More Signal, Less Noise
Wednesday, June 15, 2005
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NETSURFER DIGEST
More Signal, Less Noise |
Volume 11, Issue 23 Wednesday, June 15, 2005
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NETSURFER LINKS
 BREAKING SURF
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BREAKING SURF DARPA Challenge Finalist Robots The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has winnowed the original 118 entrants in its autonomous ground vehicle Grand Challenge down to 40 teams. The successful semifinalists, from 14 states and Canada, will compete this September to be selected for the final showdown of 20 teams. The Grand Challenge challenges robotic vehicles to travel 150 miles of tough roads in the desert between Los Angeles and Las Vegas using only built in navigation equipment and sensors to find their way and avoid obstacles. The team whose vehicle finishes the course in the shortest time will win $2 million. This is, of course, the second running of the DARPA Grand Challenge; last year's was a dismal failure. DARPA designed the contest to spur innovation among private researchers, in the ultimate hope that the technology developed for contests such as this will result in battlefield-ready robot vehicles. There 's some vigorous and detailed debate in the DARPA Grand Challenge site's Discussion Forums on all aspects of the contest, and a press release brings glory to the semifinalists.http://www.darpa.mil/grandchallenge/ Do you remember the movie "Twister", in which Helen Hunt played a tornado researcher who chased storms with a new instrument, Dorothy, that would gather data from inside a tornado? Reality is much more exciting, even if not quite as good-looking. National Geographic's Inside Tornadoes site presents video recorded by a scientific instrument that captured the environment inside a twister. The multimedia consists of remarkable video of a tornado overtaking the ground-based observation device. The instrument resembles nothing so much as a UFO that doesn't fly. The story is short, and the video is in Flash - it's a must see, even if you missed "Twister". Especially rewarding is the first chapter, "Quick Setup" - researchers appear to dawdle as the storm bears down on them.. http://www7.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0506/feature6/index.html The University of Wisconsin-Madison is home to a specimen of Amorphophallus titanum, otherwise known as the titan arum or corpse flower. It's called the corpse flower for the flower's pungent smell, which resembles that of rotting corpses. The flower has several other characteristics that help make it unique. For one, it is enormous; the Wisconsin specimen reached almost 250 centimeters (98 inches) high at press time. For another, the plant only blooms once every several years, and the bloom stays open only 24 to 48 hours. The Wisconsin plant last bloomed in June 2001 and did so again June 9 this year. The university has a series of videos that show the progression of the flower as well as more information about this wonderfully weird plant. Alas, despite past promises, there is as yet no smellovision on the Internet, so the visuals will have to do. http://www.news.wisc.edu/titanarum/ The Only Worthy Thing to Come from the Michael Jackson Trial Well, he's not guilty on all counts. We could link you to the trial transcripts, or the Court TV newsfeed, or even Google News links to relevant stories. But what would be the point? Instead, we present this, which pretty much sums up the circus that was the Michael Jackson trial: Triumph, the insult comic dog, with Michael Jackson supporters outside the courthouse.http://www.ifilm.com/ifilmdetail/2672935 Rumors of Leaked Mac OS X for x86, Hoax Files Circulate Ever since Apple released a developer version of OS X for Intel x86 chips, rumors that copies of the operating system have been leaked to the Internet have been circulating. This may or may not be true. We can't find it. The real story may well be that fake files purporting to be x86 OS X are popping up all over the file-trading networks. The current situation provides a perfect set-up for black-hat hackers, who eagerly jump at any opportunity to have people run one of their Trojan programs on their PC. An article at MacDailyNews was one of the earliest sources of the leaked rumor, which they spin as a perfect Apple stealth marketing move. We're skeptical, and suggest you don't download anything that smells like a copy unless you have a quarantined and unimportant PC box you want to devote to virus and worm research. While we're on the topic of rumors, here's a link to a widely debated Robert X. Cringely column, in which he speculates that Intel and Apple will unite as one company.MacDailyNews: http://macdailynews.com/index.php/weblog/comments/6012/ Cringely: http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20050609.html How to Deal with a Million Spams a Day ACME Laboratories (motto: "Yes, our logo is an anvil"), also known as Jef Poskanzer, gets a million spam e-mails each day. It's no surprise that he has had to develop cost-effective ways to keep the scourge at bay. With few resources to throw at the problem, Poskanzer has developed an approach he claims is superior to that of Microsoft, which has a whole department to deal with spam. His specific fixes are geared for a Unix system using Sendmail and probably won't work with other operating systems, but the general approach and background discussion are instructive for anyone who has to deal with unwanted messages. Poskanzer gives loads of technical details on a host of specific techniques and also provides a Hall of Shame that highlights poor but widely used anti-spam measures like AOL's approach, which bans e-mails that contain IP addresses. In Poskanzer's view, four groups are responsible for spam: spammers; the folks who click naively; ISPs that don't use outbound SMTP filters; and Microsoft, for its spam-vulnerable operating system and e-mail programs.http://www.acme.com/mail_filtering/ Bruce Schneier is one of the leading experts in Internet security. A recent blog post of his summarizes the state of the art in network attacks, including the changing nature of the dominant viruses. He singles out two Microsoft vulnerabilities and declares them the greatest vectors for new attacks. Schneier also believes that peer-to-peer networks will become avenues of attack before the year is out. If you have any interest in network security, this and the rest of Schneier's site is a must read. http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/06/attack_trends_2.html An important new class of security problem is a result of the complexity of the modern webserving environment. When most people think of fetching pages from the Web, they generally understand that the browser (e.g. Firefox) fetches Web pages from a webserver (e.g. Apache), but nowadays this model often oversimplifies the situation. The Web page being fetched can go from a webserver through a firewall into a caching server, possibly through a proxy webserver, and only then wind up in your browser. The security problem arises when those different elements in the request path handle HTTP request headers in inconsistent ways. By crafting specific request headers to exploit these inconsistencies, it is possible to mount a number of serious hacking attacks against users. How serious is this problem in the real world? That depends entirely on the combination of software in the path of a Web-page request. The technical paper that describes the problem has numerous examples of various webserver/cache/firewall combinations and the specific HTTP request smuggling exploits to which they are vulnerable. Webmasters should be familiar with this. http://www.watchfire.com/resources/HTTP-Request-Smuggling.pdf When is a story not a story? The short answer is never. Once an article or column reaches print or pixels in the news media, it should remain available on the original Web site, like old print stories can be found on LexisNexis. Occasionally, however, a publisher decides to purge a story - as though that makes it go away. Not so: there's bound to be a copy archived somewhere on the Net. It's no surprise that such practices have spawned a rolling debate centered upon journalistic ethics and proper practices. The upshot seems to be that even if a story turns out to have errors, you should leave it up - but append corrections as warranted. Online Journalism Review looks into the matter. http://www.ojr.org/ojr/stories/050607glaser/ BBC Radio 3 broadcast Beethoven, and nothing but Beethoven, for almost a full week - to the delight of many and to the chagrin of some. The centerpieces of the broadcasts were the composer's First through Fifth Symphonies, performed by the BBC Philharmonic. You can download the performances from the BBC, which also offers recommended reading on the man and his work, a quiz, and, of course, message boards. It's unusual for a media provider to devote nearly an entire week of airtime to one specific subject, so Radio 3's decision must be seen as gutsy. We include a link to additional music at the Classical Music Archives and another to a brief biography of the temperamental genius. BBC: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/beethoven/index.shtml Classical Music Archives: http://www.classicalarchives.com/beethovn.html Beethoven: http://www.lucare.com/immortal/ Identifying Unique Torah Scrolls According to Jewish myth, evil entered the world when man mistranscribed a single letter in the Torah. Even today, if a scribe misspells a single word in a Torah, the entire scroll must be redone. Given the labor-intensive character of Torah construction and the thousands of dollars each costs, there is a black market for stolen Torah scrolls. The problem is that each Torah is essentially identical. Nothing but the Torah's text may be written on the scrolls. The way to identify each scroll and deter theft depends upon two ingenious forms of technological identification. Two technologies compete in the field of Torah identification. Wired looks at both and provides fascinating insight into how you go about making the uniqueness of an object accessible to others without affecting the object. It turns out that uniqueness is a variable upon which one can search.http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,67743,00.html Report on Korean Net Culture and Hompy South Korea is reputed to be the most wired country on our little globe. It boasts the highest level of broadband penetration of any nation, with the predictable result of a huge involvement in gaming, blogging, and what the locals call "hompy" (an abbreviated term for "home page"), among other things. Joi Ito reports on the South Korean scene from notes scribbled on napkins over the course of a dinner among friends, and foreign netsurfers may find the report eye-opening and worthwhile.http://joi.ito.com/archives/2005/06/02/korean_bloggers.html The point of the Underhanded C Contest is to write innocent-looking C code that implements malicious behavior, in many ways the very opposite of the more famous Obfuscated C Contest. The winner will be the hacker who writes source code that most easily passes visual inspection by other programmers. This year's challenge is to "write a simple program that performs some basic image-processing operation, for example smoothing or resampling, but manages to conceal a unique imperceptible fingerprint in each image it outputs." Submission deadline is July 10, and first prize is beer. http://www.brainhz.com/underhanded/ ONLINE TRAVEL Virtual Out-of-the-Ordinary Travel to Out-of-the-Way Places Travel can educate, entertain, and engage the mind. Sadly, the proliferation of guidebooks and package tours can make travel dull as millions of tourists visit the same spots in herds instead of stepping aside and seeking new perspectives. Polar Inertia seeks to redress that balance by touring what most travelers would stereotypically deem mundane or ugly destinations and photographing them for virtual tourists. The images capture unexpected beauty in German gravel mines, explore the seasonal changes of almost ignored billboards in Los Angeles, and document the dramatic contrasts of boondocking camper-vans with the barren but elegant environments they inhabit. We loved the feature on cellular phone towers disguised as plastic trees. Take a trip, open your eyes, and see what other sights, typically ignored by tourists, await exploration. Make up your own mind, without a guidebook.http://www.polarinertia.com/ Chicago did a lot of growing between 1889 and 1963, some of which is chronicled at Urban Experience in Chicago. Often called the heart of the nation, the city is more accurately defined as the great cosmopolitan melting pot of the nation. The settlement movement took root in Chicago precisely because of its diversity and the resultant cosmopolitanism that this increasingly urban heartland community fostered. Hull-House, a community center that opened in 1889 and which is the focal point of the Web site, in many ways was emblematic, a symbol of the transformation of American society as a result of the efforts of a diverse range of women. This big Web site befits the big city it covers. http://www.uic.edu/jaddams/hull/urbanexp/ Brooklyn from Above is yet another site based on movies and photography, but don't hold that against it. This is an excellent concept. Visitors start with an aerial photomap of the sprawling Borough of Kings County, N.Y., otherwise and better known as Brooklyn. Clicking on selected areas zoom the perspective down to house and street level, where a simple legend indicates where you can view movies, stills, and fascinating 360-degree panoramas. The only drawback is the limited number of available images and the limited area - Greenpoint, barely considered Brooklyn by most Brooklynese - that this site covers. http://www.subterrain.com/brook01.html BBC's Country Profiles Come with a Chuckle or Two In the US, the British tendency towards understatement is seen as the backbone of English humor. The BBC News's Country Profiles pages unintentionally take this to a new level as a result of the need to be brief. Read, for example, the initial abstract for Ireland: "Although the history of Ireland has seen troubled times, its people have always been associated with a love of music, storytelling and a bit of craic, as a good time with friends is known." More detailed paragraphs follow, but that lede gave us a chuckle. Here's the beginning of the US entry: "The US is the world's foremost economic and military power. It is also a major source of entertainment...." Beyond unintended humor, you'll find a lot of info here, including population figures, income and trade numbers, and snapshots of current social issues in each country. In short, it's a friendlier face to the same data you can find in the CIA's more austere World Factbook.Country Profiles: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/country_profiles/default.stm World Factbook: http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/index.html Gnome Travels chronicles the adventures of the Rom Gnomes, a merry band of gnome musicians who struck out from the confines of a lush Seattle garden in search of their 15 minutes of fame. Humble beginnings as street buskers in Seattle necessitate the hiring of an agent, and then a second agent, who books them in New York City. Things snowball into a whirlwind tour of the US and a flurry of photo-ops with the likes of the President, Sting, and the Dalai Lama. Not to mention Dual Mountain Dolly, Kevin Costner and yes, the lads from Spinal Tap. Gnome Travels is a cute site, definitely worth a grin and a giggle. If you want more, try Travelocity's gnome mascot, part of a slick marketing campaign. Gnome Travels: http://www.troutdream.com/gnomes/ Travelocity: http://tinyurl.com/4b6pn Lookthung Music and Other Thai-ness It's been months since we've updated you on the latest lookthung news - OK, make that never, but we'll fix that. Fortunately, or unfortunately, you don't have to crawl through Bangkok bars to learn about Thailand's country-music scene. If you think Nashville has turned American country into big business, check out what Thai television and radio have done to the lookthung genre of songs formerly sung by workers in the rice fields. A dozen music and video clips showcase the biggest lookthung performers and explain how their live shows are moving to the recording studios. Another page memorializes the lovely and talented Pumpuang, one of lookthung's first stars, who died tragically at 31 after a life of public scandal and intrigue. For a truly strange clash of cultures, read about the farang (foreign) singers who've adopted lookthung as their own. Christy Gibson may not look Thai, but she packs 'em in at concerts. Keep clicking to Thai more on.http://home.wxs.nl/~hendr012/indexeng.htm ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT Lakota Winter-Counting Drawings Lakota Winter Counts is a fascinating online exhibition of Lakota record-keeping and historical and contemporary background into the lives of the Plains tribes. The winter count is a traditional form of calendar which measures the span of one year from first snowfall to first snowfall. Each given year was named for a specific event, generally the most memorable event, and a drawing depicting said event would be entered onto the winter count. For example, the year 1833 is remembered as the Year the Stars Fell - a reference to the Leonid meteor storm in November 1833. Lakota Winter Counts is a truly gorgeous site with a wealth of material from the Smithsonian collection. It's worth a peek for anyone with an interest in aboriginal cultures.http://wintercounts.si.edu/ If you think masks are for kids at Halloween, primitive tribesmen, and ancient Greek plays, think again. Eric Strawczynski is fascinated with masks and their ability to lend us all new faces. He's also pretty handy with cardboard and paint, and he makes the most amazing pieces of art to ever disguise any face. Some of his masks pay homage to great artists of the past, others use clever word play such as Ex Libris constructed from books and Cumulus composed of cloud shapes. Others simply exist as a result of Strawczynski's fertile imagination. Each mask is unique, just like each face, yet all spring with energy from the screen. It's hard to imagine someone remaining still for long while wearing one. Forums about each mask are largely filled with French commentary but perhaps that helps the French non-speakers among us to imagine reasons and wearers for these shields. http://www.ericstraw.com/ We've written about Eric Harshbarger's Lego tile creations four times now (NSDs 5.40, 9.04, 11.04, and 11.18), so we thought we ought to spread the wealth to other professional Lego artists, such as Nathan Sawaya. Sawaya gave up being a lawyer to go build for Legoland amusement park in California. Now he's given up that prestigious stint to go off on his own and freelance in creating stuff out of Lego tiles. He gets to do what he loves, and makes money doing it. You get a really cool piece of Lego art. It's a win-win situation. http://www.nathanbrickartist.com/ Modern dance is inaccessible to many. Others find that dance's display of raw emotion moves them. The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts has put together an interactive fictional account, including music and video, of a young dancer who joins the prestigious Martha Graham Dance Company. It will help young people understand what goes into creating a performance and helps adults understand how the emotionality becomes so expressive. Both groups, the moved and the perplexed, will find something to appreciate. http://www.artsedge.kennedy-center.org/marthagraham/ You might want to argue over the word "ugly" the FBI's Art Theft Program site uses to describe that criminal specialty. It's not nice, but at least it shows taste, no? You can't argue, however, with the FBI's stories of stolen and recovered art. The stories are short but interesting reading - but our random survey revealed that many more art thefts await resolution than are solved. While the agency has no specific art theft unit, it says it has agents that know their stuff. We suppose that's where an art history/police science double-major comes in. If the information on the FBI site stirs your interest in heisted treasures, or if you really can't believe that those ancient Mesopotamian artifacts on eBay can be legit, you might want to subscribe to Interpol's Stolen Works of Art CD-ROM, which lists 26,000 stolen art objects. FBI: http://www.fbi.gov/hq/cid/arttheft/arttheft.htm eBay: http://search.ebay.com/mesopotamian_W0QQfromZR8QQpqryZmesapotamian Interpol: http://www.interpol.int/Public/WorkOfArt/CDrom/default.asp Internet Movie Script Database The IMSDb is a treasure trove of movie scripts that spans a broad selection of genres. The site contains primarily Hollywood-produced scripts from the last 25 years and we will pay no attention to potential copyright violations. Samples include gems such as "Adaptation", "Trainspotting", and "Finding Nemo", and the list truly does go on. Of particular interest is the fact that none of the featured scripts are actual shooting scripts: many of these drafts came quite early in the process and it is fascinating to compare the writer's initial concepts to what eventually showed up as the finished product. Another point of interest is simply how much the craft of screenplay writing and, for that matter, script format has changed through the years. Witness the transformation from "Duck Soup" to "American Graffiti" to "Thelma and Louise" to "Sideways".http://www.imsdb.com/ BOOKS & E-ZINES If you grew up reading Erma Bombeck's columns, you probably never imagined that you'd visit her museum on a virtual information superhighway. Her family and the University of Dayton have stuffed an online archive with material about her life and her writing. You can view family photos of her wedding and her first house and hear her son Matt describe his unsuccessful attempts to teach his mom to use a computer. A text timeline traces her childhood and college years and shows how housecleaning piqued her sense of humor in the 1950s - a time when no newspaper editor believed that suburban domestic life merited sarcastic humor. If you've worn out your collection of Bombeck books but need to pass her wisdom to a new generation, the gift shop will help you track down texts. And did you know that she was a child tap-dancing star?http://www.ermamuseum.org/home.asp
SURFING SCIENCE Atlas of Our Changing Environment One Planet Many People is a sumptuous up-to-date look at the impact of natural processes and human activities on the environment. You can buy the large format 332-page book or look at it online in 17 big PDF files. The pages offer striking before and after satellite images of natural events such as volcanoes and tsunamis and vividly illustrate the effects of urbanization, energy consumption, and habitat loss. The colorful atlas includes 30 environmental case studies and many new environmental maps. It's a major work that belongs on your coffee table or computer monitor. The fact is, you can read tracts on environmental impact all you want, but looking at satellite images of the processes in effect provides a whole new perspective on the situation, literally and figuratively. Together, the pictures and accompanying text present a broad and fascinating overview of the environmental status of our planet.http://www.na.unep.net/OnePlanetManyPeople/index.php Our ancestors left Africa in a journey that would take them to the farthest ends of the Earth. Thanks to the science of genetics, we today are able to trace their paths and reveal the genetic footprints they left behind. This outstanding interactive atlas from National Geographic will help you understand the course of the great migrations undertaken by prehistoric humans and how we are able to follow their routes through the study of DNA traces. All human populations have in their cells one of the genetic markers traced here. The atlas timeline displays a series of illustrations of human remains and archeological sites. The site's creators also provide a section on general genetics to educate you on the principles of the workings of genes and chromosomes, on how we pass our characteristics on to our children, and on the structure of DNA. If your interest in your deep ancestry is thoroughly aroused, you can order through the Web site a Public Participation Kit to sample and submit your own DNA and discover your own genetic background. https://www5.nationalgeographic.com/genographic/ PBS and National Geographic have teamed up to present Strange Days on Planet Earth, a companion site to the TV series of the same name. Scientists hypothesize that we are in a time of global change that's occurinng more quickly than any human being has seen before. The series and site try to answer questions of where the planet is headed and whether we should do anything to alter the course of events. The site offers information on global warming, the effects of introduced species, and the results of predator elimination, among other topics. Should you care? What do the experts say? And why? Answer these and other questions with a visit to this evolving Flash-based outpost. http://www.pbs.org/strangedays/index_flash.html Anasazi Great Kiva Reconstruction The Chaco Anasazi, also called Chacoans, were among the most distinctive builders of their time and place - over a thousand years ago in the American Southwest. This tribe built large constructions known as kivas - the largest, the great kivas, measured as much as 30 meters in diameter. What was the purpose of these buildings? The folks who study these things suspect they were ritual centers that helped knit Anasazi communities together. The Sipapu site offers a number of ways to tour a virtual kiva, although these do not take advantage of actual photos - they rely on detailed renderings. In many cases, sound and text are added into the mix, allowing the casual visitor to grasp some of the significance associated with such places.http://sipapu.gsu.edu/html/kiva.html Amateur High-Altitude Ballooning Remember Larry "Lounge Chair" Walters and his impromptu entry into aviation history with little more than weather balloons and a pellet gun? It's likely that Mike Coffey and Dan Bowen of the University of Tennessee Amateur Radio Club (UTARC) do. Last month, after years of research and design (sort of), they launched a helium balloon with a payload of a recording package. Like Walters's odyssey, their launch didn't go precisely as planned and nearly ended in disaster. But unlike Walters, they documented their efforts with dozens of images and video clips. The balloon soared as high as 52,000 feet and floated over 90 miles while reporting GPS data to the chase crew over a radio link hacked together at the last minute. In fact, most of the system seems to have been hacked together at the last minute, which makes the results more impressive. UTARC lanched a second balloon earlier this month. Stay tuned for details. For more on Walters, see the Urban Legend Reference Pages (ULRP).UTARC: http://sunsite.utk.edu/~mcoffey/ux-1/ ULRP: http://www.snopes.com/travel/airline/walters.asp If, like Indiana Jones, you scorn snakes, this is not the place for you. However, those who are fascinated by unusual adaptations, zoology, and the science behind the animals of Asia should slither aboard - you're in for a high ride. Five species of tree-dwelling snakes from south and southeast Asia have the ability to "fly" from tree to tree by jumping, flattening their torsos, and gliding. It may make for sturdy hats and a lot of upward glances when you're trekking in their habitat but you have to admire their style. The Flying Snake Home Page has enough video footage to convince any skeptics plus surprisingly crisp images of the snakes in action and at rest. The longest flying snakes measure only four feet long, their bite is harmless to humans, and they've never actually landed on anybody's head. Indiana Jones can rest easy tonight. http://flyingsnake.org/ Amazing Not-Stupid Photography Tricks Light travels in reasonably straight rays, at least to our habitual frame of reference. That's the key to this extremely cool but ultimately pointless technology. Digital projectors project images the same way monitors or TVs do, with a beam that lights pixel by pixel at extremely fast speeds. It occurred to a group of genius-geeks that this scanning is the projection of a light ray through each pixel. If the projector projects just white light, a camera looking at a tangible scene it is illuminating can, if fast enough, record each pixel's worth of light. Now, since each of these pixel-rays travels a straight line, you can take what the camera records and follow the light rays' paths in reverse to reveal the scene as it appears from the projector's perspective. Waaay coooool. In terms of practical application, however, the process accomplishes nothing you can't more easily get by replacing the projector with a second camera. Skip the paper, but watch the 63-MB video. The card trick at the end is amazing.http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/dual_photography/ Travel at the speed of light seems boring when we're used to warp drives and hyperspeed on our screens. Anything's possible in science fiction. But if we could, say, drive through a city at nearly the speed of light, what would things look like? You never see any attempt at realism in the movies - it's usually just a bunch of stars stretched into light-producing line segments. Captains bellow "Engage!" and stars shoot past the windows. The real thing would be far different, and you can see how different at Space Time Travel, which shows you what it would look like if you sped through Tubingen, Germany on a light-speed scooter. While at the site, you can also cruise into a black hole without being stretched into spaghetti in the process - although that might not happen if time slows down. Aaah! Brain pretzel! http://www.spacetimetravel.org/index.html You love gadgets. It's just your way. You can't help it, nor prevent it - which is why you'll drop by and bookmark Design News after you take a look at its Gadget Freak archive. Among the gems you'll find are complete instructions on how to build your own penny slot machine. And we mean complete. The page even provides a full parts list and the microcontroller code needed to put it all together. Or maybe you'd just like to add some pizzazz to your school's pep rallies and games with a robotic mascot - again, complete instructions and parts lists are provided. Feed your inner geek, and if you want to see how you're doing geek-wise, try the Ultimate Engineer Game link in the left-hand column. http://tinyurl.com/23uyo SOFTWARE Microsoft Betas Acrylic Graphic Tool Microsoft's latest program, Acrylic, is meant to compete with Adobe's de facto graphic-industry standards Photoshop and Illustrator. Acrylic blends pixel-based image editing (the Photoshop part) with manipulation of vector-based graphics (what Illustrator does). Microsoft is inviting users to test the program, which is a rebranded version of software the company acquired in a 2003 takeover. Microsoft acknowledges Acrylic's slow performance, even on the relatively high-end system the company recommends for use. Early reviews have generally not been positive. Many users have commented on the Acrylic forums that the program lacks polish and compares poorly to its Adobe competition. The 77-MB download beta is for Windows only, and expires Oct. 1.http://www.microsoft.com/products/expression/ Debian Releases Debian Linux 3.1 "sarge" Linux users have been waiting since July 2002 for the venerable Debian distribution to release a new major update, so long that a next stable branch of Debian Linux rivaled Duke Nukem as the poster boy of promised but undelivered software. The latest release, codenamed "sarge", is the end result of Debian's insanely anal testing process. Debian puts nothing into the stable branch without meticulous oversight, both to find bugs and to make sure that it can be easily installed with its great "apt" update tools. Due to its stability and excellent backporting of security fixes, Debian is a favorite with people who run servers, though many users ignore the stable branch and keep up with the latest software packages via the constantly updated unstable branch. In recent months, and partly due to Debian's glacial update cycle, many desktop Linux users have switched to more frequently released but still Debian-based distributions such as Ubuntu. Read the release and install notes closely since there are a few gotchas if you're upgrading from Debian's previous Woody stable release.http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/ Red Hat Releases Fedora Core 4 Linux Red Hat Software has released the latest version of its Fedora Core Linux distribution. Fedora Core is an important Linux distribution since it serves as Red Hat's testbed for technologies that may eventually migrate into the company's commercial Enterprise Linux distributions. It is also popular with many desktop Linux users, though given the large number of customizations and quirks Red Hat introduces into its builds, Fedora Core tends to be more popular with Linux users who enjoy the bleeding edge of Linux software. In addition to PC machines, Fedora Core 2 can be installed on Macintosh hardware. Read the release notes for details on what's new.Fedora Core: http://fedora.redhat.com/ Release notes: http://fedora.redhat.com/docs/release-notes/fc4/ |
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