Kaizenlog

01 10 2007

[Slashdot] Stories for 2007-10-01

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Slashdot Daily Newsletter

In this issue:
* Michael Meeks On ODF and OOXML
* Olin College — Re-Engineering Engineering
* Amazon MP3 Vs. iTunes Music Store
* Coppola Loses All His Data
* Google May Blur Canadian Faces and License Plates
* Debian Refuses To Push Timezone Update For NZ DST
* LA Airport Uses Random Numbers To Catch Terrorists
* Rising to the “Science Visualization Challenge”
* Novel Method for Universal Email Authentication
* Quantum Cryptography Slowed by “Dead Times”
* Processor Throttling In Windows XP
* Halo 3 Causing Network Issues
* A Case Study In GPLv2 / GPLv3 Compatibility
* Silicon Valley Culture Originated In Radio Days
* Virtual Robots Fooled By Visual Illusions

biscuitfever11 writes “ZDNet has up a great [0]interview with Michael
Meeks, the distinguished Novell engineer, who’s currently deeply involved
in open document format and OpenOffice.org. In the interview, Meeks takes
Microsoft to task on its alternative format OOXML and argues that
Microsoft should adopt ODF — but says that realistically they never will.
He also mentions his favorite example to explain the benefits of open
source software to a nontechnical person: the flexibility of open source
would have allowed us to free ourselves from Clippy, the world’s most
despised paperclip, by changing a single line of code.”

Discuss this story at:
http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=07/09/29/2341224

Links:
0. http://www.zdnet.co.uk/misc/print/0,1000000169,39289664-39001068c,00.htm

+—————————–—————————————+
| Olin College — Re-Engineering Engineering |
| from the would-you-like-thinking-with-that dept. |
| posted by kdawson on Saturday September 29, @21:59 (Education) |
| http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/09/30/0121256 |
+—————————–—————————————+

[0]theodp writes “In its College Issue, the NYT Magazine profiles
tuition-free [1]Olin College, which is [2]building a different breed of
engineer, stressing creativity, teamwork, and entrepreneurship — and, in
no small part, courage. But questions remain as to whether the industry
is ready for the freethinking products of Olin, and vice versa. Few of
the class of 2006 are going on to grad study in engineering or jobs in
the field.”

Discuss this story at:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=07/09/30/0121256

Links:
0. mailto:theodp [Email address: theodp #AT# aol.com - replace #AT# with @ ]
1. http://www.olin.edu/
2. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/30/magazine/30OLIN-t.html?_r=1&ref=magazine&oref=slogin

[0]Ali writes “As discussed here recently, amazon.com has launched a
[1]public beta of Amazon MP3, a digital music store that provides
DRM-free downloads of over 2 million songs from 180,000 artists and
20,000 labels. In comparison, Apple says the iTunes Store now contains
over 6 million songs. Here is a [2]head-to-head comparison.”

Discuss this story at:
http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=07/09/30/0148246

Links:
0. http://www.daniusoft.com/
1. http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/09/26/1748213&tid=141
2. http://db.tidbits.com/article/9203

Colin Smith writes in with an object lesson in backup methodology — once
you have backed everything up, take it somewhere else. “Film director
Francis Ford Coppola has [0]appealed for the return of his computer
backup device following a robbery at his house in Argentina on Wednesday.
He told Argentine broadcaster Todo Noticias he had lost 15 years’ worth
of data, including writing and photographs of his family.”

Discuss this story at:
http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=07/09/30/0132221

Links:
0. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/7019644.stm

KingK writes “Reuters reports that Google is considering a [0]Canadian
launch of its Street View map feature, which offers street-level
close-ups of city centers. But the company said it would probably blur
people’s faces and vehicle license plates to respect tougher Canadian
privacy laws.”

Discuss this story at:
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=07/09/30/0213214

Links:
0. http://uk.reuters.com/article/technology-media-telco-SP/idUKN2430696920070925

+—————————–—————————————+
| Debian Refuses To Push Timezone Update For NZ DST |
| from the does-anyone-really-know-what-time-it-is dept. |
| posted by kdawson on Sunday September 30, @07:57 (Debian) |
| http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/09/30/1117241 |
+—————————–—————————————+

Jasper Bryant-Greene writes “Although a tzdata release that includes New
Zealand’s recent DST changes (2007f) has been out for some time, Debian
are [0]refusing to push the update from testing into the current stable
distribution, codenamed Etch, on the basis that ‘it’s not a security
bug.’ This means that unless New Zealand sysadmins install the package
manually, pull the package from testing, or alter the timezone to
‘GMT-13′ manually, all systems running Debian Etch in New Zealand
currently have the incorrect time, as DST went into effect this morning.
As one of the last comments in the bug report says, ‘even Microsoft are
not this silly.’ The final comment (at this writing), from madcoder, says
‘The package sits in volatile for months. Please take your troll
elsewhere.’”

Discuss this story at:
http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=07/09/30/1117241

Links:
0. http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=433869

+—————————–—————————————+
| LA Airport Uses Random Numbers To Catch Terrorists |
| from the better-than-searching-me-whenever-i-have-a-beard dept. |
| posted by CmdrTaco on Sunday September 30, @09:27 (Math) |
| http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/09/30/138233 |
+—————————–—————————————+

An anonymous reader writes “Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) is
[0]using randomization software to determine the location and timing of
security checkpoints and patrols. The theory is that random security will
make it impossible for terrorists to predict the actions of security
forces. The ARMOR software, written by computer scientists at the
University of Southern California, was initially developed to solve a
problem in game theory. Doctoral student Praveen Paruchuri wrote
algorithms on how an agent should react to an opponent who has perfect
information about the agent’s choices.”

Discuss this story at:
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=07/09/30/138233

Links:
0. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21035785/site/newsweek/page/0

+—————————–—————————————+
| Rising to the “Science Visualization Challenge” |
| from the what-graph-charts-suck dept. |
| posted by CmdrTaco on Sunday September 30, @10:39 (Science) |
| http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/09/30/1320224 |
+—————————–—————————————+

[0]ahab_2001 writes “The NSF and the journal Science have announced the
2007 winners of the annual [1]Science and Engineering Visualization
Challenge, mounted each year “to encourage cutting-edge efforts to
visualize scientific data.” There’s a [2]write-up of the winners in the
journal, and also a slide presentation showcasing the winning images and
videos.”

Discuss this story at:
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=07/09/30/1320224

Links:
0. mailto:ahab_slash [Email address: ahab_slash #AT# yahoo.com - replace #AT# with @ ]
1. http://www.sciencemag.org/sciext/vis2007/
2. http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/317/5846/1858

+—————————–—————————————+
| Novel Method for Universal Email Authentication |
| from the well-kinda-novell-anyway dept. |
| posted by CmdrTaco on Sunday September 30, @11:48 (Spam) |
| http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/09/30/1339248 |
+—————————–—————————————+

[0]MKaplan writes “Most spam is sent using spoofed domains. Email
authentication schemes such as [1]SPF attempt to foil spoofing by having
domain administrators publish a list of their approved outgoing mail
servers. SPF is sharply limited by incomplete domain participation and
failure to authenticate forwarded email. A paper describes [0]a novel
method to rapidly generate a near-perfect global SPF database independent
of the participation of domain administrators. A single email from an
unauthenticated domain is bounced and then resent — this previously
unauthenticated domain and the server listed in the return path of the
resent bounce are entered into a globally accessible database. All future
emails sent from this domain via this server will be authenticated after
checking this new database. Mechanisms to authenticate forwarded email
and to nullify subversion of this anti-spam system are also described.”

Discuss this story at:
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=07/09/30/1339248

Links:
0. http://spamfizzle.com/
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sender_Policy_Framework

+—————————–—————————————+
| Quantum Cryptography Slowed by “Dead Times” |
| from the what-i-call-the-time-before-my-first-cup-of-coffee dept.|
| posted by CmdrTaco on Sunday September 30, @12:54 (Science) |
| http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/09/30/1416204 |
+—————————–—————————————+

[0]coondoggie writes “Researchers at the National Institute of Standards
and Technology and the Joint Quantum Institute said today that
technological and security issues will stall maximum transmission rates
at levels comparable to that of a single broadband connection, such as a
cable modem, [1]unless researchers reduce “dead times” in the detectors
that receive quantum-encrypted messages.”

Discuss this story at:
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=07/09/30/1416204

Links:
0. http://networkworld.com/
1. http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/20061

TomSlick writes “Michael Chu, a former Intel employee, has written up a
fairly interesting and readable summary of [0]Windows XP power schemes as
they relate to Intel processor throttling. An old topic, but one still
relevant as many business notebooks still use XP.”

Discuss this story at:
http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=07/09/30/1716234

Links:
0. http://www.orthogonalthought.com/blog/index.php/2007/09/intel-speedstep-windows-xp-and-confusing-power-profiles/

Recently at my university where I’m a student and a sys admin, we have
been experiencing some odd outages, in particular since the 25th of
September. The outages seemed to occur between 8 PM and 12:00 AM — peak
gaming hours for our dorms. It just happens that Halo 3 came out on the
25th of September. Upon further investigation we found that our network
routers were shaping TCP packets, but not UDP. Once we applied UDP
shaping as well, all network outages ceased. Gamers complained, but
university students attempting to access network resources such as our
UNIX clusters were satisfied.

Discuss this story at:
http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=07/09/30/1731222

An anonymous reader writes “A project called [0]OpenChange is working to
develop an open source client library for Microsoft Exchange. They are
heavily dependent on Samba code for the underlying protocol support and
[1]have been forced to move to GPLv3 once [2]Samba moved. This has gotten
in the way of legally adding support to other software [3]such as KDE,
which is unwilling or unable to go GPLv3.” It sounds like all the
developers involved expect the GPLv2/GPLv3 issues to be resolved in time.

Discuss this story at:
http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=07/09/30/195207

Links:
0. http://www.openchange.org/
1. http://mailman.openchange.org/pipermail/devel/2007-September/000351.html
2. http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/07/09/2224257&tid=117
3. http://commit-digest.org/issues/2007-09-23/

+—————————–—————————————+
| Silicon Valley Culture Originated In Radio Days |
| from the engineers-money-and-risk dept. |
| posted by kdawson on Sunday September 30, @17:35 (Businesses) |
| http://features.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/09/30/1926242 |
+—————————–—————————————+

[0]yroJJory writes to recommend a piece up at SFGate on the [1]history of
Silicon Valley and its roots in radio, accompanied by some [2]great old
photos. “When the Traitorous Eight [founders of Fairchild], as they’re
sometimes called, held their hush-hush meeting in San Francisco, they had
reason to fear discovery — but no way to know that by quitting safe jobs
for a risky startup, they would earn a place among what Stanford
University historian Leslie Berlin calls the ‘Founding Fathers of Silicon
Valley’… Roughly 30 years before Hewlett and Packard started work in
their garage, and almost 50 years before the Traitorous Eight created
Fairchild, the basic culture of Silicon Valley was forming around radio:
engineers who hung out in hobby clubs, brainstormed and borrowed
equipment, spun new companies out of old ones, and established a
meritocracy ruled by those who made electronic products cheaper, faster
and better.”

Discuss this story at:
http://features.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=07/09/30/1926242

Links:
0. mailto:me.jory@org [Email address: me.jory #AT# org - replace #AT# with @ ]
1. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/09/30/MNDTSEMSJ.DTL&tsp=business
2. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/object/article?o=0&f=/c/a/2007/09/30/MNDTSEMSJ.DTL

[0]Roland Piquepaille alerts us to research out of University College
London in which virtual robots, trained to “see” as we do, were [1]duped
by optical illusions the same way humans are. Here’s [2]one of the
illusions the software system fell for.

Discuss this story at:
http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=07/09/30/2026239

Links:
0. http://www.primidi.com/2007/09/30.html
1. http://www.ucl.ac.uk/media/library/robotillusions
2. http://www.lottolab.org/Visual%20Demos/Demo%2015.html

Popularity: 3% [?]

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