TheInquirer: “Visitors downloading files from Microsoft’s Japanese Web site got an unexpected surprise yesterday morning – the Nimda worm appearing in their inboxes.”

Linus: “More merging..

Btw, my mailbox is overflowing – for some reason I’m now on the cc list of
what appears to be a few hundred independent small diskcussions (but I’m
sure it’s just a dozen or so), and if your patch is missing from pre13,
please don’t send it again immediately. I’m trying to catch up with the
mail flood, and while you can _almost_ assume that if your patch isn’t in
pre13 it’s gone (and should be re-sent), please wait with the re-send for
a few days.”

linux-2.4.10-pre13
Date: Thu, 20 Sep 2001 21:25:01 -0700 (PDT)
From: Linus Torvalds 
To: Kernel Mailing List 


More merging..

Btw, my mailbox is overflowing - for some reason I'm now on the cc list of
what appears to be a few hundred independent small diskcussions (but I'm
sure it's just a dozen or so), and if your patch is missing from pre13,
please don't send it again immediately. I'm trying to catch up with the
mail flood, and while you can _almost_ assume that if your patch isn't in
pre13 it's gone (and should be re-sent), please wait with the re-send for
a few days.

I'm concentrating on trying to merge existing patches (ie mainly -ac), and
on getting the VM issues sorted out, anything else pretty much got dropped
the last few days (and expect them to get dropped for a few more days at
least).

                 Linus

----
pre13:
 - Manfred Spraul: /proc/pid/maps cleanup (and bugfix for non-x86)
 - Al Viro: "block device fs" - cleanup of page cache handling
 - Hugh Dickins: VM/shmem cleanups and swap search speedup
 - Andrea Arkangeli, Andrew Morton etc: various VM fixes
 - David Miller: sparc updates, soc driver typo fix, net updates
 - Jeff Garzik: network driver updates (dl2k, yellowfin and tulip)
 - Neil Brown: knfsd cleanups and fixues
 - Ben LaHaise: zap_page_range merge from -ac

LinuxPlanet: “One of the topics I have been watching with increasing interest is this debate on how Linux is or is not ready for the desktop. Granted, this debate
was raging before I took my hiatus, but I have a new perspective on the situation having spent a lot of time playing around with the new Windows
and Office XP products.”

John Wheeler writes: “I am a 22 year old programmer for the county of Riverside, CA. My brother, also a programmer, inspired me when he said he has decided to volunteer his time programming for the government in light of the events that occured on September 11. I searched “army volunteer” on Google and came up with a cached copy of this page: www.orn.usace.army.mil/volunteer/ which gave me this phone number: 1-800-885-8337 for the Army Clearinghouse–a place you can call to volunteer time doing various things including programming. The state of information technology during the time of any other nationwide crisis pales in comparision to its current state. How can we leverage our skills to aid our nation in its time of need? Are other developers like myself willing to volunteer?”

– by Tina Gasperson –
Scott Draves was kicking back one night, enjoying some relaxation and friendship and watching a video of a fractal flame animation, when the idea for electric sheep, a distributed screen saver that makes real-time animations of fractal flames, was born.His Web site, electricsheep.org, showcases many of the hauntingly beautiful flames that are created on the fly with this GPLed application. Draves’ page is the destination on the ‘Net for fractal flame examples and software.

An Adobe AfterEffects plugin called AeFlame is based on Draves’ original work with the flame render engine. But the screensaver idea is by far the most intriguing offering. Draves and his friend Nick Thompson sat and “fantasized about realtime animation, but computers are still 1,000 times too slow” to create realistic animations of the complicated fractal images, says Draves. “The idea dawned on us: put a bunch of computers together via the Internet, like seti@home, but creating beauty instead of wasting cycles.”

At the time, Draves says, it was just idle chat. But shortly after that, he left his job as a software engineer at Transmeta and suddenly had the time to make the fantasy come true. “It took me a week to write the first version. It was good enough to release and get
the project going. It was also the first perl program that I had written from scratch.”

The screensaver gets its name from Philip K. Dick’s novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? — and Draves says of it, “it realizes the collective dream of sleeping computers from all over the Internet.”

Here’s how it works: When the screensaver is activated, the computer connects to a remote server as a client, and joins in with other computer in creating animations of fractal flames. Every 15 minutes, a new “sheep” or flame animation, is distributed to every client, and that sheep is displayed in the screensaver.

Draves’ site displays some examples of the computer-generated artwork, as well as links to RPMs and source code for the program. On the status page, you can check to see if the server is up, and look at the current sheep.

Draves has just taken a leave of absence from his current job in order to concentrate fully on adopting a new video codec for the engine, which will increase the size of the graphic display. He’s open to suggestions. “If anyone can recommend a video codec that is fully open source (coder and decoder) and handles high bitrate (640×480 30fps high quality) please point me at it! Compression ratio is not as important as quality and fast playback.”

He is grateful for the support he’s received so far, but is quick to point out that the project can always use some help. “Paul Graham made a very generous donation of cash to support this project, and more of the same would make a big difference! The web hosting is provided by Dean Gaudet’s arctic.org online community. Dean is an old-school apache developer. And some of the heavy lifting of the hosting of the mpeg files is provided by cs.cmu.edu.”

The help forum is bustling. Questions and requests for help get quick response from Draves and others. The file is small and easy to install if you have the apps it depends on to run. Just one thing: I wouldn’t recommend electricsheep for those who are actually trying to get some shuteye — these animated fractal flames are just too gorgeous to take your eyes off of. You’ll want to keep your hands off the keyboard just to keep that screensaver going.

Ian Bell writes “Designtechnica does a preview of a new technological product called Electronics Ink. Imagine a paper thin LCD display that uses less than a 1/4 of the energy required for an LCD. If you have ever seen the movie Red Planet where Val Kilmer rolls out a paper thin LCD map, then you know what I am talking about.”

From ZDNet: “Microsoft on Oct. 1 will dramatically change how it licenses software to its largest customers. That change will drive up what they pay for products such as Office XP or Windows 2000 between 33 percent and 107 percent, according to market researcher Gartner.”

ZDNet reports that “Sony has unveiled what it claims is the world’s smallest network digital camcorder, measuring the length of a handheld computer and weighing less than 11 ounces” or 700 grams.

From PC World: “More than a year after it first offered the world a peak at its upcoming tablet PC, Taiwan’s First International Computer will soon begin mass production of the device.”

From PC World: “Looking to charm home users leery of the complexities of networking, Compaq has released an entire suite of iPaq-branded networking products that it says makes home networking simple.”