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Comment Re:It could also... (Score 1) 602

by Zuato (#34049894) Attached to: BSG Prequel Series Caprica Canceled

Not only was there a huge break, they changed the day it aired from Friday to Tuesday. To compound the issue further I had checked the syfy site in August and they showed it as not starting back up until January. I checked back last week to discover the show had not only started back up at the beginning of October, but had been moved from Friday to Tuesday. Thankfully they had the episodes online so I could catch up, but now they are pulling the plug.

And they wonder why they didn't have the viewership for this one.
Businesses

Chinese Companies Rent White Foreigners Screenshot-sm 145

Posted by samzenpus from the token-white-guy dept.
The job market may look bad here, but if you're in China, and you happen to be white, all you need is a suit and tie. An increasing number of Chinese companies are willing to pay any price to have a few fair-skinned faux employees walking around. From the article: "'Face, we say in China, is more important than life itself,' said Zhang Haihua, author of Think Like Chinese. 'Because Western countries are so developed, people think they are more well off, so people think that if a company can hire foreigners, it must have a lot of money and have very important connections overseas. So when they really want to impress someone, they may roll out a foreigner.' Or rent one."

Comment Re:Plenty of free AV options (Score 1) 531

by Zuato (#31820778) Attached to: Ubuntu on a Dime

The problem is the average customer buys a boxed machine at Best Buy, Wal-Mart, etc and takes it home. Upon booting up the machine they get their 30 to 90 day trial of McAfee or Norton, then subscribe at the end up and end up resubbing every year. My guess is this is where he is getting this.

The average reader of Slashdot knows that there are free alternatives. The average consumer that buys a HP, Dell, or whatever at the local brick and mortar retailer does not.
Education

Recommendations For C++/OpenGL Linux Tutorials? 117

Posted by timothy from the no-you-guide-me dept.
QuaveringGrape writes "After a few years of Python I've recently been trying to expand my programming knowledge into the realm of compiled languages. I started with C, then switched over to C++. A friend and longtime OpenGL programmer told me about NeHe's tutorials as a good step after the command-line programs started to get old, but there's a problem: all the tutorials are very Windows-based, and I've been using Linux as my single platform for a while now. I'm looking for suggestions for tutorials that are easy to learn, without being dumbed down or geared towards non-programmers."
Earth

Planned Nuclear Reactors Will Destroy Atomic Waste 344

Posted by Soulskill from the but-where-will-we-get-our-superheroes dept.
separsons writes "A group of French scientists are developing a nuclear reactor that burns up actinides — highly radioactive uranium isotopes. They estimate that 'the volume of high-level nuclear waste produced by all of France’s 58 reactors over the past 40 years could fit in one Olympic-size swimming pool.' And they're not the only ones trying to eliminate atomic waste: Researchers at the University of Texas in Austin are working on a fusion-fission reactor. The reactor destroys waste by firing streams of neutrons at it, reducing atomic waste by up to 99 percent!"
Businesses

UMG To Price New CDs Under $10 362

Posted by kdawson from the too-little-too-late dept.
marmoset writes "Perhaps a decade late, Universal Music Group has decided to try out sub-$10 CD pricing in the US. 'Beginning in the second quarter and continuing through most of the year, the company's Velocity program will test lower CD prices. Single CDs will have the suggested list prices of $10, $9, $8, $7 and $6.'" CD retailers are not convinced the price cuts will work out. For one thing it depends on whether other major labels follow suit, but the article notes that "executives at the other majors were nervous about the UMG move" and "privately, some appeared annoyed."

Comment Re:Answers (Score 1) 671

by Zuato (#31070896) Attached to: The iPad Questions Apple Won't Answer

Being that the iPad and the iPhone use the same base OS I'd be really surprised if the iPad did NOT support Exchange Email out of the box since the iPhone already does. The VPN I am not sure on. The iPhone does, the iPad in theory *should* but we won't know for sure until it ships.

Those two points alone should be pretty easy for InfoWorld to get a good educated guess on based on what is available for the iPhone now, and in the developers kit if you have access to it. And from what I've seen the iPad is focused at the consumer market primarily. I would not be surprised if the next version of the iPad has more enterprise features built in just as the iPhone 3g did over the original iPhone.

Comment Re:Can somebody tell me why? (Score 1) 627

by Zuato (#29758633) Attached to: Michael Dell Says Windows 7 Will Make You Love PCs

Meh, I'm running 7 Ultimate (technet license - full version, not the release candidates) on a Dell Latitude E6400 and I'd like to say that so far, RDP is NOT better. It hangs on closing to the point of needing a system reboot. I had better RDP in Ubuntu 9.04, Vista, and XP than this. Sometimes a reboot helps, but lately it has been pretty consistent in the hang on logging out of an RDP session.

Office 2007 (outlook) hangs on certain emails (one from the local Apple store, go figure), and hung on printing an email from a vendor. If I load up my XP VM (for my phone system admin software) Outlook 2007 works fine on the email and printing.

Power management certainly is not better than Ubuntu. I had longer life on a charge from Ubuntu than I get now with 7 - this is with unmodified settings in either OS.

Boot up was generally faster than Vista and XP, but is starting to slow down. Overall time to desktop is definitely better, but with age it is starting to slow down like previous versions of Windows have.

Shut down is another story...sometimes it hangs and I have to hold the power button down to get the laptop to shut down. Other times it seems to take an eternity but does shut down properly on its own.

All drivers are up to date, all updates from Microsoft have been applied, and I am running the Microsoft Security Essentials to see how well it works (so far it seems ok, but haven't really tried to purposely infect the machine).

Overall my impression of it is an updated version of Vista. There are some nice features added to it, but at this point from my experiences I'd say hold off a bit and wait for some updates to come along for both the OS and the hardware drivers.
Security

Researchers Hijack Mebroot Botnet, Study Drive-By Downloads 130

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the hijack-and-inject-vaccine dept.
TechReviewAl writes "Researchers at the University of California at Santa Barbara hijacked the Mebroot botnet for about a month and used it to study drive-by downloading. The researchers managed to intercept Mebroot communications by reverse-engineering the algorithm used to select domains to connect to. Mebroot infects legitimate websites and uses them to redirect users to malicious sites that attempt to install malware on a victim's machine. The team, who previously infiltrated the Torpig botnet, found that at least 13.3 percent of systems that were redirected by Mebroot were already infected and 70 percent were vulnerable to about 40 common attacks."
Novell

Submission + - SPAM: Novell forces customers to pay for maintenance

Submitted by
viralMeme
viralMeme writes: ".. Novell this week felt the ire of its user base, as it warned partners that in a few months it would be requiring that customers get a maintenance contract on software before they would get access to patches, updates, and technical documents for that software .."
Link to Original Source
Apple

Submission + - Apple censoring Single Payer advocacy App for the (wordpress.com) 1

Submitted by
ourcraft
ourcraft writes: "Apple store censored and prevented an iphone app that allows people to advocate for single payer healthcare.
"PALO ALTO, CA â"Apple, Inc. has censored an iPhone application promoting health insurance reform in the United States. iSinglePayer, an iPhone application that advocates for single-payer health care reform was rejected from the App Store by Apple because it is âoepolitically charged.â The application displays charts and bullet points about single-payer health care systems, and it allows users to call members of congress. iSinglePayer even calculates your local congressperson using GPS, and displays the amount of money donated to each congressperson from the health sector."
This is awful! This evil. This is just about the end of the line for apple arrogantly, stupidly, fascisticly thinking they can control our lives. And yes I mean fascist. They want to prevent you from using the tools they sell you from acting like a citizen? Yep thats fascism. Your phone wont let talk about politics. SHAME on Apple"
Intel

Submission + - Intel Announces Ct Beta Program (ddj.com)

Submitted by
sdt
sdt writes: "Hot on the heels of Intel's purchase of multicore startups RapidMind and CilkArts, Dr Dobbs reports that Intel has opened up applications to their Ct beta program. Ct is Intel's technology for data-parallel programming and is meant to make writing parallel applications easy while allowing "forward-scaling". There's no word yet on whether Ct will be limited to Intel's hardware only."

Submission + - German "Die Piratenpartei" (Pirate Party) gets 2% 1

Submitted by
the_doctor_23
the_doctor_23 writes: "The German Piratenpartei managed to win 2% of the votes in yesterdays federal election.
While they will not be represented in parliarment due to a 5% minimum threshold,
this is none the less a remarkable feat for the young party modeled after Sweden's Piratpartiet.
According to polls the pirates attracted as many as 13% of the first time voters."

Comment Re:You know what company is shamefully absent? (Score 1) 282

by Zuato (#29133201) Attached to: The Myth of the Isolated Kernel Hacker

Wireless in Ubuntu has been pretty darned good the last two or three versions released. I've had zero issues getting wireless to work across three different laptop manufacturers and on my old desktop with an ancient D-Link wireless PCI card. Wireless worked right out of the box so to speak with no tinkering required.

I'll say it has been better than XP and Vista on two of the lap tops and the desktop to set up my wireless networking.
Role Playing (Games)

Submission + - Blizzard ignores huge problem in Warcraft

Submitted by
blast3r
blast3r writes: "Blizzard has been aware of a serious problem where players are unable to enter Instances (Dungeons) where at some times it can take over and hour to get in. The problem originated earlier this year when they were trying to fix over population of these instances which would often cause the instance to crash and the players would have to start over. They are saying they need to tweak hardware (July 2, 2009) yet refuse to give updates to their customers and are even banning those that are complaining in this thread. This is not a very good situation for Blizzard especially since Blizzcon is just around the corner. So what did Blizzard do with the hundreds of millions of dollars they made between early this year and the release of patch 3.2? Everyone knows that new patches generates more traffic. In any event, their PR people probably need to be prepared to meat some disgruntled customers!"

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