Patents

A Replacement Term for 'Intellectual Property'? 177

Posted by Cliff from the do-not-underestimate-the-power-of-language dept.
femto asks: "Every time I read the words 'intellectual property', I get peeved off. It is an oxymoron. A term loaded with invalid assumptions. To even use such words is an admission that intellect can be owned and controlled like a car, clothing or other thing made of atoms. Can anyone propose a replacement for the words 'Intellectual Property'? Something that implies intellect cannot be owned. Something that implies [what Jefferson once said]: 'He who lites his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.' Once we have this term, we need to get it accepted. Use it in publications. Cite these publications to get it in dictionaries. Get the term into everyday conversation and writing. So far, the best I have come up with is 'Intellectual Controls'. Can Slashdot come up with something better?"
Music

Build a Multi-Output MP3 Server? 394

Posted by Cliff from the tunes-in-every-room dept.
z80 asks: "I'm rebuilding my house and I am thinking about fitting speakers in every room of the house and pulling some massive amount of cables in the walls. I also want to control and send the output to each set of speakers from the same source, and was thinking that a PC, with 4-6 soundcards, would do the trick, and there are of course a couple of questions I have. What kind of hardware would be required to be able to stream up to six different MP3's through six soundcards at the same time ? Can it even be done? What kind of software can be used to do it? Which OS? How can it be remotely controlled? With respect to the last question, I'm thinking about mounting a couple of flat displays around the house connected to old PC's that run some sort of connection (VNC maybe) to the mp3 server." This is a topic Ask Slashdot tackled three years ago. Now, with applications like Ardour showing off the power of Open Source frameworks like JACK, it seems like building such a machine might not be as hard as it once was. For those of you who have managed to build something like this, what did you do and what hurdles did you have to navigate before things were working? How would you set up a machine to run independent audio to 4 or more rooms?
Media

Royalty Free AV Data for Benchmarking? 24

Posted by Cliff from the free-data-for-free-benchmarks dept.
Foredecker asks: "I'm developing some audio and video encoding benchmarks. (yes, they will be open source), and I need royalty free high quality audio and video. Unfortunately, I can't simply rip CD's and DVD's for distribution. I need to distribute the content with the benchmark to provide a consistent data set. I'd like both stereo and 5:1 audio and regular and high-def video. Anyone have any ideas where I can get such content?"
Software

Cybercafè Travel Kit? 33

Posted by Cliff from the for-the-nomads-among-us dept.
Xthlc asks: "I've been traveling in Europe this summer, and wanted to share photos and a journal with my friends and family as I went along. A laptop was out of the question, since I'm backpacking in some areas where the risk of loss is too great. So I'm limited to cybercafès. I thought I had everything I needed: a digital camera, a USB CF card reader, a universal AC adapter to recharge the camera, and a MovableType installation back home. However, I'm discovering that, in fact, there were a lot of things I forgot: a software CD with drivers and image editing programs, a cybercafè directory that lists things like prices and features, and a dictionary that has the Catalonian word for 'download'. So, for those experienced readers who weblog: what's your ultimate cybercafè survival kit? If you actually travel with a laptop, how do you deal with overseas connectivity? Also, where the heck do you find time to actually SEE stuff instead of just writing about it in your weblog?"
Software

Marking Your Cyber Territory? 47

Posted by Cliff from the kilroy-wuz-here dept.
NoOnesMessiah asks: "I recently finished a relatively major webmail install for a large company and it all went very, very well. I left a '/.cornerstone' file for posterity (with names, dates the disks started spinning, 'asbuilt' notes for apache, php, etc) so that future generations would know who to blame (or call) in 3 to 5 years. I have also done this in various and sundry places within my network infrastructure while I wore the mantel of Senior Systems Engineer and even in bits of a major mp3 player's website while it was growing up on our network. Hell, even the concept of the 'asbuilt' is more than 14 years old to me. How was PHP built? Look at the "asbuilt" file for configure or compile-time options... This got me to wondering; How do Slashdot readers mark their territory so future generations know they were there? Certainly I'm not the only one who does this. I would think that most people do, even in some small way. Do you mark your own personal mailer, web server or desktops in the same fashion as you might for your employers or clients?"
Data Storage

Using Linux for Windows HD Snapshots? 94

Posted by Cliff from the drive-imaging-but-not-with-a-camera dept.
DBordello asks: "Our company is currently backing up weekly to tape. I would like to begin taking snapshots of our NT 4.0 server. My first thought was a Linux box running an Open Source solution. My research shows that most Open Source applications to take snapshots assume that the backup target is Linux based. This presents a problem with mounting the NT 4.0 server. While I could mount the share with Samba, all of the backup applications do not provide options to backup a local mount. What do you guys use to snapshot your Windows network?"
Spam

Why Are We on E-mail Blacklists? 118

Posted by Cliff from the no-spam-from-here...honestly! dept.
LogicallyRogue asks: "I run an email server for a small webhosting company. We've crawled all around the email server to make it as secure as possible: tightened Sendmail's security, POP Before SMTP, denying non-authenticated relaying, using SpamCop DNS blacklist, etc. However, with all this in place, every few months, it seems that we have been blacklisted by some ISP somewhere. This month it was AOL. We had no warning, and we don't know why we were blacklisted. All the information we have is a single URL. We visit all the DNS blacklist services we can to be sure we are not on any of them. We send emails to the postmasters inquiring for more information (like perhaps a reason or copy of the email that made the ISP blacklist us) - however, those are usually bounced back because we are blacklisted. We've tried calling the Blacklisting ISP tech support - and usually get the stunned I-have-no-clue-what-you-are-talking-about silence. Have any other Slashdot readers experienced similar problems with blacklisting and the big ISPs?"
Hardware

Hardware Recommendations for a School Server? 124

Posted by Cliff from the maximizing-horsepower-at-minimal-cost dept.
nychef asks: "My school has decided to give me money to set up a server for my club. I'll be running e-mail for about 250 people, and webpages for about 100 which will mostly be static webpages, but there will be a few dynamic ones. I am trying to figure out just how powerful I need the hardware to be. They gave me a pretty decent budget, but my budget is to include the internet line. So I want to maximize bandwidth and minimize the cost of the server. I am looking in the range of dual P4 2.8's with a 3 disk RAID5 stack and 1 GB of ram. Is this adequate or overkill?" nychef has a budget of about $4,000. What kind of hardware and bandwidth options do you think he can afford?
Hardware

Next Generation Input Devices? 25

Posted by Cliff from the gestures-and-flat-keypads dept.
TenDimensions asks: "Has anyone at Slashdot seen this new input device and tried it out? What's it like? There's no doubt that new computer input devices are on the way (did anyone use the Minority Report-style hand-gesture detector at the car show a couple of months ago?) This seems interesting enough to try out, but I thought I'd ask you folks before I plunked down the money."
Education

Innovative Uses for a Computer Classroom? 350

Posted by Cliff from the non-tech-classes-in-a-tech-environment dept.
flard asks: "I will be teaching a Freshman English class at a medium sized public university, in a computer classroom for next semester. Every student has their own machine with an internet connection. I am thinking about using a weblog for them to post their work and critique each other. Do you guys have any other cool ideas on what to do and what NOT to do?" How can the computers best be applied to assist in teaching a non-technical class? Use of a weblog is a start, but are there other pieces of software that can be deployed in such a setting?
X

Making Mouse Wheels Work w/ a KVM? 85

Posted by Cliff from the pesky-hardware-filtering-of-input-signals dept.
Elvii asks: "My mouse wheel doesn't want to work through my KVM. It doesn't work in X11 under Linux (Debian 3.0, kernel 2.4.20), but it works in Windows on same machine, through same KVM, so that tells me it's a protocol or driver issue , which is beyond me. I have no other OS's to test on, although I read online that FreeBSD can handle the mouse wheel in this type of setup. When I set the mouse type to IMPS/2, it just twitches in corner and randomly clicks. Anyone know if it's a kernel issue or an X11 issue? I've googled and found nothing of real use there - just that some KVMs work and some don't. Plain PS/2 works but I want my wheel too." The kicker is that when the mouse is plugged directly to the machine, the mouse wheel works just fine! Has anyone else experienced the problem? What did you do to fix it?
The Internet

Browser Support for XHTML? 73

Posted by Cliff from the will-your-content-display-like-you-want-it-to dept.
eLoco asks: "What support do today's browsers have for XHTML? Maybe a better question would be: what support do the major browsers in current use have for formatting/display of XML with DTD defined? I don't have any browser prejudice per se (I use MSIE, Mozilla, Safari/KHTML, and Opera depending on the system I am working on and my mood), but I am primarily interested in the browsers with greater 'market share,' since my main reason for asking is this: If at least the "main" browsers in current use have decent support (vague, I know) for XHTML/XML rendering, why haven't we all converted over yet?" While it doesn't cover all browsers out there, this chart serves as a good starting point. For those of you working with application/xhtml+xml files, what issues have you run into when serving up your files to various browsers?
Displays

Do Later LCDs Need Screen Savers? 223

Posted by Cliff from the two-steps-backward? dept.
bwdunn asks: "Do we need to run screen savers again to prevent the burn-in we saw on the very old CRTs? Dell's latest and greatest laptops, the Latitude D800 and Inspiron 8500 both suffer from horrible screen burn-in problems with burn-in visible after as little as 2 hours. Dell claims this is an industry wide problem. The high end displays from Apple also seem to have this problem. I have never seen this problem before 2002. Is this something new due to inferior LCD screen manufacturing compared to screens from just a few years ago?"
The Internet

Managing Bandwidth and Bandwidth Costs? 202

Posted by Cliff from the preparations-for-a-slashdotting dept.
azav asks: "The company I work for has bandwidth requirements that occasionally spike to satisfy the immediate requirements of a several meg download to say 30,000 users. We hope to make this several million in the future. With that in mind, this request is directed to any person who manages a site that must deliver content on an irregular schedule. How do you manage your bandwidth costs? How do you manage the availability of bandwidth?"
The Almighty Buck

Collecting a Judgement? 82

Posted by Cliff from the getting-paid-what's-owed-to-you dept.
rk2z asks: "I did some independent contractor work about 6 months ago. I delivered the software as specified in my contract and turned in the hours that it took. I then sent the company an invoice for $1400 which was based upon my contracted hourly work rate. They had paid me in the past so I didnâ(TM)t do anything like withhold source code until payment. To make a long story short, they refused to pay me and I ended up taking them to Small Claims court in the state of Nebraska. I won a judgment for the above amount. The problem is, Iâ(TM)m not really sure how to go about collecting my judgment. The amount is relatively small so I donâ(TM)t want to consult a lawyer, because it not really worth blowing the entire judgment before I even get it. But it's big enough that I donâ(TM)t want to give up on it."

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