weiv - Slashdot User

Submission + - NFL Copyrights Nix Church Super Bowl Party

Submitted by

Copywrong

on Friday February 02, 2007 @03:36PM

Copywrong writes: "Having taken a cue from the Grinch, the NFL's lawyers have threatened legal action to prevent the Fall Creek Baptist Church's Super Bowl party. They're not worried about them charging admission, nor are they worried about using the trademarked term "Super Bowl" in promoting it — the church was more than happy not to do either — instead, the deal breaker was that their TV is too big. That's right, the NFL believes that watching the Super Bowl on more than one TV, or on a TV that's over 55 inches would violate their public performance rights under US copyright law, a limitation you can find codified in 17 USC 110."

Submission + - Next Generation Source Code Search Engine

Submitted by on Friday February 02, 2007 @12:06AM

An anonymous reader writes: Newsforge has an article on a new source code search engine, All The Code which has just launched a public alpha. According to the article, unlike previous generations of source code search engines (such as koders and google codesearch) this new engine "looks at how code is used" to help determine the relevance. The idea being that if a library is used more frequently in a certain context, it is probably more relevant than a less popular library. Unfortunately only supports Java for the time being, but the faq indicates they will be adding more languages once the alpha is completed. I wonder if the other players will adopt this method?

Submission + - Just saw my first green Address Bar...

Submitted by

Panaqqa

on Thursday February 01, 2007 @11:35PM

Panaqqa writes: "One of the browsers I need occasionally is Internet Explorer 7, complete with its new security features. Today, for the first time, I saw a green address bar reflecting "Class 2 Certification" — GoDaddy had it. Am I alone in my ominous feeling that somewhere down the road, this green address bar will become an expectation for the general public using an ecommerce site, giving an advantage to only incorporated businesses who can afford the large cost?"

Vista Upgrades Require Presence of Old OS 561

Posted by kdawson on Sunday January 28, 2007 @09:43PM from the recovery?-disaster dept.

kapaopango writes "Ars Technica is reporting that upgrade versions of Windows Vista Home Basic, Premium, and Starter Edition cannot be installed on a PC unless Windows XP or Windows 2000 is already installed. This is a change from previous versions of Windows, which only required a valid license key. This change has the potential to make disaster recovery very tedious. The article says: 'For its part, Microsoft seems to be confident that the Vista repair process should be sufficient to solve any problems with the OS, since otherwise the only option for disaster recovery in the absence of backups would be to wipe a machine, install XP, and then upgrade to Vista. This will certainly make disaster recovery a more irritating experience.'"

Submission + - Making A Job Fair Interesting

Submitted by

moszern

on Sunday January 28, 2007 @05:07PM

moszern writes: "The startup I work for is growing to the point where we are need to do some serious hiring. We are toying with the idea of setting up a booth at a upcoming local college job fair. For the most part it seems these events are all the same with nothing much distinguishing each company from the next. My question for the Slashdot crowd is have they ever been to a job fair where a company had a very unorthodox booth or way of attracting potential employees? What would you want to see at a job fair to grab your attention?"

Submission + - Quantifying Recursion In Java 6

Submitted by

aahmad

on Sunday January 28, 2007 @12:41AM

aahmad writes: "If you are like most developers, you believe that although recursive solutions to problems are elegant, they neither perform nor scale as well as their iterative cousins. In the expose, "Quantifying Recursion on the Java Platform", Amin Ahmad blows the pants off this fallacy: all other things being equal, recursive solutions run a factor of 2x-3x faster than iterative ones on Java 6.

That said, the article acknowledges that recursive solutions do not scale well which greatly limits their applicability. I'm curious to hear about other slashdotters experiences with recursion, in particular on the Java platform."

Submission + - Movie piracy no big deal to most Americans

Submitted by ScottSCY on Friday January 26, 2007 @08:22PM

ScottSCY writes: MSNBC.com is reporting that Solutions Research Group recently conducted a phone survey in which only 40% of Americans believe illegally downloading movies to be a 'very serious offense', compared to 59% who think parking in a fire lane is a worse offense. Contrast this with 78% who said shoplifting a DVD from a store is a serious offense.

Submission + - Daylight Savings time change in 2007

Submitted by goDzi7la on Friday January 26, 2007 @04:04PM

goDzi7la writes: In the United States & Canada the start and end of daylight savings times are being changed in 2007. Daylight savings time will now start on March 11, 2007 (rather than early April) and will end on November 4, 2007 (rather than late October). I've begun going through all my machines to apply the patches, but I want to make sure I don't miss anything. So besides OS patches or fixes, what other sofware needs updating? I've seen that some versions of Java SDK & JRE need to be updated. Whadda bout stuff like PHP? Perl? Oracle? MySQL? Anybody have a good list of what things need to be updated? What about the ramifications of not updating certain things?

Submission + - Is a CS degree any good for an old guy?

Submitted by mbuckingham on Friday January 26, 2007 @04:00PM

mbuckingham writes: I'm 39 and have been programming for 20 years. By "programming", I'm talking about the usual business applications type of stuff. Easy stuff really. I went to college for a while, but never got my degree. It bugs me that I've never completed my degree, but since I've always had decent jobs, it hasn't really mattered too much. I'm really bored with what I do every day though. Anyway, I'm thinking about going back, getting the degree, because I think it will make it possible to move towards doing some more advanced system-level type stuff. Does this make sense? Would a CS degree or a Computer Engineering degree be better? I know I don't want a MIS degree, because that would be rehashing everything I'm already bored with.

Sony and Universal Prohibit Sharing Via Zune 325

Posted by Zonk on Friday January 19, 2007 @11:56PM from the as-if-the-zune-didn't-have-enough-trouble-already dept.

ack154 writes "Engadget has a story about Sony and Universal Music apparently denying Zune owners the ability to 'squirt' songs by certain artists to other Zune users. That's right, if you've actually purchased songs from the Zune marketplace and happen to run into another Zune owner, you're prohibited from sharing certain songs. From the article: 'In a non-scientific sampling of popular artists by Zunerama and Zune Thoughts, it looks like it's roughly 40-50 percent of artists that fall under this prohibited banner, and the worst news is that there's no warning that a song might be unsharable until you actually try to send it and fail.'"

Submission + - Why Spam Fighting Needs Immediate Change

Submitted by netconcern on Thursday January 18, 2007 @03:29PM

netconcern writes: CircleID has featured an article by iCAUCE director, Neil Schwartzman "Trench Warfare in the Age of The Laser-Guided Missile", shedding an outstanding light on the seriousness of zombie botnets threatening the infrastructure of the internet. From the article: "The historical development of spam fighting is allowing computer-aware criminals to take the upper hand in the fight against what has now evolved into a completely technologically and organizationally merged threat to public safety. If we do not change our strategic approach immediately, the battle, indeed even the war may be all but lost." A must read!

NIST Condemns Paperless Electronic Voting 201

Posted by Zonk on Friday December 01, 2006 @05:24PM from the they're-not-the-only-ones dept.

quizzicus writes "Paperless electronic voting machines 'cannot be made secure' [pdf] according to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). In the most sweeping condemnation of voting machines issued by any federal agency, NIST echoes what critics have been saying all along, that due to the lack of verifiability, 'a single programmer could rig a major election.' Rather than adding printers, though, NIST endorses the hand-marked optical-scan system as the most reliable."

Novell Dumps the Hula Project 440

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday November 28, 2006 @05:51PM from the wonder-why? dept.

asv108 writes, "On the Hula general mailing list today, it was announced that Novell is no longer providing full-time developers to Hula. While the project will continue, it appears that Novell is not committed to developing a viable open-source alternative to MS Exchange. The Hula project was announced in February 2005 with much fanfare."

UK Schools Bans WiFi Due To Health Concerns 535

Posted by Zonk on Friday November 24, 2006 @09:39PM from the no-bad-teeth-jokes dept.

Mantrid42 writes "Schools in the UK are getting rid of their WiFi network, citing health concerns from parents and teachers. The wireless emanations, parents fear, may be the root cause of a host of problems from simple fatigue to the possibility of cancer. A few scientists think younger humans may be more vulnerable to the transmissions, because of thinner skulls. From the article: "Vivienne Baron, who is bringing up Sebastian, her ten-year-old grandson, said: 'I did not want Sebastian exposed to a wireless computer network at school. No real evidence has been produced to prove that this new technology is safe in the long term. Until it is, I think we should take a precautionary approach and use cabled systems.'"

The Information Factories Are Here 126

Posted by CowboyNeal on Friday November 10, 2006 @12:46AM from the brave-new-world dept.

prostoalex writes, "Wired magazine has coined a new term for the massive data centers built in the Pacific Northwest by Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! Cloudware is, ironically, a return of the centralized data and bandwidth power houses caused by the decentralized and distributed nature of the Internet. George Gilder thinks we're witnessing something monumental: 'According to Bell's law, every decade a new class of computer emerges from a hundredfold drop in the price of processing power. As we approach a billionth of a cent per byte of storage, and pennies per gigabit per second of bandwidth, what kind of machine labors to be born? How will we feed it? How will it be tamed? And how soon will it, in its inevitable turn, become a dinosaur?'"

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