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The Courts

Red Hat Challenges Swiss Government Over Microsoft Monopoly 245

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the fighting-ignorance-with-lawsuits dept.
An anonymous reader writes "'Linux vendor Red Hat, and 17 other vendors, have protested a Swiss government contract given to Microsoft without any public bidding. The move exposes a wider Microsoft monopoly that European governments accept, despite their lip service for open source, according to commentators. The Red Hat group has asked a Swiss federal court to overturn a three-year contract issued to Microsoft by the Swiss Federal Bureau for Building and Logistics, to provide Windows desktops and applications, with support and maintenance, for 14M Swiss francs (£8M; $15M) each year. The contract, for 'standardized workstations,' was issued with no public bidding process, Red Hat's legal team reports in a blog — because the Swiss agency asserted there was no sufficient alternative to Microsoft products.'"
Spam

Opting Out Increases Spam? 481

Posted by timothy from the damned-either-way dept.
J. L. Tympanum writes "I used to ignore spam but recently I have been using the opt-out feature. Now I get more spam than ever, especially of the Nigerian scam (and related) types. The latter has gone from almost none to several a day. Was I a fool for opting out? Is my email address being harvested when I opt out? Has anybody had similar experience?"
Music

Apple Shifts iTunes Pricing; $0.69 Tracks MIA 429

Posted by kdawson from the where-it-comes-down-that-is-not-my-department dept.
Hodejo1 writes "Steve Jobs vowed weeks ago that when iTunes shifted to a tiered price structure in April, older tracks priced at $0.69 would outnumber the contemporary hits that are rising to $1.29. Today, several weeks later, iTunes made the transition. While the $1.29 tracks are immediately visible, locating cheaper tracks is proving to be an exercise in futility. With the exception of 48 songs that Apple has placed on the iTunes main page, $0.69 downloads are a scarce commodity. MP3 Newswire tried to methodically drill down to unearth more of them only to find: 1) A download like Heart's 34-year-old song Barracuda went up to $1.29, not down. 2) Obscure '90s Brit pop and '50s rockabilly artists — those most likely to benefit from a price drop — remained at $0.99. 3) Collected tracks from a cross-section of 1920s, '30s, and '40s artists all remained at $0.99. Finally, MP3 Newswire called up tracks in the public domain from an artist named Ada Jones who first recorded in 1893 on Edison cylinder technology. The price on all of the century-old, public-domain tracks remained at $0.99. (The same tracks are available for free on archive.org.) The scarcity of lower-priced tracks may reflect the fact that the labels themselves decide which price tier they want to pursue for a given artist; and they are mostly ignoring the lower tier. Meanwhile, Amazon's UK site has decided to counter-promote their service by dropping prices on select tracks to 29 pence ($0.42)."
Software

Microsoft Open Sources ASP.NET MVC 227

Posted by timothy from the bee-ess-dee-like dept.
Jimmy Zimms writes "Microsoft's ASP.NET MVC is an extension built on the core of ASP.NET that brings some of the popular practices and ease of development that were popularized by Ruby on Rails and Django to the .NET developers. Scott Guthrie, the inventor of ASP.NET, just announced that Microsoft is open sourcing the ASP.NET MVC stack under the MS-PL license. 'I'm excited today to announce that we are also releasing the ASP.NET MVC source code under the Microsoft Public License (MS-PL). MS-PL is an OSI-approved open source license. The MS-PL contains no platform restrictions and provides broad rights to modify and redistribute the source code.' Here's the text of the MS-PL.

Comment Re:What's next, an email client and html editor? (Score 1) 360

by nsebban (#27410221) Attached to: Command Lines and the Future of Firefox
I'll rephrase : I'd like a browser that only displays web-pages (html + css + javascript + flash) and that's all. By doing just that, maybe I can even dream of a web-browser that won't be using 100M when launched, and 2-300M after a few hours of usage.

You have to admit that today's Firefox is pretty far from that, and it's not exactly getting better :/

Comment Re:What's next, an email client and html editor? (Score 1) 360

by nsebban (#27407797) Attached to: Command Lines and the Future of Firefox
For me, it would be pretty much everything. I don't use the search field, I don't use the bookmarks, I use an online RSS reader, I don't print-preview and print web-pages, I don't use history, I don't use side-panels. I wish all this could at least be optional.

Many of FF3 features now rely on SQLite database as a data storage system. It's a great idea, it's really fast and all, but if there's a need to store data that way, for a web-browser, maybe there's too much data in the first place ?
Games

Believable Stupidity In Game AI 378

Posted by Soulskill from the much-more-common-in-real-players dept.
Gamasutra is running a feature written by Mick West, co-founder of Neversoft, about creating game AI that is dumb enough to defeat, yet intelligent enough that its "mistakes" are similar to those a real player would make, thus preserving the illusion that the AI is not just throwing the game. "The simplest way to introduce stupidity into AI is to reduce the amount of computation that it's allowed to perform. Chess AI generally performs billions of calculations when deciding what move to make. ... The problem with this approach is that it decreases the realism of the AI player. When you reduce the amount of computation, the AI will begin to make incredibly stupid mistakes — mistakes that are so stupid, no human would ever make them. The artificial nature of the game will then become apparent, which destroys the illusion of playing against a real opponent. ... By reducing the amount of computation, we create an AI opponent that is trying to win, but has been crippled in a way that leads to unrealistic gameplay."
Google

Google To Monitor Surfing Habits For Ad-Serving 219

Posted by CmdrTaco from the do-you-see-what-i-see dept.
superglaze (ZDNet UK) writes "Google is gearing up to launch cookie-based 'interest-based' advertising, which involves monitoring the user's passage across various WebSense partner sites. The idea is to have better-targeted advertising, which is not a million miles away from what Phorm is trying to do — the difference, it seems at first glance, is that Google is being relatively up-front about its intentions."
Games

Maxis Launches Spore API Contest 35

Posted by Soulskill from the not-the-three-letters-they're-known-for dept.
Today EA Maxis announced the beginning of a development contest for their new Spore API. They're calling on players to submit useful and interesting apps and widgets, and they've provided samples to show the kinds of ideas they're looking for. The samples include an update list for creations by game buddies, a creature dueling app, a creature tournament app, and a variety of viewers.
The Almighty Buck

The Formula That Killed Wall Street 561

Posted by kdawson from the easy-go dept.
We recently discussed the perspective that the harrowing of Wall Street was caused by over-reliance on computer models that produced a single number to characterize risk. Wired has a piece profiling David X. Li, the quant behind the formula that enabled the creation of such simple risk models. "For five years, Li's formula, known as a Gaussian copula function, looked like an unambiguously positive breakthrough, a piece of financial technology that allowed hugely complex risks to be modeled with more ease and accuracy than ever before. With his brilliant spark of mathematical legerdemain, Li made it possible for traders to sell vast quantities of new securities, expanding financial markets to unimaginable levels. His method was adopted by everybody from bond investors and Wall Street banks to ratings agencies and regulators. ... [T]he real danger was created not because any given trader adopted it but because every trader did. In financial markets, everybody doing the same thing is the classic recipe for a bubble and inevitable bust."
Government

Should Obama Give Stimulus To Open Source? 525

Posted by samzenpus from the more-money-please dept.
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Bill Snyder posits a deeper relationship between government and open source than was proposed in last week's open letter to Obama calling for broader open source adoption: economic stimulus. Since software vendors urged the president to go open source last week, security companies 'have raised scary points about vulnerabilities in open source,' suggesting they could step in to help secure an open source switch. Rather than opt for this kind of security through obscurity, Snyder argues in favor of earmarking funds for open source development to instead ensure security through transparency. 'Once the government expands its use and support of open source, venture money — which is drying up in the current recession — would again start flowing to those small companies, allowing them to hire or rehire some of the tens of thousands of unemployed IT workers,' he argues."

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