Opera Watch writes “Opera Software today announced that it would offer free licenses to higher education institutions. This is a change from the previous cost

of $1000 (US) for unlimited licenses. It remains to be seen, however, whether Opera will allow schools to give standard Opera licenses to
students to use on personal computers/laptops within campus at no additional cost, that came with the $1000 license fee. This comes after
a respected university advised its students not to use Internet Explorer, for its lack of security. Opera Software said they are doing so in an effort to meet the student and university need for security on the Internet.”

Slashdot | Opera Offers Free Licenses For Educational Use

UnderScan writes “Eric Ries, writer/programmer/CTO, authored an article ‘Kenosis and the World Free Web‘ at Freshmeat [Owned by Slashdot's Parent OSTG]. Kenosis is described as a ‘fully-distributed peer-to-peer RPC system built on top of XMLRPC.’ He has combined his Kenosis with BitTorrent & removed the need for a centralized tracker. He states: ‘To demonstrate Kenosis’s suitability for these new applications, we have used it to improve upon another peer-to-peer filesharing application that Just Works: BitTorrent. BitTorrent does one thing incredibly well. Using a centralized “tracker,” BitTorrent manages efficient distribution of data that is in high demand. We have extended BitTorrent, using Kenosis, to eliminate this dependence on a centralized tracker.’ See also the Kenosis README for details on using Kenosis-enabled BitTorrent.”

Slashdot | Decentralize BitTorrent with Kenosis

CmdrTaco of Slashdot writes “A number of announcements from the Mac World keynote
this afternoon. The iPod Shuffle is pack-of-gum sized, no screen, weighs less than an ounce. Ships today, $99 for the half gig, $149 for
a gig. The Mac Mini is the headless iMac… 6x6x2.5 with all the expected plugs, starting at $499. Lot’s of tiger bits, spotlight, virtual folders in Mail.app. iLife ’05 will ship Jan 22. iPhoto gets folders and video support. iMovie supports HD. GarageBand gets 8 channel recording. iWork includes Keynote 2, and ‘Pages’ the new word processor and ships the same day as iLife.”

Slashdot | iPod Shuffle, Mac Mini, iLife ’05, iWork

mindpixel writes “The Scotsman is reporting that the Japanese are very confident they can build a robotic team that will win the World Cup by 2050 using a descendent of the 38cm tall VisiON which operates completely independently of human input, making its own decisions based on information that it perceives with its 360 degree vision, and is able to recognise the football, approach it and deliver a hefty kick. It is also able to identify an opponent and shield the ball in much the same way as a human player does.”

Slashdot | Robot Makers Say World Cup Will Be Theirs By 2050

Slashdot reader Kris_J writes “The makers of the (classic) compression package Stuffit have written a program that can compress JPGs by roughly 30%.
This isn’t the raw image to JPG compression, this is lossless compression applied to the JPG file. Typical compression rates for JPGs are 2% to -1%. If you read the whitepaper (PDF), they are even proposing a new image format; StuffIt Image Format (SIF). Now I just need someone to write a SIF compressor for my old Kodak DC260.”

Slashdot | Breakthrough In JPEG Compression