The Newspaper Shop -- Thursday edition

[walktalker]

Microsoft note: Back off Linux attacks
Some of Microsoft's efforts to disparage open-source software such as Linux have backfired, according to a recent memo by the software maker. Top Microsoft executives, including co-founder Bill Gates and Chief Executive Steve Ballmer, have long derided open-source software as being everything from a "cancer" to "Pac-Man-like." But those messages have failed to diminish the popularity of open-source programs such as Linux among developers and customers, according to a Microsoft memo distributed at a strategy meeting in Berlin in September. "Messaging that discusses possible Linux patent violations, pings the OSS (open-source software) development process for lacking accountability, attempts to call out the 'viral' aspect of the GPL (General Public License), and the like are only marginally effective in driving unfavorable opinions... and in some cases backfire," the memo states.


About-face paves way for SOAP standard
Portal software maker Epicentric has changed its stance regarding a patent on a key Web services standard, paving the way for its approval. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), a standards body that oversees some Internet protocols, is nearing approval on Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) 1.2, one of the four key Web services specifications. Along with Extensible Markup Language (XML), SOAP makes Web services possible by essentially allowing different programs running on different computers to communicate with one another. Many industry observers trace the beginning of the Web services movement to the introduction of SOAP 1.1 in May 2000. The W3C has been working on the follow-up to the initial specification for about two years and has been close to the final stages. But patent issues could have held up the process.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-964896.html

MS Palladium: A must or a menace?
At the USENIX Security Conference held here recently, Microsoft developers touted the company's upcoming Palladium architecture as technology that would enhance privacy, stymie piracy and increase a corporation's control over its computers. Others, however, see a more nefarious role for the security software. Instead of just keeping hackers out, critics say programs like Palladium could also block computer users from certain data. For example, the technology could be used as a policing mechanism that bars people from material stored on their own computers if they have not met licensing and other requirements.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-964876.html

Microsoft's red-letter day for Tablet PC
Hoping to write a new chapter in the saga of pen-based computing, Microsoft on Thursday officially unveiled Windows XP Tablet PC Edition. Executives representing more than 20 companies manufacturing devices using the software joined Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates here for the launch. Acer, Fujitsu, Hewlett-Packard and Toshiba are among the companies making the new tablet PCs, which are similar to notebook PCs. Most of the devices allow the input of data with a stylus in addition to or instead of a keyboard. Microsoft and other software developers, including Autodesk, Corel and Groove, have either updated existing programs or released new applications to support the Tablet PC operating system.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1103-964903.html

Study: PCs will sap your strength
Researchers in Japan have scientifically documented what dwellers of Dilbertville have known for years: Prolonged daily computer use can make you sore and sap your strength, energy and motivation. In a three-year study of more than 25,000 workers, Japanese researchers discovered that people who sat in front of computer screens were more likely to experience physical pain such as eye and shoulder strain, and to suffer from motivational symptoms such as lethargy. Although workers are spending an increasing amount of time in front of their computers, no consistent guidelines exist about how long is safe to sit at a computer screen.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1106-964918.html

Privacy group counters P2P crackdown
The Electronic Privacy Information Center is launching a counterattack against Hollywood's efforts to crack down on student file-swapping. The privacy advocacy group is sending letters to presidents of colleges across the country, asking them to think before they install monitoring tools on university networks. "Monitoring the content of communications is fundamentally incompatible with the mission of educational institutions to foster critical thinking and exploration," EPIC wrote. "Monitoring chills behavior and can squelch creativity that must thrive in educational settings." EPIC's effort comes in response to attempts by the entertainment industry to pressure colleges into curtailing file swapping.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-964908.html

Key Internet server moved for security
One of the 13 key servers that let people get around on the Internet was moved this week due to security concerns, said VeriSign, the company that runs the machine. The move comes just weeks after hackers bombarded the "root" servers with a flood of data designed to overwhelm them and shut them down, an attack that raised the specter of an all-out Internet collapse. But VeriSign, which runs two of the Net's 13 domain name service (DNS) root servers, said Thursday that the timing of the move was coincidental and that the measure was part of a general program to reduce security risks.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-964978.html?tag=fd_top
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...,56248,00.html

Technology is bringing new powers, and new problems, to art research and conservation
It looks like an art lover's nightmare. A bronze nymph stands in a studio, head cast down, arm outstretched. Suddenly, a spot of red light sweeps across her body and fixes, like a marksman's sight, on a point on her left breast. In a flash, the light turns from red to brilliant white and begins to pulse. A crackling sound fills the air and a tiny plume of smoke drifts from the statue's surface. To a casual observer, this is a shocking scene. You half-expect to find a hole shot right through this fin-de-siècle beauty, created by Edward Onslow Ford, a Victorian sculptor. But for John Larson, head of statue conservation at the Merseyside gallery in Liverpool, it is all in a day's work. Mr Larson specialises in the laser cleaning of statues, monuments and other works of art.
http://www.economist.com/science/dis...ory_id=1429361

Disney battles coupon goof
A coupon mix-up at Walt Disney's online store over the weekend led to a surge of orders -- and a huge headache for the company. Using a coupon code that was passed around on shopping discussion sites, such as FatWallet.com and DVD Talk, consumers flooded DisneyStore.com with four times the normal volume of orders. After seeing the site's order volume increase, Disney modified the offer, limiting customers' ability to use the coupon and started combing through the orders to determine which were legitimate, said company spokeswoman Maria Gladowski. Disney is still going through those orders and hasn't yet determined what to do with orders from customers who shouldn't have had access to the coupon code, Gladowski said.
http://news.com.com/2100-1017-964831.html?tag=cd_mh

Shockwave surfs into online gaming
AtomShockwave has launched a new subscription video game service on its Shockwave.com Web site. The online entertainment company hopes the new service, called GameBlast, will convince casual gamers to pay $9.95 a month to play. AtomShockwave already sells games that can be downloaded onto a PC, and more limited demo versions of these titles are available online. With GameBlast, the company is now letting people play full versions of the games via the Internet. "We took the most popular games and made them available online as a subscription service," Mika Salmi, CEO of AtomShockwave, said in an interview.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-965006.html?tag=cd_mh

MusicMatch unveils new jukebox-to-go
MusicMatch on Wednesday plugged in new online jukebox technology that will enable subscribers to easily transfer music files onto portable devices, including Apple Computer's iPod for Windows operating systems. The San Diego, Calif.-based company introduced MusicMatch version 7.5, free and subscription-based software for listening to music via the Web. For subscribers, the technology lets music fans print stylish labels for CDs, which can be custom mixed and burned using the software. Aimed at riding high on holiday sales of portable MP3 devices, the technology also lets consumers sync up a library of audio files with popular gadgets like the iPod -- but only for people using the Windows operating system.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-964826.html?tag=cd_mh

Apple adds DVD burner to PowerBook
Apple Computer on Wednesday updated its entire portable line, most notably adding its first PowerBook capable of burning DVDs. The PowerBook line now includes an 867MHz model, available now for $2,299, and a 1GHz model that can both burn and read CDs and DVDs. That model will be available later this month for $2,999. "We're turning up the heat today by making the iBook and Powerbook more robust and more affordable," Greg Joswiak, Apple's vice president of hardware marketing, said in an interview. He noted that the new PowerBook was the first notebook with a slot-loading drive that can burn DVDs.
http://news.com.com/2100-1040-964708.html

Graphics chipmaker Nvidia still on top
Graphics chipmaker Nvidia has managed to continue gaining market share against rival ATI, despite delays in launching its speedy new processor, a report says. A Mercury Research report, released this week, found that in the third quarter of 2002 Nvidia's market share rose to 58 percent, from 56 percent the previous quarter. ATI lost market share, shrinking from 36 percent in the second quarter to 33 percent in the third, despite selling the highest-performing graphics chip. The report looked at worldwide shipments of standalone graphics controllers. Nvidia is preparing the way for the launch of its NV30 graphics processor later this month with a public event showing off the chip's power and demonstrating its "cinematic" effects.
http://news.com.com/2100-1040-964780.html?tag=cd_mh

Philips touts PC DVD-rewritable design
Philips Electronics has developed a reference design for DVD-rewritable drives in PCs in a push to promote the DVD+RW format. The consumer electronics giant's semiconductor division on Monday debuted the main guts of a DVD+RW drive, including an integrated chipset, optical pickup unit, firmware and reference design, that can record speeds up to 8X. The company will license and sell components for the drive and expects manufacturers to have them available in the first half of next year. "In the PC world, time to market is everything, and the rational here is to help drive makers to hit those tight windows and give them the quickest time to market," said Roger Gregory, a marketing manager in the company's semiconductor group.
http://news.com.com/2100-1040-964597.html?tag=cd_mh

Hey Mac, Can You Burn a DVD?
Apple announced the addition of a DVD burner to its Titanium PowerBook portable computer on Wednesday. The burning question: Will consumers who burn billions of audio CDs a year use the new portables to bootleg Hollywood movies? Even the Motion Picture Association of America doesn't seem too worried about it. "The reason we're not particularly jumping up and down is we're spending a great deal of time in private forums with the people offering these products," said Scott Dinsdale, the MPAA's executive vice president of digital strategy.
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,56267,00.html

Hatching Plans for Stem-Cell Law
The Republican party now controls both Congress and the White House, and that makes Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch a happy man. He's happy because key parts of the Republican agenda -- like passing the Homeland Security Act -- stand an excellent chance of getting through Congress. But the future of human cloning research, something that ardently Hatch supports, could face real trouble. The Human Cloning Prohibition Act of 2001 (H.R. 2505), which was passed by the House in August 2001 only to founder in the Democrat-controlled Senate, might also get through next time.
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,56255,00.html

Forced Vaccines Haunt Gulf Vets
It was, the doctor at the Long Beach Veteran's Administration Hospital said, an incidental finding. A little gray smudge on the X-ray, a blob next to the pituitary gland. Six months later, University of California at Los Angeles surgeons worked six hours to sever a tumor from the brain of a muscular, 25-year-old ex-Special Forces Ranger and Gulf War veteran. The costly surgery was performed at UCLA, the patient said, because VA doctors denied that the "incidental finding" caused his excruciating, unremitting headaches. He blamed Army-administered drugs for the tumor. And his girlfriend said there were other "side effects" of his service in the Gulf, including increased agitation and sperm that "burned."
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,56099,00.html

When Everything Was Spam to ISP
An overly-sensitive spam filter is to blame for a week-long blockade that resulted in nondelivery of some e-mail messages sent to EarthLink subscribers in late October. EarthLink servers refused and returned incoming mail sent from many Internet domains during the last week of October, according to an e-mail sent earlier this week by EarthLink to those affected by the problem. The problem was caused by a fault in the way EarthLink's mail server software loaded configuration data used by the service to block spam. Blocked e-mail was returned to senders with a message informing them their network had been identified as a source of spam and had been banned from sending e-mail to EarthLink subscribers.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...,56235,00.html

No Fish Tale: Swimming in Macs
Some animal lovers stuff a beloved pet when it dies. Mac fans convert dead machines into fish tanks. Comedian Jay Leno has an iMac aquarium. Steve Jobs reportedly has a couple of them. Timothy Leary had a Mac aquarium, and so did Abbey Hoffman. Wall Street is positively swimming in them: For some reason, they're a favorite gift among stockbrokers and bankers. Mac aquariums are as iconic as the Mac itself. Thousands reside in homes and schools across the world. Converting an old compact Mac into an aquarium is probably the obsolete machines' most common fate.
http://www.wired.com/news/mac/0,2125,56217,00.html

Potter 'Twin' Causes Controversy
From the jagged, jumbled lettering of the title to the picture of a youngster flying through the air framed by pillars, the book looks fantastically familiar. But the figure on the front isn't Harry Potter it's Tanya Grotter, heroine of a Russian series that has the boy wizard's backers crying plagiarism. While Tanya Grotter is an 11-year-old girl and rides a magical double bass instead of a broomstick, she shares several attributes with her near-namesake: Like Potter, she is an orphan, wears glasses and has an unusual mark on her face a mole on her nose. And like the Potter books, the Grotter series is full of fanciful magic words that set spells in motion.
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,56254,00.html

Website contest to tempt teen girls
The UK Government is teaming up with the music industry in an attempt to entice young girls into technology. ITbeat is a nationwide initiative, designed to encourage girls aged 11- 15 to rethink their attitudes to careers in information technology. The initiative is a response to statistics which find that the number of female technology professionals in the UK has fallen dramatically over the last seven years to a low of just 20%. The project, developed by e-skills UK, the Department of Trade and Industry, IBM, the Science Museum and some members of the music industry, will offer teenage girls the chance to design a website for their favourite pop star.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/2411661.stm

Bunker-busters set to go nuclear
The US government is set to fund research into a new type of nuclear weapon that is designed to penetrate and obliterate deeply buried targets such as underground weapons bunkers. Coming 50 years after the world's first hydrogen bomb was detonated in the Pacific, the news has alarmed scientists opposed to nuclear proliferation. They say the thousands of tonnes of radioactive debris produced by a bunker-busting nuclear weapon would not be contained within the rock, concrete and soil above the target, but would contaminate a wide area around it. Funding of $15 million has been proposed for research into the so-called Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator (RNEP), as part of the government's draft Defense Authorisation Bill for 2003. But the bill has not yet been passed by the Senate Committee on Armed Services. While a decision has been delayed until after this week's Congressional elections, a source close to the committee says the RNEP will get the green light.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99993016

A digital repository will revolutionize the way research is shared and preserved
Every year MIT researchers create at least 10,000 papers, data files, images, collections of field notes, and audio and video clips. The research often finds its way into professional journals, but the rest of the material remains squirreled away on personal computers, Web sites, and departmental servers. It’s accessible to only a few right now. And with computers and software evolving rapidly, the time is coming when files saved today will not be accessible to anyone at all. Until recently there has been no overall plan to archive or preserve such work for posterity. But true to its problem-solving nature, MIT has come up with a solution.
http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/atwood1202.asp

How Did You Meet? If Answer Is 'Online,' Couples Tend to Lie
When love blooms online, what is the happy couple going to tell people about how they met? The truth? Not likely. Sandra DeSimone had been using the dating site Matchmaker.com for about a month when she met Anthony Florindi. Their profiles clicked. They were about the same age. (She's 30, he's 31). They both lived in the Boston area. Both like Italian food and the color blue. Both had been unlucky in love. She had come within three days of getting married when her fiance called off the wedding; Mr. Florindi was recently divorced. After sending each other e-mail and talking on the phone for several weeks, they met in October for dinner at Rabia's in Boston's North End, then moved on to dessert at Cafe Vittoria and finally to the Four Seasons for drinks. Even happily matched online couples remain uneasy about telling friends and family how their love affairs started, despite a surging use of dating services.
http://online.wsj.com/article_email/...168988,00.html

Alcohol's erroneous ways revealed
Just two glasses of wine can ruin your brain's ability to detect its own errors, and to correct them. The finding helps explain why alcohol so severely impairs driving ability, and casts new light on the basic action of the drug on the brain, says a Dutch team. "We all know on a subjective level what alcohol does - we lose control a little bit, we become more error-prone. But this research gives a new perspective on how alcohol has these effects," researcher Richard Ridderinkhof of the University of Amsterdam told New Scientist. Ridderinkhof's team studied people performing a lab task designed to generate a high proportion of errors. They found that alcohol had a significant effect on activity in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), a region known to be involved in detecting errors and in signalling a need to adjust performance after an error.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99993031

Martian meteorite mysteries resolved
Nagging doubts about a family of Martian rocks that planet-hopped to Earth have finally been laid to rest after two-decades of investigation. Scientists say they can now explain why the rocks from Mars are so unexpectedly young and common. In the 1980s, scientists found convincing evidence that several meteorites found on Earth came from Mars. Analysis of gases trapped inside the rocks matched measurements of the Martian atmosphere by the Viking landers. These rocks must have been blasted off the Red Planet by asteroid impacts, then wandered the Solar System for a few million years, before crash-landing on Earth. But the vast majority of the 26 Martian meteorites known today are relatively young - about 200 million years old. Yet 90 per cent of the Martian surface is much older than that.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99993030

'Fighting spirit' does not boost cancer survival
A positive mental attitude does not improve a cancer patient's chances of survival, UK researchers say. Their conclusion is based on a detailed review of 28 studies that investigated the way in which people cope with their illnesses. The few studies that have found a relationship between a fighting spirit and a better long-term prognosis were small-scale or flawed, say the scientists, led by Mark Petticrew of the MRC Social and Public Health Sciences Unit in Glasgow, UK. They admit such a link is "biologically plausible" and widely believed by doctors and patients, but say there is very little scientific basis for it. This means patients should not feel under pressure to adopt a particular mental approach to coping with their disease, they say. But it does not mean that a positive attitude has no benefits at all to a patient.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99993029

Who said I would not write a paper tomorrow ?!?

[TankGirl]

Originally posted by walktalker
Who said I would not write a paper tomorrow ?!?

Not me!

- tg

[multi]

wanst me either ...