Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:What if everyone got a piece? (Score 5, Interesting) 318

by Frymaster (#26039841) Attached to: Canadian Groups Call For Massive Net Regulation
and the tax on cd-rs is such a wild success.

witness my band. we suck. people hate us. no one comes to our shows. so, we release a cd. since we're not big enough to be granted an exemption, we pay the cd-r tax on all the blanks we use (and, yes, we used a legit duplication plant). of course, our cd sells miserably and we get nowhere near the beak-even point.

which means.... we lose $300 putting out our cd, and the tax we paid on the blanks goes straight into the pockets of a big-name canadian act. perhaps avril levign. that's right: levign makes more money off my artistic creation than i do.

thank you socan!
Games

Game Distribution and the 'Idiocy' of DRM 271

Posted by Soulskill from the completely-neutral-titles dept.
In light of the increased focus on the DRM controversy in recent days, Ars Technica did an interview with execs from CD Projekt's Good Old Games about where the problems are with current DRM implementation. "For me, the idiocy of those protection solutions shows how far from reality and from customers a lot of executives at big companies can be. You don't have to be a genius to check the internet and see all the pros and cons of those actions." Penny Arcade is also running a three-part series on DRM from game journalists Brian Crecente and Chris Remo. Crecente talks about how some companies are making progress in developing acceptable DRM, and some aren't. Remo recommends against a trend of overreaction to minor gripes.
Operating Systems

Foxconn Releases Test BIOS Fixing Linux Crashes 196

Posted by kdawson from the happy-ending-group-hug dept.
Ryan1984 writes "Only a week after the bad press coverage regarding the Linux-related bugs in a number of motherboards released by Foxconn (which turned out to be the AMI BIOS that several board makers use), Foxconn is the first vendor out with a publicly released test patch that fixes the bulk of the problems, allowing kernel 2.6.26 to run well on the afflicted boards. The remaining issues appear to either be kernel bugs in builds earlier than 2.6.26, issues with the Intel chipset itself, or minor annoyances that Foxconn is still working to resolve. Foxconn representative Heart Zhang has posted on the Ubuntu forums (where the situation began), apologizing for the issues, thanking Foxconn customers and the community at-large for their feedback, and promising that Foxconn will take Linux support and testing seriously, going forward."

Bill Gates Brags About Vista, Reacts to Apple's Latest Ads 891

Posted by Zonk from the oh-bill dept.
fr8_liner writes "In an unusually candid interview with Newsweek Bill Gates lays it all on the line, bragging about the benefits of Vista, ragging on Apple for their 'I'm a Mac' ads, and claiming primacy in a number of features shared by Vista and OSX. Specifically, it is Mr. Gates' opinion that the Apple adverts are misleading if not untruthful. He makes the claim that 'security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come out with a total exploit, your machine can be taken over totally. I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine.' The interview also touches on the future of Microsoft and Operating systems, and some of the company's plans for internet-based computing."
Communications

Submission + - Telecommute. Kill a career?

Submitted by
coondoggie
coondoggie writes: "Employees who frequently telecommute may damage or kill their chances to advance within a particular career. Over 60% of 1,320 global executives surveyed by executive search firm Korn/Ferry International said they believe that telecommuters are less likely to advance in their careers in comparison to employees working in traditional office settings. Company executives want face time with their employees, the study said. Oddly enough, despite this assertion, 48% of respondents indicated that they would consider a job which involved telecommuting on a regular basis and the vast majority 78% stated that telecommuters are either equally or more productive than those who work in offices. http://www.networkworld.com/news/2007/011707-telec ommute-career.html"
Book Reviews

Who won? 555

Posted by samzenpus from the start-the-political-machines dept.
doom writes "I think they call them "exit polls" because people bolt for the exits when you mention them, but I'm still fascinated by the subject myself, and this book is one of the reasons why. In Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen?, the central focus is, of course, on the infamous exit-poll discrepancies of the 2004 US Presidential election; but the authors also put it into context: they discuss the 2000 election, the irregularities in Ohio in 2004, the electronic voting machines issues, and the media's strange reluctance to report on any of these problems. Further, in the chapter "How did America really vote?", they compare the indications of the raw exit-poll data to other available polling data. Throughout, Freeman and Bleifuss do an excellent job of presenting arguments based on statistical analysis in a clear, concise way." Read the rest of doom's review
Space

Detection of Earth-like Civilizations in Space Now Possible 345

Posted by Zonk from the in-spaaaaaaace dept.
Mr. McGibby writes "Astronomers have come up with an improved method of looking for extraterrestrial life with an Earth-like civilization. Theorist Avi Loeb proposes to use instruments like the Low Frequency Demonstrator (LFD) of the Mileura Wide-Field Array (MWA), an Australian facility for radio astronomy currently under construction. The array could (theoretically) detect civilizations broadcasting in the same frequencies as our own society. From the article: 'Loeb and Zaldarriaga calculate that by staring at the sky for a month, the MWA-LFD could detect Earth-like radio signals from a distance of up to 30 light-years, which would encompass approximately 1,000 stars. More powerful broadcasts could be detected to even greater distances. Future observatories like the Square Kilometer Array could detect Earth-like broadcasts from 10 times farther away, which would encompass 100 million stars. ' The original paper describes the details."
Microsoft

MS Fights Gmail With 2-GB Exchange Mailboxes 353

Posted by kdawson from the supersize-it dept.
prawnonthebarbie writes "Microsoft is battling the trend for frazzled office workers to give up on Outlook and auto-forward all their mail to Gmail: the company is promising 2-GB mailboxes in Exchange 2007 rather than the piffling 50-MB mailboxes most workplaces have now. Speaking at the launch of Vista, Office, and Exchange in Singapore, Microsoft Product Marketing Manager Martha DeAmicis said Microsoft had built clustered replication into Exchange so corporate IT admins wouldn't be worrying about backing up big mailboxes to tape. However, its killer feature appears to be its plans to make those gigs of email available on Joe Officeworker's mobile phone."

Slashdot Top Deals

"Intelligence without character is a dangerous thing." -- G. Steinem

Close