Slashback: Reviews, Resources, Pogo

As usual, updates and tangents from previous stories in tonight's Slashback. Read on for more on toys from Pittsburgh, the newest iteration of the Magician-named distro, open source directory entries, and everyone's favorite trademark dispute. So hit the button.

For better, for worse, for what it's worth. Thanks to the people who pointed out reviews of Mandrake 8.0 after I complained about a dearth of these when posting a couple of other reviews

Chris "soup" Campbell, for instance, points to his 8.0 review at Binary Freedom, and the_rev_matt writes: "Timothy was bemoaning the lack of Mandrake 8.0 reviews, so here is one." There's also a pctalk.org review discussed at the excellent Mandrakeforum site, as well as quite a few harsher comments when the release was announced. (I wish other distros would put comments in a forum like this, too.)

You know, 'bouncy bouncy'! Illah Nourbakhsh of CMU's CS lab (the same folks who brought your the Palm Pilot robot kit) writes: "... So here is the newest thing we've done. We make one-legged hopping robots that use an unusual spring system. We wondered what would happen if we scale the hopping robot up so it's much larger than 6 inches-- big enough to carry a human being. Then we can throw away the computer and the human can do the control. The result, the BowGo, enables ordinary humans to jump very, very high into the air and over obstacles. It is a far more powerful Pogo stick. http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~bowgo - there are both pictures and videos available from there. This is from the Toy Robots Initiative at Carnegie Mellon University."

Please give these people your venture capital, because I want to ride one of these! Mountain pogo-ing looks fun.

How can a jump rope be "open"? An unnamed reader contributes: "I've kept my eye on the guys over at the open source directory since I saw them take a good tongue lashing on /. a few weeks ago. They aren't doing too bad getting some listings, but the ones they have gotten seem to be making some waves. By my math, it looks like they've somehow gotten *two* new open source licenses passed through the boys at OSI (open source initiative) since they started three weeks ago."

Well, my tongue is out of lashing practice, but queries for "nano," "bluefish," "gimp" and "python" all return zero matches, so it doesn't seem like the first place I would go "to find Open-Source applications that are stable." The site still looks like a good idea, but is it eclipsed by existing resources? Maybe if enough people go visit it and add entries ...

A high-security remote terminal app by any other name nodvin writes: "In a Slashdot story on Mar. 22, 2001, it was stated Secure Shell Will Remain 'SSH'. However, the draft documents
now start with the title "draft-ietf-secsh-" rather than "draft-ietf-ssh". The charter is now found at: http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/secsh-charter.ht ml and the mail archive is now at:
ftp://ftp.ietf.org/ietf-mail-archive/secsh/ "

Say it ain't so.