Nilatir - Slashdot User

Richard Stallman's Dissenting View of Steve Jobs 1452

Posted by samzenpus on Monday October 10, 2011 @09:38AM from the if-you-don't-have-anything-nice-to-say dept.

Garabito writes "Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation, has posted his not-so-fond memories of Steve Jobs on his personal site, saying, 'As Chicago Mayor Harold Washington said of the corrupt former Mayor Daley, "I'm not glad he's dead, but I'm glad he's gone." Nobody deserves to have to die — not Jobs, not Mr. Bill, not even people guilty of bigger evils than theirs. But we all deserve the end of Jobs' malign influence on people's computing.' His statement has spurred reaction from the community; some even asking to the Free Software movement to find a new voice."

Trojan Goes After Bitcoins 344

Posted by Soulskill on Friday June 17, 2011 @10:42AM from the strict-inevitabilities dept.

Orome1 writes "Bitcoin has definitely caught the attention of criminals. Even though it has been calculated that the use of botnets for Bitcoin mining is still not quite as lucrative as renting them out for other purposes, targeting people who have them in their digital wallets is quite another matter. Symantec researchers have spotted in the wild a Trojan dedicated to this specific purpose. Named Infostealer.Coinbit, it searches for the Bitcoin wallet.dat file on the infected computer and sends it to the criminal(s)."

Comment Re:Sounds like an antitrust conspiracy (Score 2) 190

by Nilatir on Tuesday June 07, 2011 @12:13PM (#36363322) Attached to: Advocacy Group Files FCC Complaint Over Verizon Tethering Ban

Which is ironic because it's was Google who got the 'shall not deny, limit, or restrict the ability of their customers to use the devices and applications of their choice' clause in the LTE spectrum in the first place to prevent carriers from denying people's ability to use Android devices.

Google Allows Carriers To Ban Tethering Apps 328

Posted by timothy on Tuesday May 03, 2011 @07:53PM from the ultra-customizable dept.

iluvcapra writes "Google, in its continuing struggle to provide phone carriers (if not its end users) with an open platform, is now banning tethering apps from the Android market. These apps haven't disappeared and can still be sideloaded, insofar as your carrier doesn't lock this functionality or snoop on your packets."

NVIDIA Gets Away With Bait-and-Switch 336

Posted by Soulskill on Monday May 02, 2011 @05:28PM from the can-we-blame-moore-for-this dept.

racquetballguy writes "As part of a December 2010 settlement agreement, NVIDIA agreed to provide all owners of laptops containing a defective NVIDIA GPU with a laptop of similar kind and value. In February, NVIDIA announced that a $279 single-core Compaq CQ56 would be provided as a replacement to all laptops — from $2500 dual-core tablet PCs to $2000 17" entertainment notebooks. Ted Frank, from the Center for Class Action Fairness, filed an objection to the court, which was overruled by Judge Ware today. Once again, the consumers of a class action lawsuit lose."

Sony Wins Restraining Order Against Geohot 397

Posted by timothy on Thursday January 27, 2011 @06:13PM from the do-you-defend-him-to-your-death? dept.

tekgoblin writes "The courts have just issued a temporary restraining order against George Hotz (Geohot). Sony filed this lawsuit because they were unhappy that Geohot had released the Playstation 3 decryption keys so other people could play unsigned games on it. [Geohot is prohibited from] 'offering to the public, creating, posting online, marketing, advertising, promoting, installing, distributing, providing, or otherwise trafficking' in any software or methods for circumventing the PS3's protection methods. No longer can he 'provide links from any website to any other website' relating to such matters, or publish any information obtained by hacking the PS3. And more to the point, he can no longer 'engage in acts of circumvention of TPMS in the PS3 System to access, obtain, remove, or traffic in copyrighted works.' Pretty much he can't talk or think about the PS3 for some time."

Comment Re:Sorry, the movie was "meh" at best. (Score 1) 429

by Nilatir on Tuesday December 28, 2010 @01:46AM (#34683300) Attached to: <em>Tron: Legacy</em> — Too Much Imagination Required?

Kevin Flynn is The Dude...

From Tron:

---*Because*, man, *somewhere* in one of these memories is the *evidence*! If I got in far enough, I could reconstruct it.

---Paranoids, Matrix Blaster, Vice Squad, a whole slew of them. I was this close to starting my own little enterprise, man. But enter another software engineer. Not so young, not so bright, but very very sneaky. Ed Dillinger. So one night, our boy Flynn, he goes to his terminal, tries to read up his file. I get nothing on there, it's a big blank. Okay, now we take you three months later. Dillinger presents Encom with five video games, that's HE'S invented. The slime didn't even change the names, man! He gets a big, fat promotion. And thus begins his meteoric rise to - -what is he now? Executive VP?

---Like the man says, there's no problems, only solutions.

Foodtubes Proposes Underground, Physical Internet 431

Posted by Soulskill on Friday December 03, 2010 @12:27PM from the snail-mail-two-point-oh dept.

geek4 writes "Automatically routed canisters could replace trucks with an Internet of things, says Foodtubes. A group of academics is proposing a system of underground tunnels which could deliver food and other goods in all weathers with massive energy savings. The Foodtubes group wants to put goods in metal capsules two meters long, which are shifted through underground polyethylene tubes at speeds of up to 60 miles per hour, directed by linear induction motors and routed by intelligent software to their destinations. The group, which includes an Oxford physics professor and logistics experts, wants £15 million to build a five-mile test circuit, and believes the scheme could fund itself if used by large supermarkets and local councils, and could expand because it uses an open architecture."

Mr. Pike, Tear Down This ASCII Wall! 728

Posted by samzenpus on Sunday October 31, 2010 @07:55PM from the fresh-design dept.

theodp writes "To move forward with programming languages, argues Poul-Henning Kamp, we need to break free from the tyranny of ASCII. While Kamp admires programming language designers like the Father-of-Go Rob Pike, he simply can't forgive Pike for 'trying to cram an expressive syntax into the straitjacket of the 95 glyphs of ASCII when Unicode has been the new black for most of the past decade.' Kamp adds: 'For some reason computer people are so conservative that we still find it more uncompromisingly important for our source code to be compatible with a Teletype ASR-33 terminal and its 1963-vintage ASCII table than it is for us to be able to express our intentions clearly.' So, should the new Hello World look more like this?"

Thieves Use Vacuum To Siphon Cash From Safes 173

Posted by samzenpus on Friday September 24, 2010 @09:41AM from the gone-with-the-wind dept.

Tootech writes "A gang of thieves armed with a powerful vacuum cleaner that sucks cash from supermarket safes has struck for the fifteenth time in France. The burglars broke into their latest store near Paris and drilled a hole in the pneumatic tube that siphons money from the checkout to the strong-room. They then sucked rolls of cash totaling £60,000 from the safe without even having to break its lock. Police said the gang — dubbed the Vacuum Burglars — always raid Monoprix supermarkets and have hit 15 of the stores branches around Paris in the past four years. A spokesman added: 'They spotted a weakness in the company's security system and have been exploiting it ever since.'"

Toyota Adds External Speakers To Warn Pedestrians 531

Posted by CmdrTaco on Tuesday August 24, 2010 @04:20PM from the noise-pollution dept.

HockeyPuck writes "When I was a kid, playing with my matchbox cars, I used to say 'VROOOM VROOOM' to pretend my toy cars had big engines in them. Well it seems that Toyota has decided to do the same thing with the Prius by optionally installing, in Japan, external speakers to alert pedestrians of oncoming Priuses."

Why the World Is Running Out of Helium 475

Posted by CmdrTaco on Monday August 23, 2010 @11:28AM from the i-blame-politics dept.

jamie writes "The US National Helium Reserve stores a billion cubic meters of helium, half the world supply, in an old natural gasfield. The array of pipes and mines runs 200 miles from Texas to Kansas. In the name of deficit reduction, we're selling it all off for cheap. Physics professor and Nobel laureate Robert Richardson says: 'In 1996, the US Congress decided to sell off the strategic reserve and the consequence was that the market was swelled with cheap helium because its price was not determined by the market. The motivation was to sell it all by 2015. The basic problem is that helium is too cheap. The Earth is 4.7 billion years old and it has taken that long to accumulate our helium reserves, which we will dissipate in about 100 years. One generation does not have the right to determine availability forever.' Another view is The Impact of Selling the Federal Helium Reserve, the government study from 10 years ago that suggested the government's price would end up being over market value by 25% — but cautioned that this was based on the assumption that demand would grow slowly, and urged periodic reviews of the state of the industry."

Atlantis Blasts Off On Final Mission 143

Posted by Soulskill on Friday May 14, 2010 @04:08PM from the to-boldly-go dept.

shuz writes "Space shuttle Atlantis lifted off today on its STS-132 mission to the International Space Station — the final flight for the venerable vehicle. The mission involves three spacewalks over 12 days (PDF), during which the team will replace six batteries on the port truss which store energy from solar panels on that truss, bolt on a spare space-to-ground Ku-band antenna, and attach a new tool platform to Canada's Dextre robotic arm." NASA has video of the historic launch and reader janek78 adds this quote from the mission summary: "Atlantis lifted off on its maiden voyage on Oct. 3, 1985, on mission 51-J. Later missions included the launch of the Magellan probe to Venus on STS-30 in May 1989, Galileo interplanetary probe to Jupiter on STS-34 in October 1989, the first shuttle docking to the Mir Space Station on STS-71 in June1995, and the final Hubble servicing mission on STS-125 in May 2009."

Comment Re:What next? (Score 1) 237

by Nilatir on Wednesday April 28, 2010 @10:26AM (#32014236) Attached to: Apple Bans Online Sales In Japan

I agree. I actually held off on buying a backpack recently because the "add to cart" price seemed *too* good. Turns out the manufacturer had started enforcing the Minimum Advertised Price forcing smaller webshops to hide the price, this was also the reason that eBags.com had suddenly increased their price beyond the MSRP. This way eBags perpetual 20% off coupons don't run afoul of the MAP.

Thanks US Supreme Court... :(

SCO Asks Judge To Give Them the Unix Copyright 286

Posted by CmdrTaco on Wednesday April 28, 2010 @09:37AM from the we-promise-to-walk-it-every-day dept.

Raul654 writes "In March, the jury in the Novell/SCO case found that Novell owns the copyright to Unix. Now, SCO's lawyers have asked judge Ted Stewart to order Novell to turn over the Unix copyright to them. 'SCO contends the jury did not answer the specific issue before Stewart that involves a legal principle called "specific performance," under which a party can ask a court to order another party to fulfill an aspect of an agreement.'" Over at Groklaw, PJ is deep into a community project to annotate SCO's filing. It's for the benefit of future historians, but it makes amusing reading now.

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