froggero1 - Slashdot User

Submission + - Wikipedia as a political battleground

Submitted by

Denis Troller

on Sunday May 06, 2007 @10:06PM

Denis Troller writes: "During the French debate between the two presidential contestants on TV thursday 04/03, among other discussions, Segolene Royal asked her rival if he new what generation the EPR (Europeean Pressurized Reactor). "Fourth", was Nicolas Sarkozy's answer, which Segolene Royal corrected saying "you're wrong, it's third".

The issue at hand is not the trivia exchanged by the condidates, but the fact reported by the French journal "Liberation" [liberation, in french].

Under a few hours, the french EPR page on wikipedia underwent a succession of changes (about 50), Sarkozy's supporters trying to mask their candidate's mistake, and Segolene's trying to maintain the correct information. An interesting twist on wikipedia's open modification scheme and the growing usage of "online medium" for political campaigning, be it in France or in the US (see Obama's MySpace "scandal" on that matter)."

Submission + - PHP 5.2.2 and 4.4.7 Released

Submitted by daeg on Friday May 04, 2007 @08:33AM

daeg writes: PHP 5.2.2 and 4.4.7 have been released with a plethora of security updates. Many of the security notifications come from the Month of PHP Bugs effort, and range from double freed memory to bugs in functions that allow attackers to enable register_globals, to memory corruption with unserialize(), to input validation flaws that allow e-mail header injections, with an unhealthy sprinkling of other bugs and flaws fixed. All administrators that run any version of PHP are encouraged to update immediately.

Submission + - Is "Personal" Computing Dead?

Submitted by jg21 on Friday May 04, 2007 @07:51AM

jg21 writes: Yahoo!'s Jeremy Zawodny recently asked What the heck is Web 2.0 anyway? and received a set of responses reminiscent of those garnered by The Reg back in 2005, which famously concluded, based on its readers' responses, that Web 2.0 was made up of 12% badger's paws, 6% JavaScript worms, and 26% nothing. Nonetheless, as Social Computing (SoC) widens and deepens its footprint, we seem to be witnessing the death of "Personal" Computing. SoC has already, for better or for worse, become an academic field of study.

Submission + - Microsoft Looks to refuel talks with Yahoo

Submitted by

froggero1

on Friday May 04, 2007 @07:16AM

froggero1 writes: "Software-but-not-so-much-search giant Microsoft wants to rekindle the takeover talks with Yahoo. According to the New York Post article, Yahoo! has repeatability turned away their offers, but Microsoft hopes that a lucrative 50 billion dollar offer will bring them back to the table. This move would increase Microsoft's web search market share to roughly 38%. But will one company being in control of the second and third ranked search engines have any impact on Google?"

Submission + - New Gandi.net services

Submitted by

armelle

on Friday May 04, 2007 @06:55AM

armelle writes: "Gandi.net , the largest domain name registrar in France and accredited by ICANN is pleased to announce today the releasing of.us domains and the addition of allowing payment in US Dollars for domain names. Gandi continues to expand its services, this time more targeted to its customers based in the US. Since its beginning, Gandi has had a large following in the United States and the company has been frequently mentionned in respected American media (CNET...) as a registrar that leads the way in terms of integrity, its dedication to customer care, and its technical know- "There has been a high demand for .us domains and payment in dollars from our customers recently, and this is why we are making these services avalaible today. We also hope to welcome many more American, who frequently provide us with positive feedback, and who give us their support for our integrity ans quality of service", observes Stephan Ramoin, President and CEO of Gandi. Today Gandi is considered as a strong point of reference in the fields of domain name registrar. The company's goal is to create an alternative and independent line of Internet services based around domain names. Check our web site to get more info: http://www.gandi.net/"

Submission + - Asked to install Pirated Software, what do you do?

Submitted by

on Thursday May 03, 2007 @09:15AM

An anonymous reader writes: I am an IT professional, and due to budget constraints, I have been told to install multiple copies of MS Office, despite offering to install OpenOffice, and other OpenSource Office products. Even though most of the uses are for people using Excel like a database, or formatting of text in cells, other programs are not tolerated. I have been over ruled by our controller, to my disagreement. Other than drafting a letter to the owners of the company on how I disagree with the policy, what else can I do? I would never turn them in, but I am in tough place by knowing doing something illegal. I want to keep my job, but disagree with some of the decision making on this issue.

Steve Jobs Personally Resolves Customer Complaint 341

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday May 03, 2007 @08:05AM from the steve-jobs-my-dishes-need-to-be-washed dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The Consumerist recently published a story about an Apple customer who went through support hell with a broken Macbook. After escalating the issue up the support chain, and a month wait for his Macbook, the guy gave up and simply wrote Steve Jobs a blistering flame-mail. So, was he surprised when Jobs' executive assistant responded back the next day! He got both a brand new Macbook, as well as his old one to copy the hard drive. The guy also responded in a comment, and he turns out to be a slashdotter! He even wrote a journal entry here about the story."

Submission + - CNet Claims Exclusive On Santa Rosa Benchmarks

Submitted by LuckyCat on Thursday May 03, 2007 @07:18AM

LuckyCat writes: CNet has posted what I believe to be the first ever review of Intel's soon to be launched Santa Rosa chipset, "Good news laptop fans, we've got a Santa Rosa laptop, and we've been putting it through its paces for the last few days." One of the most interesting feaures is something called Turbo Memory, "which is designed to speed up boot times and application responsiveness. This is essentially a piece of NAND memory (either 512MB or 1GB in size) mounted directly into the motherboard, or into a special slot should the laptop manufacturer choose."

Submission + - On May 21st, Talk Like Yoda, You Will

Submitted by

wpanderson

on Thursday May 03, 2007 @06:54AM

wpanderson writes: "May the 4th is the unofficial Star Wars Day, but May 21st (the 1980 release date of The Empire Strikes Back) could be Talk Like Yoda Day: think Talk Like a Pirate Day, but with mixed up your words will be."

Submission + - Sun joins development of OpenOffice.org for Mac

Submitted by

widhalmt

on Thursday May 03, 2007 @06:52AM

widhalmt writes: "In a Blogpost a member of Sun Microsystems announces the new effort of Sun Microsoystems to help with porting OpenOffice.org to Mac OS X.

The Open Source Office Suite is well known on Linux and Windows, but lacks support for Mac OS by now. For a long time Sun did not want to join the development of that port but now they will actively push it."

Submission + - The Internet of Things: What is a Spime?

Submitted by

CoolVibe

on Thursday May 03, 2007 @06:45AM

CoolVibe writes: "From the abstract in the talk: "World-renowned Science Fiction writer and futurist Bruce Sterling will outline his ideas for SPIMES, a form of ubiquitous computing that gives smarts and 'searchabiliity' to even the most mundane of physical products. Imagine losing your car keys and being able to search for them with Google Earth." It's a very interesting lecture given by Bruce Sterling about something we might see in the near future. The lecture can be viewed here on Google Video."

Submission + - How the (US)feds do Secure IDs.

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 03, 2007 @12:55AM

An anonymous reader writes: The Presidential directive hspd-12 required a complete overhaul of the requirements for identification, backgrounds checks and access control for employees at federally funded sites (this includes people who are not federal employees and are working at sites that are not run by the government — like Sandia or JPL). The deadline for the overhaul is rapidly approaching and somewhere this year there will be millions of Americans who will be issued one of these new secure badges. Or are they secure? Anybody out there who can tell me what this PDF is really telling me and whether the proposed mechanisms make sense and/or whether/how/where they have weak spots?

Submission + - Australian Do Not Call Register launched

Submitted by

BarryHaworth

on Wednesday May 02, 2007 @11:48PM

BarryHaworth writes: "The Australian Communications and Media Authority has announced that registrations are being accepted for the Australian Do Not Call Register. Once the register is active (from the 30th of May) numbers on the register may not be called by telemarketing companies subject to heavy fines. Numbers on the register may still be called by political parties, charities and market research companies.

Currently numbers may only be registered via the web, at www.donotcall.gov.au or by mail."

Submission + - a longevity gene found

Submitted by

quixote9

on Wednesday May 02, 2007 @11:23PM

quixote9 writes: "Calorie restriction while maintaining nutrient levels has long been known to dramatically increase life spans. Very different lab animals, from worms to mice, live up to 50% longer (or even more) on the restricted diets. However, so far, nobody has been able to figure out how this works. Scientists at the Salk Institute have found a specific gene in worms (there's a very similar one in people) that is directly involved in the longevity effect. That opens up the interesting possibility that doctors may someday be able to activate that gene directly and we can live long and prosper . . . without giving up chocolate."

Submission + - Five online video editors reviewed

Submitted by

prostoalex

on Wednesday May 02, 2007 @11:07PM

prostoalex writes: "ExtremeTech reviews five online video editors: EyeSpot, Cuts, JumpCut, MotionBox, and One True Media. Their conclusion? "Jumpcut offers the strongest editing and enhancing tools of the services we tested for this roundup. Unfortunately, it's still in beta, and we ran into some uploading difficulties." EyeSpot wins the format wars with support for ASF, AVI, DivX, DV, FLV, MOV, MPEG, MPG, MP4, RM, WMV, 3GP, and 3G2."

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