeze tends to stop the adding of magic ponys.

Not quite what I said - by nanday (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

While having a story linked to on Slashdot always makes my day, the summary given with the link doesn’t accurately report what I said:

— To say that I found 4.1 “wanting” is incomplete. I say that it is a major improvement over 4.0.x, but, based on the beta, isn’t likely to deliver everything people want. I suggest that, while it has faults, it may be the most innovative free desktop currently.

- I say that it crashes, not as criticism (it is a beta, after all), but to suggest that casual users might not want to spend the time compiling it, and should use a Live CD to explore it instead.

- The full context in which I call KDE 4 a mistake is: “Everyone agrees now that KDE 4.0 was a mistake. However, what the mistake was — and whose — is a matter of opinion. KDE developers blame distributions for rushing to include a release that was never intended for everyday use, while users blame developers for changing everything.” In other words, all I’m saying is that it’s causing a lot of controversy — a fact that anyone who knows how to open a search engine can easily verify.

Trying to correct an impression that gets started in comments is difficult, but I thought I’d try anyway. So, let me spell out my opinion as clearly as possibly: I’m fascinated by the KDE 4.0 series with all its innovations (in fact, I’m using it on my laptop), but I think the KDE developers seriously misjudged user reaction, and that the software itself has a ways to go.

I don’t mind in the least if people disagree with me, or even condemn me; you get used to it, after a while. However, I would prefer if they disagreed with or condemned what I actually said.

Re:Not quite what I said - by bjourne (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

Err.. no. That is not at all what you are saying. If everyone is in agreement on a point, there can be no controversy on that point. Anyway, the “everyone agrees … ” statement was the most interesting part of your article and I was displeased to see that it was just grabbed out of the blue. If the KDE core devs feel that 4.0 was a mistake, getting to know why, what they think they should have done different and what they have learned would have been very valuable to know for other developers. If distributors feel that distributing 4.0 was a mistake, then I would like to know what they will do about it? Will they be more strict about upgrading to flaky libraries?

But it is extremely uncommon for developers to admit that they have made a mistake. And I very much doubt that the KDE 4.0 guys think it was a mistake. You definitely made a mistake if you thought that an “everyone agrees” statement would slip. :)

What ars said… - by Hoplite3 (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080702-the-critics-are-wrong-kde-4-doesnt-need-a-fork.html

KDE4 will get better. There’s a lot of promise in plasma. Until then, 3.5 is totally usable (I’m using it now). KDE has often put forward a lot of wacky ideas just to see what sticks to the wall. Good on ‘em, I say.

Look about the full KDE3 installation, you can find all sorts of ideas that never really made it. Drag and drop stuff, little file servers, and so on. Some of these things are probably in use by someone now. It’s all part of KDE’s great flexibility.

How I do it… - by Ankh (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

I run fromoldbooks.org, a Web site devoted to scanned pictures and text from old books — some more than 500 years old.

I use an Epson Expression 1000XL flatbed scanner (A3+ resolution, approx 12x17.5” with colour calibration), Linux xsane and gimp, for most of the images, but this does involve damaging the binding of thicker books. I scan wood engravings usually at 2400dpi, but modern screened pictures at only 1200dpi or sometimes even lower. The idea that you only need to scan at twice your print resolution assumes (1) you know what printer you’ll use 10 years from now, (2) that once you scale down by more than 50% there’s no visible difference (false). For colour you will need to do some descreening, which will generally involve something like an 11 to 17 pixel radius gaussian blur followed by a sharpen.

I also use a Canon 450D (Digital Rebel) camera on a tripod, with a 50mm f/1.8 lens (you can get the lens for around $75 to $100 in US or Canada, less if used) and a remote control; use the mirror lockup function of the camera and the remote to minimise camera shake. I point the camera at the open book.

In either case if there are significant amounts of text I then use Abby FineReader OCR; the open source OCR programs (and most of the other commercial programs) are a waste of time by comparison, or at least that was true 2 years ago when I was last researching this.

Go and buy a couple of large USB external disk drives, e.g. 500GBytes or more, and also write DVD backups frequently. Use a consistent naming scheme; I use a separate directory (folder) for each book or magazine, and I include the page number in the filename, together with -raw for the origial scan and -cleaned for the processed version. I use PNG to save the files because it’s lossless, an open standard, and widely supported; I’d suggest avoiding GIF (not enough colours), TIFF (portability problems) or JPEG (lossy).

Obviously if you want to put the magazines on the Web you’ll need permission; in my case I am usually digitising out-of-copyright books, although copyright laws have changed since I started, and also my understanding of copyright has changed. E.g I started out believing Wkipedia :-)

It can be a big project, but a lot of fun!

ambient light, tripod, shutter release remote - by maiki (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread
I’m not a professional magazine photographer (as in, photographer of magazines), but these tips might help. Whenever I photograph a document or painting, I just use my plain ol’ digital camera. 
A few things:

1. Do not use flash or direct light. Shiny magazine pages will reflect much of the light and create a glare. Use soft, ambient light (bounce it off a white sheet or something)
2. Stabilize the camera. Use a tripod or a stack of books. Don’t hold it in your hands
3. Use a shutter release remote. If you don’t have one, use the camera’s timer feature (so you don’t shake the camera by pushing the button)
4. Use macro-mode, and set your aperture as low as it will go. This will help you focus on something close up.
5. Use a low ISO. You’ll might need a longer exposure time, but it will cut down on graininess.
6. Maybe this is obvious, but use something to hold the magazine in the right spot (keep the pages as flat as possible to avoid “warping” in the picture)
7. Try to keep the same distance for each shot, so the digital images are roughly the same scale. Also don’t worry about seeing the background around the magazine, you can crop it later (better than zooming too close and missing the page number or something)

Re:ambient light, tripod, shutter release remote - by m85476585 (Score: 4, Interesting) Thread
Most people don’t have an autofeed scanner, but many people do have a digital camera. A flatbed scanner would work, but it takes a long time. I needed to make a copy of a section of a reference book, and instead of spending hours lining it up on my scanner pressing scan, waiting for it to finish, etc., I set up my 5mp digital camera on a tripod with a light angled so that it wouldn’t reflect off the pages. In 20 minutes—10 minutes of setup and 10 minutes of taking pictures—I got a hundred pages digitized and readable. A higher resolution camera and flatter light would have helpt, but the results I got were acceptable.

Let me guess… - by RabidMoose (Score: 4, Funny) Thread
…this is probably the result of a “compromise” between you and your wife, because those old mags are taking up too much shelf space?

Plustek OpticBook 3600 Plus scanner - by Anonymous Coward (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

I Use a Plustek OpticBook 3600 Plus scanner. 
It allows scanning a book without forcing it flat.

The scanner itself is great, but be warned, the software is infuriatingly buggy, even in the latest release. Luckily there are work-arounds.

regards … Zim

Oh the shame - by EEPROMS (Score: 5, Funny) Thread
The world will find out about my Thomas the Tank engine fetish…

lose the files - by Anonymous Coward (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

just say they were ‘lost’ and that the backups were destroyed or lost due to shady backup practices. works for the White House.

Not much of a problem… - by John Hasler (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

…if you don’t have a Google login name. Google search works just fine without one. It even works fine without any Google cookies.

The problem isn’t Google, it’s us. - by guanxi (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

Google clearly should have anticipated this. Governments have requested/required info on individual users before, as has been posted many times to /. For some countries, Google even moved user data off-shore, to protect it. Privacy advocates warned of this problem happening.

Google’s rule is ‘don’t be evil’, as long as it doesn’t interfere with business.

But the problem isn’t Google, it’s us. We keep using Google, though we knew about the risks and problems. The day a company risks significant revenue over privacy, is the day they will pay attention to it.

We have met the enemy and he is us.  
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pogo_(comics)#.22We_have_met_the_enemy…22

Re:The problem isn’t Google, it’s us. - by Televiper2000 (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
Why do I feel like I’m the only person that takes “don’t be evil” with a grain of salt. Google has been a great corporation because they understood people on the Internet and how they wanted to be treated. But, they also use that knowledge when they calculate how far they can push the envelope. “Don’t be evil” has translated into webmail accounts with massive amounts of space, web ads that’s don’t flash or pop-up, and a search engine who’s front page maintains the very bland basic HTML feel. Now people dream of Google being the great fixer in any industry that has annoyed them over the years.