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Comment Re:What is this? (Score 0, Troll) 383

by Freshly Exhumed (#45835803) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Command Line Interfaces -- What Is Out There?

Lately we've had egregious dupes, insipid, noobie-focused "what you need to do to your Windoze computer" items, a couple of my own submissions, then this... THIS! I demand that /. mods swear off what they've been ingesting over the holidays and speak to a kind social worker who will offer them a donut and tell them to stick closer to church-oriented activities.

Submission + - ReactOS Finally on Kickstarter (kickstarter.com)

Submitted by jeditobe
jeditobe writes: Aleksey Bragin, along with Steven Edwards (Present and former ReactOS Project Coordinators) have just launched ReactOS to Kickstarter under the name "Thorium Core Cloud Desktop".

"Thorium Core" is a commercial distribution of ReactOS, the Open Source Windows compatible operating system, targeted for cloud computing

Thorium Core will allow you to configure an optimized, virtualized or embedded system tailored to run Windows-compatible applications using fewer resources than a modern version of Windows would require, without the licensing costs and complexity associated with Microsoft products and giving the user the Freedom that comes with Open Source software.

Submission + - Website Checkout Glitches: Two Very Different Corporate Responses 1

Submitted by Freshly Exhumed
Freshly Exhumed writes: On the morning of December 26th, 2013, an error on the website of Delta Air Lines' produced impossibly low fare discounts of as much as 90% for about 2 hours before the problem was corrected. Delta, to their PR benefit, have swallowed the losses, and the lucky customers have shared their delight via social media. Unfortunately for many buyers of goods from The Brick furniture retailer, no such consumer warmth is forthcoming. The Brick's website checkout had awarded them an additional 50% off, over and above all other costs, but the official corporate response has been to demand the money be returned. Affected customers are now lashing The Brick with social media opprobrium and drawing direct comparisons with Delta's response. So, given that these are not small, mom-and-pop companies, have we reached a point at which online retailers are expected to just swallow such costs for PR purposes, as part of doing web business?

Submission + - Sherlock Holmes finally in the public domain in the US 1

Submitted by ferrisoxide.com
ferrisoxide.com writes: As reported on the Australian ABC news website, film-makers in the US are finally free to work on Sherlock Holmes stories without paying a licencing free to the estate of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle after a ruling by Judge Ruben Castillo.

A quirk of US copyright law kept 10 stories out of the public domain, on the basis that these stories where continuously developed. In his ruling Judge Castillo opined that only the "story elements" in the short stories published after 1923 were protected and that everything else in the Holmes canon was "free for public use" — including the characters of Holmes and Watson.

Holmes scholar Leslie Klinger, who challenged the estate, celebrated the ruling.

"Sherlock Holmes belongs to the world," Mr Klinger said in a statement posted on his Free Sherlock website.

IANAL, but the ruling of Judge Castillo that "adopting Conan Doyle's position would be to extend impermissibly the copyright of certain character elements of Holmes and Watson beyond their statutory period," is surely going to have implications across US copyright law. Mark Twain must be twisting and writhing in his grave.

Submission + - Inventor of AK-47 Dies at 94

Submitted by necro81
necro81 writes: Lt. Gen. Mikhail T. Kalashnikov, an arms designer for the Soviet Union, creator of the AK-47, passed away today at age 94. Kalashnikov was born a peasant and entered the Soviet Army as a conscript. However, the self-taught tinkerer had an aptitude that took him far. The AK-47, his best-known creation, was praised for its reliability and low cost; attributes that have made it the most successful firearm ever, seeing use in homeland defense, rebellion, terrorism, and untold massacres. The inventor was himself ambivalent about the uses his creation had seen, but was nevertheless proud of his contribution to his country, where he is praised as a hero.

Submission + - A Short History of Computers in the Movies

Submitted by Esther Schindler
Esther Schindler writes: The big screen has always tried to keep step with technology usually unsuccessfully. Peter Salus looks at how the film industry has treated computing.

For a long time, the "product placement" of big iron was limited to a few brands, primarily Burroughs. For instance:

Batman: The Movie and Fantastic Voyage (both 1966) revert to the archaic Burroughs B205, though Fantastic Voyage also shows an IBM AN/FSQ-7 Combat Direction Central. At 250 tons for each installation (there were about two dozen) the AN/FSQ-7 was the largest computer ever built, with 60,000 vacuum tubes and a requirement of 3 megawatts of power to perform 75,000 ips for regional radar centers. The last IBM AN/FSQ-7, at Luke Air Force Base in Arizona, was demolished in February 1984.

Fun reading, I think.

Submission + - Microsoft pulls update for Surface 2 after problems. (theinquirer.net)

Submitted by whoever57
whoever57 writes: On Decemer 10, Microsoft released a firmware update for Surface Pro 2. Now, due to widespread issues with battery life, charging, sleeping, etc., Microsoft has pulled the update. It appears that some of the tablets failed to completely install the update. The number of people posting about the the problem in the Microsoft Community site shows that there are at least hundreds of users with this problem. What propeortion of the Surface Pro 2 user base does this represent?

Submission + - Microsoft senior manager Brian Jorgenson charged with insider trading (seattletimes.com)

Submitted by McGruber
McGruber writes: On Thursday, federal prosecutors unsealed a complaint charging Microsoft senior manager Brian Jorgenson and another man, Sean Stokke, each with 35 felony counts of insider trading, alleging they made nearly $400,000 through a series of transactions based on insider information passed to Stokke by Jorgenson. At the same time, the Securities and Exchange Commission filed a civil lawsuit asking they forfeit those profits.

Jorgenson told The Seattle Times that he tipped a friend to nonpublic, proprietary Microsoft financial information three times in the past 18 months, allowing them to make money in the stock market. He estimated his friend made more than $200,000, although Jorgenson said it is hard to say exactly how much money was made since he didn’t have direct access to his friend’s trading accounts. In exchange, Jorgenson said his friend gave him about $40,000.

Jorgenson worked at Microsoft for three years as a $130,000-a-year senior manager in the company’s Treasury Group before he was fired when the trading scheme was uncovered last month.

Submission + - Scientific Data Disappears At Alarming Rate, 80% Lost In Two Decades (upi.com)

Submitted by cold fjord
cold fjord writes: UPI reports, ""Eighty percent of scientific data are lost within two decades, disappearing into old email addresses and obsolete storage devices, a Canadian study (abstract, article paywalled) indicated. The finding comes from a study tracking the accessibility of scientific data over time, conducted at the University of British Columbia. Researchers attempted to collect original research data from a random set of 516 studies published between 1991 and 2011. While all data sets were available two years after publication, the odds of obtaining the underlying data dropped by 17 per cent per year after that, they reported. "Publicly funded science generates an extraordinary amount of data each year," UBC visiting scholar Tim Vines said. "Much of these data are unique to a time and place, and is thus irreplaceable, and many other data sets are expensive to regenerate."" — More at The Vancouver Sun and Smithsonian.

Submission + - KDE Releases Applications and Development Platform 4.12 (kde.org)

Submitted by KDE Community
KDE Community writes: The KDE Community is proud to announce the latest major updates to KDE software delivering new features and fixes. With Plasma Workspaces and the KDE Platform frozen and receiving only long term support, those teams are focusing on the technical transition to Frameworks 5. This release marks substantial improvements in the KDE PIM stack, giving much better performance and many new features. Kate added new features including initial Vim-macro suppor, and games and educational applications bring a variety of new features. The announcement for the KDE Applications 4.12 has more information. This release of KDE Platform 4.12 only includes bugfixes and minor optimizations and features. About 20 bugfixes as well as several optimizations have been made to various subsystems. A technology preview of the Next Generation KDE Platform, named KDE Frameworks 5, is coming this month.

Submission + - Billion Star Surveyor 'Gaia' Lifts Off

Submitted by mrspoonsi
mrspoonsi writes: BBC Reports: Europe has launched the Gaia satellite — one of the most ambitious space missions in history. The 740m-euro (£620m) observatory lifted off from the Sinnamary complex in French Guiana at 06:12 local time (09:12 GMT). Gaia is going to map the precise positions and distances to more than a billion stars. This should give us the first realistic picture of how our Milky Way galaxy is constructed. Gaia's remarkable sensitivity will lead also to the detection of many thousands of previously unseen objects, including new planets and asteroids. Gaia will use this ultra-stable and supersensitive optical equipment to pinpoint its sample of stars with extraordinary confidence. By repeatedly viewing its targets over five years, it should get to know the brightest stars' coordinates down to an error of just seven micro-arcseconds. "This angle is equivalent to the size of a euro coin on the Moon as seen from Earth," explained Prof Alvaro Gimenez, Esa's director of science.

Submission + - First exomoon glimpsed – 1800 light years from Earth (newscientist.com)

Submitted by nachiketas
nachiketas writes: Exomoons have long been predicted to exist – some may even be habitable worlds – but until now, no one had detected any. "This is the first serious candidate from any survey that I am aware of," says astronomer David Kipping of Harvard University, who was not involved in the discovery. Unlike the exomoons that feature in the films Avatar and Return of the Jedi, not to mention the moons in our solar system, the new moon and its exoplanet seem to be adrift in the cosmos, far from any star.

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