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Censorship

Submission + - Blogging in Iran takes courage

Submitted by
netbuzz
netbuzz writes: "This morning's Boston Globe has a thought-provoking profile of Iranian bloggers who are risking everything, quite literally, to bring a modicum of openness and truth to a society where the former is not tolerated and the latter strictly defined by government/religious authorities. It's worth taking a moment to salute their courage.

Globe story:
http://www.boston.com/news/world/middleeast/articl es/2006/12/18/iran_bloggers_test_regimes_tolerance /

Blog post about it:
http://www.networkworld.com/community/?q=node/9808 "
Microsoft

Submission + - Zune Sales Continue to Weaken

Submitted by Dak RIT
Dak RIT writes: Market share data for the first month of Microsoft's Zune sales is now available, and appears to confirm that after the initial hype, sales have fallen off dramatically. Microsoft came in fourth for sales during the month of November with only 1.9% of the market. Apple remained unchanged at 62.2%, and SanDisk even managed to increase to 18.4% (looks like the Zune might not even be able to compete with the rest of the market, let alone the iPod). The one surprise though is that the brown Zune is apparently not only being bought, but more popular than the white model.
Movies

Submission + - BubblePLY.com: Make Your Own Pop-Up Video

Submitted by
doublebubble
doublebubble writes: "A new website, Bubbleply.com has just been launched, which allows users to easily make creative additions to any online video, much like a "user-generated pop-up video". BubblePLY.com is the first of a series of interactive applications that has been developed by PLYmedia, a company whose technology enables layers of independent content to be added on top of any existing video so they can be viewed together. BubblePLY employs innovative technology whereby a transparent layer, known as a 'PLY' is created. This PLY is placed on top of a video on which independent content can be added without infringing upon the original content owners rights as their video is never altered, edited nor copied. On this layer, the user can add "Bubbles" — similar to those in comics such as a speech, thought or commentary captions — that can currently include comments, links and other effects to accompany, explain or enhance the underlying video. Shortly, pictures and sounds will be able to be added too."
The Internet

Submission + - Copyright Holders Sign China Piracy Agreement

Submitted by
eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes: "On Friday, a whole bunch of associations signed an agreement with China to combat internet piracy. From the article, "China's National Copyright Administration said the country would investigate and punish those suspected of online intellectual property abuses by the movie association as well as other groups such as the Association of American Publishers." From another article, I found that not only was it the MPA but also the Business Software Alliance (BSA), Association of American Publishers (AAP) and The Publishers Association (TPA) of the U.K."
Databases

Submission + - MySQL's Questionable Activities

Submitted by
eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes: "There's a two page article at ITWire about a recent deal that MySQL did with Microsoft and delays in releases for Debian. The open source company has struck a deal to make a plug-in for Visual Studio 2005 which would make it possible for Visual Studio developers to build applications for MySQL. It would also mean that users can manage MySQL databases from Studio environments. There's nothing wrong with building interoperability of your product but the question remains whether this plug-in or subsequent improvements/additions to it will be open source. It is also curious that MySQL has delayed production of binaries for its enterprise product for Debian. Is this a sign that supporting Microsoft is slowly becoming a primary concern for this open source company?"
PC Games (Games)

Submission + - CPL Announces New Professional Videogame

Submitted by Anonymous
Anonymous writes: Last night The Cyberathlete Professional League® (CPL), one of the biggest professional videogame tournament organizers in the world, announced their plans to develop a new multiplayer FPS game, Severity, geared toward professional videogame tournaments. Tom Mustaine, former Vice-President and co-founder of Ritual Entertainment (he left them a couple of weeks ago), will be Director of Game Development at the new studio.

The announcement was also accompanied by a 2 minute video of John Romero, co-founder of id software and Chairman of the CPL (amongst other things), talking about the project. In it he mentions that the project will be using an engine from id software.
Businesses

Submission + - The job from heaven or hell in the Netherlands

Submitted by
FreshnFurter
FreshnFurter writes: "An original job opening in the Netherlands seems to be shoe in for some of the slashdot audience: http://www.nationalevacaturebank.nl/vac/1212231/?s key=mmwn

The company is rockingstone which apparantly makes Windows software too.

The opening is looking for a "Kettingrokende, atheistische, niet al te autistische Linux freak" (i.e. Chain smoking, atheist, not too autistic Linux freak). The pension plan is interesting too.: "No bullshit about pensionplans, you get that yourself. You get to choose what insurance company or bank gets to do you over."

More specifics on personality: 1) No guys with mustaches, 2) No idiots who implement major changes on a server on friday afternoon.

Slashdotters, what are you waiting for!"
Power

Submission + - Worlds biggest wind farm gets the go-ahead

Submitted by
cliffski
cliffski writes: "According to the BBC website The UK govt has just given the go ahead to two large offshore wind-farm projects. Between them the schemes would produce enough renewable electricity to power about one million households. The larger London Array project covers 144 sq miles (232 sq km) between Margate in Kent and Clacton, Essex and will be the world's biggest when it is completed. The £1.5bn scheme will have 341 turbines rising from the sea about 12 miles (20km) off the Kent and Essex coasts, as well as five offshore substations and four meteorological masts"
Robotics

Submission + - Your robotic future: Copyrighted by Microsoft

Submitted by
word munger
word munger writes: "The cover story in this month's Scientific American, written by Bill Gates, discusses one of the toughest problems in robotics: "how to simultaneously handle all the data coming in from multiple sensors and send the appropriate commands to the robot's motors, a challenge known as concurrency." Gates believes that robotics today is like the world of computers 30 years ago. Robots, like computers in the 1970s, have widespread applications in industry, but the models available for home users tend to be expensive and have appeal mainly for tinkerers and hobbyists. Microsoft's solution to the problem is to design a proprietary operating system for robots, built for everything from home surveillance to mars rovers. Could this be the world's next mega-monopoly? I discuss some of the implications at Cognitive Daily."
Windows

Journal Journal: The sudden appeal of XP 1

Journal by Snarfiorix
Having to work in a support enviroment, you often end up in talks about the latest thing that is going to hit you for support. Now, in my case, I socialise a lot with my co-workers and often we get together at parties and the subject of the latest thing to make our lives miserable comes up. Such is the case with Vista, but what is noticable is how we chat for about 20 minutes about features, hardware and software compatabillity untill someone mentions what he done to his XP partition to make (mo
Security

Submission + - UTD Network Intrusion Exposes Names, SSNs, etc.

Submitted by
Ein2015
Ein2015 writes: "At the University of Texas at Dallas on Monday, Dec. 11, 2006 at 1:36 a.m., a network intrusion occured which might have exposed names, addresses, Social Security numbers, email addresses and telephone numbers.

"University staff discovered a potential system weakness which may have inadvertently resulted in exposure of some individuals' personal information. At this time it is known to potentially affect approximately 6,000 faculty, staff, students and others. The individuals whose information is known to be involved at this time include:
- In the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science, students and faculty as well as applicants for admission dating back as far as 1993.
- All staff and faculty of the University who were employed from January 1999 through August 2005."

For more information go to http://www.utdallas.edu/datacompromise/."
Networking

Submission + - ORDB.org is shutting down

Submitted by
Allan Joergensen
Allan Joergensen writes: "ORDB.org has announced that they will shut down their services after fighting open relays and spam for more than five and a half years.

The RBL DNS service and mailing lists will be taken down today (December 18, 2006) and the website will vanish by December 31, 2006."
The Internet

Submission + - Skype thinks it always rains in London

Submitted by
Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward writes: "Skype version 2.5.0.151 slanders London as a place that is associated with permanent downpoor.
Users on this version that receive the phrase "(london") in a chat will be presented with the emoticon for "(rain)" instead."
Portables

Submission + - GPS PDA for diving and underwater exploration

Submitted by Alex Davis
Alex Davis writes: This company in the UK are reportedly working on a new version of their PDA device that will work underwater. It will use GPS to tour divers and scuba aficionados around the world's most famous dive sights. The report appeared in a local newspaper that referred to their technical researchers doing on-site demos at this dive site. Are there any divers out there who would go in for this sort of thing?

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