Comment Re:HTTP/real estate (Score 2) 87
The MTA museum offers these tours occasionally: http://mta.info/mta/museum/index.html. Keep an eye out for it. You can sleep on my couch if you want.
Comment Re:Oh dear... (Score 1) 630
What are you talking about?
1. Mozilla never developed Netscape.
2. Netscape supported videos through the native operating system - a sensible, sane, fast way to play videos. If only WMP hadn't been such a target for malware, and slow to start up, it would have taken off, too.
Comment Re:To me, it's a question of mobility. (Score 1) 572
Huh? Zune - can you even write apps for that? Kin - you can't write apps for that, it's not a smartphone. Windows 7 mobile - since when do you need Microsoft's involvement to release an app for that? I haven't used windows 7, but previous stuff, like windows CE, was an open platform - not FOSS, but you could do whatever you wanted with what you had. Palm too, btw. That's why this new trend emanating from Apple is so devastatingly bad for freedom. Lay off the RDF.
Comment #11 was real! (Score 2, Informative) 56
I still own my foldable keyboard, although I got it wet and haven't gotten around to trying to fix it yet. It was awesome! I keep on wishing I had one for my current Palm TX...
Comment Re:Sounds like a KDE-type cleanup (Score 1) 276
Any application, not just GNOME applications, can use filesystems mounted with GNOME's 'connect to server' feature, for instance. I think it's more desirable to write a FUSE module than a KDE-specific KIOSlave.
You say that, but if you look at the apps on the ground, most, well, don't. For instance, I can mount my network drive using GVFS all I want, but I still can't watch anything on it, since VLC has no clue about it. A nice idea, but it would be preferable if they integrated it into the rest of Linux too. That said, I use Gnome every day.
Submission + - Ubuntu Releases Patch for SSD-Destroying Bug (launchpad.net)
Rozine writes: Today Ubuntu released a patch for Karmic that stops the destruction of some SSDs caused by a software bug. This is great news, especially since just yesterday we sent my wife's Eee PC for warranty service due to this same issue. The kicker? The bug was first reported in October 2009! Is it time to look to other distros for the crown of easy-to-use Linux? To me, allowing a *hardware destroying* bug to sit for months, whatever the cause, is completely unacceptable. Hopefully I've applied the patch on my other computers fast enough to prevent permanent damage on them as well.
Comment Re:Other Amendments (Score 1) 490
That is incorrect. The American Civil War was about a century after the Constitution came into effect, minus a couple decades.
Comment Re:You get what you pay for? (Score 4, Informative) 423
I understand your frustration, but you're doing it wrong. If you use the official hardware drivers program in the administration menu, kernel upgrades will not cause this behavior. (This is actually the default behavior on a new install now - it pops up and asks you). And it is supported by Canonical.
Comment Re:"negotiate a buyout with the contractor" (Score 1) 200
Mod parent up. This is actually one of the first posts I've seen on slashdot that's actually gotten the bailouts factually correct.
Submission + - Bill Gates Demands 'Energy Miracles' (cnn.com)
eldavojohn writes: At TED, former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates has officially declared clean energy and carbon emissions reductions more important than creating new vaccines and improving farming techniques. He notes that climate change will hit the poor the hardest and calls for creating a new system on a global scale. He said that our energy portfolio 'must include carbon capture and storage technology as well as nuclear, wind and both solar photovoltaics and solar thermal power.' He also called for improved battery technology. Aside from demanding 'energy miracles' right now, he spent a part of his speech highlighting a new nuclear technology that would turn spent uranium rods into energy. From the article, 'Gates said the deadline for the world to cut all of its carbon emissions is 2050. He suggested that researchers spend the next 20 years inventing and perfecting clean-energy technologies, and then the next 20 years implementing them.' Sounds simple enough. Despite declaring these new focuses more important than vaccines and farming techniques (of which they've donated billions to), the Gates Foundation has done little for climate change and in his 2010 letter, Gates explains why they 'don't currently see a role for the foundation in energy.' Okay everybody, you can stop slacking off. Start discovering energy miracles now!
Comment Re:You always need to be first! (Score 1) 314
Not that I'm defending this idiocy, but...
Two equal camps, check.
Group all "current" scientists together, check.
Appeal to "reasonable folks" who want to find a "middle ground", check.
Can you push any more buttons from the anti-science and anti-evolution camp? This is simple physics - non-ionizing radiation does not cause damage to DNA, period. There is real research on this. What more do you want?
The next time I hear someone appeal to the average man for authority in politics I'm going to go crazy. If I wanted the idiot down the street making decisions for me I would have asked him myself. I want people who have actually spent some time researching this to give me information, thanks.
Best Man Rigs Newlyweds' Bed To Tweet During Sex
272
When an UK man was asked to be the best man at a friend's wedding he agreed that he would not pull any pranks before or during the ceremony. Now the groom wishes he had extended the agreement to after the blessed occasion as well. The best man snuck into the newlyweds' house while they were away on their honeymoon and placed a pressure-sensitive device under their mattress. The device now automatically tweets when the couple have sex. The updates include the length of activity and how vigorous the act was on a scale of 1-10.
Big Dipper "Star" Actually a Sextuplet System 88
Theosis sends word that an astronomer at the University of Rochester and his colleagues have made the surprise discovery that Alcor, one of the brightest stars in the Big Dipper, is actually two stars; and it is apparently gravitationally bound to the four-star Mizar system, making the whole group a sextuplet. This would make the Mizar-Alcor sextuplet the second-nearest such system known. The discovery is especially surprising because Alcor is one of the most studied stars in the sky. The Mizar-Alcor system has been involved in many "firsts" in the history of astronomy: "Benedetto Castelli, Galileo's protege and collaborator, first observed with a telescope that Mizar was not a single star in 1617, and Galileo observed it a week after hearing about this from Castelli, and noted it in his notebooks... Those two stars, called Mizar A and Mizar B, together with Alcor, in 1857 became the first binary stars ever photographed through a telescope. In 1890, Mizar A was discovered to itself be a binary, being the first binary to be discovered using spectroscopy. In 1908, spectroscopy revealed that Mizar B was also a pair of stars, making the group the first-known quintuple star system."
Mozilla Thunderbird 3 Released 272
supersloshy writes Today Mozilla released Thunderbird 3.
Many new features are available, including Tabs and enhanced search features, a message archive for emails you don't want to delete but still want to keep, Firefox 3's improved Add-ons Manager, Personas support, and many other improvements. Download here."
Linux Kernel 2.6.32 Released 195
diegocg writes "Linus Torvalds has officially released the version 2.6.32 of the Linux kernel. New features include virtualization memory de-duplication, a rewrite of the writeback code faster and more scalable, many important Btrfs improvements and speedups, ATI R600/R700 3D and KMS support and other graphic improvements, a CFQ low latency mode, tracing improvements including a 'perf timechart' tool that tries to be a better bootchart, soft limits in the memory controller, support for the S+Core architecture, support for Intel Moorestown and its new firmware interface, run-time power management support, and many other improvements and new drivers. See the full changelog for more details."
