Comment Re:Oh goshdarnit! That other guy git in (Score 1) 3709
Silly, move to Canada!
Comment Re:Finally! (Score 1) 3709
You say that 'cause you're not getting that 100k. If you did, you'd think "Heck, I worked my ass to get 100k per year and this ingrate, which I pay a house and health, keeps complaining about his job!"
I'm not saying that you *should* think like that. I'm saying this 'cause it's a fact. Most people with a lot of money don't care about the ones who couldn't have the luck of having so much money.
Linux-Based E-Voting In Brazil 302
John Sokol writes "I just heard from a good friend and Linux kernel hacker in Brazil that they have just finished their municipal election with 128 million people using Linux to vote. They voted nationwide for something like 5,000 city mayors. Voting is mandatory in Brazil. The embedded computer they are using once ran VirtuOS (a variant of MS-DOS); it now has its own locally developed, Linux-based distro. These are much nicer, smaller, and cheaper than the systems being deployed here in the US. Here is a Java-required site with a simulated Brazilian voting system. It's very cool; they even show you a picture of the candidate you voted for."
Twitter Reportedly May Abandon Ruby On Rails 423
Raster Burn writes "According to TechCrunch, Twitter has plans to abandon Ruby on Rails after two years of scalability issues. Candidates to replace Rails are said to be PHP, Java, and Ruby without the Rails framework." The post links a brief comment (at 139 characters, probably a tweet) from Twitter founder Ev Williams saying it ain't so. The comments following the post embody the controversy over whether or not RoR sucks.
"Cascade B" Particle Discovered At Fermilab 140
pnotequalsnp writes to note that physicists at Fermilab have discovered a new heavy particle called the Cascade B. This is the first particle ever seen that is made up of quarks representing all three quark families. A team of 610 physicists from 88 institutions reported the discovery in a paper submitted to Physical Review Letters last week. This must be the discovery that triggered rumors that the Higgs had been found.
Performance Evaluation of Xen Vs. OpenVZ 116
An anonymous reader writes "Compared to an operating-system-level virtualization technology like OpenVZ, Xen — a hypervisor-level virtualization technology that allows multiple operating systems to be run with and without para-virtualization — trades off performance for much better isolation and security. OpenVZ's performance advantage due to running virtual containers in a single operating system kernel can be significant. A performance evaluation study (PDF) done by researchers at the University of Michigan and HP labs provides insight into how big a performance penalty Zen pays and what causes the overheads (primarily L2 cache misses)." From the report: "We compare both technologies with a base system in terms of application performance, resource consumption, scalability, low-level system metrics like cache misses and virtualization-specific metrics like Domain-0 consumption in Xen. Our experiments indicate that the average response time can increase by over 400% in Xen and only a modest 100% in OpenVZ as the number of application instances grows from one to four... A similar trend is observed in CPU consumptions of virtual containers."
Why Microsoft Won't List Claimed Patent Violations 626
BlueOni0n writes "Earlier today, Microsoft announced it will begin actively seeking reparations for claimed patent infringement by Linux and the open source community in general. One opinion on why Microsoft won't reveal these 235 alleged IP infringements to the public is that they're afraid of having the claims debunked or challenged — so instead they're waiting until the OS community comes to the bargaining table. But a more optimistic thought is that Microsoft may be afraid to list these supposed violations because it knows the patents can be worked around by the open source community, leaving Microsoft high and dry without any leverage at all."
Hilf Claims Free Software Movement Dead 395
moe1975 writes to mention that Bill Hilf has taken a rather aggressive stance with regard to the status of the Free Software movement. With claims like; "The Free Software movement is dead. Linux doesn't exist in 2007. Even Linus has got a job today" it would certainly seem that the next offensive is going to be sponsored by denial. "For the desktop, Hilf sees a new frontier in terms of rich client programming. With more and more services by Amazon, Google, Yahoo and, of course, Microsoft being run as services rather than as software installed locally, it will be up to the desktop to provide richer functionality."
Original Star Trek Getting CGI Makeover 378
Tony Pascale writes "Star Trek is the latest sci-fi classic to get the CGI 'special edition' treatment. According to rumors picked up by
TrekMovie.com, CBS and
Paramount have been secretly working on a new version of Star Trek: The Original Series for HDTV. The shows will feature the original episodes with brand new state-of-the-art CGI visual effects, including a a redone title sequence (with re-recorded music). The effects are likely to be limited to the space scenes and not effect the live action scenes, so Edith Keeler will not shoot first. The HDTV Star Trek series will begin broadcasting this fall just in time for the 40th Anniversary of Star Trek."
Google Brazil Pressured to Give Up Names 263
Kordau writes "Google Brazil is under pressure to release user info from Orkut, relating to a child porn investigation by the Brazilian government. Google Brazil maintains that the info officials want is held on US servers and if they want the info, they should talk to Google USA."
The Tech of the Colossus 62
Via a Cathode Tan post, a gloriously in-depth look at the technology behind the PS2 title Shadow of the Colossus. From that article: "In games such as DOOM3 on the PC, the model used for generating the shadow volume is almost equivalent to the character itself. But with SOTC, in order to speed this up, we made use of a simpler model with much fewer polygons in. The main character generally consists of 3,000 polygons, but the colossus can be around 18,000 polygons, depending on the type. But the model used for shadow generation will contain a substantially lower amount than this. For example, the simple model seen by the player will probably only use 1/40th of what the original model contained."
Journal Journal: Getting fonts right
1: Install Microsoft true-type fonts.
2: You could install them via this script: http://vigna.dsi.unimi.it/webFonts4Linux/webFonts. sh [unimi.it]
Then do the following:
Configure X and Gnome to 96 dpi sudo cp
Journal Journal: MST3K really is useful
I weren't for all those MST3K episodes, I would never get this joke:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=153575&cid=12883264
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=153575&cid=12883313
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=153575&cid=12883514
Journal Journal: Oz
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=133534&cid=11152860
All geeks are just failed wizards : (
Journal Journal: On FPS Snipping the Ruination Of Gameplay
http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=93600&cid=8035613
In real life. Snipers are a bitch. It takes very real work to take out a sniper in a battlefield, especially a good one.
