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The Internet

Submission + - Dilbert goes Flash and readers revolt

Submitted by
spagiola
spagiola writes: "The Dilbert.com website just got an extreme makeover. Gone is the old, rather clunky but perfectly functional, website, replaced by a Flash-heavy website that only Mordac the Preventer of Information Services could love. Users have been pretty unanimous in condemning the changes. Among the politer comments: "Congrats. Vista is no more lonely at the top in the Competition For The Worst Upgrade In Computing Industry, this web site upgrade being a serious contender." You have to register to leave comments, but many seem to have registered for the express purpose of panning the new design."
Google

Hackontest — 24h Open Source Coding Marathon 50

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the room-full-of-doritos-and-mountain-dew dept.
maemst writes "Can you code 24 hours non-stop? Hackontest is a new Google-sponsored 24-hour programming competition between different open source projects. Its goals are to enhance Free Software projects according to user needs and to make visible how enthusiastically open source software is being developed. During the current online selection process users and developers of open source software may submit feature requests and rate and comment them. On August 1st, 2008 the Hackontest jury will pick the three most promising teams. Each team will receive a free trip to Switzerland on September 24/25, 2008 to participate in the competition located in Zurich. Hacking 24 hours inside an etoy.CONTAINER, the teams and their virtually present communities will implement certain features based on the online ratings and jury selection. In the end, the Hackontest jury evaluates the code and awards the winners with a total of USD 8500. The jury is made up of 10 renowned open source contributors: Jeremy Alison (Samba), Jono Bacon (Ubuntu), Brian W. Fitzpatrick (Subversion), Martin F. Krafft (Debian), Alexander Limi (Plone), Federico Mena-Quintero (GNOME), Bram Moolenaar (vim), Bruce Perens (OSI founder), Lukas K. Smith (PHP) and Harald Welte (gpl-violations.org)."
Announcements

Submission + - Piratebay: All your cops belong to MPAA

Submitted by eiapoce
eiapoce writes: The guys operating piratebay discovered that the "Chief police investigator in Pirate Bay trial [is] employed by the copyright industry"

Short version, the chief behing the preliminary investigaton at piratebay is now a Warner Bros employee. The discovery comes through his facebook profile and has been confirmed. According to the operators at piratebay this is a another signal that "The copyright industry stands no chance in an objective legal judgement and therefore have to cheat their way forward."

Original Blog article here: http://static.thepiratebay.org/pm/20080418_eng.txt
Intel

Submission + - Performance comparison of all Intel Core 2 CPUs (techarp.com)

Submitted by
crazyeyes
crazyeyes writes: "Intel has way too many Core 2 processor models. No one really knows if it's worth paying $100 more for a Core 2 Quad, instead of a Core 2 Duo. And when tech websites start interjecting codenames like Wolfdale, Kentsfield and Yorkfield, you know the battle is lost.

All we want is a simple guide on the REAL WORLD performance differences between the many Intel Core 2 processors. How do they perform in games like Crysis, 3D rendering software, video encoding software, etc.? Fortunately, there is such a guide — just simple comparisons of the relative performance of these CPUs. You will want to bookmark this link . It's a keeper."
Math

Submission + - Edward Lorenz Has Died

Submitted by Aglassis
Aglassis writes: Professor Edward Lorenz whose discovery that minute changes in the initial conditions of some non-linear dynamical systems can lead to large divergences passed away on Wednesday at the age of 90. The coiner of the "butterfly effect" discovered in 1961 that a computer model of a weather system displayed seemingly random behavior when the initial conditions were perturbed by small amounts even though the system was deterministic. This discovery resulted in the foundation of chaos theory. Another contribution Professor Lorenz made to chaos theory was the discovery of strange attractors. In being awarded the Kyoto Prize in 1991 it was said of Professor Lorenz that his discovery of chaos theory "profoundly influenced a wide range of basic sciences and brought about one of the most dramatic changes in mankind's view of nature since Sir Isaac Newton".
Linux Business

Submission + - Jealousy? Novell, Red Hat, and the Linux Desktop (reviewk.com)

Submitted by
desmondhaynes
desmondhaynes writes: " Tecwatcher writes in this blog Recently, both Novell and Red Hat went on record as dismissing the idea that the consumer Linux desktop is going to be taking off anytime soon. It's not? Has anyone told Asus and Xandros? Everex and gOS? How about Dell and Ubuntu? They're all doing great with consumer Linux desktops. Novell actually isn't taking an extreme position on the consumer Linux desktop. Novell CEO Ron Hovsepian on April 15th in India, according to an InfoWorld report, simply said that the consumer market is taking longer to develop than the business market and that "The market for the desktop for the next three to five years is mainly enterprise-related." OK, fair enough. I think the consumer Linux desktop is growing faster than he does, but he's certainly right when he says that the Linux desktop is going to grow faster still in business. I mean, there must be some enterprises moving to Microsoft Vista, I just don't happen to know of any. For businesses that want a desktop upgrade and get ill at the very thought of dealing with Vista's woes, SLED (SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop) 10 SP1 deserves serious consideration. That's especially true since businesses can now buy SLED pre-installed on Lenovo ThinkPads and the HP Mini. Red Hat, though, in their announcement that they were giving up on their consumer Linux desktop plans went overboard. In their blog post, the Red Hat desktop team declared, "The desktop market suffers from having one dominant vendor, and some people still perceive that today's Linux desktops simply don't provide a practical alternative." And this is news how? Linux, not just the desktop, but the now popular server, still suffered from fools that don't realize it's a mature, business and home ready operating system. If Red Hat had started out with a similar attitude when the company started that Microsoft and the Unix companies had too strong a hold on servers and that people didn't understand Linux could work for them, Red Hat would be long dead. If you don't believe in your product, how can you expect anyone else to? The Red Hat desktop team then went on, "Of course, a growing number of technically savvy users and companies have discovered that today's Linux desktop is indeed a practical alternative. Nevertheless, building a sustainable business around the Linux desktop is tough, and history is littered with example efforts that have either failed outright, are stalled or are run as charities." Sure, it's tough. Selling anything new is always tough. Most businesses, whether it's selling pizzas or operating systems fail. If you can't deal with it, go get a job flipping burgers. But, here's the point Red Hat, there are businesses working with the Linux desktop that have not failed, not stalled and, frankly, I'm not even what you're talking about when you mention charities. OLPC (One Laptop per Child)? The project is meant to do good, but it's also meant to pay for its own. The OLPC sells XO laptops, it doesn't give them away. In fact, if you follow what's been happening with the Linux desktop, you'll see it's doing great. Asus sold 300-thousand of its Eee PC series running Xandros Linux last year. This year, the Taiwanese company expects to sell 2-million of them. Sounds to me like desktop Linux is doing pretty darn good for them. Everex hasn't released numbers for its gOS-powered gPCs, but from all reports this Google-oriented Linux PC is doing quite well. Dell's been selling some of its PCs with Ubuntu Linux for closing in on a year now. While, Dell won't give out sales numbers either, as Todd Weiss reports in ComputerWorld, Dell spokesperson Anne Camden said, A [sales] number is not going to validate it as much as our actions to date." Those actions have been to continue to add new Ubuntu-powered models like the Dell Inspiron 1525 and updating their systems with Ubuntu 7.10 and the ability to play DVDs.. Those are just the big success stories. You also have major retailers like Amazon, Best Buy and Sears now selling pre-installed Linux PCs. And, thanks to the Vista flop, Windows PC sales are actually declining. Put it all together and what do you get? You get the best time ever for the consumer Linux desktop to gain customers' attention. So, why is Novell lukewarm and Red Hat downright cool about home Linux? read rest of the story here"
Networking

Submission + - FBI and next-generation P2P network monitoring (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by AHuxley
AHuxley writes: Can the FBI get funding to create a next-generation network monitoring and database system for P2P networks, web sites, and chat rooms?
Could the FBI's Regional Information Sharing Systems (RISS) network be opened to more law enforcement agents across the USA?
Will the tracking of p2p users via "unique serial numbers" generated from a from the person's computer be expanded from its first use in late 2005?
Is your p2p application or plug in sending back your MAC address, firmware revision, manufacture date, GUID or other details?
Sun Microsystems

Submission + - boot support from ZFS root fs on x86 and SPARC (opensolaris.org)

Submitted by
Derkjan de Haan
Derkjan de Haan writes: "I am glad to see progress is being made on the the ability to boot from a ZFS filesystem:
This putback provides the ability to boot the Solaris Operating System from a ZFS root file system on both x86 and SPARC platforms. Full ZFS boot and install support will be available in a subsequent build. Because of the phased putback, we recommend waiting for the full boot and install support rather than attempting to use the ZFS boot features separately."
Security

Submission + - iPhone Skyhook location information can be spoofed

Submitted by mspohr
mspohr writes: In a news article from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich http://www.ethlife.ethz.ch/archive_articles/080417_WiFi_location_spoofing/index_EN

"The System Security Group, led by Professor Srdjan Capkun, at ETH Zurich's Department of Computer Science (D-INFK) has demonstrated that positions displayed on any device using a new self-localization system can be falsified, and so are unsuitable for security or safety-critical applications. But the group also proposes mechanisms that could potentially address the problem."

The Skyhook system is used by iPhone, iPod touch and others.

Feed Techdirt: Creative Labs Stops Guy From Making Its Technology Work Better (techdirt.com)

From feed by techdirtfeed
It appears that Creative Labs is the latest company to shoot itself in the foot over "intellectual property" issues. Apparently, many users have been upset that Creative has failed to support certain systems, and a user in the Creative Labs' forums started releasing drivers to make things actually work or work better. Creative struck back and has removed the various threads in their forums discussing these drivers (thanks to Joe for sending in the link). Basically, this user, Daniel_K was making Creative products work better, and Creative has forced him to stop, claiming that it's violating their intellectual property rights. From a legal standpoint, Creative is probably absolutely right. But from a business perspective, the move seems suicidal. Just read a few of the comments in the long thread following the announcement from Creative. Many people were buying Creative products because of Daniel's mods, and will now look elsewhere. This seems like yet another case of IP laws being used to hold back innovation, rather than encourage it.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story


Programming

Submission + - Why developers can't develop for Symbian phones?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: To develop Symbian applications, you need a developer certificate, a publisher ID... and lots of patience.
The Symbian Signed website is not working for more than one month and angry developers posts are pilling up in their forums.
Their excuse is that some developers are publishing unsigned applications and asking end users to get developer certificates to sign their applications themselves... they argue this generated so much traffic that their web servers can't handle and they can't get more computing power to handle this. The solution: beg for a developer certificate in their forums and pray to receive one after paying US$200,00 for a published ID!

The deal is to buy a very expensive smart phone with Symbian 3rd Edition and to get a dumb phone, because Symbian decided to make the certification process so hard for developers it is almost impossible to do something really useful with them.

This blog post compares the pain between Symbian and iPhone, but it really describes how painful it is to develop for Symbian 3rd Edition.
http://blog.redinnovation.com/2008/03/14/symbian-digging-its-own-grave-with-symbiansignedcom/

With more than one hundred million of mobiles phones running their operating Systems, why should they care about software developers?
Are Symbian protecting end users with this or just annoying developers?
Will this hurt their market dominance?
Communications

Japanese ISPs To Cut Net Access For File Sharers 167

Posted by Zonk from the would-be-nice-to-surf-the-net dept.
modemac writes "Four major Japanese telecom organizations, which represent 'about 1,000 major and smaller' domestic ISPs, have agreed to forcibly cut the Internet connection of filesharers. They're specifically targeting users of the 'Winny' program, trading copied gaming software and music. The article states that a new set of ISP guidelines will be drawn up on how to cut off users who 'leak illegally copied material onto the Net.'"

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