Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Music

Submission + - Amazon to offer DRM-free music downloads

Submitted by squidfood
squidfood writes: The Guardian is announcing that Amazon.com will begin offering music downloads DRM-free in MP3 format, including the EMI catalog, according to their press release. I'm liking Bezos a little more than Jobs today... a welcome competition- bringing DRM-free entry with such substantial clout and infrastructure.
Censorship

Submission + - What is the deal anyway? whats news vs. whats not

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: I'm so angry! -that I don't know where to start. I read slashdot a few times per day, 'almost' every day. I've tried to submit a story several times about some new hardware that revolutionizes both home and office. A drastically different piece of hardware than anything else out there. But My story got tossed I don't know how many times. I re-wrote it different ways, each time making sure it was not an "advertisement" for a company, but an awareness article. -all to no avail.

THEN I see stories on the FRONT page of slashdot, such as "what is your favorite way to make coffee?" (just to pull out a recent one) and I about lost it!

For years I have thought that slashdot was for latest breaking news about software, hardware, issues, and for news surrounding computers, IT, security etc.. but I cannot understand why my story of a powerful and unique piece of hardware cannot make the news.. but "how I like my coffee" can..

I give up... I'm beginning to think that concerned readers/posters, who are truly concerned about what slashdot has always been about, have all left the building. And, that I'm beginning to wonder what the people are like who are reading this now. How can a question of 'How I like my coffee' or 'what is my favorite soda' make the front page.. but not something revolutionary in the computer industry... I just cannot understand..

so my question is.. what is most important for you to read about in slashdot?
What is missing in slashdot? -I hope to see this question come online, because I really want to know.
PlayStation (Games)

Submission + - PS3 losing ground in Japan

Submitted by
Krommenaas
Krommenaas writes: "Last week's sales figures from Japan show the PS3 dramatically losing the console battle in Japan, the home market of both Sony and Nintendo. The PS3 loses out 6:1 to the Wii in hardware sales and a whopping 30:1 in software sales (325,619 for the Wii vs. 10,412 for the PS3). Not a single PS3 title is in the top 50 of best sold games, while Nintendo occupies the top 19 spots with DS and Wii titles."
Movies

Submission + - New "Terminator" Trilogy Planned

Submitted by
Ant
Ant writes: "Dark Horizons report after much talk and posturing over the future of "The Terminator" franchise/series in recent years, something surprising has happened... The Halcyon Company has acquired the franchise rights to the popular "The Terminator" movie series and intend to make a new trilogy that would anchor their movie company..."
Graphics

Submission + - ATI committed to fixing its problems with OSS

Submitted by
Sits
Sits writes: "While talking about the Red Hat summit Chris Blizzard mentions how an ATI marketing spokesman was on stage. The spokesman said ATI knows it has a problem with open source and is committed to fixing it. Does this mean ATI will finally resolve alleged agpgart misappropriation, fast track the release of open source 2D drivers on its latest cards while releasing specifications for its mid-range cards or is ATI only concerned with fixes to its binary driver to maintain feature parity with competitors?"
Music

Submission + - SPAM: Online music; What the Music Industry Doesn't Want

Submitted by
Brian Beshore
Brian Beshore writes: "Online music. It's a revolution. Everyone knows about it. What you mainly hear about, however, is what the big record companies have to say about online music. They talk about piracy, and what do they say about that? They say 'it's not fair to the artist!' 'You're ripping the artist off!' they say. 'The artist is not getting their royalties!' The big record companies are really concerned about the artists in their stables. Right. Let's take a look at how record companies 'take care' of their stars. "According to Ronald Zalkind, in Getting Ahead in the Music Business (Schirmer Books), the expenses an artist incurs for record production often outweigh record royalties: 'Let us now hypothesize an artists with initial record royalties, on the sale of 100,000 units, of $40,600. The artist has a personal manager who gets 20 percent off the top, which reduces the $40,600 figure to $32,480. The average cost of producing an album today (which is what our hypothetical artist ran up at session costs) is $75,000. This means that the artist owes the record company $34,400. Also, the artist receives a $10,000 advance against royalties as bare subsistence income on which federal, state. and local taxes were paid. This raises the artist's outstanding debt, on his first release, to $44,400. Now, let us suppose that the artist's second album with the record company sells gold: The initial payout, less container charges, is $203,000. The personal manager gets 20 percent, which brings the artist's take down to $162,400. The artist owes $44,400 from the first album, which further reduces the artist's gold record income to $118,000. Finally, the artist spent $100,000 on the second go-round in the studio and took a $15,000 advance. With a gold record on the wall, the artist after two successful album releases, has only earned $3,000.' " The above quote is from Making Money Making Music (No Matter Where You Live) by James W. Dearing. (Writer's Digest Books) Is it any wonder that we saw Don Henley appealing to congress about his and other artists recording contracts, saying he felt like an indentured servant. Is it any wonder that more and more artists are turning to the internet to promote their music. Even though mostly what we've heard about online music is about the piracy that goes on, and truly this is not right, what we will see more and more of is that online music is where to look for new music. [spam URL stripped]"
Censorship

Submission + - Surprise arrest for online Scientology critic

Submitted by
destinyland
destinyland writes: "An online critic of Scientology was confronted at a routine hearing Tuesday with surprise arrest warrants, and thrown into jail. Six years as a fugitive ended in Feburary. (After picketing a Scientology complex in 2000, he'd been arrested for "threatening a religion" over a Usenet joke about "Tom Cruise Missiles.") But 64-year-old Keith Henson had been out on bail, and was even scheduled to address the European Space Agency conference on Space Elevators. He's a co-founder of the Space Colony movement, and one of the original researchers at Texas Instruments. In this interview he discusses both space-based solar energy and his war with the Scientologists — just a few days before he was arrested and sent to prison."
Announcements

Submission + - Election farce in Scotland

Submitted by
Peil
Peil writes: "In the most closely contested elections in Scotland since devolution it appears that the electoral system in Scotland has failed badly on two counts.

Firstly, in addition to the first past the post system for electing Members of the Scottish Parliament, the Single transferable vote was brought in for local council elections. This has caused no end of confusion with an estimated 100k ballot papers being classed as void due to being filled incorrectly.(http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/6 623287.stm)

Secondly,the team providing electronic counting of ballot papers had a technical snafu which led to counts being suspended overnight — apparently the counting machines worked perfectly, it was when they fed he results back to a central database for collation that it all went pear shaped (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/glasgow_and_w est/6623239.stm)"
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft Looks to refuel talks with Yahoo

Submitted by
froggero1
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?"
Media

Submission + - AACS Body Responds to Key Postings

Submitted by massivefoot
massivefoot writes: Bloggers "crossed the line" when they posted a software key that could break the encryption on some HD-DVDs, the AACS copy protection body has said. An AACS executive said it was looking at "legal and technical tools" to confront those who published the key.
Music

Submission + - Harvard Law Prof Urges University to Fight RIAA

Submitted by
NewYorkCountryLawyer
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes: "Distinguished Harvard University Law School Professor Charles Nesson has called upon Harvard University to fight back against the RIAA and stand up for its students: "Students and faculty use the Internet to gather and share knowledge now more than ever....Yet "new deterrence and education initiatives" from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) threaten access to this vibrant resource. The RIAA has already requested that universities serve as conduits for more than 1,200 "pre-litigation letters." Seeking to outsource its enforcement costs, the RIAA asks universities to point fingers at their students, to filter their Internet access, and to pass along notices of claimed copyright infringement. But these responses distort the University's educational mission....... One can easily understand why the RIAA wants help from universities in facilitating its enforcement actions against students who download copyrighted music without paying for it. It is easier to litigate against change than to change with it. If the RIAA saw a better way to protect its existing business, it would not be threatening our students, forcing our librarians and administrators to be copyright police, and flooding our courts with lawsuits against relatively defenseless families without lawyers or ready means to pay. We can even understand the attraction of using lawsuits to shore up an aging business model rather than engaging with disruptive technologies and the risks that new business models entail...... But mere understanding is no reason for a university to voluntarily assist the RIAA with its threatening and abusive tactics. Instead, we should be assisting our students both by explaining the law and by resisting the subpoenas that the RIAA serves upon us. We should be deploying our clinical legal student training programs to defend our targeted students......""
Software

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

Submitted by
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.
The Internet

Submission + - Pandora limits service to U.S. and U.K only

Submitted by
Felix P. Dau
Felix P. Dau writes: "On May, 2nd Tim Westergren, Founder of the Pandora Radio and Music Genome Project, announced in an eMail to all listeners, that due to licencing restrictions, will cease to function for international users outside the U.S.

Here's a transcript of the eMail sent:

Dear Pandora listener,
Today we have some extremely disappointing news to share with you. Due to international licensing constraints, we are deeply, deeply sorry to say that we must begin proactively preventing access to Pandora's streaming service for most countries outside of the U.S.
It is difficult to convey just how disappointing this is for us. Our vision remains to eventually make Pandora a truly global service, but for the time being, we can no longer continue as we have been. As a small company, the best chance we have of realizing our dream of Pandora all around the world is to grow as the licensing landscape allows.
We show your IP address is '84.xx.xx.xx', which indicates you are listening from Germany. If you believe you are seeing this by mistake, we offer our sincere apologies and ask that you please reply to this email.
Delivery of Pandora is based on proper licensing from the people who created the music — we have always believed in honoring the guidelines as determined by legislators and regulators, artists and songwriters, and the labels and publishers they work with. In the U.S. there is a federal statute that provides this license for all the music streamed on Pandora. Unfortunately, there is no equivalent license outside the U.S. and there is no global licensing organization to enable us to legitimately offer Pandora around the world. Other than in the U.K., we have not yet been able to make significant progress in our efforts to obtain a sufficient number of international licenses at terms that would enable us to run a viable business. The volume of listening on Pandora makes it a very expensive service to run. Streaming costs are very high, and since our inception, we have been making publishing and performance royalty payments for every song we play.
Until now, we have not been able to tell where a listener is based, relying only on zip code information provided upon registration. We are now able to recognize a listener's country of origin based on the IP address from which they are accessing the service. Consequently, on May 3rd, we will begin blocking access to Pandora to listeners from your country. We are very sad to have to do this, but there is no other alternative.
We will be posting updates on our blog regarding our ongoing effort to launch in other countries, so please stay in touch. We will keep a record of your existing stations and bookmarked artists and songs, so that when we are able to launch in your country, they will be waiting for you. We deeply share your sense of disappointment and greatly appreciate your understanding. "
XBox (Games)

Submission + - Xbox 360 not as useful as PS3 for Folding@home

Submitted by
Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward writes: "Vijay Pande, creator of the Folding@home project, which harnesses the power of networked Playstation3s across the world to carry out essential research into Alzheimer's Disease, has revealed to Pro-G that the 360 is of limited help to his work.

After being asked if he thought the power of the 360 could be useful, he said: "Possibly, although the cell processor in the PS3 is much more powerful for our calculations than the CPU in the Xbox 360."

Giving details of how the power of the Playstation3 was useful to his research, Pande explained: "We are simulating key processes in protein folding and misfolding in Alzheimer's Disease. PS3's are performing aspects of these simulations, and doing so about 20 times faster than a typical PC."

The program has seen a strong uptake by PS3 owners with more than 250,000 unique users having registered, delivering nearly 400 teraflops of computing power. Total computing power at a single moment is now recorded at 700 teraflops, more than double the capacity of the network before PlayStation 3 joined the program.

There is still no word on any plans for the folding@home project to embrace the Xbox 360, but we're sure that many Xbox 360 owners would be more than willing to help out such a good cause.

http://www.pro-g.co.uk/news/03-05-2007-5386.html"

Slashdot Top Deals

What good is a ticket to the good life, if you can't find the entrance?

Close