Habberhead writes "Some people are aware of the quest for a palindromic solution for the number 196. Basically any number that doesn't form a palindrome by reversing and adding its digits is known as a Lychrel Number. (Sequence Number A023108 of Sloan's On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences) The number 196 happens to be the first of them. In over a year's worth of time, and more than 2 quadrillion calculations, this guy at www.p196.org has reversed and added the number over 100 MILLION times. His current answer is over 41 million digits long! Apparently he and a few others are also working on a distributed computing program for finding larger and larger Lychrel Numbers. It looks like they have in mind a Seti@Home style program with visible results."

Cephalien writes "As reported by Reuters (The link is from AT&T Worldnet -- No registration required, etc, etc), looks like congress has pushed this through against Nevada's objections (NIMBY, anyone?). Now all that's left is the licensing from the NRC. I dunno about you folks, but I'm glad I don't live in Nevada." After 20 years in the making and 4 billion in studies construction on the $58b facility can begin. It was this or Cmdrtacos basement.

JewFish writes "Dr. Bjarne Stroustrup, designer and implementer of the C++ programming language is switching jobs. He has accepted the COE Endowed Chair in Computer Science at Texas A&M University. The fulfillment of this fulltime position was announced today by the head of the computer science department. Now that Dr. Stroustrup will be on faculty I sure hope they start offering a C++ course or two."

joelav22 writes: "I've got to move to San Francisco! RCN has upgraded current customers to 3 megabits of bandwith for no extra charge. In the days of all the bandwith chopping and caps, this is definitely a welcome trend. I hope ATT and Comcast can take a hint."

311Stylee writes: "Wow. I've never even heard of this before, but it looks genuine with a writeup on MSNBC and Space.com . Existing technology is used to measure sea temperatures through clouds via satellite, but newer cameras could be used in a huge array of applications because of their ability to see through walls, clothing, smoke and clouds. Google gets 546 hits on T-rays, inlcuding one from AT+T Bell Labs."

MBCook writes: "It appears that AT&T broadband doesn't like it when customers own their own cable modem. According to this article at ZDNet, ATT will be 'changing' their prices for all users. If you own your own cable modem, your bill is going up $7. If you lease your cable modem, you end up paying the same ammount you were before. I guess AT&T likes to milk it's customers. If I don't have a long distance service with any phone company, I have to pay for the privilage of not depending on them. Now I'll have to pay for the privilage of not depending on AT&T for a modem?"

P800guy writes "Psion Place has a review of the SonyEricsson P800 available in Q3, this looks to be the best PDA/phone combined in the world. Running Symbian OS v7.0, 208x320 color touchscreen, triple-band GSM compatible, Multimedia Messaging (MMS), Bluetooth, GPRS always-on internet connection, built-in digital camera, support for HTML, xHTML, Java, iMode, WAP, Word, Excel, PPT. Check out the pictures, open, closed. In the US it'll work on Voicestream, ATT Wireless, and Cingular just don't expect it to be offically supported from day 1 of release." Getting closer- now if it just had a few gigs of memory for MP3s ;)

NexUK writes "Guardian Online has an article about the imminent closure of the UK based AT&T lab , the place that brought us VNC, the popular desktop remote control system. The article talks about a nice "Toys" budget where the employees could buy gadgets without prior authorization." AT&T Strikes again, I'm surprised they haven't bought PARC and closed it down too.

rgmoore writes "The Los Angeles Times is running an interesting article on the impact of DVDs on the movie making process. They briefly mention the possibilities of end-users being able to re-edit the movie (with a veiled reference to The Phantom Edit) but focus more on the way that it's starting to influence directors and producers during the course of making the movie."

michael_cain writes: "Multichannel News is reporting that the FCC has ruled that cable companies providing high-speed data service do not need to provide access to competing ISPs. Depending on whom you believe, this should lead to either (a) more rapid rollout of cable modem service since the cable companies don't have to share the revenues or (b) cable companies limiting the content and services you can reach over their IP infrastructure." And an Anonymous Coward writes: "Excite is running an article indicating that the FCC has exempted cable internet companies from having to share their lines to competition. Unlike telephone companies, cable companies are required only to share their lines when specifically told to by the government. As a condition of the AOL Time Warner merger, that company was forced to offer its consumers a choice of Internet service providers on its high-speed lines. Thursday's vote, classifying cable Internet as an "information service" rather than a telecommunications service that is subject to the open-access provision, makes sure that cable companies won't have to share anytime soon."

michael_cain asks: "Due to a large corporate merger, we're in the process of combining two technical organizations with radically different structures. One has lots of very specific job titles ('Senior Assistant Software Engineer for Icons and Buttons'), each with a specific description and a very narrow compensation range. The other has essentially one non-management title ('Member of Technical Staff') with a wide range of compensation. I admit to a bias due to more than twenty years in a single-title structure, but believe that said structure makes it easier to compensate people and teams based on their contribution, to encourage staff to learn new skills and grow, and to shift resources to meet changing business needs. The merged human resources group tends to favor the rigid title-driven structure. Which would you prefer?" I'm a firm believer in the old addage: less complicated something is, the better. I think this would apply to organizational structures just as well as it does for code. Thoughts?

jonerik writes: "MSNBC has this article about AT&T's frustration with the increasing quantity and sophistication of spam traffic. As has been noted here already, much of it these days is originating from Asia and, according to the article, 'now represents 20 percent of all e-mail floating around the Internet.'"

Red Roo writes: "This online article addresses the recent criticism of Gnutella network scalability by pointing out that it is a Cayley tree. As a viable candidate for massively scalable P2P bandwidth, all trees are dead! But by going to higher dimensional virtual networks (aka "hypernets") e.g., hypercubes or hypertori, near linear scalability can be achieved for P2P populations on the order of several million peers each with only 20 open connections. This concept seems to have been entirely overlooked by critics and developers alike."

Kancer was among the many readers to write with news (as carried by the Boston Globe) that "'beginning next month through March 15, current subscribers with (username)@mediaone.net addresses will be required to change them over to an address ending in attbi.com.' Also 'After March 15, any mail sent to a mediaone.net address will be rejected.' What a pain, looks like they are taking down pop mail and replacing it with web-based e-mail as well."

ergo98 asks: "About a year ago I had the need to evaluate XML compression technologies (for a project where two machines had to communicate via XML document, and there was an excess of CPU power and a dearth of bandwidth): At the time the best option seemed to be a research project called XMill, however it seemed even then to be an abandoned project with no more updates and little market presence, and was only source available as a command line utility requiring reworking into library form. I'm curious if there's been any progress in the XML compression arena in the past year: If you have more CPU power than bandwidth what is the best option for XML document compression? Has any XML specific compression algorithms been made as a module for Apache?"

Slashback this evening brings you news and updates on several previous stories, including (not limited to) @home service, Linuxgruven, and some followups to Slashdot book reviews.

quualudes was one of the many people to submit the AT&T Broadband/Comcast merger. CNNfn has more of the story as well. 72$ billion is the cost. Wow. I wonder how this affects @Home. One alert reader also submitted the news that Comcast will evidently by launching a video gaming channel - more information will be coming in February 2002.

Slashback with ever more on ... the massive bust of illegal software producers reported on last week, the gaping security hole moaned at by those confined to the Microsoft asylum, another review of the new Linux+Java Zaurus from Sharp, and how to get the binary watch you've always wanted. Enjoy!

aruil writes: "MSNBC has a story reporting on yet another audio fingerprinting application. Next year, Royal Philips Electronics will begin selling licenses to allow users to identify songs using their cell phones. Similar technology has already been open-sourced in FreeAmp, which uses the Relatable engine."

thumbtack writes: "In the neverending story of the @home saga it's being reported (on the Excite Portal which is not going under) that AT&T has broken off their bid to purchase Excite@home assets. They cite a number of significant contractual breaches and other violations by the bankrupt broadband Internet access company. In another related story Comcast and Cox say they have inked separate $160 million dollar deals to continued service while they develop their own networks. AT&T say that as of Tuesday morning they have moved 500,000 of their subscribers over to their network."