zap1992 - Slashdot User

Comment I hope not (Score 1) 1

by zap1992 on Friday February 08, 2013 @07:27PM (#42838825) Attached to: Microsoft rumored to be taking a 'meaningful look' at Office for Linux

Part of what gives us, as GNU/Linux users, a unique cultural identity is our choice of software. In general, we don't use proprietary software, and bringing popular proprietary programs like Office or Photoshop to our platform would ruin our status as the free operating system. While it might draw in new users, GNU/Linux is more valuable as a free operating system than a popular one.

Submission + - What could have been in the public domain January 1, but isn't (duke.edu)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 31, 2012 @07:11PM

An anonymous reader writes: What could have been entering the public domain in the US on January 1, 2013? Under the law that existed until 1978 Works from 1956. The films Godzilla, King of the Monsters!, The Best Things in Life Are Free, Forbidden Planet, The Ten Commandments, and Around the World in 80 Days, the stories 101 Dalmations and Phillip K. Dick’s The Minority Report, the songs Que Sera, Sera and Heartbreak Hotel, and more What is entering the public domain this year? Nothing.

Submission + - Free Software Foundation Campaigning To Stop UEFI SecureBoot (slashdot.org)

Submitted by

gnujoshua

on Sunday December 30, 2012 @01:44PM

gnujoshua writes: "The article title is "Free Software Foundation Campaigning To Stop UEFI SecureBoot". However, this is simply not true. We want computer manufacturers to implement Secure Boot in a way that is secure. If a user can't disable Secure Boot and they are unable to sign their own software (e.g., bootloader, OS, etc), then we call that particular implementation "Restricted Boot." We don't want computer makers to implement Restricted Boot. We want them to implement Secure Boot and to provide a way for individuals to install a fully free OS on their computers. Many computer makers *are* implementing UEFI Secure Boot in this way and we want to continue encouraging them to do so. Please add a correction/update to this article because it is very damaging to our work. Below is the complete text of our statement that we ask people to sign:

We, the undersigned, urge all computer makers implementing UEFI's so-called "Secure Boot" to do it in a way that allows free software operating systems to be installed. To respect user freedom and truly protect user security, manufacturers must either allow computer owners to disable the boot restrictions, or provide a sure-fire way for them to install and run a free software operating system of their choice. We commit that we will neither purchase nor recommend computers that strip users of this critical freedom, and we will actively urge people in our communities to avoid such jailed systems."

Submission + - Has 3D Film-Making had its Day? (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by dryriver on Tuesday December 25, 2012 @05:37PM

dryriver writes: The BBC reports: 'It's three years since audiences around the world swarmed into cinemas to see James Cameron's Avatar. It rapidly became the biggest grossing film of all time, in part because of its ground-breaking digital 3D technology. But, in retrospect, Avatar now seems the high-point of 3D movie-making, with little since 2009 to challenge its achievement. Three years on, has the appeal of 3D gone flat? Nic Knowland has been a respected director of photography in Britain for 30 years. He's seen cinema trends and fads come and go, but never one for which he's had so little enthusiasm as 3D. "From the cinematographer's perspective it may offer production value and scale to certain kinds of film. But for many movies it offers only distraction and some fairly uncomfortable viewing experiences for the audience. I haven't yet encountered a director of photography who's genuinely enthusiastic about it." Nic Knowland's opinion of 3D is backed by another British cinematographer Oliver Stapleton, who has shot Hollywood movies such as The Cider House Rules and The Proposal. "3D is antithetical to storytelling, where immersion in character is the goal. It constantly reminds you you're watching a screen — and it completely prevents emotional involvement. Natural human vision bears no resemblance to 3D in the cinema. 2D doesn't reveal the smoke and mirrors of filmmaking in the same way. Of course that's partly because we're used to it, but also — it's not trying to mimic our vision. My goal as a cinematographer is to make the stitches in the cloth invisible. 3D says 'Look at me, I'm a picture!', 2-D simply says 'Once upon a time...'"'

Submission + - How the internet became a closed shop (smh.com.au)

Submitted by AcidAUS on Friday December 21, 2012 @04:23PM

AcidAUS writes: A little over a decade ago, just before the masses discovered the digital universe, the internet was a borderless new frontier: a terra nullius to be populated by individuals, groups and programmers as they saw fit. There were few rules and no boundaries. Freedom and open standards, sharing information for the greater good was the ethos. Today, the open internet we once knew is fracturing into a series of gated communities or fiefdoms controlled by giants like Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon and to a lesser extent Microsoft. A billion-dollar battle conducted in walled cities where companies try to lock our consumption into their vision of the internet. It has left some lamenting the ''web we lost''.

Submission + - Real world code sucks (theregister.co.uk)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 21, 2012 @03:22PM

An anonymous reader writes: There is a kind of cognitive dissonance in most people who’ve moved from the academic study of computer science to a job as a real-world software developer. The conflict lies in the fact that, whereas nearly every sample program in every textbook is a perfect and well-thought-out specimen, virtually no software out in the wild is, and this is rarely acknowledged.
To be precise: a tremendous amount of source code written for real applications is not merely less perfect than the simple examples seen in school — it’s outright terrible by any number of measures.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/12/21/financial_software_disasters/

Anon Techie

=========

Submission + - USAF Taps ESPN To Compile Drone "Highlight" Video 2

Submitted by mbstone on Friday December 21, 2012 @01:25PM

mbstone writes: The Air Force has a problem: Its drones generate thousands of hours of video (I almost said "footage.") And most of it is miles of endless desert. USAF needs to distill the highlights, if you will, and nobody does it better than ESPN, the TV sports network. Air Force officials have asked ESPN for help in analyzing the 327,384 hours collected just this year.

What we really need in times like these is sportscaster Warner Wolf. 'Let's go to the videotape, pick it up right here, Taliban in the home black.'

Submission + - BeWelcome switches to OpenStreetMap (bewelcome.org) 2

Submitted by

meinhard

on Thursday December 20, 2012 @10:27AM

meinhard writes: "Last Friday hospitality exchange network and CouchSurfing open source alternative BeWelcome released a major update, dropping Google Maps as default map provider in favor of OpenStreetMap.

BeWelcome decided to make the switch because OpenStreetMap mapping material has greatly improved over the last years, and because implementation through third party services such as Cloudmade/Leaflet.js has become relatively painless.

With this step volunteer-run BeWelcome also emphasizes its non-profit values — in a time where "peer-to-peer hospitality" is subject to increasing commercialization by venture capitalists.

Check out the spikes in usage and sign-ups every time VC darling CouchSurfing dumped major changes on their community: http://www.bewelcome.org/statistics ;)"

Submission + - W3C Finalizes HTML5 Specification (paritynews.com)

Submitted by hypnosec on Monday December 17, 2012 @03:12PM

hypnosec writes: The Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C) has announced today that it has finalized specifications for HTML5 and that it is ready for interoperability testing. HTML5 hasn’t been given the status of standard yet but it is feature complete now thereby giving developers a stable target to develop their web applications. The W3C while making the announcement said "HTML5 is the cornerstone of the Open Web Platform" and that it provides an environment where cross-platform applications can be developed which can utilize all of a device’s capabilities like videos, animations, graphics and typography. The HTML5 specifications still have a long way to go before they hit the Recommendation status. HTML5 will have to go through a round of testing that looks specifically into interoperability and performance whereby it will be given a Candidate Recommendation title.

Submission + - Anonymous hacks Westboro Baptist Church (inquisitr.com)

Submitted by

elashish14

on Sunday December 16, 2012 @07:11PM

elashish14 writes: "The Westboro Baptist Church stated earlier this week that they would be picketing the funerals of the victims of Newtown Connecticut's tragic shooting in an effort to bring awareness to their hate messages. In response, the Anonymous hacker collective has hacked their website and posted the personal information of all of its members."

Submission + - Swede gets photo driving license - with a photo of a painting of himself (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by RockDoctor on Sunday December 16, 2012 @06:57AM

RockDoctor writes: The BBC are reporting that a Swedish artist has read the terms of his driving license application carefully, and complied with them. The application calls, specifically, for a "recent likeness" of the subject, not for a photograph of the subject. So, he got out his paintbrushes and painted a self-portrait — a "likeness", and "recent" too — against the regulation plain background. Attaching a photograph of the portrait to the application, he then mailed off the application, and a while later got his new driving license in the post.

The artist cites arty-farty inspirations such as Magritte's painting of a pipe entitled "Ceci n'est pas une pipe", as well as "[questions of] technology and [...] of identity". Or maybe he's just a trouble-maker who deserves a day in a dark room with a police thug and a $5 wrench.

Of course any nerd would have spent months finding and writing drivers for managing a 1990s 480x320 pixel webcam and using that to produce the photo. It does rather beg questions of just how low a resolution a picture you can get away with though. And how would the police (etc) manage an HDR photograph (of one's reflection, out of focus, in a poor-quality mirror).

Submission + - Imagine if Google Had Been Developed in the 1960s

Submitted by

Hugh Pickens writes

on Friday December 14, 2012 @04:21PM

Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Jennifer O'Mahony writes in the Telegraph about Google parody web sites including one by Designer Norbert Landsteiner that allows users to imagine what google would be like if it had been invented in the era of 'Mad Men' complete with a punch card machine, magnetic tape unit and central processor using Job Control Language (JCL), a scripting language used on IBM 360 mainframe operating systems to instruct the system on how to run a batch job or start a subsystem. To complete the theme, the search engine is quite noisy, with typewriter key clicks and bells, and constant printing and paper-loading noises. Landsteiner says the goal of the project is to “explore distances and heroism in user interfaces.” Another Landsteiner project re-imagines Google as as a BBS terminal in the 1980s."

Submission + - Raspberry Pi Model A, First Photos and Video (adafruit.com)

Submitted by

coop0030

on Friday December 14, 2012 @12:06PM

coop0030 writes: "The first photos and videos of the Model A production samples are now available. The Raspberry Pi Model A is the newest low-cost computer from the Raspberry Pi Foundation. Compared to the popular Model B, the Model A forgoes the Ethernet Controller, has 256MB of RAM, and has a single USB port. A benefit of the missing Ethernet controller is that power consumption is reduced. This allowed them to reach their goals of a low-cost $25 computer. The release date is for sometime early in 2013."

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Replacing a TI-84 with software on a Linux box?

Submitted by

yanom

on Thursday December 13, 2012 @10:15PM

yanom writes: "I'm currently a high school student using my TI-84 for mathematics courses. It has all the functionality I need (except CAS), but saying that the hardware is dated is putting it nicely. Waiting 4-5 seconds for a simple function to be graphed on it's 96x64 screen just makes me want to hurl it at the wall. Recently, I've begun to notice the absurdity of doing my math homework on a 70's era microchip when I have an i7 machine with Linux within arm's reach. I've begun looking for software packages that could supposedly replace the graphing calculator's functionality, including Xcas and Maxima, but both lack what I consider basic calculator functionality — xcas can't create a table of values for a function, and maxima can't use degrees, only radians. So, does anyone know of a good software package to replace my graphing calculator (and maybe provide CAS to boot)?"

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