Alpha Whisky - Slashdot User

How Do I Manage Seasoned Programmers? 551

Posted by kdawson on Friday December 12, 2008 @05:07PM from the just-don't-say-mmm-kay dept.

An anonymous reader writes "I have a technology background and worked as a programmer for a few years before slipping over to the dark side. I am now on the business side and have been given responsibility for a small team of Java programmers. While the technology aspect of what my team works on doesn't scare me, I need ideas to make sure the team stays motivated while reporting to me, a business-oriented guy. Perhaps I should mention I am in my early 30s while the majority of the team constitute an older, wiser generation. What advice should I follow to avoid turning into yet another Bill Lumbergh?"

OpenOffice.org 3.0 Is Officially Here 284

Posted by CmdrTaco on Monday October 13, 2008 @08:30AM from the who-needs-office-anyway dept.

SNate writes "After a grinding three-year development cycle, the OpenOffice.org team has finally squeezed out a new release. New features include support for the controversial Microsoft OOXML file format, multi-page views in Writer, and PDF import via an extension. Linux Format has an overview of the new release, asking the question: is it really worth the 3.0 label?"

Canadians File Class Actions Over Incoming SMS Fees 292

Posted by kdawson on Monday August 04, 2008 @03:06AM from the unilaterally-changing-the-locked-in-contract dept.

dontmakemethink writes "CTV reports that over the last couple of weeks class-action lawsuits have been filed against two major Canadian cellular service providers, Bell and Telus, for imposing fees on incoming text messages. While there has been very vocal opposition to the introduction of the fees, those who cannot change providers due to binding contracts feel the situation is actionable in court. Some of those not bound by contract, such as myself, have given their service provider notice that they will charge the provider for having to contact them to have charges reversed for unsolicited texts. Because service providers are aware of the volume of unsolicited texts, we feel they are liable for the inconvenience to their clients for preventing spam charges, and more importantly under no circumstances should service providers profit from spam. We also feel that requiring us to buy text bundles to avoid the inconvenience of reversing spam charges constitutes extortion. They can charge me for texts when they stop the spam."

Submission + - New DVD protection that stops (most) pc playback!

Submitted by

Lance Vick

on Tuesday July 29, 2008 @01:35AM

Lance Vick writes: "Well it would appear Warner Brothers has done it again. On at least our copy of 10,000 BC rented from RedBox at Wal-Mart... we found what appears to be some new variation of Sony's ARccoS ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARccOS_Protection ). A copy protection scheme where the disks actually ship with bad sectors which makes it difficult if not impossible for many pc ripping software and playback software to play the disk. Regular dvd players just blindly follow a set of instructions on the disk (like the ones that tell the player to show previews first no matter what). As such "most" consumer players are not affected... except for smarter ones that try to actually read the disk normally... they die.

In this case however we call it a variation because on 2 out of 3 machines in our office, the dvd-rom drives themselves came back with hardware errors trying to initialize the disk!

The two machines it did not work on resulted with a hardware output as follows:

ATAPI device hdc:
Error: Illegal request — (Sense key=0x05)
Logical block address out of range — (asc=0x21, ascq=0x00)
The failed "Read 10" packet command was:
"28 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 01 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 "

(^ this is a pretty standard error a linux kernel will spit out when a drive is unable to read a badly damaged disk or one that is just an unregognized format)

One failing machine is a desktop containing a "MAD DOG TF-DVDRW TSH652N".
The other is a laptop contianing a "MATASHITA DVD/CDRW UJDA770".

Since the hardware itself fails that means we do not even have the ability to try any software means to play back or rip the dvd we rented on those machines.
On the third machine (which contains a TSSTcorp CD/DVDW TS-L532U) It at least actually sees the disk as a dvd, however the protection still gave serious issues to most software.

VLC acted like it played the disc, but with no audio or video output.

unDVD, handbrake, and Thoggen all failed to be able to read through the bad sectors and the attempt would just die almost instantly.

Mplayer -will- play it however it takes a LONG time to seek before actually figureing the mess out and playing.( It actually took the video decoder 7 times to initialize before it actually was able to process!)

DVDrip however seems to be able to both play and rip the dvd without any issues. Way to go DVDrip team on supporting some new unknown copy protection!

We also have a uber generic consumer dvd player (a "Norcent np-315" we found beside a dumpster) in our workshop that plays the dvd flawlessly.

It seems this new ARccoS variant does a decent job of totally screwing up most attempts for a pc to read the virtually scratch free disk. That means we as legitimate holders of this disk with a right to play it, can not pop it into our main media machine and play it.

Bravo Warner Brothers, bravo. Way to encourage people to pirate.

We have yet to find any other information on this protection, nor anything regarding warner brothers releasing this mechanism. Hopefully someone else can shed some more light on this for us.

Please share any other experiences, tests, information, or thoughts regarding this.

-Lance Vick
Cross-Technical, LLC."

Slashdot Top Deals