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Education

Submission + - AISD Teacher Throws Fit Over Student's Linux CD (austinist.com) 1

Submitted by
VSpike
VSpike writes: "The Austinist reports on a classic misunderstanding reminiscent of the City of Tuttle vs. CentOS. A teacher sees a student showing off his HeliOS system and confiscates all the disks. She reprimands the student for distributing illegal software and then fires off a threatening email to the person who provided the software to the student, stating "No software is free and spreading that misconception is harmful.""
Patents

Rewriting a Software Product After Quitting a Job? 604

Posted by kdawson from the clean-room-white-coats dept.
hi_caramba_2008 writes "We are a bunch of good friends at a large software company. The product we work on is under-budgeted and over-hyped by the sales drones. The code quality sucks, and management keeps pulling in different direction. Discussing this among ourselves, we talked about leaving the company and rebuilding the code from scratch over a few months. We are not taking any code with us. We are not taking customer lists (we probably will aim at different customers anyway). The code architecture will also be different — hosted vs. stand-alone, different modules and APIs. But at the feature level, we will imitate this product. Can we be sued for IP infringement, theft, or whatever? Are workers allowed to imitate the product they were working on? We know we have to deal with the non-compete clause in our employment contracts, but in our state this clause has been very difficult to enforce. We are more concerned with other IP legal aspects."
Science

CERN Releases Analysis of LHC Incident 149

Posted by timothy from the training-exercise-was-too-trite dept.
sash writes "From the fresh press release: 'Investigations at CERN following a large helium leak into sector 3-4 of the Large Hadron Collider tunnel have confirmed that cause of the incident was a faulty electrical connection between two of the accelerator's magnets. This resulted in mechanical damage and release of helium from the magnet cold mass into the tunnel. Proper safety procedures were in force, the safety systems performed as expected, and no one was put at risk. Sufficient spare components are in hand to ensure that the LHC is able to restart in 2009, and measures to prevent a similar incident in the future are being put in place.'"
The Internet

Submission + - gnomefiles.org hacked

Submitted by
VSpike
VSpike writes: "gnomefiles.org appears to have been hacked, although the site itself is not giving much away, serving only a minimal homepage at http://www.gnomefiles.org/

The site RSS feed sent the the following articles this morning:-

http://www.gnomefiles.org/app.php?soft_id=313 iiNautilus script that strips symbols off object files./ibr / br / bAbout this version/bbr / Final version./ibr / br / bAbout this version/bbr / Hacked By casakiller Mon, 01 Sep 2008 01:07:53 GMT http://www.gnomefiles.org/app.php?soft_id=313#Hacked+By+casakiller

[New] dsqfsqdfsfqd (ver. test)
from GnomeFiles.org
FuCk_You_LaMeR
About this version
FuCk_You_LaMeR
GreeTz to ALL Muslims

[New] FuCk_You_Lamer (ver. 1.2)
from GnomeFiles.org
FuCk_You_LaMeR
About this version
FuCk_You_LaMeR
FucK_You_Lamer"
The Internet

Submission + - How to co-exist with Outlook users

Submitted by
VSpike
VSpike writes: "The company for which I work has mandated for marketing & presentation reasons that all email should be in a Futura Book 10pt font with a standard signature including a company logo. This effectively mandates the use of Outlook within the company, even though we do not have exchange server, because no other email client can actually do this. But, there is a deeper problem here related to the Microsoft-centric view of business software. I can see the basic intention (consistent presentation across all media) but most people will not see the desired font because most people do not have Futura Book installed. Furthermore, only Outlook is vaguely guaranteed to render this in the way intended. I use Thunderbird, and mostly see plaintext messages with winmail.dat attachments. Even if the Outlook users switch on HTML format, older versions of Outlook and many other HTML-capable clients will render the bletcherous HTML that Outlook generates differently.

I'm not totally opposed to HTML email and I'm not religious about top posting vs. bottom posting and other old favourites, but this well-intentioned but misguided practice will only have the desired effect with people using a recent version of Outlook, and could shut out anyone who is not. I couldn't find good statistics on this, but one estimate is that even in the world of business 20 to 30% of people don't use Outlook. I argue that HTML should be used where required only, and should be limited to simple constructs like emphasis, italics, bulleted lists, fixed vs. proportional fonts and so on.

How can I educate my CEO and colleagues about this? Has anyone had any success doing this, or is it a fight that was already lost some time ago?"

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