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The Internet

Submission + - 2012 Olympic Logo gets thumbs down

Murthy writes: "There is lot of criticism against 2012 Olympic Logo. ABC News Online reports that "Nearly 45,000 people have so far signed a petition demanding London's 2012 Olympics logo be scrapped". What is the opinion of Slashdot readers on 2012 Olympic Logo? Should we give lot of importance to the logo?"
United States

Journal SPAM: Naomi Wolf: Fascist America, in 10 easy steps 5

If you look at history, you can see that there is essentially a blueprint for turning an open society into a dictatorship. That blueprint has been used again and again in more and less bloody, more and less terrifying ways. But it is always effective. It is very difficult and arduous to create and sustain a democracy - but history shows that closing one down is much simpler. You simply have to be willing to take the 10 steps.

Operating Systems

Submission + - CentOS 5 Released

LivinFree writes: Today marks the release of CentOS 5.0. The release notice clarifies that the i386 and x86_64 are the only architectures available, but others are on the way. Fire up your BitTorrent client of choice and head to the mirror re-direct!
It's funny.  Laugh.

Submission + - BOFH

nerdin writes: I was teaching a couple of newbies what a Real Sysop must be, so I googled for BOFH. It was sad news for me to find this . At first I asked myself where in the Universe I had been that I didn't notice, so I made a search in /. to read his nerd peers eulogy, just to find nothing. So let's preserve his memory and -late better than never- recognize his role in IT industry, spanning a least 2 generations of sysadmins
Space

Submission + - Water Found in Exoplanet's Atmosphere

anthemaniac writes: Astronomers have long suspected that water should exist in the atmospheres of extrasolar planets. Now they have evidence. Water has been discovered in a planet called HD209458b, which was previously found to have oxygen. From the article: 'The discovery ... means one of the most crucial elements for life as we know it can exist around planets orbiting other stars.' But don't go looking for little green men. You might remember HD209458b as a 'hot jupiter' that boils under the glow of its very nearby star.
NASA

Submission + - Scientists Design Open-Source Program at NASA

Barkmullz writes: NASA scientists plan to announce a new open-source project this month called CosmosCode — it's aimed at recruiting volunteers to write code for live space missions. The program was launched quietly last year under NASA's CoLab entrepreneur outreach program, created by Robert Schingler and Jessy Cowan-Sharp of NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California. Members of the CosmosCode group have been meeting in Second Life and will open the program to the public in the coming weeks.
United States

Journal SPAM: Beware Dominionist Sleeper Cell in the U.S.A. 15

If another nation had specifically trained agents in ways to subvert our constitution, and then managed to get these agents embedded into positions throughout the government, would we be afraid? Very afraid!

Slashdot.org

Submission + - How to resurrect reputation

athloi writes: "This is probably a dumb question, but it might relate to the large number of phantom accounts on Slashdot. What happens when a user, such as myself, makes some useful contributions but then stumbles into a fractious area like, say, Windows Vista fandom or Mac advocacy, and then gets modded down to the point where no future posts are even considered? With karma at -1, without any trolling or other bad behavior, it seems my only choice is to create another account and try again. Is this what Slashdot editors or users want, or is there another way to get in the good graces of a site I enjoy, even if I sometimes make slightly snarky comments about our large corporate overlords?"
User Journal

Journal Journal: April Fool's Submissions Overboard and Underfunny 2

I agree with some of the comments and submissions I have seen today that the yearly stupidity on Slashdot is just plain dumb. Unfortunately, these comments are drowned out. One or two good hoaxes would have made my day. ("Google Paper" was actually quite good). A score of idiotic and unbelievable posts just ruins the site and real news is buried. Having looked through the Firehose at several points today, there have been several serious submissions that have been voted up but have never made

Data Storage

Submission + - AppServer File Storage: DB vs. File System

Goyuix writes: This question seems to come up again and again, and never quite gets a definitive answer. There are certainly advantages to storing binary data in the database and drawbacks too. The same holds true for using the file system as [insert Deity] intended. To top things off there are probably a bunch of different tips to optimize the storage/access to that data — as well as pitfalls. Modern databases are certainly capable of handling large amounts of binary data and many of the limits of yesteryear have been addressed. My question is this: Is there any reason not to use the database? Is there a good answer for this or does it all boil down to requirements? If it is just requirements, do you have any tips to evaluate them to make the right decision? Is there one single unifying theory [Hint: the answer is 42]? To add to the speculation, some of the requirements are: ASP.NET web application using Oracle as a database, the data size is at least 50GB initially, possibly up to 500GB of PDF documents (and more into the future?). Each file ranges in size from 100KB to almost 2GB at the largest currently, and there are potentially 50,000 documents with a growth rate of maybe one thousand docs / year.
Music

Submission + - Better Jukebox Software for Bigger Libraries?

jimjenkins1975 writes: I recently ripped and encoded my entire CD and Vinyl library, as well as merged my home and work computer's libraries (I work at a music company so my work library is very very large). It resulted in well over 750 GB of MP3's. I was hoping to get away with using iTunes to manage this, however the XML database file has grown very large, and the application itself is nonresponsive or very sluggish at best once it has loaded up (a process that takes several minutes itself) Question: Is there another application with similar features out there that can handle a library of this size with aplomb? I'm primarily on a Mac, and would prefer to keep using it, but I have a PC as well. Any ideas?
Media

Submission + - Linux as an OS for music production?

Ximogen writes: "You just can't get decent music production tools for anything but Windows and MacOS, and I'll not touch anything from Apple with a bargepole. If you believe otherwise let me know as I'd be interested to find out. I currently use Cubase 4 as my primary music production application along with an extensive library of VST instruments, effects and mastering tools. So any Linux (either open or closed source) alternative would need to support VST2 & VST3"

I included the above comment in a post relating to a different story but it got me thinking. I am a Windows user for many reasons but the most significant reason in recent years is that I've just not been able to find acceptable music production tools for Linux. Given that I'm repeatedly informed by Linux users that Linux is more stable and out-performs Windows on equal hardware AND that I am currently looking to spec a new PC for the sole purpose of music production I thought I might put this to the test.

Unfortunately I fell at the first hurdle, drivers for my E-MU 1820M (E-MU 1010M + IO breakout box + sync daughter card) and given that I don't want to replace a perfectly functional £300+ audio interface that is pretty much where I've got to. Of course £300+ is peanuts compared to the extensive library of VST instruments, effects and mastering tools I've purchased over the years so if the performance benefits of moving to Linux were sufficient and I could utilize my existing library of VSTs I would consider new audio hardware.

While talking of hardware the new PC is likely to be built around an Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 2.4GHz CPU on an Intel DP965LT motherboard.

Am I barking up the wrong tree here? Is there likely to be enough of a performance difference to give any practical benefit? Does anyone out there use Linux for music production?

Any thoughts or recommendations gratefully received!
Security

Submission + - Security a top issue as teleworking grows

coondoggie writes: "Security continues to dominate as IT's most pressing concern when it comes to supporting a large telecommuting workforce. But while security is a concern, teleworking, especially in the government realm, continues to grow at an impressive clip according to a study released by the CDW Government consultancy today. The group's report says during the past year, telework growth in the Federal government also outpaced the private sector: 35% of Federal teleworkers started teleworking, compared to 10% of private-sector teleworkers. It also said 44% of Federal employee respondents to the survey indicate that they have the option to telework — up 6% from 2006 — while 15% of private-sector employee respondents have that option, CDW says. http://www.networkworld.com/community/?q=node/1263 3"
Linux Business

Submission + - Central User Management w/Linux desktop and server

mvip writes: "With the Desktop improvements of the latest releases of Ubuntu Desktop I'm seriously considering migrating one of the offices I administrate entirely over to Linux. All the software that is not available for Linux will run under Wine, so no problems as far as that is concerned.

My thoughts is to install a server with some Linux distribution (Ubuntu Server or Gentoo), and then Ubuntu Desktop on the clients (a handful of them). The only thing I really need from the server is to share files, but I would also like to have central user management.

Now, as far as I know there are two ways to go when it comes to central user authentication; Kerberos or Samba w/ PDC. Kerberos seems to be the 'Unix'-way to do it (recommended in FreeBSD's handbook) , while Samba PDC is more like a mixed-environment solution. Both of these solutions can use OpenLDAP as a back-end, which I need. As for the file-sharing, I guess NFS goes with Kerberos, while obviously Samba takes care of the Samba file-sharing.

What I really want to know is what kind of experience people have when it comes to this. Which is the most 'optimal' way to go, and what would work with the least amount of tweaking/hacking?

I posted on both Ubuntu and Gentoo's forum, but received little feedback."

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