Follow Slashdot blog updates by subscribing to our blog RSS feed

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Privacy

London Police Seek To Install CCTV In Pubs 293

Posted by timothy from the well-they-do-call-it-a-public-house dept.
JCWDenton writes "The Met Police got a short sharp rap over the knuckles yesterday, as the Office of the Information Commissioner questioned what looks very much like a blanket policy to force CCTV onto public houses in certain parts of London. The story begins with a letter to the Guardian last week, from Nick Gibson. He is currently renovating Islington pub The Drapers Arms, after its previous owners allowed it to go insolvent and then disappeared. In his letter, he argues that if he had merely taken over an existing licence, the police could not have imposed any additional conditions. However, because this was now a new licence, the police were able to make specific requests, including one particular request in respect of installing CCTV."
Privacy

Bill Would Require ISPs, Wi-Fi Users To Keep Logs 857

Posted by kdawson from the boon-for-disk-makers dept.
suraj.sun notes CNet reporting on bills filed in the US House and Senate that would require all ISPs and operators of Wi-Fi hotspots — including home users — to maintain access logs for 2 years to aid in law enforcement. The bills were filed by Republicans, but the article notes that the idea of forcing data retention has been popular on both sides of the aisle over the years. "Republican politicians on Thursday called for a sweeping new federal law that... would impose unprecedented data retention requirements on a broad swath of Internet access providers and is certain to draw fire from businesses and privacy advocates. ... Each [bill] contains the same language: 'A provider of an electronic communication service or remote computing service shall retain for a period of at least two years all records or other information pertaining to the identity of a user of a temporarily assigned network address the service assigns to that user [i.e., DHCP].'"
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."

Comment Re:How have the APIs changed? (Score 3, Informative) 448

by Baba Ram Dass (#26820571) Attached to: BeOS Successor Haiku Keeps the Faith

I'm interested to know if Haiku will run under Parallels system virtualization, which itself runs under OSX.

Yes.

I'm curious, too, if it is able to run in a full non-virtual memory, non-swapping configuration for speed and reliability.

Yep, by default (while still in pre-alpha at least) it runs without paging.

Comment Re:hardware drivers (Score 2, Informative) 448

by Baba Ram Dass (#26820349) Attached to: BeOS Successor Haiku Keeps the Faith

Haiku has drivers for both nVidia and ATI, though they're nowhere near where they should be... but they do work quite well. 3D support is provided by Mesa. I don't think 3D hardware is supported ATM.

Ethernet support is pretty damn good. I've yet to test a machine whose NIC isn't supported by Haiku. Its netstack is very very good for its alpha state, quite fast and stable.

Last time I tried, sound was pretty flaky. BUT that was before they integrated Open Sound System and all that jazz. I hear support is quite good.

But don't take my word for it; go try it out yourself.
Operating Systems

Ubuntu Wipes Windows 7 In Benchmarks 781

Posted by timothy from the such-things-need-more-context-than-substance dept.
twitter writes "Recent and controversial benchmarks for Windows 7 leave an important question unanswered: 'Is it faster than GNU/Linux?' Here, at last, is a benchmark that pits Ubuntu, Vista and Windows 7 against each other on the same modern hardware. From install time to GUI efficiency, Ubuntu beats Windows and is often twice as fast. Where Windows 7 is competitive, the difference is something the average user would not notice. The average GNU/Linux user is now getting better absolute performance from their computer as well as better value than the average Windows user."
Networking

Best FOSS Active Directory Alternative? 409

Posted by kdawson from the war-stories dept.
danboid writes "I'm an IT technician at a large school near Manchester, England. We currently have two separate networks (one for pupils, one for staff) each with its own Windows Server 2003 Active Directory box handling authentication and storing users' files. We're planning on restructuring the network soon and we'd like to be able to replace the two aging AD servers with a single, more powerful Linux server running an open source OpenLDAP implementation. The main contenders for this purpose seem to be Fedora Directory Server, OpenDS, and Apache Directory Server; but I've been unable to find meaningful comparisons among the three. I'd like to hear which solution Slashdot readers recommend. What is your experience with ease of implementation / maintenance? Any stories of similar (un)successful migrations? Any other tips for an organization wanting to drop AD for a FOSS equivalent?"
Microsoft

MS Silverlight To Stream Obama Inauguration Events 589

Posted by kdawson from the open-to-most dept.
Ilgaz writes in to let us know that we will have to install MS Silverlight 2 to watch the US President's inauguration online. Everyone running Mac PPC, Linux, and FreeBSD has been left out, as there are no working Silverlight 2-capable alternatives on these systems. Here is Microsoft's press release announcing the selection of Silverlight yesterday. Streaming of various events around the inauguration begins today at the Presidential Inaugural Committee site, which touts its "inclusive and accessible" coverage.

Comment Re:Nuts (Score 1) 296

by Baba Ram Dass (#26317971) Attached to: Protection From Online Eviction?

If AOL is providing a service for free, then you're correct. But if AOL is providing a service in exchange for showing you ads, or data-mining your surfing habits, then you are paying for the service and AOL is bound by the terms of the contract.

That's ridiculous.

I can listen to FM radio all day long for free, but I have to suffer through the sporadic commercials. So I guess by your logic the radio station should be required to notify me if they decide to drop a poorly-performing program.
The Internet

Protection From Online Eviction? 296

Posted by kdawson from the our-data-our-selves dept.
AOL has been shutting down its free Web services, in some cases with little or no notice to users, and they are not the only ones. This blog post on the coming "datapocalypse" makes the case that those who host Web content should be required to provide notice and access to data for a year, and be held strictly accountable the way landlords are before they can evict a tenant. Some commenters on the post argue that you get what you pay for with free Web services, and that users should be backing up their data anyway. What do you think, should there be required notice and access before online hosts take user data offline for good?
Education

Improving Wikipedia Coverage of Computer Science 186

Posted by kdawson from the accused-of-original-research dept.
Pickens writes "MIT computer scientist Scott Aaronson has an interesting post on how to improve Wikipedia's coverage of theoretical computer science. Aaronson writes what while Wikpedia will never be an ideal venue for academics because 'we're used to (1) putting our names on our stuff, (2) editorializing pretty freely, (3) using "original research" as a compliment and not an accusation, and (4) not having our prose rewritten or deleted by people calling themselves Duduyat, Raul654, and Prokonsul Piotrus,' he identifies twenty basic research areas and terms in theoretical computer science that are not defined on Wikipedia, and invites readers to write some articles about them. Article suggestions include property testing, algorithmic game theory, derandomization, sketching algorithms, propositional proof complexity, arithmetic circuit complexity, discrete harmonic analysis, streaming algorithms, and hardness of approximation. One commenter suggests that professors should encourage students to improve the Wikipedia articles about topics they are studying. 'This will help them understand the topic and at the same time improve Wikipedia.'"

Slashdot Top Deals

egrep -n '^[a-z].*\(' $ | sort -t':' +2.0

Close