Comment And once again... (Score 1) 3
...Osama grins in his grave.
Submission + - {Video} How is Linux Actually Built? (youtube.com)
jencloer writes: "While Linux is running our phones, friend requests, tweets, financial trades, ATMs and more, most of us don't know how it's actually built. This short video takes you inside the process by which the largest collaborative development project in the history of computing is organized. Based on the annual report "Who Writes Linux," this is a powerful and inspiring story of how Linux has become a volunteer-driven phenomenon."
Submission + - Dutch Pirateparty refuses order to take down proxy (wordpress.com)
CAPSLOCK2000 writes: The Dutch Pirateparty has refused an order from Brein to take down a proxy to The PirateBay. Last month Brein (the distribution-industries paralegal outfit) forced a number of ISP to block The PirateBay; the first site ever blocked in The Netherlands. Immediately people started using proxies at other ISP's to get to TPB. Brein then threatened a number of those proxies with legal action. As most of these are run by hobbyists without legal or financial means there was little resistance. Now the Dutch Pirateparty has decided to stand up to the intimidation and refuses to take down it's proxy. Today they sent there response in style: by uploading it to The PirateBay In translation: "The Pirateparty disputes your claim and will not comply with your request."
Submission + - iPad app that lets mute kids speak menaced by patent lawsuit (theregister.co.uk) 1
Mojo66 writes: A company that makes specialist talking tablet computers for speech-disabled children has mounted a patent lawsuit which seems set to kill off an iPad app that does the same thing for a tenth of the price. Prentke Romich's Minspeak touchscreen devices enable mute children to communicate through a speech synthesiser controlled by an on-screen keyboard of symbols. Kids hit buttons to string together sentences. Prentke says a dynamic keyboard of symbols and the ability to redefine these keys have been patented — and Speak For Yourself allegedly violates these patents.
Submission + - A telescope that generates more data than the whole internet (cnn.com)
Sector Bug writes: IBM is working on new technology to handle the massive amount of data expected to be generated by the SKA (Square Kilometer Array) radio telescope being devloped by ASTRON (the Netherlands Institute of Radio Astronomy).
"The project is called DOME, and it's challenged to find a way to capture and process approximately one exabyte every day, which works out to about twice the amount of data that's generated every day by the World Wide Web, IBM says."
"The project is called DOME, and it's challenged to find a way to capture and process approximately one exabyte every day, which works out to about twice the amount of data that's generated every day by the World Wide Web, IBM says."
Submission + - Why There Won't Be An iPhone 5 (infoworld.com)
snydeq writes: Speculators' attention is turning again to iPhone rumors — and missing the deeper shift: that version numbers for mobile devices are increasingly unnecessary given that software is the ultimate driver of value for the devices, writes InfoWorld's Galen Gruman. 'Apple understands that the deep value is in the ecosystem, not the box that runs it, and the importance for owners of all models to feel current. It doesn't really matter whether your MacBook Pro is from 2009 or 2011 but whether it runs OS X Lion and iCloud. Ditto on mobile devices, where iOS 5 and iCloud compatibility is the major advantage. ... What all this comes down to is the rapid maturation of device hardware. Though hardware is important, software ultimately creates the most value, partly by enabling the hardware's value. We'll see version numbers on iOS, OS X, Android, and Windows for some time, but the devices that run them, not so much.'
Comment Re:Total? (Score 1) 370
The current budget is €11M, and it is estimated to be €15M if they had upgraded to Windows 7. That's where the €4M in savings come from.
Comment Re:Not Surprised (Score 1) 370
The savings are not about PCs that break, but those that don't do. While those perfectly running machines would have to be written off and replaced with new hardware for a Windows 7 install, while with Linux their lifetime can be extended, which saved €1.2M so far.
Comment In future news: (Score 1) 418
Just 4 weeks after the release of their latest AAA title, SimCity 2013, EA today complained about millions of downloads of the illegal, but DRM-free version of the game from P2P sites after a server malfunction made playing the game impossible for hours. Hackers had removed the need to be always online from the game earlier this week. "They are stealing our intellectual property!", a unnamed EA spokesperson said.
Submission + - Munich has saved €4M so far after switch to Linux (golem.de)
Mojo66 writes: Mayor Ude today reported (german) (english translation) that the city of Munich has saved €4 million so far by switching its IT infrastructure from Windows NT and Office to Linux and OpenOffice. At the same time, the number of trouble tickets decreased from 70 to 46 per month. Savings were €2.8M from software licensing and €1.2M from hardware because demands are lower for Linux compared to Windows 7.
Comment In related news: (Score 0, Troll) 116
Comment Re:Why not (Score 1) 1091
I'm talking about surfing the web, reading/writing e-mail, listening to music. Agree on the lack of a PDF reader on Windows but I'd consider this already on the border to what most people need. Video codecs, naah. Spreadsheet program is totally off the line.
Comment Re:Why not (Score 1) 1091
You're trolling. The default on Ubuntu is brasero, which gives you the option to burn on the fly right in the dialog.
Next time, pick a less transparent lie.
Mart
Well and because it gives you the option automatically means it works 100% and has no bugs?
Quoting from Ubuntu Bug #774203:
If I try creating a CD by adding files in Brasero then buring directly to disk (using defaults all the way through) brasero creates coasters every time.
I destroyed several cd's before finding the workaround...for new ubuntu users it is deterrent that you cannot burn cd's...
This bug has been reported months ago and nothing happened since.
Comment Windows is pre-installed on every PC (Score 1) 1091
Something I haven't read in the comments so far is the fact that M$ is allowed to more or less force PC vendors to ship new machines with Windows. What would politicians say if Daimler-Benz demands every new car on this planet ships with a Mercedes engine?
To break a monopoly, either some political changes must happen, or a competing product covers a niché feature that the monopolist product lacks. On servers, the niché is the pricing. But desktop Windows doesn't seem to lack something that is big enough of a niché so that a competitor could live in it.
My conclusion is that as long as every PC ships with Windows pre-installed we'll never see real competition in the desktop OS market.
Comment Re:Why not (Score 1, Troll) 1091
Why not? It simply works, I can do whatever I want.
That's not my experience. First off, I'm a UNIX sysadmin. I'm running Ubuntu 10.04 on a low-power Atom box at home. Recently I wanted to quickly burn some data on a DVD. But all programs I tried either produced a coaster or crashed. The problem was that the
And that is the proble with Linux. While Apple and Microsoft ship their OSes with a set of working apps that cover most of the average user's needs, Linux distros come with a gazillion number of "My first app" quality software that does one particular thing better than all the other apps but fails in 90% of the rest.
What's needed is a concerted effort to develop a set of feature-complete apps that cover the basic functionality, and not waste resources into yet another mp3 player. It's nice to be able to choose between Gnome and KDE etc. but the average user prefers one set of feature-complete apps over choosing between a dozen varieties of the same functionality that all lack features.
