Dice Fivefold - Slashdot User

Comment Hmm, for us non-Americans... (Score 1) 146

by Dice Fivefold on Wednesday October 28, 2009 @01:18AM (#29893421) Attached to: New DoD Memo On Open Source Software

When I contribute to OSS projects I like to think of it as doing some work for the good of the global community. What I don't like to think of it as, is to work for a foreign military for no pay. Actually I think i rather have foreign military spend some more on programmers and have less over to spend on bombs and soliders.

Is there some alternative OSS license that don't allow the software to be used for military purposes?

Comment Full article (Score 1) 117

by Dice Fivefold on Tuesday July 21, 2009 @07:22AM (#28767869) Attached to: Making Cesium Atoms Do a Quantum Walk

You can get the full article from the arxive:

http://arxiv1.library.cornell.edu/abs/0907.1565

It is really a beautiful experiment. I have never seen such a demonstration of how deterministic the propagation of the wavefunction is. By simply running the experiment backwards they manage to get the atom to go back to it's initial position in the walk.

Comment Availibe for Gutsy? (Score 1) 488

by Dice Fivefold on Friday April 03, 2009 @01:09PM (#27447547) Attached to: VLC 0.9.9, The Best Media Player Just Got Better

Does anyone know where or if it's even possible to find a binary of vlc 0.9.9 for gutsy gibbon? The one in ubuntus repositories is very dated.

Attempting To Reframe "KDE Vs. GNOME" 455

Posted by kdawson on Monday March 30, 2009 @05:00AM from the evolution-revolution dept.

jammag writes "Setting aside the now tired debate about whether KDE or GNOME is the 'better' Linux desktop, Bruce Byfield compares their disparate development approaches and asks, not which desktop is subjectively better, but which developmental approach is likely to be most successful in the next few years. 'In the short term, GNOME's gradualism seems sensible. But, in the long-term, it could very well mean continuing to be dragged down by support for legacy sub-systems. It means being reduced to an imitator rather than innovator.' In contrast, 'you could say that KDE has done what's necessary and ripped the bandage off the scab. In the short term, the result has been a lot of screaming, but, in the long term, it has done what was necessary to thrive.'"

Linux Kernel Benchmarks, 2.6.24-2.6.29 38

Posted by timothy on Tuesday March 24, 2009 @06:30PM from the impressive-span dept.

Ashmash writes "Phoronix has posted benchmarks of the Linux kernel from versions 2.6.24 to 2.6.29. They ran a number of desktop benchmarks from the Phoronix Test Suite on each of the six kernels on an Ubuntu host with an Intel Core 2 processor. The points they make with the new Linux 2.6.29 kernel are 1. there's a regression with 7-Zip compression 2. OpenSSL has improved significantly 3. a regression drastically impacting the SQLite performance has been fixed 4. the OpenMP GraphicsMagick performance is phenomenally better with this new kernel. In all of their other tests, the kernel performance was the roughly the same."

The Ouroborus 67

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday January 15, 2009 @02:14PM from the stop-eating dept.

If I could do this I'd never leave the house.

Black Holes Lead Galaxy Growth 50

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday January 06, 2009 @10:03PM from the why-did-the-galaxy-cross-the-road dept.

The AAS meeting in San Diego is producing lots of news on the astronomy front. Studying galaxies that were forming in the universe's first billion years, astronomers have solved a longstanding cosmic chicken-and-egg problem: which forms first, galaxies or the black holes at their cores? "'We finally have been able to measure black-hole and bulge masses in several galaxies seen as they were in the first billion years after the Big Bang, and the evidence suggests that the constant ratio seen nearby may not hold in the early Universe. The black holes in these young galaxies are much more massive compared to the bulges than those seen in the nearby Universe,"' said Fabian Walter of the Max-Planck Institute for Radioastronomy in Germany. 'The implication is that the black holes started growing first.'"

Is There a Cyberwar, and Is the US Losing It? 320

Posted by CmdrTaco on Monday December 08, 2008 @09:48AM from the who-will-oil-the-computers-of-the-future dept.

kenblakely writes "BusinessWeek is running a story asserting that the 'US is Losing the Global Cyberwar.' This whole cyberwar thing has been discussed a few times on Slashdot where the Chinese are asserted to be using cyberwarfare to attain military superiority. And, of course, there is the whole Russia-Georgia thing. Even the US military is getting in on the action, and the fear of a cyber Pearl Harbor seems almost palpable. I'm curious what the Slashdot crowd thinks about the growing fascination with 'cyberwar': hype to get more money and create new force structure, source of the next world war, or somewhere in between?"

Comment Use these hacker for good instead (Score 1) 408

by Dice Fivefold on Thursday October 02, 2008 @01:14PM (#25235143) Attached to: Now Google's CAPTCHA Is Broken

A guy that can write AI to crack captchas, clearly can be used to write spam filters instead.

Submission + - Study finds link between fear & Conservative v

Submitted by Y.A.A.P. on Thursday September 18, 2008 @04:05PM

Y.A.A.P. writes: NewScientist has an article about a study that links fear response and threat sensitivity with Conservative or Liberal views. The study found those who identified themselves as social Conservatives had a stronger response to fear stimuli and greater threat sensitivity. The article goes on to draw a stronger political connection, but I'll just note that this shows strong reasoning behind why fear-mongering has worked so well for Republicans in elections in the past few decades.

Submission + - AskSlashdot: Crisis

Submitted by Dice Fivefold on Thursday September 18, 2008 @08:30AM

Dice Fivefold writes: Whos fault is the current US financial crisis?

*************************************
Not part of submission:

It's simple question that I think would lead to a nice discussion. This is just a filler text to let the submission through the slashdot system.

****************************************

Can I Be Fired For Refusing To File a Patent? 617

Posted by kdawson on Sunday August 17, 2008 @04:02AM from the if-you-don't-cooperate-your-replacement-will dept.

An anonymous reader writes "I am a developer for a medium-sized private technology company getting ready for an IPO. My manager woke up one morning and decided to patent some stuff I did recently. The problem is, I'm strongly opposed to software patents, believing that they are stifling innovation and dragging the technology industry down (see all the frivolous lawsuits reported here on Slashdot!). Now, my concern is: what kind of consequences could I bring on myself for refusing to support the patent process? Has anybody been in a similar position and what was the outcome?"

Sweden's Snoop Law Targets Russia 186

Posted by timothy on Wednesday July 09, 2008 @03:42PM from the well-then-it's-ok dept.

praps writes "There's been much controversy lately over Sweden's new law which allows the signal intelligence agency (FRA) to monitor all data traffic within the country's borders. The Swedish government has kept curiously quiet about the new law's objectives but sources close to the intelligence community say that Russia is the prime target. '"80 percent of Russia's contacts with large parts of the world travel through cables in Sweden. That is the core of the issue," said one source.'" Related: EuroConcerned writes "Many things are happening in Sweden after the new legislation on wiretapping has been voted. TorrentFreak has an article on what's going on, including massive protests and Google moving their servers away from the country."

Unreleased Atari 2600 Game Found At Flea Market 253

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday April 22, 2008 @04:01AM from the once-in-a-lifetime dept.

VonGuard writes "I was at the flea market in Oakland yesterday when a pile of EPROMs caught my eye. When I got them home I found that they were prototypes for Colecovision games. A few were unpublished or saw limited runs, like Video Hustler (billiards). Others were fully released, like WarGames. But the crown jewel is what look to be a number of chips with various revisions of Cabbage Patch Kids Adventures in the Park for Atari 2600. This game was never released and has never been seen. It was a port of the version for Colecovision, and this lot of chips also included the Coleco version. So now I have to find someone who can dump EPROMs gently onto a PC so we can play this never-before seen game, which is almost certainly awful."

Senator Proposes to Monitor All P2P Traffic for Illegal Files 626

Posted by Zonk on Thursday April 17, 2008 @09:19AM from the kind-of-strains-the-mind-to-think-about-huh dept.

mytrip writes "Senator Joe Biden (D-Del) has proposed an ambitious plan, costing on the order of $1 billion, aimed at curtailing illegal activities via P2P networks. His plan involves utilizing new software to monitor peer-to-peer traffic on an ongoing basis. 'At an afternoon Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing about child exploitation on the Internet, Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.) said he was under the impression it's "pretty easy to pick out the person engaged in either transmitting or downloading violent scenes of rape, molestation" simply by looking at file names. He urged use of those techniques by investigators to help nab the most egregious offenders."

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