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Home Subscriptions Netsurfer Science E-Zine Netsurfer Books E-Zine |
| The Tale of Sex.com |
| Interview with Richard Stallman, Free Software God |
| War of the Open Source Gods: Raymond vs. Perens, Snit vs. Snit |
| The California Museum of Photography |
| The Photo Loft |
| Collage, Haiku, and Watercolor |
| Netsurfer Recommendations |
| El Rancho de Weblo |
| Alliterative Medieval Poetry |
| Living in the Future |
| Nanolife |
| Frogs Invade San Francisco! |
| We Know Pain |
| Anatomical Reproduction |
| SETI@Home Client 0.46: Search for Signals from Outer Space |
| Nmap 2.12 Network Scanner |
| Python 1.5.2: Alternative to Perl |
| GNOME 1.0.5: Open Source GUI |
| Kaffe 1.0b4: Open Source Java |
| You Spell Iqaluit, We Spell Iqualuit... |
| Another 5.10 Mistake |
| PC Technology Moves Forward |
| BOOK REVIEWS |
| LETTERS TO THE EDITOR |
| Contact and Subscription Information |
| Credits |
BREAKING SURF
Windows NT Whips Linux/Apache on Web and File Server Benchmarks
A new benchmark comparison of performance between Windows NT and Linux has NT beating the metaphorical pants off the penguin. Mindcraft thoroughly tested two setups on a Dell 4 CPU Pentium II Xeon machine. One setup was decked out in Microsoft NT and the IIS 4 web server, while the other one had Red Hat Linux Kernel 2.2.2 running Apache. Bottom line: Microsoft Windows NT Server 4.0 is 2.5 times faster than Linux as a file server and 3.7 times faster as a Web server. While that's got to sting the open source crowd, note that in the real world, performance trades off with cost, reliability, and, in some cases, philosophical fanaticism. You can bet that hackers everywhere are feverishly working on tuning both Linux and Apache if for no other reason than wounded pride.http://www.mindcraft.com/whitepapers/nts4rhlinux.html
Linux FreeS/WAN 1.0 Released, Lets Anyone Set Up Virtual Secure Networks
Basically, the free FreeS/WAN lets you set up secure tunnels through untrusted networks. What's so important about that and why isn't this in the Software section? A great deal of online traffic is easy to wiretap, not least by law enforcement and intelligence agencies. This software takes a first step toward making all Internet network connections wiretap-proof. Ultimately, this kind of software should automatically initiate encrypted communications with machines similarly equipped while remaining perfectly compatible with unencrypted servers. Read John Gilmore's information on this project, including his fine reasoning about why he initiated and supports the effort. Volunteer contributors and testers are welcome.FreeS/WAN: http://www.xs4all.nl/~freeswan/
Gilmore: http://www.toad.com/swan.html
A phony Bloomberg tip, part of a not-too-cleverly disguised Web page hoax about a purported takeover of PairGain Technologies, spurred online speculators into a feeding frenzy and sent shares of the company's stock soaring April 7. A Yahoo chat room visitor publicized the page's existence and many presumably fell for the fake and rushed to buy the stock. The market ain't all smart. Neither was PairGain employee Gary Dale Hoke of Raleigh, N.C., whom the FBI arrested eight days later and charged with posting a false news story on the Internet. The FBI traced his work through Net access logs subpoenaed from Yahoo, Hotmail, Angelfire, PairGain, and MindSpring.
http://www.news.com/News/Item/0,4,35201,00.html?st.ne.lh..ni
Demonstrating the power of the Web for good, five online auction houses have provided an easy way to help the refugees from Kosovo. Yahoo, eBay, LiveBid, Amazon, and Up4Sale let you bid on special Kosovo auction items and donate to the American Red Cross your proceeds from items you sell. Pay a visit and make a bid or put something up for sale to join in the humanitarian relief effort.
http://auctions.yahoo.com/user/Kosovo_Charity_Auctions
http://members.ebay.com/aboutme/kosovo-relief/
http://www2.livebid.com/kosovo/kosovo.html
http://auctions.amazon.com/exec/varzea/subst/promotions/arc/arc.html/002-0011876-2967052
http://www.up4sale.com/kosovo.htm
Remembering a June 4 Fight for Freedom
One banner in Beijing's Tiananmen Square ten years ago sported Patrick Henry's famous "Give me liberty or give me death." More of the student protestors received the latter than the former. The Global Petition Campaign invites you to add your name in support of the pro-democracy protest so bloodily suppressed. Initiated by exiled Chinese dissident Wang Dan, and supported by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and others, the multilingual site features an archive of campaign news and a small, sobering picture gallery. When we looked the site was heading for a million hits and 7,000 signatures. CNet has a longer article.Petition: http://www.june4.org/
CNet: http://www.news.com/News/Item/0,4,34945,00.html
We know this won't stump NSD readers, but we have to ask you anyway. What do the reckless gunplay by Washington police, voter fraud in Miami, and the Russian financial crisis have in common? Hint: the money's not great, but the prestige is considerable. That's right - these topics have all been covered by this year's Pulitzer Prize winners. Read all about it as Joseph Pulitzer's 1904 will continues to shine its bright light on the world of journalism. Alas, there's no category yet for online-only publications....
http://www.pulitzer.org/year/1999/
InterNIC Changes Homepage... Again
InterNIC has revamped its homepage yet again. It has replaced the corporate-style domain name registration page with text that explains the coming changes in the registration process and the registrar accreditation plan. InterNIC had been criticized for replacing its bare-bones registration page with a highly commercialized site. This new page, however, defaults to the commercial site after 90 seconds. In an unrelated incident, the Aberdeen Group, a marketing research firm, has publicly aired a grievance with InterNIC about the handling of its DNS entry. InterNIC denied service after claiming Aberdeen hadn't paid its renewal fee, making Aberdeen's site unavailable for 36 hours, an eternity on the Web, especially for a marketing firm specializing in technology.InterNIC: http://www.networksolutions.com/internic/internic.html
Aberdeen: http://www.aberdeen.com/ab_research/1999/04/0499internic/0499internic.htm
Grieving Parents Sue Entertainment Media for $130 Million
In 1997, Michael Carneal, a 14-year-old high-school freshman in Kentucky, opened fire on 35 students with a stolen .22-calibre pistol as the students finished a prayer meeting. He killed three, wounded five, and was sentenced to life in prison. Parents of the slain students claim scenes in the movie "The Basketball Diaries" influenced Carneal and that he refined his shooting skills with games such as Doom, Quake, and Redneck Rampage. Their lawsuit - you knew that was coming, didn't you? - also claims that online porn contributed to the attack. Defendants include Time Warner, New Line Cinema, Meow Media, Nintendo, Sega, Sony, Id Software, and Interplay Entertainment. Wired has the story. For an equally farfetched view from the other side of the fence, check out Michael Carneal - Understanding.Wired: http://www.wired.com/news/news/politics/story/19088.html
Understanding: http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Acres/8125/122597.html
Red Hat Software's holding a contest which will get a half-dozen Linux types out into that nasty UV radiation and the gritty stuff that gets between your toes and in your shorts. Six winners will share a week in sunny Wrightsville Beach, N.C. to attend the Linux Expo '99 conference. To win, visit the Red Hat site after April 26, find the GNOME footprint hidden there, click it, and provide the requested info on at least five days of the ten-day contest. The camera shy need not bother - all of it will be "videotaped, photographed and documented for the world to see from their computer". Finally, a chance for all you Where's Waldo pros to put your skills to good use!
http://www.redhat.com/geekworld/
IBM has committed to supporting Linux in future products. Big Blue will offer products that support Linux as early as June and will provide full technical support, penguin toys not included.
IBM: http://www.software.ibm.com/is/mp/linux/
ONLINE CULTURE
An unusually long story in Wired tells how the domain name sex.com was allegedly stolen by a convicted felon. Needless to say, the guy is now making millions with it. There are forged memos, offshore shell companies, and $1 million per month from advertising alone (hey, what are we doing wrong here at Netsurfer???). As you can imagine, lawsuits are flying left and right. An entertaining read which should really become a bestselling book.http://www.wired.com/news/news/business/story/19140.html
Interview with Richard Stallman, Free Software God
This interview with Richard Stallman, one of the founders of the open source movement, is worth reading for his articulation of his free software philosophy, an exposition of the well known "if it's not free, it's crap" theme. You'll also find some background on how the GNU project got started and where it's going.http://www.linuxsoft.net/departments/news/stallman_interview0399.html
War of the Open Source Gods: Raymond vs. Perens, Snit vs. Snit
This amusing tempest in a teapot comes courtesy of two open source biggies. Eric Raymond and Bruce Perens founded the Open Source Initiative. Last week, their personal snit made it to the Net in an amusing example of a flame war. Now we know how the British tabloids felt when they reported on private conversations between Charles and Camilla - a bit soiled yet oddly amused. Click on the Thread Index link at the top of those pages for onlookers' reactions.Open Source: http://www.opensource.org/
Threat: http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9904/msg00197.html
Retraction: http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9904/msg00205.html
Counter-Retraction: http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9904/msg00216.html
ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT
The California Museum of Photography
UC Riverside's California Museum of Photography has struck at its Web site a well-choreographed balance between its real and virtual presences: the online exhibits make you want to visit the museum. Even at 72 dpi, the stuff here will knock you out. Online teasers illustrate each exhibit with handfuls of photographs, and guide you through much as would a brochure at a local gallery. The site also archives past exhibits - something a tangible museum usually cannot do. Be sure to glance through the hand-scrawled notes reshaping "ideal" beauty seen through the lens of Raoul Gradvohl in his burlesque portraits (not for the kids). We also liked First Sundays, which documents an educational enrichment program for Riverside's kids. Will the kid who threw the plastic fork on the glass be the next Jackson Pollock?http://www.cmp.ucr.edu/
Photoloft, a large collection of personal photo albums, in some ways resembles a portal. While it sells services (turning your photos into greeting cards and other gifts, for example, and membership accounts with 50 MB of online storage), it seeks to build community with contests and access to albums from photographers around the world. Personal albums are organized by topics - animals, celebrities, fashion, and so forth - in an easily browsed directory structure. To view albums, you have to sign up for either a free or "premium" account. Some visitors expect to view samples before they decide whether to sign up but we found neither sample albums or photos. Perhaps the sign-up requirement will discourage casual visitors so that only contributors with a commitment to photography frequent this inviting site. Too bad.
http://www.photoloft.com/
Collage, Haiku, and Watercolor
A delicious blend of Haiku, watercolor, and stunning collage on this Taoist Web site provides a feast for the eyes and the mind. The beautiful, intricate collage images can hold your interest by themselves, but the accompanying haikus add to viewers' perceptions. The watercolors illustrate a featured story by a child, written with the clear eyes of a ten-year-old and the vocabulary of an adult. A unique, aesthetically pleasing, charming site.http://www.taomountain.com/
BOOKS & E-ZINES
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Items our staff likes and you might too. Click on the image or title to order at a hefty discount from our affiliates Amazon.com and Beyond.com, and send a few pennies our way as well.
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Writing Apache Modules with Perl and C
Lindbergh
The Matrix: Music from the Motion Picture
Dreamweaver 2http://www.listbot.com/archive/deweblo/
If you have limited browsing time, make sure to at least read the poetic introduction to this collection of medieval and modern fantasy - it is witty, warm, and beautifully done by Paul Deane. The knights and dragons that jostle for space in the rest of the site, surrounded by magic swords and beautiful maidens, breathe an air of ancient mystery into the electronic world. The works, in particular those of the talented Mr. Deane, are classic in structure, rare in quality, and a pleasure to read.
http://www.jps.net/pdeane/fgr/
Cyber Times comes across more as a series of dispatches from the future than an online magazine from the UK. At the site, you'll find monthly features, high-tech toy and equipment reviews, and an interesting job posting section. Care to try your hand at nanostructural physics? Short on visuals and long on info and pointers to other Web sites, Cyber Times is a good URL to have bookmarked in your "Future Tech" folder.
http://www.modified.demon.co.uk/
SURFING SCIENCE
If you're hip enough to read NSD, you no doubt remember the exposure of and debate over those supposed fossils of Martian bacteria discovered in an Antarctic rock. One strike against them was that no living bacteria of such extraordinarily small size had ever been seen. Few reports of the discovery mentioned that other geologists had also reported fossils of these so-called nanobacteria in ancient Earth rocks. But no one had ever seen such small scale life live until a team led by Philippa Uwins isolated living "nanobes" - different from nanobacteria, but of the same scale - in rocks millions of years old from kilometers beneath the sea bed. The report is a bit technical, but nifty.http://www.uq.edu.au/nanoworld/uwins.html
If you know NSD, you know we know frogs, no? The Exploratorium in San Francisco appropriately calls its newest exhibition Frogs. It has built a miniature nature preserve of tanks and terrariums to contain more than 75 individuals representing 18 species of frogs and toads. In support of the live exhibition, the Exploratorium offers a Web site packed with information and gorgeous photos. Visitors to this exceptional site can view a video by frog specialists and a Shockwave presentation on frog calls, among other offerings. Junior high and high school teachers: if you can't take your class to the actual show, definitely drop by the site.
http://www.exploratorium.edu/frogs/index.html
Pain is the final frontier of medicine, and while pain treatment has made great strides, it has usually depended upon the crudest of methods. But this is changing. The PainLink site lets medical professionals exchange information on the management of pain. Our non-professional reviewer was a bit perturbed to find how many of the statistics on who suffers from pain come from entities like Nuprin and McNeil Pharmaceutical, and was puzzled by the eerie precision of the statement that 3,473,301 people in the US suffer from acute headaches. A dry site that explores a world that most of us, at one time or another, will visit. Be glad someone's thinking about it.
http://www.edc.org/PainLink/
Real people are expensive, wear out quickly, and scream if you shove the catheter in wrong. Plastic people are so much more... malleable. Medical Plastics Laboratory can provide you with everything from realistic skeletons to moaning patients, all out of high-quality plastic. Every possible wound, injury, and burn is represented. The skeletons are even opaque to X-rays. You can pick up a GDW-2600 Complete Care Doll with Multi-Sounds, if you have $4615 (realism does not come cheap). Take a look at the models available for training medical students, and maybe you'll understand why your doctor gets so startled when you talk to him.
http://www.medicalplastics.com/
SOFTWARE
SETI@Home Client 0.46: Search for Signals from Outer Space
Finally, the project we first reported upon in NSD 3,28 has come to fruition. A beta release of the software lets you participate in the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI). This is a Unix client, but versions for Mac and Windows should be available in mid-May.http://www.setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/
A new version of the popular - some say dangerous - network scanning software has been released. Mostly a bug fix release.
http://www.insecure.org/nmap/index.html
Python 1.5.2: Alternative to Perl
This latest version of the alternative programming language, oddly popular despite using indentation to separate blocks of code - sheesh! - now ships with an integrated development environment built on Tk. If you're a fan, you'll want to download this.http://www.python.org/
The latest version of open source desktop - the GNU Network Object Model Environment (GNOME), basically one of the GUI for Linux projects. Lots of bug fixes as well as GNOME-based games, utilities, programs, etc.
http://www.gnome.org/
Kaffe is an open source Java 1.1 compliant environment, completely free of royalties and Sun licenses. This beta release corrects many bugs and adds enhancements.
http://www.kaffe.org/
CORRECTIONS
You Spell Iqaluit, We Spell Iqualuit...
But we don't have to call the whole thing off. Do, however, look for a wise-assed letter to the editor the next time we put up a batch. Not much more to add, other than that we goofed this in NSD 5.10.David Fiedler kindly took a moment to let us know that in our "Aspirin's 100 Years Old " article, we confused the name of the town of Leverkusen, Germany with Werk Leverkusen, the name of that particular factory.
In NSD 4.29, we referred y'all to the PC Technology Guide, which has recently upgraded to a new URL.
http://www.pctechguide.com/