lostinbrave - Slashdot User

Submission + - Finally, the jury rules against SCO (groklaw.net)

Submitted by rewt66 on Tuesday March 30, 2010 @04:07PM

rewt66 writes: SCO got the day in court that they've always claimed they wanted. And the jury ruled that the Unix copyrights did not transfer from Novell to SCO, so even if some SVRX code did get put in Linux (which I doubt), SCO doesn't own the copyrights to it.

Submission + - What Would Have Entered the Public Domain Tomorrow (duke.edu)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 31, 2009 @03:15PM

An anonymous reader writes: "Casino Royale, Marilyn Monroe’s Playboy cover, The Adventures of Augie March, the Golden Age of Science Fiction, Crick & Watson’s Nature article decoding the double helix, Disney’s Peter Pan, The Crucible"... "How ironic that Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, with its book burning firemen, was published in 1953 and would once have been entering the public domain on January 1, 2010. To quote James Boyle, "Bradbury’s firemen at least set fire to their own culture out of deep ideological commitment, vile though it may have been. We have set fire to our cultural record for no reason; even if we had wanted retrospectively to enrich the tiny number of beneficiaries whose work keeps commercial value beyond 56 years, we could have done so without these effects. The ironies are almost too painful to contemplate."

Submission + - How many /. polls did you respond to in 2009? 3

Submitted by thetsguy on Thursday December 31, 2009 @03:38AM

thetsguy writes: a) 1 — 3 polls
b) 3 — 6 polls
c) 6 — 9 polls
d) 9 — 12 polls

Submission + - Windows ignores microsoft.com in hosts file

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 31, 2009 @02:09AM

An anonymous reader writes: If you try to block microsoft.com in your hosts file, windows will just ignore the entry. On Vistas Windows Defender even steps in and tries to stop you from adding microsoft.com to the hosts file, but even if you ignore Defender microsoft.com will still work as if the entry wasn't there.

Submission + - Do your developers have local admin rights? 6

Submitted by plover on Wednesday December 30, 2009 @11:19AM

plover writes: I work as a developer for a Very Large American Corporation. We are not an IT company, but have a large IT organization that does a lot of internal development. In my area, we do Windows development, which includes writing and maintaining code for various services and executables. A few years ago the Info Security group removed local administrator rights from most accounts and machines, but our area was granted exceptions for developers. My question is: do other developers in other large companies have local admin rights to their development environment? If not, how do you handle tasks like debugging, testing installations, or installing updated development tools that aren't a part of the standard corporate workstation?

Submission + - US Army developing body armor to protect against ' (aviationweek.com)

Submitted by Rubicks13 on Monday December 07, 2009 @09:37PM

Rubicks13 writes: In the past several years, the U.S. Army has developed an advanced generation of protective ballistic plates for soldiers in what it calls the "X-Sapi" (Small-Arms Protective Insert) program. But, despite buying 120,000 plates from Ceradyne and BAE Systems, it has yet to issue the gear to troops in the field sand it may not ever do so. AviationWeek.com has in-depth information on this developing story.

Herschel Spectroscopy of Future Supernova 21

Posted by Soulskill on Saturday November 28, 2009 @01:50PM from the that's-a-big-star dept.

davecl writes "ESA's Herschel Space Telescope has released its first spectroscopic results. These include observations of VYCMa, a star 50 times as massive as the sun and soon to become a supernova, as well as a nearby galaxy, more distant colliding starburst galaxies and a comet in our own solar system. The spectra show more lines than have ever been seen in these objects in the far-infrared and will allow astronomers to work out the detailed chemistry and physics behind star and planet formation as well as the last stages of stellar evolution before VYCMa's eventual collapse into a supernova. More coverage is available at the Herschel Mission Blog, which I run."

Programmable Quantum Computer Created 132

Posted by Soulskill on Thursday November 26, 2009 @12:41PM from the four-out-of-five-ain't-bad dept.

An anonymous reader writes "A team at NIST (the National Institute of Standards and Technology) used berylium ions, lasers and electrodes to develop a quantum system that performed 160 randomly chosen routines. Other quantum systems to date have only been able to perform single, prescribed tasks. Other researchers say the system could be scaled up. 'The researchers ran each program 900 times. On average, the quantum computer operated accurately 79 percent of the time, the team reported in their paper.'"

Submission + - Starcraft II Beta Delayed (tomshardware.com)

Submitted by Ghan_04 on Monday November 09, 2009 @08:26PM

Ghan_04 writes: "Wondering what the heck happened to those StarCraft II beta invites? After all, it's late 2009 as Blizzard originally promised, and so far there's no word about its impending release. Unfortunately, it doesn't look as if the beta will make an appearance in 2009 after all according to Blizzard producer Chris Sigaty. In a recent interview with Russian website Goha.ru held during the three-day games expo IgroMir, Sigaty said that the beta won't make an appearance until 2010..."

Submission + - Firefox Tops With 44% Of All Browser Bugs (computerworld.com)

Submitted by CWmike on Monday November 09, 2009 @07:56PM

CWmike writes: Firefox accounted for almost half of all browser vulnerabilities in the first six months of 2009, Web security company Cenzic said Monday (PDF). Mozilla's browser had the largest percentage of Web vulnerabilities over the six-month span, while Apple's Safari had the dubious distinction of coming in second. Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) was third, while Opera Software's flagship browser took fourth place, the company said. "It's not rocket science," said Lars Ewe, Cenzic's chief technology officer, referring to the browser bug counting. "We used several databases, including the CVE (common vulnerabilities and exposures) database to count the number of known vulnerabilities." Firefox accounted for 44% of all browser bugs reported in the first half of the year, said Ewe, while Safari vulnerabilities came to 35% of the total. IE, meanwhile, accounted for 15%, while 6% of all the flaws were in Opera. Cenzic did not separately count the number of "zero-day" bugs

Submission + - Google releasing their own Android smartphone (wiseandroid.com)

Submitted by wiseandroid on Tuesday October 20, 2009 @09:39PM

wiseandroid writes: Google is jumping into the smartphone market with an Android phone of its own.

Submission + - 125 Years of 0 0' 00" at Greenwich (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 20, 2009 @08:21PM

An anonymous reader writes: This week marks the 125th anniversary of the International Meridian Conference which determined that the prime meridian (i.e., longitude 0 0' 00") would travel through Greenwich, UK. One of the reasons that Greenwich was agreed upon "was that 72% of the world's shipping already depended on sea charts that used Greenwich as the Prime Meridian." Sandford Fleming's proposal of a single 24-hour clock for the entire world, located at the centre of the Earth and not linked to any surface meridian was rejected / not voted on (as it was felt it was outside the purview of the conference).

Submission + - Doing Internet Searches Boosts Older Brains 1

Submitted by

Hugh Pickens

on Tuesday October 20, 2009 @07:33PM

Hugh Pickens writes: "Medical News Daily reports that researchers have found signs of enhanced neural stimulation in parts of the brain that control decision-making and reasoning when they scanned the brains of middle aged and older first time Internet users after only seven days of performing interent searches. "We found that for older people with minimal experience, performing Internet searches for even a relatively short period of time can change brain activity patterns and enhance function," says Dr Gary Small, a professor of psychiatry at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA. At the start of the study, the participants performed Internet searches while the researchers took functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans of their brains to track changes in blood flow in the brain and record subtle changes in neural activity. After practicing searching the Internet for 7 days over 2 weeks at home, the brains of the Internet novices showed activity in the same regions as before, but this time there was new activity in the middle frontal gyrus and inferior frontal gyrus, the parts of the brain that are important for working memory and decision-making. "You can exercise your mind by using the Internet, but it depends on how it's used," adds Small. "If you get hooked on gambling or eBay shopping, that may not be positive.""

Submission + - LHC and the Higgs Boson (scientificcomputing.com)

Submitted by gpronger on Tuesday October 20, 2009 @04:24PM

gpronger writes: LHC scientist Steven Nahn comments on the article reported previously on Slashdot. Though he does not dispute the theoretical basis of the statements, it's pretty clear that at least for himself, he feels that the proposal is unlikely. Chasing info on the original article, which cites the NY Times, one of the original papers can be downloaded at arXiv.org with the abstract at; http://arxiv.org/abs/0802.2991 along with a link to download it (you'll need to register to download).

The point in the rebuttal is largely that the proposal is highly theoretical to the extent that according to Steven Nahn, the theory (by Nielsen and Ninomiya) could be applied to the "Cubbies" effect which basically states that; Nature (or should this be "God") hates the Cubs or at least doesn't want them to win the World Series, therefore their continued failure is maintained by back engineering events so as not to happen, (though I live in Chicago area I am at least smart enough to be a Sox fan thereby avoiding the wrath of God).

Now, though the Cubbies effect does seem real, if you read the article by Nahn and the article by Nielsen and Ninomiya, the later article does approach some of the theories postulated by Douglas Adams such as the Improbability Drive; not that I'm dismissing Douglas Adams, but simply that the proposal that nature is back-engineering events for the LHC to fail does come across as somewhat preposterous.

Submission + - U.S. Internet traffic peaks at 11 p.m. every day (networkworld.com) 1

Submitted by carusoj on Tuesday October 20, 2009 @04:09PM

carusoj writes: Arbor Networks recently studied Internet traffic patterns and found that U.S. Internet traffic usually reaches its highest point of the day at about 11 p.m. Eastern time and stays pretty high until about 3 a.m. Driving the bulk of the traffic is online gaming and streaming video, which both hit their highest levels around that time.

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