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Patents

Red Hat Settles Patent Case 76

Posted by Soulskill from the making-it-go-away dept.
darthcamaro writes "Red Hat has settled another patent case with patent holding firm Acacia. This time the patent is US Patent #6,163,776, 'System and method for exchanging data and commands between an object oriented system and relational system.' While it's great that Red Hat has ended this particular patent threat, it's not yet clear how they've settled this case. The last time Red Hat tangled with Acacia they won in an Texas jury trial. 'Red Hat routinely addresses attempts to impede the innovative forces of open source via allegations of patent infringement,' Red Hat said in a statement. 'We can confirm that Red Hat, Inc and Software Tree LLC have settled patent litigation that was pending in federal court in the Eastern District of Texas.'"
Handhelds

RIM Announces BlackBerry PlayBook Tablet 184

Posted by Soulskill from the getting-into-the-game dept.
siliconbits writes "Today, at the BlackBerry Developers Conference in San Francisco, company President and co-CEO Mike Lazaridis kicked off the event with the widely-anticipated news that RIM is developing a tablet PC of its own. Called the BlackBerry Playbook, the device is a 'Flash-loving,' 'device-paring,' 'enterprise ready' tablet, says RIM, with a 7-inch screen. It is 9.7 millimeters thick and features a 1024x600 widescreen display. It also supports 1080p through HDMI and has a USB port." The tablet will run on a dual-core, 1GHz CPU and have 1GB RAM. Its browser will be WebKit-based, and the device will be running a brand new operating system developed by QNX software. The tablet won't have 3G access of its own when it launches, but will be able to tether to existing BlackBerry devices via Bluetooth.
Mandriva

Developers Fork Mandriva Linux, Creating Mageia 206

Posted by Soulskill from the onward-and-upward dept.
Anssi55 writes "As most of the Mandriva employees working on the Linux distribution were laid off due to the liquidation of Edge-IT (a subsidiary of Mandriva SA) and trust in the company has diminished, the development community (including the core developers) has decided to fork the project. The new Linux distribution, named Mageia, will be managed by a not-for-profit organization that will be set up in the coming days. There are already many people that have decided to follow the fork, but the people behind it are still welcoming any help offered in the various tasks related to establishing the new distribution."
Microsoft

Child Abuse Verdict Held Back By MS Word Glitch 191

Posted by samzenpus from the messy-verdict dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Last week several defendants including one high-profile TV presenter were sentenced in Portugal in what has been known as the Casa Pia scandal. The judges delivered on September 3 a summary of the 2000-page verdict, which would be disclosed in full only three days later. The disclosure of the full verdict has been postponed from September 8 to a yet-to-be-announced date, allegedly because the full document was written in several MS Word files which, when merged together, retained 'computer related annotations which should not be present in any legal document.' (Google translated article.) Microsoft specialists were called in to help the judges sort out the 'text formatting glitch,' while the defendants and their lawyers eagerly wait to access the full text of the verdict."
Image

The Push For Colbert's "Restoring Truthiness" Rally 703

Posted by samzenpus from the giving-truth-the-bump dept.
jamie writes "A grassroots campaign has begun to get Stephen Colbert to hold a rally on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to counter Glenn Beck's recent 'Restoring Honor' event. The would-be rally has been dubbed 'Restoring Truthiness' and was inspired by a recent post on Reddit, where a young woman wondered if the only way to point out the absurdity of the Tea Party's rally would be if Colbert mirrored it with his own Colbert Nation.'"
Image

Open Sarcasm Fighting Copyrighted Punctuation 155

Posted by samzenpus from the free-language dept.
pinkushun writes "SarcMark is a copyrighted punctuation mark, that claims 'It's time that sarcasm is treated equally!' Pretty damn cheeky while they're charging for their software, which only inserts their punctuation through a hotkey. Open Sarcasm is destroying SarcMark by advocating a new punctuation mark (not displaying here properly — alt+U0161) as the new open and free sarcasm symbol. Either way, this will be one interesting turnout. With bad unicode support across the web, displaying the characters properly might be an issue. PS Left out sarcastic end sentence as Slashdot doesn't display the U0161 character."
First Person Shooters (Games)

Crytek Dev On Fun vs. Realism In Game Guns 324

Posted by Soulskill from the rocket-jumping-is-as-real-as-it-needs-to-be dept.
An anonymous reader tips a post from Pascal Eggert, a gun enthusiast and Crytek developer, who sheds some light on how weaponry in modern shooters is designed. Quoting: "Guns in games are like guns in movies: it is all about looks, sounds and clichés. Just like in the movies, games have established a certain perception of weapons in the mind of the public and just like in movies games get almost everything wrong. ... The fact is that we are not trying to simulate reality but are creating products to provide entertainment. ... if you want to replicate the looks of something you need to at least see it, but using it is even better. You should hold a gun in your hands, fire it and reload it to understand what does what — and at that point you will realize, there is nothing on it that does not have a function — because guns are tools for professionals. Lot of weapon designers in the game industry get that wrong. They think of guns like products for consumers or magic devices that kill people at a distance when really it's just a simple and elegant mechanism that propels little pieces of metal. Unfortunately 3D artists often only get access to the photos that Google Image Search comes up with if you enter 'future assault rifle' or, even worse, pictures from other games and movies that also got it wrong. This may explain a lot of common visual mistakes in games, especially since guns are mostly photographed from the side and egoshooters show weapons from the first person view." This article is drawn from his personal experience in the game industry. The images shown are Pascal's personal work and are not related to his work at Crytek.
Portables

BlackBerry Tablet Confirmed, Supports Flash 159

Posted by CmdrTaco from the isn't-that-cute dept.
HouseMuzik writes "Betanews' Tim Conneally reports that sources close to RIM have confirmed the existence of a BlackBerry Tablet device, with a ship date by the end of the year. Previous reporting on the device was confirmed by the source, including a 7" screen and a 1GHz processor. The source added that the device would support Flash, and would include a hardware-based Flash accelerator. Betanews' reporting seems to confirm an earlier report that quoted Rodman & Renshaw analyst Ashok Kumar as saying the BlackBerry Tablet indeed existed."
Iphone

Experts Explain iPhone 4 Antenna Problem 427

Posted by Soulskill from the darth-jobs-doesn't-see-what-the-fuss-is-about dept.
CWmike writes "Reports of call and data signal strength problems in the new iPhone 4 have a basis in fact, a hardware expert said Thursday. Later in the day, Apple acknowledged that holding the iPhone 4 may result in a diminished signal that could make it difficult to make and maintain calls or retain a data connection. 'Gripping any phone will result in some attenuation of its antenna performance with certain places being worse than others depending on the placement of the antennas. This is a fact of life for every wireless phone,' Apple said in a statement issued to several media outlets, including PC Magazine, which had run tests earlier Thursday. 'If you ever experience this on your iPhone 4, avoid gripping it in the lower left corner in a way that covers both sides of the black strip in the metal band, or simply use one of many available cases.' Scores of new iPhone owners confirmed the reception problem in a string of more than 360 messages posted to a thread on Apple's iPhone 4 support forum." A blog post from an antenna design company explains that the reception problems are probably the direct result of phone design adapting to FCC requirements.

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