arun_s - Slashdot User

Submission + - Zune team getting amnesty for iPod use

Submitted by MsManhattan on Friday May 25, 2007 @06:22AM

MsManhattan writes: The Zune development team at Microsoft is apparently offering amnesty to employees who give up their iPods in favor of using the Zune MP3 player. An MSNBC employee has posted a photo on Flickr of the company's "iPod Amnesty Bin," which sports an image of a bitten green apple and the words "Bite me." Whether it's to be taken seriously or is a joke to boost employee morale is anyone's guess, and naturally no one at Microsoft was available for comment. From what can be seen in the photo, only a few early-model iPods have been deposited.

Submission + - A Static Universe in 3 Trillion Years

Submitted by ultracool on Friday May 25, 2007 @05:20AM

ultracool writes: When Dutch astronomer Willem de Sitter proposed a static model of the universe in the early 1900s, he was some 3 trillion years ahead of his time. Now, physicists Lawrence Krauss from Case Western Reserve University and Robert J. Scherrer from Vanderbilt University predict that trillions of years into the future, the information that currently allows us to understand how the universe expands will have disappeared over the visible horizon. What remains will be "an island universe" made from the Milky Way and its nearby galactic Local Group neighbors in an overwhelmingly dark void.

Submission + - China bans horror books to protect children

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 15, 2007 @06:46AM

An anonymous reader writes: China's capital is seizing ghost and horror books from shops to protect the "physical and mental health" of its youngsters, local media said on Tuesday. The tales are usually printed by small illegal publishers or circulated on the Internet, often borrowing from a rich pool of classic Chinese ghost stories, giving them up-to-date settings such as elevators or night buses. "The illegal publications are quite popular among students and are apt to harm the physical and mental health of young people," the newspaper quoted a government circular as saying. Collections of scary tales have found a frantic readership in China in recent years, especially among students and white-collar workers who find them a ready outlet from stressful lives. Among the blacklisted stories are adaptations of "Death Note", a Japanese manga comic series about a high school student who has a supernatural notebook that kills anyone whose name is written in it, the Beijing News said.

Submission + - Yahoo! Photos to shut down

Submitted by

prostoalex

on Friday May 04, 2007 @02:10AM

prostoalex writes: "Yahoo has finally made a decision regarding Yahoo! Photos vs. Flickr battle, and will be shutting down Yahoo! Photos by the fall of this year. Even though Yahoo! Photos currently maintains a higher share of Internet visits, Flickr growth convinced the company to maintain a single photo site from now on. Says USA Today: "Stewart Butterfield, who co-founded Flickr in 2004 with wife Caterina Fake, says the move is a "validation" of the central idea of Flickr: that photos in the digital age are very different from a physical print. "We saw it as a means of communication and connecting with people," says Butterfield, Flickr's general manager. "People can take a picture and get immediate feedback from all over the world, and you can't do that with a printed photo."""

Submission + - No Windows on OLPCs (officially)

Submitted by

Kadin2048

on Thursday May 03, 2007 @01:10AM

Kadin2048 writes: "Despite reports last week in major news sources indicating that the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project was in negotiations with Microsoft to bring Windows XP to the low-cost platform, Walter Bender, president of Software and Content at OLPC, said in an interview with Ars Technica, "We are a free and open-source shop. We have no one from OLPC working with Microsoft on developing a Windows platform for the XO.""

Submission + - Orkut : Google's tell all pact with Mumbai police

Submitted by food4thought on Tuesday May 01, 2007 @02:39AM

food4thought writes: Economic times is running an article where its reported that Google had an agreement with Mumbai police to improve the communication between Google and Mumbai police. Apparently this agreement came to light after some unfavorable remarks against the likes of Chhatrapati Shivaji , Dr. B R Ambedkar , and politician Bal Thackeray. According the article, Google will block forums and communities with defamatory or inflammatory content and will provide the IP addresses to the police from which the content was generated.

Their this new agreement with police raises few questions about free speech, Googles role in enabling free speech and their "Don't be evil" motto :

a)Is this the beginning of new service by Google i.e. Google Police, whereby instead of searching some text on web, Google has also started searching people which some country's police or politicians believe are criminals?
b)Isn't this against one of the basic assumptions of free speech of Web and also of a democratic country like India ?
c)Isn't this against Google's "Don't be evil" slogan. Or is this a slogan by Google for others action and not for Google's own action?
d)Is this the beginning of web censorship by Google in India, similar to what it's doing in China?

Submission + - Phone Taps in Italy Spur Use of Encryption

Submitted by manekineko2 on Monday April 30, 2007 @01:38PM

manekineko2 writes: This article on the New York Times discusses how a recent rash of high profile mobile phone taps in Italy is spurring a rush towards software encrypted phone conversations. Private conversations have been tapped and subsequently leaked to the media and have resulted in disclosures of sensitive takeover discussions, revelations regarding game-fixing in soccer, and the arrest of a prince on charges of providing prostitutes and illegal slot machines. An Italian investigative reporter stated that no on would ever discuss sensitive information on the phone now. As a result, encryption software for mobile phones has moved from the government and military world into the mainstream. Are GSM phones in the United States just waiting for a similar explosion in the use of commercially-availble wiretapping technology, and could this be the impetus to finally see widespread use of software encryption in communications?

Submission + - OLPC Sugar User Interface Reviewed

Submitted by

awesomegoer

on Friday April 13, 2007 @03:17AM

awesomegoer writes: "OSWeekly.com has the first review of OLPC's user interface, codenamed Sugar. The author writes, "By now, everyone has at least heard of the noble project to bring the world of computing to children in countries where this might not normally be possible. It's been appropriately called the One Laptop Per Child project. As early as 2004, the obvious focus has been on the hardware that was to be used to make this happen. A number of companies supported the endeavor by "taking a loss" and to help support and develop a viable solution for third world countries. However, what seems to have fallen by the wayside, for the most part, is whether or not the provided UI and included software are up to the speed with the needs of the world's children."

Submission + - White House: E-mail on Fired Lawyers was Deleted

Submitted by

narramissic

on Thursday April 12, 2007 @02:17PM

narramissic writes: "In another apparent case of 'oops that incriminating e-mail was deleted,' officials for President Bush have claimed that an unknown number of e-mails regarding the firing of eight government lawyers have gone missing. White House spokesperson Scott Stanzel said that the authors of those e-mails may have used accounts maintained by the Republican National Committee to discuss official government business. Here's the rub: The Republican National Committee has a policy of deleting e-mails from its accounts approximately once a month — although e-mails from nonpolitical White House accounts are automatically archived."

Submission + - Internet without the World Wide Web

Submitted by

kiyoshilionz

on Tuesday April 10, 2007 @01:58AM

kiyoshilionz writes: "As some of the older techies will note, there was an Internet before the World Wide Web. I'm doing some history research on the transition from the Internet without the World Wide Web to its exponential growth following the introduction of Mosaic. Are there any Slashdot users that are old enough to have been around during the pre-WWW Internet? Or witnesses to the post-Mosaic boom? Perhaps even someone who was a developer who made it happen? I'd like any firsthand account of the birth of the World Wide Web or the popularity of the Mosaic browser."

Submission + - OpenBSD in a GPL violation?

Submitted by

Yenya

on Thursday April 05, 2007 @05:21AM

Yenya writes: "In a message sent to OpenBSD developers as well as the linux-wireless and bcm43xx-devel lists, Michael Buesch, the main developer of the Linux bcm43xx driver for Broadcom WiFi devices, wrote:

[...]We believe that you might have directly copied code out of bcm43xx (licensed under GPL v2), without our explicit permission, into bcw (licensed under BSD license). There are implementation details in bcm43xx that appear exactly the same in bcw. These implementation details clearly don't come from the open specifications at bcm-specs.sipsolutions.net or bcm-v4.sipsolutions.net.

The bcm43xx driver is being developed as a clean room design, based on the reverse-enginered specs, created by another team. As it seems now, the bcw driver in question might just be removed from the OpenBSD source."

Submission + - Best Corporate IM client?

Submitted by GJSchaller on Thursday March 22, 2007 @01:35PM

GJSchaller writes: We're looking for a new corporate IM client for our workplace. There's plenty of clients out there, but none quite seem to fit our needs. We're looking for a client that will connect to multiple protocols (MSN and AIM are primary, but others would be nice), and that has the ability to store preferences in a location other than the user's desktop, such as a home folder on the network (so that people can hop PCs and not need to reconfigure the client each time they do). I'm fond of many of the Open Source clients, but they don't seem to fit the ability to store a configuration somewhere on the network.

Has anyone come across a suitable IM client for the workplace that they can recommend? Open Source, Closed Source, or even an appliance are all options.

Submission + - satelites repairing satelites

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 10, 2007 @04:47AM

An anonymous reader writes: An experimental pair of satelites have been launched to test if satelites repairing satelites is a practical idea. the two experimental models launched by the branch of the U.S. military that created the internet are planned to do eight experimental missions where they will dock and exchange batteries, fuel and other parts. http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2007/03/09/tech -orbitalexpress-20070309.html

Submission + - Students busted on piracy charges

Submitted by taoman1 on Friday March 09, 2007 @12:53AM

taoman1 writes: The music industry is asking 50 Ohio University students to pay $3,000 each to avoid lawsuits accusing them of pirating songs off the Internet. The Recording Industry Association of America asked the university to pass along letters to the students with Internet addresses accused of being involved with the illegal sharing of copyrighted music. The university notified the students on Monday. "The downloading has occurred and we can't change that, but we can let them know what their options are," OU spokeswoman Sally Linder said Wednesday.

Submission + - Exclusive Interview with Douglas Adams from 1979

Submitted by

DarkerMatter

on Wednesday February 28, 2007 @09:38AM

DarkerMatter writes: "A new online science fiction magazine, Darker Matter, has just gone live with an exclusive interview conducted with Douglas Adams (author of the Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy) in 1979, just before his first book was published. The interview was never used until now. The site also has high quality short sf stories from writers inclusing Hugo award winner David D. Levine, Bud Sparhawk and Edward M. Lerner. The site is funded by advertising, pays the going rate to writers and is planning to donate any profits to charity.

http://www.darkermatter.com/"

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