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Piracy

Submission + - Warner Bros sued for pirating Louis Vuitton tradem (blogspot.com) 2

Submitted by
NewYorkCountryLawyer
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes: "You have to love a case where Warner Brothers, copyright maximalist extraordinaire, gets sued for "piracy", in this case for using a knock-off Luis Vuitton bag in a recent movie. This lawsuit has been described as "awkward" for Warner; I have to agree with that characterization. Louis Vuitton's 22-page complaint (PDF) alleges that Warner Bros. had knowledge that the bag was a knock-off, and went ahead, and used it, anyway. Apparently Warner Bros. takes IP rights seriously only when its Warner's IP rights that are involved."

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Cell phone and PC interaction for te

Submitted by abell
abell writes: Last year a young man I know had an accident which left him without the use of the four limbs. He only has very limited movement of one arm (but not of his hands).
In order for him to have some social interaction, not limited to visitors who drop by during visit hours, I was thinking of a way for him to use a cell phone: something along the ways of speakers and a mic and possibly a way to start and reply calls with voice commands or at most by pushing a single button, which would need to be installed in his bed by his side and not be so obtrusive as to hinder the nurses' job.
If he were also able in a near future to use a PC with internet connection I think his life quality would improve considerably.
Do you fellow slashdotters have any experience on such setups and any advice to share?
How could one avoid the audio feedback between the speakers and the mic, which would probably need to be in a fixed position at some distance?
Would the cell phone setup be possible to build with cheap off-the-shelf components?
How about a PC interface he might be able to use?
For any location-specific advice, I should specify that my friend is in Poland.
Oracle

Submission + - First Look: Oracle NoSQL Database (infoworld.com)

Submitted by
snydeq
snydeq writes: "InfoWorld's Peter Wayner takes a first look at Oracle NoSQL Database, the company's take on the distributed key-value data store for the enterprise. 'There are dozens of small ways in which the tool is more thorough and sophisticated than the simpler NoSQL projects. You get a number of different options for increasing the durability in the face of a node crash or trading that durability for speed,' Wayner writes. 'Oracle NoSQL might not offer the heady fun and "just build it" experimentation of many of the pure open source NoSQL projects, but that's not really its role. Oracle borrowed the best ideas from these groups and built something that will deliver good performance to the sweet spot of the enterprise market.'"
Chrome

Submission + - Microsoft Security Essentials Detects Chrome as ZB (google.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: I updated my definition files for Microsoft Security Essentials this morning and it detected PWS:Win32/ZBot. I told MSE to remove the malware and then found that Chrome no longer worked. MSE is detecting Chrome.exe as ZBot. I haven't seen confirmation yet on whether this is just a mistake, Chrome is truly infected, or if a conspiracy is afoot.

Submission + - MapReduce vs RDBMS for scalable data processing

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: I work for a small company that does vehicle tracking using rfid. All of the rfid data is sent to our servers where it is processed and we generate useful reports for our users. The company is growing and we are starting to get more and more data and as a result, our data processing engine is having trouble keeping up with the load. Currently all of the data is stored in a mysql database instance. I have identified some areas in the engine where we could make things more efficient but as we get more data, we will need to implement a solution that can scale. If you had to implement a scalable data processing solution, would you choose a MapReduce type solution, e.g. a Hadoop cluster or use an RDBMS, e.g. Oracle with parallel queries? Is there a point at which the dataset warrants a MapReduce approach vs a traditional RDBMS approach? If you chose an RDBMS approach what RDBMS would you use? What are the tradeoffs between the two approaches?

Submission + - How should Slashdot grow and mature? 8

Submitted by tloh
tloh writes: With the recent resignation of Rob "CmdrTaco" Malta from Slashdot, this community has reached a milestone of sorts. For those who've been paying attention, changes are indeed creeping through. For example, many more story submissions that make it to the front page are billed as by "first time submitters". Is what's to come and where we are headed going to be more cosmetic or more fundamental? Where do *you*, fellow Slashdoters want to go? This is your chance to tell those receiving the baton how to evolve this community to meet the needs of the future.
Games

Submission + - Linux 3D games run faster on PC-BSD (phoronix.com)

Submitted by koinu
koinu writes: Phoronix has published benchmarks comparing 3D games on Ubuntu Linux 11.04 and the FreeBSD Linux ABI emulation on the 8.2 release of PC-BSD, which is a desktop variant of FreeBSD. Most results show that the emulated Linux layer on FreeBSD performs better than Linux natively. It is pretty interesting, because most people would expect that an additional abstraction layer would generally slow down the execution of binaries.

Submission + - Cryptic codes in Oslo-terrorist manifest (no.net)

Submitted by repvik
repvik writes: The 1500 page manifest of terrorist that killed 77 people in Oslo and on Utøya two weeks ago, contains a series of seemingly encrypted URLs. There are 46 of them, and the initial part of the URLs appear to be GPS coordinates. An effort to analyze the codes have been launched.
Technology

Submission + - Scientist Creates 3D Scanner App for iPhone (physorg.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A research scientist at Georgia Tech has created a 3D scanner app for the iPhone which uses the phone's screen as a light source to quickly capture digital 3D models of faces and other objects. The app, called Trimensional, can output directly to a 3D printer to make physical copies of objects, which a few people have already tried. An Android version is in the works.
GNOME

Submission + - ALS sufferer used legs to contribute last patch (gnome.org) 1

Submitted by
krkhan
krkhan writes: "This is a little old but seeing as it didn't make it to /. at the time I think it deserves a headline now. Adrian Hands was suffering from ALS and had lost motor skills when he used his legs to type in Morse code and fix a 9 year old bug in Gnome. The patch was submitted three days before he passed away."
Google

Submission + - Google ditches algorithm for human autocompleters (networkworld.com)

Submitted by
jbrodkin
jbrodkin writes: "Google is ditching its sophisticated autocompletion algorithms for a team of humans who can type 32,000 words per minute — and they're hiring more. Sitting in front of his computer, one Google autocompleter says "This is my console. Letters come in up here from users — anonymized of course — and I try to make a prediction as to what they're searching for and I type it as quickly as I can. This year Google is going to hire more people than ever before and people think you need to be some Ph.D, computer science, techno-mathmagician, but that's not always the case. Sometimes we just need people who can type really fast. And who are also psychic.""
Open Source

Submission + - Death of a Community

Submitted by storycrafter
storycrafter writes: Well, it's official. The OpenSolaris communities official governing body has adopted a resolution and collectively resigned, returning control of the community official back to Oracle. A follow up to an earlier Slashdot story, this officially puts the toe-tag on the corpse. It's now up to the spork of Illumos to rise from the soon to be cremated body's ashes.

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