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Businesses

Submission + - Open Source: Selling software that sells itself (linuxworld.com)

Submitted by
mrcgran
mrcgran writes: "LinuxWorld is running an insightful interview: "Open source is changing not just how companies make software, but how they sell it. Alfresco's Matt Asay explains the new sales cycle and the skills that today's software sales people need to close deals ... 'But you know what? We have worked with Microsoft on interop without doing any sort of a patent deal; as has Sugar and MySQL and Zend and these other companies. We work directly with Microsoft for a customer of ours to insure SQL Server integration with Alfresco. Didn't have to sign any patent deal with them to get that done. We both had a mutual customer. It was in our mutual interest. We both wanted to make money, therefore we did it. But the patent thing is a complete smoke and mirrors, I don't want to say trick, but it has nothing to do with interoperability. No matter how much Microsoft may repeat that, it has nothing to do with interoperability.' " Be sure also to check out their open source survey on 10000 enterprises with interesting insights and data."
Privacy

Submission + - Going to Yosemite? Get your passport ready! (cnn.com)

Submitted by rev_media
rev_media writes: The Real ID acts mandates all states to begin issuing federal IDs to all citizens by 2008. Costs could be as much at $14 billion, but only 40 million are currently allocated. Several states have passed legislation expressly forbidding participation in the program, while others seem to be all for it. The IDs will be required for access to all federal areas including flights, state parks and federal buildings. People in states refusing to comply will need to show passports even for domestic flights.
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft ask for votes to support OOXML

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: I live in Mexico and today received a call from a Microsoft representative to be part of the commission in my country to vote for the approval of Office Open XML (OOXML). After talked with this representative I found something interesting... if you tell them that you will support them you will receive the documentation to 'enroll' you in the 'committee' and make all the arrangements with the National Chamber for IT and Telecommunications (I don't know what they will do if you refuse to support them but I'm thinking about it ...). So here is my question. Is this happening in other countries? Have any other slashdotters received similar calls?
Quickies

Submission + - Update on ODF vs. OOXML File Counts on the Web (geniisoft.com)

Submitted by
mrcgran
mrcgran writes: "In eight months since Office 2007 was released to the general public (10 months since release to enterprise customers), there are under 2000 of these office documents posted on the web. In [the last] three months, 13,400 more ODF documents have been added to the web, with only 1,329 OOXML documents added. It is hard to spin ten times as many ODF documents added as OOXML documents, especially as 451 (34%) of those new documents were added on Microsoft.com. That isn't what I would call good traction for the overwhelmingly dominant office suite [of Microsoft]."
Movies

Submission + - Pirated Simpsons video filmed on mobile (smh.com.au)

Submitted by fullcircleflight
fullcircleflight writes: A 21-year-old man from Sydney Australia faces up to five years' imprisonment after he was charged with uploading a pirated copy of The Simpsons Movie on the internet. Adrianne Pecotic, executive director of the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft, said it was the first illegal copy of the hit movie to be intercepted anywhere in the world. Police alleged the man illegally filmed the movie via a mobile phone on July 26, the first day of release, and within hours had uploaded the footage onto the internet.The man was arrested in a raid on his home yesterday and charged by Federal Police with copyright theft after information provided to the AFP by the movie's producer, 20th Century Fox in the US. Pecotic said the illegal footage was removed within two hours, but not before it was downloaded about 3000 times. The file quickly spread to BitTorrent sites and other file sharing networks and within 72 hours had been downloaded by another 110,000 people.
The Internet

Submission + - How much are ad servers slowing down the internet? 2

Submitted by vipermac
vipermac writes: Most the times I have a problem with a web page loading slow (or freezing temporarily), I look down at the status bar and see that it is waiting on an ad server, google analytics, or the like. It seems to me on popular web sites the bottle neck is overwhelmingly on the ad servers now and not on the servers of the main web site itself. In my opinion it seems we need a better model for serving ads or else these services need to add more servers/bandwidth. Are there any studies on the delay that 3rd party ad servers are creating, or any new models that are being introduced to serve ads?
Data Storage

Submission + - How to keep laptop & desktop files in sync?

Submitted by
corinroyal
corinroyal writes: "I've setup Xubuntu & Lyx on my grandmother's old iBook G3 for my moderately luddite housemate who's writing her novel. I'd like her to be able to write on either her desktop or laptop and have any edits automagically synchronized with the other machine whenever the laptop is connected to our home network. I've looked a bit into options like Rsync, Unison, and the Coda distributed file system. Wondering if anyone here has found a good solution they'd care to describe. To my mind a great solution would have the following:
  1. Near real-time, continuous syncing when connected to the network
  2. Intelligent options for merging conflicting changes (such as when the same file has been edited on the disconnected laptop and on the desktop)
  3. Encrypted network traffic, compatibility with encrypted filesystems like truecrypt
  4. Invisible to user except in case of change conflicts
"
Space

Submission + - 30 years since the 'Wow!' signal

Submitted by smooth wombat
smooth wombat writes: Thirty years ago, a signal was received by Ohio State University's Big Ear Radio Observatory which, for a brief moment, set the scientific community ablaze. Had we heard the first proof of an intelligent civilization outside our own?

Unfortunately, the signal was not repeated and has not been heard from since despite the best efforts of astronomers during the last three decades. The debate over what the signal actually was continues to this day but new help is on the way. The SETI institute will soon be using the Allen Telescope Array in California to search the same area of sky. The array uses dozens of separate radio dishes to produce an instrument that will eventually become more sensitive than the world's largest single-dish telescope in Aricebo.
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft one vote short of fast-track OOXML (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by
mrcgran
mrcgran writes: "Arstechnica is reporting: 'Executive board members of the International Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITS), the organization that represents the United States in ISO standardization deliberations, recently held an internal poll to determine the position that the United States should take on Microsoft's request for Office Open XML (OOXML) approval. With eight votes in favor, seven against, and one abstention, the group was one vote short of the nine votes required for approving OOXLM ISO standardization. This does not mean that OOXML is dead in the water, however.' The poll also holds interesting official comments for each company that voted."
Businesses

Submission + - Ubuntu Dell now in UK, France and Germany (direct2dell.com)

Submitted by
mrcgran
mrcgran writes: "Dell announced the availability of Ubuntu in Europe and future plans in China: 'I hinted at this before, but today, it's official: Dell announced that consumers in the United Kingdom, France and Germany can order an Inspiron 6400 notebook or an Inspiron 530N desktop with Ubuntu 7.04 pre-installed. In his LinuxWorld keynote, Kevin Kettler announced that Dell and Novell intend to offer SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 factory-installed on select consumer notebooks and desktops in China. This is another step in making Linux available to more customers worldwide.' :-)"
Microsoft

Submission + - Free as in free milk (freesoftwaremagazine.com)

Submitted by
mrcgran
mrcgran writes: "FSFDaily is running a story about Microsoft's business practices in developing countries: 'A first draft of this article has been sitting for months in my hard disk. I decided to finish it after reading that Microsoft will offer its operating system and office suite for $3 per machine to developing countries. That made me think of the way the giant software company "helps" these countries by giving licenses of its proprietary software almost for free, and that in turn made me think of free milk. Let me tell you about it.'"
Unix

Submission + - Open Sound System (OSS4) goes GPLv2 (opensound.com)

Submitted by
mrcgran
mrcgran writes: "The Open Sound System (OSS) is one of the first sound systems for Linux, predating ALSA, but in the last 10 years it's stalled in version 3.8 (the last public GPL version) and it's being replaced by ALSA as the sound system of choice in Linux. ALSA is a Linux-only solution, while OSS works in a range of Unixes as well, and both have advantages and disadvantages over the other. Now, OSS4 is out under a GPLv2 license, with a number of advanced features over ALSA, like its new dynamic VMIXing capabilities, low-latency kernel modules, simple API and many other features. This release seems to be important enough to shake the foundations of the current desktop sound systems, specially in Linux."
Mars

Submission + - Mars Phoenix Probe Successfully Launched

Submitted by necro81
necro81 writes: The Mars Phoenix lander, built from the ashes of two earlier Mars missions, successfully launched atop a Delta II rocket from Canaveral this morning. The mission takes the 350-kg lander to northern latitudes (comparable to Greenland or Siberia) to investigate subsurface ice for the chemical precursors of life. The lander should arrive on Mars on May 25, 2008.
Education

Submission + - OLPC Kids Surf Pr0n Just Like Us (reuters.com)

Submitted by joe_n_bloe
joe_n_bloe writes: Here comes solid evidence that those OLPC laptops have all the essential functionality of conventional laptops. According to Reuters, 'Nigerian schoolchildren who received laptops from a U.S. aid organization [OLPC] have used them to explore pornographic sites on the Internet.' Apparently OLPC is responding to this by outfitting the computers with filters.

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