kojot350 - Slashdot User

Smart Immigrants Going Home 770

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday March 03, 2009 @08:04PM from the no-longer-the-only-land-of-opportunity dept.

olddotter writes "A 24-page paper on a reverse brain drain from the US back to home countries (PDF) is getting news coverage. Quoting: 'Our new paper, "America's Loss Is the World's Gain," finds that the vast majority of these returnees were relatively young. The average age was 30 for Indian returnees, and 33 for Chinese. They were highly educated, with degrees in management, technology, or science. Fifty-one percent of the Chinese held master's degrees and 41% had PhDs. Sixty-six percent of the Indians held a master's and 12.1% had PhDs. They were at very top of the educational distribution for these highly educated immigrant groups — precisely the kind of people who make the greatest contribution to the US economy and to business and job growth." Adding to the brain drain is a problem with slow US visa processing, since last November or so, that has been driving desirable students and scientists out of the country.

Portugal's Vortalgate — No Microsoft, No Bidding 312

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday March 03, 2009 @04:04PM from the bad-for-bidders-and-for-bidness dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Companies using software other than Microsoft's are unable to bid at many Portuguese public tenders. This is due to the use of Silverlight 2.0 technology by the company, Vortal, contracted to build the e-procurement portal. This situation has triggered a complaint to the European Commission by the Portuguese Open Source Business Association; the case is unofficially known in Portugal as 'Vortalgate.'"

The Finns Who Invented the Graphical Browser 148

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday March 03, 2009 @03:15PM from the something-in-the-water dept.

waderoush writes "If you thought Mosaic was the first graphical Web browser, think again. In their first major interview, three of the four Finnish software engineers behind Erwise — a point-and-click graphical Web browser for the X Window system — describe the creation of their program in 1991-1992, a full year before Marc Andreessen's Mosaic (which, of course, evolved into Netscape). Kim Nyberg, Kari Sydänmaanlakka, and Teemu Rantanen, with their fellow Helsinki University of Technology student Kati Borgers (nee Suominen), gave Erwise features such as text searching and the ability to load multiple Web pages that wouldn't be seen in other browsers until much later. The three engineers, who today work for the architectural software firm Tekla, say they never commercialized the project because there was no financing — Finland was in a deep recession at the time and lacked a strong venture capital or angel investing market. Otherwise, the Web revolution might have begun a year earlier."

QT 4.5 Released, Plus New IDE and Analysis Tool 62

Posted by timothy on Tuesday March 03, 2009 @11:41AM from the cute-train-is-the-q-train dept.

stoolpigeon writes "QT 4.5 has arrived and is now available for download. This new release is quite significant due to licensing changes that now make it simpler to use QT in a wider range of products without cost as well as a number of new features. The latest version of Webkit is now integrated into the product. Qt 4.5 sees the introduction of QtBenchLib, a new component to make measuring the performance of the toolkit and checking for regressions easier. Mac developers who use Qt will note a major reworking of 4.5 on the Mac, now providing 64-bit support. QT Creator is a new IDE that looks to have combined a number of previously separate tools. And there is much more."

Red Hat Returns To the Linux Desktop 192

Posted by timothy on Tuesday February 24, 2009 @01:54PM from the sequels-can-be-good dept.

CWmike writes "Red Hat used to be in the desktop business along with all the other Linux distributors. Then, they left. Now, however, Red Hat is switching from Xen to KVM for virtualization. As part of that switchover, Red Hat will be using not only KVM, but the SolidICE/SPICE desktop virtualization and management software suite to introduce a new server-based desktop virtualization system. Does this mean that Red Hat will be getting back into the Linux desktop business? That's the question I posed to Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens, in a phone call after the Red Hat/KVM press conference, and he told me that, 'Yes. Red Hat will indeed be pushing the Linux desktop again.'"

MS Publishes Papers For a Modern, Secure Browser 296

Posted by Soulskill on Sunday February 22, 2009 @02:11PM from the new-and-different dept.

V!NCENT writes with an excerpt from a new publication by Microsoft: "As web sites evolved into dynamic web applications composing content from various web sites, browsers have become multi-principal operating environments with resources shared among mutually distrusting web site principals. Nevertheless, no existing browsers, including new architectures like IE 8, Google Chrome, and OP, have a multi-principal operating system construction that gives a browser-based OS the exclusive control to manage the protection of all system resources among web site principals. In this paper, we introduce Gazelle, a secure web browser constructed as a multi-principal OS. Gazelle's Browser Kernel is an operating system that exclusively manages resource protection and sharing across web site principals." Here's the full research paper (PDF).

Web-based IDEs Edge Closer To the Mainstream 244

Posted by timothy on Thursday February 19, 2009 @11:04AM from the hope-your-connection-is-reliable dept.

snitch writes "Last week Mozilla released Bespin, their web-based framework for code editing, and only a few days later Boris Bokowski and Simon Kaegi implemented an Eclipse-based Bespin server using headless Eclipse plug-ins. With the presentation of the web-based Eclipse workbench at EclipseCon and the release of products like Heroku, a web-based IDE and hosting environment for RoR apps, it seems that web-based IDEs might soon become mainstream."

Submission + - Solar panel turns carbon dioxide into fuel

Submitted by holy_calamity on Thursday February 19, 2009 @06:37AM

holy_calamity writes: A solar panel containing a surface covered in titanium dioxide nanotubes can convert a mixture of carbon dioxide and water vapour into methane, or syngas that can be made into diesel, New Scientist reports. Efficiency is low so far, but this shows a novel way that carbon dioxide captured from power plants or other polluters might be used.

Europa Selected As Target of Next Flagship Mission 168

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday February 18, 2009 @10:00PM from the my-favorite-moon dept.

volcanopele writes "NASA and the European Space Agency announced today that they have selected the Europa/Jupiter System Mission as the next large mission to the outer solar system. For the last year, the Europa mission has been in competition with a proposal to send a mission to Saturn's moon Titan, as reported on Slashdot earlier. The Europa Mission includes two orbiters: one developed by NASA to orbit the icy moon Europa and another developed by ESA to orbit the solar system's largest moon, Ganymede. Both orbiters would spend up to 2.5 years in orbit around Jupiter before settling into orbit around their respective targets, studying Jupiter's satellites, rings, and of course the planet itself. The mission is scheduled to launch in 2020 and arrive at Jupiter in 2025 and 2026."

MacBook's "Unremovable" Battery Easy To Remove 476

Posted by timothy on Wednesday February 18, 2009 @07:17PM from the just-unscrew-16-handy-screws dept.

Slatterz writes "Going just a bit further than your average unboxing, someone has stripped a new 17-inch Apple Macbook Pro to its component parts revealing one or two little surprises. The biggest of which is that the built-in battery is easily accessible, requiring the tinkerer to remove just the 13 Philips screws which hold the bottom cover in place, and the three tri-wing security screws which hold the battery in place."

DragonFly BSD 2.2 Released 44

Posted by timothy on Wednesday February 18, 2009 @05:23PM from the big-essin'-deal dept.

An anonymous reader writes "DragonFly BSD 2.2 is now available. The second release to feature the HAMMER (versioning, among other things) filesystem — now considered production-ready — it includes 'major stability improvements across the board, new drivers, much better pkgsrc support and integration.' Apart from the CD ISO, this release has a DVD ISO with 'a fully operational X environment,' as well as a bootable USB disk-key image."

Is the Bar of Soap Tomorrow's Smarterphone? 141

Posted by timothy on Wednesday February 18, 2009 @05:00PM from the next-generation-uses-earwax-proximity dept.

Barence writes "Researchers at MIT have developed a gadget that knows whether you want to use it as a camera or smartphone, just by the way you're holding it. So, if you hold the device, dubbed the Bar of Soap, out in front of you like a camera it will automatically bring up an LCD viewfinder. However, if you then switch to holding it as you would a mobile phone, it will bring up a touchscreen keypad instead. The Bar of Soap utilises a three-axis accelerometer and 72 surface sensors to track the position of the user's fingers and its position."

Collective Intelligence in Action 53

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday February 18, 2009 @02:03PM from the read-all-about-it dept.

lamaditx writes "The book Collective Intelligence in Action shows you how to apply theory from Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence and Data Mining to your business. The goal is to create systems which make use of data created by groups of people — i.e. social networks — and abstract from these to gain new or additional information. Some of you might think "just another kind of Web 2.0." This is one application you might think of, but the input and output format do not matter that much. You can use these methods anywhere as long as the amount of data is big enough. You will find some examples related to the latest web technologies to explain methods, but the code is rather generic. Also, you won't find a lot disturbing details about HTML, HTTP and the like." Keep reading for the rest of Adrian's review.

Hackers Jump On Newest IE7 Bug 162

Posted by CmdrTaco on Wednesday February 18, 2009 @12:45PM from the hop-on-pop dept.

CWmike writes "Attackers are already exploiting a bug in Internet Explorer 7 that Microsoft patched just last week, security researchers warned today. Although the attacks are currently in 'very, very small numbers,' they may be just the forerunner of a larger campaign, said Trend Micro's Jamz Yaneza. 'I see this as a proof-of-concept,' said Yaneza, who noted that the exploit's payload is extremely straightforward and explained that there has been no attempt to mask it by, say, planting a root kit on the victimized PC at the same time. 'I wouldn't be surprised to see this [exploit] show up in one of those Chinese exploit kits,' he added. The new attack code, which Trend Micro dubbed 'XML_Dloadr.a,' arrives in a spam message as a malicious file masquerading as a Microsoft Word document."

Comment Re:Not a surprise. (Score 0) 723

by kojot350 on Monday February 16, 2009 @05:27PM (#26877445) Attached to: Pirate Bay P2P Trial Begins In Sweden

If you know you're in the moral wrong, or should otherwise know.

Who are you to decide what's moral? Morality isn't universal, it's subjective.

Cease and desist letters aren't exclusively evil. They're merely tools. Just like with the Pirate Bay, it is not exclusively a pirating tool, but it can be (and in many cases is) used as such.

Wrong. TPB is "database of pointers" to the actual data/content. It IS a big difference.

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