Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:Standards and the futility of OO.org (Score 5, Interesting) 170

by deemen (#27749529) Attached to: Oracle Buy Renews Call To Spin Off OpenOffice.org

Hate to say it, but I think Microsoft Office is a flat out better product than OpenOffice.org. It starts up faster, it has the whole macro system, it's just a lot more powerful.

What makes you think there isn't free-market competition right now? OpenOffice.org users can open MS files and save to the format as well. There are a few bugs, but those are true among Microsoft products too (open the same document in Word 97 or Word 2000 or Word 2003 and they look different). Open standards are great, but I highly doubt it will make a dent in Microsoft's hold of the office software market.

Comment Canada (Score 1) 375

by deemen (#27747945) Attached to: Cablevision To Offer 101 Mbps Down, No Caps

I wish we had this kind of speed in Canada. I guess it's not so much the speed as the bandwidth caps. What the hell are we supposed to do with a 20 GB download limit?

Somehow Canada missed the boat with Unlimited download/upload.

Comment Genetic Patents (Score 4, Interesting) 285

by deemen (#27668813) Attached to: Biotech Company To Patent Pigs

Someone has to stop these stupid genetic patents. Patents and copyrights are both way out of hand these days. Software patents, now this. I've heard of companies attempting to patent viruses and such (the kind they use to get DNA into other organisms), but a pig? I think patent law has a clause saying you can't patent a living organism (when did genes become "inventions"?). Recently though, big pharma and biotech companies like Monsanto has been lobbying to let this shit happen.

There was a movie that touched on this The Corporation. It's a Canadian movie and I think Monsanto is mentioned in there more than once.

I sincerely don't know how these companies get away with it. Giving them the same rights as people legally was a bad idea. Don't the people working at Monsanto realize how twisted this shit is?
Movies

Decent DVD-Ripping Solution For Linux? 501

Posted by timothy from the digital-camera-one-frame-at-a-time dept.
supersloshy writes "I'm a user of Ubuntu Linux and I have been for a little while now. Recently I've been trying to copy DVDs onto a portable media player, but everything I've tried isn't working right. dvd::rip always gets the language mixed up (for example, when ripping 'Howl's Moving Castle,' one of the files it ripped to was in Japanese instead of English), Acidrip just plain isn't working for me (not recognizing a disc with spaces in its name, refusing to encode, etc.), Thoggen is having trouble with chapters (chapter 1 repeated twice for me once), and OGMRip has the audio out of sync. What I'm looking for is a reliable program to copy the movie into a single file with none of the audio or video glitches as mentioned above. Is there even such thing on Linux? If you can't think of a decent Linux-based solution, then a Windows one is fine as long as it works."
Transportation

Flying Car Flies From London To Africa 148

Posted by timothy from the laden-or-unladen dept.
krou writes "It may not be exactly what people have envisioned or tried over the years, such as the flying car in Bladerunner, or the previously reported Terrafugia Transition, but the BBC is reporting that a flying car (creatively dubbed the Skycar, but different from this Skycar) has flown from London across into Africa. They modified a parajet fan that can fly a man into a bigger fan with a canopy that is capable of flying a car."
Security

Confessed Botnet Master Is a Security Professional 278

Posted by CmdrTaco from the he-should-know-better dept.
An anonymous reader writes "John Schiefer, the Los Angeles security consultant who in last 2007 admitted wielding a 250,000-node botnet to steal bank passwords, sometimes from work, says he's spent the past 15 months working as a professional in the security scene while awaiting sentencing. Prosecutors are pushing for a five-year sentence, noting the exceptional threat he represented to society."

Comment Re:More computer model dumb thinking (Score 2, Interesting) 101

by deemen (#26547569) Attached to: Google's PageRank Predicts Nobel Prize Winners

I hope they never award the Nobel Prized based strictly on this. It could be a good way of pointing people in the right direction, but it will also let in a bunch of crap.

The last thing we need is scientists Googlebombing their papers (or creating junk networks to increase page ranks). I bet the Creationists would have a field day with this. "Look, our theories have scientific basis, check out our CiteRank".

Technology is a tool, it should never replace human intelligence.

Google

Google's PageRank Predicts Nobel Prize Winners 101

Posted by CmdrTaco from the that's-a-little-strange dept.
KentuckyFC writes "The pattern of citations between scientific papers forms a network that has remarkable similarities to the network formed by the web. So why not use Google's PageRank, the world's most effective search algorithm to rank these papers in the same way it ranks websites? That's exactly what a couple of US researchers have done for physics papers published by the American Physical Society since 1893 (abstract). The results make interesting reading because almost all of the top ten papers resulted in (or were linked to) Nobel Prizes for their authors. Which means that studying the up-and-coming entries on the list ought to be a good way of predicting future winners. Better get your bets in before the bookies get wind of this."
Music

Report Claims 95% of Music Downloads Are Illegal 331

Posted by Soulskill from the seems-low dept.
Un pobre guey writes "The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) press release claims that 95% of music file downloads in 2008, an estimated 40 billion files, were illegal. Oddly enough, digital music sales are up: 'The digital music business internationally saw a sixth year of expansion in 2008, growing by an estimated 25 per cent to US$3.7 billion in trade value. Digital platforms now account for around 20 per cent of recorded music sales, up from 15 per cent in 2007. Recorded music is at the forefront of the online and mobile revolution, generating more revenue in percentage terms through digital platforms than the newspaper (4%), magazine (1%) and film industries (4%) combined... Despite these developments, the music sector is still overshadowed by the huge amount of unlicensed music distributed online. Collating separate studies in 16 countries over a three-year period, IFPI estimates over 40 billion files were illegally file-shared in 2008, giving a piracy rate of around 95 per cent.'"
Space

Is a 'Katrina-Like' Space Storm Brewing? 356

Posted by CmdrTaco from the or-maybe-thats-just-a-nice-cup-of-tea dept.
pilsner.urquell writes "A newly released NASA report warns that the world has forgotten the power of the sun, creating a technological society susceptible like never before to large infrastructure damage from solar storms. According to the report, the world has grown so dependent on modern technologies without respect of what the sun can and has done, that it's risking major communications, finance, transportation, government and even emergency services disruptions."

Comment Re:Googles playbook (Score 4, Insightful) 367

by deemen (#26416887) Attached to: Companies Using MS Word "Out of Habit," Says Forrester

Good link. I think it just proves that you can't trust the competitors to defend your personal information either.

In the end, no one will defend your important documents more than you will, and that's why I doubt Google Docs will ever gain much market share in the enterprise sector until the day they allow it to be hosted on the intranet (like they do for their corporate search service).

For small businesses it might be an interesting solution though. I think most people don't know much about security in general (not just computers), so hosting things on a Google server might be better than on your spyware ridden home office computer.

Comment Re:Googles playbook (Score 4, Insightful) 367

by deemen (#26415991) Attached to: Companies Using MS Word "Out of Habit," Says Forrester

I doubt the weak link is often the actual administrator in charge of virtual security..

Surely not, but the fact that Google is now hosting business services, they are quickly becoming the information sink of the universe. They have a history of easily folding to law enforcement, which makes me uneasy about hosting corporate stuff online. I just don't like all the big brother business, and while I use GMail for personal stuff, I wouldn't start trusting Google with sensitive documents, memos etc.

Web based tools have another huge problem. You're at Google's mercy for upgrades, feature changes etc. Does anyone remember the crap they started with the iGoogle sidebar? That sort of stuff quickly discourages corporate clients.
Patents

20+ Companies Sued Over OS Permissions Patent 282

Posted by timothy from the advancing-the-useful-arts-and-sciences dept.
freemywrld writes "According to the article on Ars Technica, Microsoft, Symantec and 20 other companies are being sued over patents covering 'systems for governing application and data permissions, as well as ensuring application integrity.' The patents were granted in the 90's to the Information Protection and Authentication of Texas (IPAT). From the article: 'A response from any of the defendants is still forthcoming, and it is unclear whether the authentication and permissions systems that IPAT's patent describes are precluded by prior art. Even if IPAT has a leg to stand on in court, however, it certainly didn't take the easy route to recovering any damages by suing 22 companies.'"
Google

New Google Favicon Deja Vu All Over Again? 227

Posted by timothy from the matters-of-deep-significance dept.
theodp writes "Last June, Google rolled out a new favicon, the small branding icon that graces your URL bar when you visit Google. Which, as it turned out, bore a striking similarity to Garth Brooks' Circle-G logo. Well, Google went back to the drawing board and has come back with a new favicon, which it says was inspired by — not copied from, mind you — its users' submitted ideas. Some are also seeing inspiration elsewhere for the new favicon, which consists of white 'g' on a background of four color swatches. Take the AVG antivirus icon, for instance. Or everybody's favorite memory toy, Simon. Or — in perhaps the unkindest cut of all — the four-color Microsoft Windows logo, shown here with a superimposed white '7'. Anything else come to mind?" What comes to mind for me is just how obsessed many people are with the Google favicon.

Slashdot Top Deals

HELP!!!! I'm being held prisoner in /usr/games/lib!

Close