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Submission + - Hosting Company Appears to be Violating the GPL (palegray.net) 2

Submitted by
palegray.net
palegray.net writes: "A web hosting provider called Appnor has recently moved the network diagnostics utility WinMTR off of SourceForge, and is now claiming the program to be a closed source, commercial application (it was previously made available under the GPL). I emailed the current maintainer of the original mtr utility about this, and have been informed that this event most likely constitutes an overt GPL violation, as it is presumed that WinMTR contains mtr code. Appnor claims that they have the right to do this, as there have been no external contributions to WinMTR in over ten years. I'm not a lawyer, but I don't think copyright law works that way."
Crime

Submission + - Unwise: Internet Search History of Murder Methods (forbes.com)

Submitted by nonprofiteer
nonprofiteer writes: Mark Jensen's home computer revealed Internet searches for botulism, poisoning, pipe bombs and mercury fulminate. A website was visited that explained how to reverse the polarity of a swimming pool — the Jensens had a pool — by switching the wires around, likening the result to the 4th of July. The State pointed out the absence of Internet searches on topics like separation, divorce, child custody or marital property.

Julie Jensen died as a result of ethylene glycol in her system, an ingredient found in antifreeze. On the morning of her death, someone attempted to “double-delete” (apparently unsuccessfully) the computer’s browsing history, which included a search for “ethylene glycol poisoning."
Operating Systems

Submission + - Running Old Desktops Headless? (blogspot.com) 2

Submitted by CajunArson
CajunArson writes: I have recently dug up an old P4 that is in fine working order and done what any self respecting Slashdotter would do... I slapped Linux on it to experiment making an NFSv4 server. One other thing I did was to remove the old AGP video card to save on power since this is a headless machine. Now... I removed the video card after the installation, and I'm doing just fine as long as the machine will boot to a state where networking works and I can SSH to it.

My question for the Slashdot audience is: Is there a good solution to allow me to login to this box if it cannot get on the network? I'm looking for solutions other than slapping a video card back in. In my case, I will have physical access to the machine.

A few caveats to make it interesting: This question is for plain old desktop/laptop systems, not network servers designed to run headless. Also, I am aware of the serial console, but even "old" machines may only have USB, and I have not seen any good documentation on how and if USB works as a substitute. Finally, if there is any way to access the BIOS settings without needing a video card that would be an extra bonus, but I'm satisfied with just local OS access starting from the GRUB prompt. I'm all ears for advice from any Slashdotters with these setups running.
The Courts

Submission + - RIAA Wants to Bar Jammie from Making Objections (blogspot.com) 2

Submitted by
NewYorkCountryLawyer
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes: "In the Duluth, Minnesota, case headed for a re-trial on June 15th, Capitol Records v. Thomas-Rasset, the RIAA has filed a motion seeking to bar the defendant Jammie Thomas-Rasset (she got married recently) from making objections, during trial number 2, to the plaintiffs' copyright registration documents. To preempt those of you reacting with shock and anger at the American judicial system, let me assure you this motion has nothing to do with the American judicial system : the RIAA's motion has the chance of a snowball in Hell of being granted, as there is simply no legal basis for preventing a person from making valid legal objections in Trial #2, just because the lawyer she had in Trial #1 didn't make similar objections. I'm guessing that the RIAA lawyers realized they have some kind of problem with their paperwork, and thought this a clever way of short circuiting it; instead, of course, they have merely red flagged it for Ms. Thomas-Rasset's new legal team. A few days earlier the RIAA lawyers filed a similarly ludicrous motion trying to keep Ms. Thomas-Rasset's expert witness from testifying; that too is doomed."
Security

Submission + - SPAM: Court says feds security checks go too far

Submitted by
coondoggie
coondoggie writes: "Can background checks go too far? The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals apparently thinks so. That court this week ruled against the federal government and in favor of employees at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in their case which centers around background investigations known as Homeland Security Presidential Directive #12 (Nelson et al. vs NASA). The finding reaffirms the JPL employees claims' that the checks threaten their constitutional rights. The stink stems from HSPD #12 which is in part aimed at gathering information to develop a common identification standard that ensures that people are who they say they are, so government facilities and sensitive information stored in networks remains protected. [spam URL stripped]"
Link to Original Source
Space

Submission + - What would it look like to fall into a black hole? (newscientist.com) 1

Submitted by
CNETNate
CNETNate writes: "A new video simulation developed by Andrew Hamilton and Gavin Polhemus of the University of Colorado, Boulder, on New Scientist today, shows what you might see on your way towards a black hole's crushing central singularity. Hamilton and Polhemus built a computer code based on the equations of Einstein's general theory of relativity, and the video produced allows the viewer to follow the fate of an imaginary observer on an orbit that swoops down into a giant black hole weighing 5 million times the mass of the sun, about the same size as the hole in the centre of our galaxy. The research could help physicists understand the apparently paradoxical fate of matter and energy in a black hole."
Hardware Hacking

Submission + - How reliable is computer memory these days?

Submitted by olddoc
olddoc writes: I remember reading about cosmic rays causing memory errors and how errors become more frequent with more RAM. That was in the days of 512MB systems. Now home PCs are stuffed with 6GB or 8GB and no one uses ECC memory in home PCs. Recently I had consistant BSODs with Vista64 on a PC with 4GB and I tried memtest86 and it always failed within hours. Yet when I ran 64bit Ubuntu at 100% load and using all memory it ran fine for days. I have 2 questions: 1) Do people trust a Memtest86 error to mean a bad memory module or motherboard or CPU? 2) When I check my email on my desktop 16GB PC next year, should I be running ECC memory?
Programming

Submission + - Project aims for 5x increase in Python performance (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by cocoanaut
cocoanaut writes: A new project launched by Google's Python engineers could make the popular programming language five times faster. The project, which is called Unladen Swallow, seeks to replace the Python interpreter's virtual machine with a new just-in-time (JIT) compilation engine that is built on LLVM. The first milestone release, which was announced at PyCon, already offers a 15-25% performance increase over the standard CPython implementation. The source code is available from the Google Code web site.
Security

Submission + - Cisco Router Hack Inspires New Patching Religion

Submitted by ancientribe
ancientribe writes: The dirty little secret about patching routers is that many enterprises don't bother — for fear of the fallout any changes to their Cisco router software could have on the rest of their infrastructure. But the recent discovery of a way to easily hack these devices has put pressure on organizations to change their ways and patch. This article in Dark Reading gives tips on how to patch without taking down the network, including input from Cisco's own director IT on how Cisco itself handles router patching.

http://www.darkreading.com/security/perimeter/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=LQ3HSG4LEIMP2QSNDLOSKHSCJUNN2JVN?articleID=216200419
GNU is Not Unix

Submission + - Richard Stallman Warns About Non-Free Web Apps (gnu.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Richard Stallman has published an article which warns about the "Javascript trap" posed by non-free AJAX-based applications. The article calls for a mechanism which would enable browsers to identify freely-licensed Javascript applications and run modified version thereof. "It is possible to release a Javascript program as free software"--Stallman writes.--"But even if the program's source is available, there is no easy way to run your modified version instead of the original ... The effect is comparable to tivoization, although not quite so hard to overcome."
Books

Submission + - Beginning GIMP: From Novice to Professional 2nd Ed

Submitted by
r3lody
r3lody writes: "An extremely large amount of the information we get on a daily basis comes from what we see. Imagery is therefore very important to those who want to communicate with us. When computers had advanced enough to be able to process images in a digital fashion, the market opened up for programs that could manipulate them in many ways. While many professionals would opt for the paid programs, there is a free alternative: GIMP (Gnu Image Manipulation Program). The only stumbling block is learning how to use it properly. That is where Beginning GIMP: From Novice to Professional, Second Edition by Akkana Peck comes in.

I first attempted to use GIMP to fix a photograph or two of mine, but was quickly bogged down in the many options available in the program. That is why I was happy to get my hands on a copy of Beginning GIMP. The book is based mainly on GIMP 2.4, but the author included a preview of GIMP 2.6 in Appendix D. When I downloaded the latest verson of GIMP from gimp.org, I received GIMP 2.6.0. So I used the PortableApps version of GIMP (2.4.6) on Windows XP while reviewing the book and found only minor variations from the text.

One thing that strikes you as you open the book is the extensive use of color. Most texts are black-and-white throughout, but here you are presented with a pleasantly colorful tome. To follow the examples as best as I could, I downloaded the images available on the gimpbook.com web site. Although the images are supposed to be for the 2nd edition, several of those shown in the text for demonstrations purposes are not included. It appears that the images for the tools new to GIMP 2.4 are missing from the web site. This is surprising, since the 1st edition of the book covered version 2.4, so you would expect the images to be there.

The book begins by giving the reader a brief tour of the three main windows of GIMP: the Toolbox window, the Layer/Channels/Path/Undo window, and the Image window. Some basic navigation is presented, along with tear-off menus and how to modify tool placement. It concludes with a simple project layering a small image onto a larger one was given. Unfortunately, the files supplied from the web site did not include the PNG file used in the text, so it's difficult to reproduce the picture as shown. I later found the missing image in a GIMP-format file called wilber.xcf.gz. Unfortunately, xcf files are not discussed until the next chapter.

After the simple introduction, the author, Akkana Peck, gets into the most common adjustments a beginning user might need: re-sizing, cropping, rotating, brightening and darkening, and fixing red-eye. Each manipulation is presented with careful step-by-step instructions. I was able to match the pictures shown in the book, providing me with a level of comfort that I was learning the right way to fix photos.

One of the most common and useful methods of altering photographs uses the concept of layers. Layers act like cinematic cels, being mostly transparent with some opaque portions to lay on top of other layers. Chapter 3 gives a clear description of how to use layers to make changes. Two sample projects use layers to add text and another image to an existing photo, and to create an animated GIF using a series of layers for each frame of the animation. While I found minor differences between the text and the version of GIMP I used, I had no real problem understanding how the concept is applied.

You will probably need to do some freehand drawing from time to time, and chapter 4 covers the tools you'll need. While these tools are familiar to anyone who has used a basic painting program like Microsoft Paint, there are enough differences in how they are applied to warrant their own chapter. After creating some basic shapes (rectangle and circles), outlining and filling them, the author explores various fills and patterns. The chapter ends with a tutorial of creating a tree in a planter box, using just the drawing tools.

Every tool you use in GIMP works on the current selection. Knowing how to select just the parts of the image you want affected is important to getting the results you want. The author devotes an entire chapter to the numerous ways to select areas, add to or subtract from the selections, and fine-tuning them to only touch the parts you want touched. Basic rectangle, ellipse, and free-hand selections are followed by more sophisticated methods including the intelligent scissors and SIOX (Simple Interactive Object Extraction). The book also shows how to save selections as channels, so you can return to them in future editing sessions.

Sometimes, however, all you really need to do is a little touch-up on a photograph. Is someone's face in shadow or too much sun? Did you wish to get rid of some little irritating extra in a photo? Maybe you just wanted to draw attention to one subject and blur out the rest. Chapter 6 provides the information on how to make these basic adjustments. Darkroom techniques called dodging and burning provide minor adjustments to brightness, while cloning and healing can completely eradicate unwanted portions of the image. To draw attention to portions of the picture, you can enhance it using the blur and sharpen tools.

In addition to simple adjustments, GIMP offers a plethora of various tools to modify or create images. Under the Filters menu, you will find a large selection of tools. When I first looked, I felt that there were so many, who would need all of them? In the Filters and Effects chapter, Akkana Peck goes through them all, showing how they can be used to enhance your image. Because there are so many, she does not provide examples of each effect, but each one is described and you are encouraged to play. Remember, Undo is your friend here!

Chapter 8 delves into a very important aspect of your photos and drawings — the colors. First, the concepts of the RGB (Red-Green-Blue) and CMY (Cyan-Magenta-Yellow) colorspaces are described, followed by the HSV (Hue-Saturation-Value) space. A lot of time is used reviewing how these different colorspaces are used, and how they can be manipulated. The tools for breaking the image into its component layers, and demonstrations on how manipulating them can enhance your photo follow. The chapter concludes with some discussion on color profiles.

Now that you've learned quite a few niceties of GIMP, you need to learn more advanced techniques. The next two chapters go into more detail about drawing and compositing. The chapter on Advanced Drawing covers three main topics: mask and layer modes, realism using perspective and shading, and making new brushes, patterns and gradients. The Layer Mode section is the most interesting, showing how blending layers using various modes other than simple overlays can produce interesting effects. There are a number of examples, all easily followed and replicated. Once you've got a basic understanding of the advanced drawing techniques, it's time to put them to use on photographs. The chapter on Advanced Compositing shows how to use layer modes to play with images to improve their looks. You can brighten images, improve contrast, create eerie landscapes, fix noisy photos, and create panoramas, all using various layer modes. Many examples are shown, so you can get a good feel for the technique.

GIMP plug-ins provide automated tasks for the user. In fact, a number of GIMP's tools are provided by plug-ins. A variety of languages is supported. Plug-in scripts can be written in Scheme (the default — always installed), Python, and Perl (if available on your computer). If you need greater speed, you can write a plug-in in C. Chapter 11 uses the sphere plug-in as an example. Xtns — Misc — Sphere creates a sphere on a solid background. Akkana explains how to modify the script to provide a transparent background. A full discussion of the programming of the original script follows. Each step is carefully explained so only a minimal amount of programming background is needed to understand the concepts. Finally, examples in Python, Perl and C round out the chapter. Also included are explanations of how to find plug-ins and help on callable routines.

Unfortunately, there is so much to GIMP that one medium-sized book cannot contain it all. There is a potpourri of topics in the final chapter, including printing, scanning, setting preferences and the configuration files. The chapter ends with information on where to go for more help, source code, and images.

The appendices offer information on how to get and install GIMP, how to install it on older systems, and how to build it from source. Naturally, GIMP is always evolving, and Appendix D offers a list of enhancements in GIMP 2.6 that were not incorporated into the main text.

Over the course of reading the book, I had very little trouble reproducing the examples as demonstrated. I must admit that, despite the book's subtitle: From Novice to Professional, I am now at best an intermediate user. The depth of the capabilities available within GIMP is much deeper than the author could provide in the text. At almost 600 pages, this book is just about the right size, and provides the right amount of instruction for most people. The Additional Topics chapter provides information and links for further study and training, for those so inclined. If you are a beginner to image manipulation, and want to get fairly proficient with GIMP, then definitely get Beginning GIMP. It's not leaving my desk any time soon."
Google

Submission + - Google solves sharing bug in Google Docs (techcrunch.com)

Submitted by
RichardDeVries
RichardDeVries writes: "Three weeks ago, I contacted Google about had a bug in Google Docs that shared documents without permission. The issue has been resolved and affected documents have had their collaborators removed. The documents' owners have been notified:

To help remedy this issue, we have used an automated process to remove collaborators and viewers from the documents that we identified as being affected. Since the impacted documents are now accessible only to you, you will need to re-share the documents manually.

See my journal entry for details on my contact with Google.
Although I think Google handled the issue admirably, this raises questions (again) about cloud computing, as well as Google's eternal beta-status for a lot of their services."
Portables

Submission + - Nvidia Mulls Cheap, Integrated x86 Chip (computerworld.com)

Submitted by
CWmike
CWmike writes: "Nvidia is considering developing an integrated chip based on the x86 architecture for use in devices such as netbooks and mobile Internet devices, said Michael Hara, vice president of investor relations at Nvidia during a speech that was webcast from the Morgan Stanley Technology Conference this week. Nvidia has already developed an integrated chip called Tegra, which combines an Arm processor, a GeForce graphics core and other components on a single chip. The chips are aimed at small devices such as smartphones and MIDs, and will start shipping in the second half of this year. 'Tegra, by any definition, is a complete computer-on-chip, and the requirements of that market are such that you have to be very low power and very small but highly efficient,' Hara said. 'Someday, it's going to make sense to take the same approach in the x86 market as well.'"
Businesses

Submission + - Small Corporation transitioning to Open Office 3

Submitted by
Pay The Piper
Pay The Piper writes: "As an IT Support Technician in a small corporation, I've been tasked by one of my managers to determine the feasibility of transitioning our small 40 or 50 person office from Microsoft Office 2000 to Open Office 3.0. What are some of the problems I may run into as far as document cross compatibility? Has the Open Office suite evolved to a point that permits easy transition from Microsoft's suite? Besides the obvious "free vs. expensive" argument, what are some of the pros and cons of transitioning? Are there any reliable ways to view/edit/save a document saved in the OpenXML format through Open Office, or are my co-workers and I still going to be stuck in Microsoftland?"

Feed Engadget: Google doesn't deny GPhone rumors, has prototype ready? (engadget.com)

From feed by engfeed

Filed under: Cellphones


We all know that when rumors start to heat up, well, it just means there's more to speculate about. Nevertheless, new reports from both the BBC and The Wall Street Journal do a fine job of getting our hopes up, as it's noted that Google refused to outrightly deny handset rumors; rather, it simply reiterated that its users and partners are saying that "they want Google search and Google applications on mobile, and it is working hard every day to deliver that." Furthermore, it's now believed that the search giant is "showing the prototype to cellphone manufacturers and network operators as it continues to hone the technical specifications." Make of that what you will, but it sounds pretty enticing over here.

[Thanks, Omar A. and Ala A.]
Read - Google sidesteps mobile reports
Read - Google shows phone prototype to manufacturers

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