wduffee - Slashdot User

Submission + - Tech bullies: Tech pioneers gone bad (itworld.com)

Submitted by JimLynch on Thursday June 03, 2010 @11:57AM

JimLynch writes: In 1976, Bill Gates, the 20-year-old head of a company that was still spelling its name "Micro-Soft," wrote an "open letter to hobbyists" decrying their copying of his company's Altair BASIC code, a landmark in the transition of computing from hobby to industry. It was also an instance of Microsoft, in its infancy, flexing its muscle to impose its will on an industry of free-wheeling free-spirits.

Submission + - Cloud Adoption Still Faces The Trust Issue (eweekeurope.co.uk)

Submitted by geek4 on Thursday June 03, 2010 @11:44AM

geek4 writes: Despite concerted efforts to set out the benefits of moving IT to cloud-based services, users still stop short of completely trusting those services, according to a web seminar chaired by eWEEK Europe.

“The cloud promises a lot for small and medium enterprises: it lets them cut the cost and compete with big companies,” said Julien Ardisson, COO at German provfider Strato AG, opening The Factors behind Cloud Adoption — part of BrightTalk’s Cloud Summit, a virtual event held on 25 May.

Submission + - HP Could Kill Off Palm Smartphones (thinq.co.uk)

Submitted by Stoobalou on Thursday June 03, 2010 @11:20AM

Stoobalou writes: Hewlett Packard boss Mark Hurd has revealed that he has no plans to make any new Palm smartphones.

HP snapped up the PDA pioneer at the end of April for $1.28 billion and the common consensus was that the computer giant wanted to get into the smartphone market.

Now it has emerged that HP has no interest in Palm's hardware business at all, but that the company was acquired for its intellectual property alone.

What Tools Do FLOSS Developers Need? 310

Posted by Soulskill on Wednesday January 20, 2010 @02:07PM from the does-soda-count-as-a-tool dept.

An anonymous reader writes "I am a free software developer; I maintain one relatively simple project written in C, targeted at end users, but I feel that I could contribute something more to the FLOSS community than my project. Instead of focusing on another project targeted at end users, I thought that I could spend my time working on something FLOSS developers need ('Developers, developers, developers, developers!'). The question is: what more do FLOSS developers need from existing development tools? What would attract new developers to existing FLOSS development tools? Which existing development tools need more attention? I can contribute code in C, Python and bash, but I can also write documentation, do testing and translate to my native language. Any hints?"

Submission + - Newegg goes public with IPO (channelregister.co.uk)

Submitted by

SoupGuru

on Tuesday September 29, 2009 @02:07PM

SoupGuru writes: "In a sign that maybe the economy is turning around, Newegg, which has grown to be the second-largest online-only retailer in the United States and one with a specialty in IT parts and consumer electronics, is going public.

Newegg was founded in 2001, and is aptly enough located in Industry, California. The company distributes over 30,000 products, has 12.6 million customers (about 4.1 million of them are active currently), and is known for decent prices and fast shipping among techies who build their own PCs and servers or who want software licenses for boxes or various electronic gadgets."

Comment Achewood was rather forward looking (Score 1) 313

by wduffee on Wednesday July 08, 2009 @03:20PM (#28626933) Attached to: Can Urine Rescue Hydrogen-Powered Cars?

From August 28 2006: http://achewood.com/index.php?date=08282006

Anyone else read this comic?

Submission + - Pocketsurfer : A mobile Internet Device (pocketsurferweb.com)

Submitted by

DominionSurfer

on Friday May 08, 2009 @03:18PM

DominionSurfer writes: "Pocketsurfer: A Mobile Internet Device Mobility to go online is in your pocket and that's true with the pocketsurfer, what amazes me is the speed to load web pages, yet giving the real web which I haven't experienced with n number of PDAs that I have tried so far. Its uniqueness is portability, speed and it's very affordable, you don't have to think of any contracts with service providers with the pocketsurfer, internet is as good as free with it. I found all the info at http://www.pocketsurferweb.com/ great site!"

Submission + - All Solid State Drives Suffer Performance Drop-off (computerworld.com) 1

Submitted by

Lucas123

on Friday May 08, 2009 @01:12PM

Lucas123 writes: "The recent revelation that Intel's consumer X25-M solid state drive had a firmware bug that drastically affected its performance lead Computerworld to question whether all SSDs can suffer performance degradation due to fragmentation issues. It seems vendors are well aware that the specifications they list on drive packaging represent burst speeds when only sequential writes are being recorded, but after use performance drops markedly over time. The drives with better controllers tend to level out, but others appear to be able to suffer performance problems. Still not fully baked are benchmarking standards that are expected out later this year from several industry organizations that will eventually compel manufacturers to list actual performance with regard to sequential and random reads and writes as well as the drive's expected lifespan under typical conditions."

Submission + - What makes a camera "professional"?

Submitted by wduffee on Tuesday October 16, 2007 @10:50PM

wduffee writes: Hello everyone,

I am planning on attending a concert in Louisiana (outdoor multi-day festival which is a paid entrance but is held on public grounds) which allows point-and-shoot still cameras but not any "professional still cameras".

What is their legal right to do so? Is it as simple as it being "their concert" (they being the organizers of the event) or can they do so under another law? How does that affect my ability to declare something non-professional (taking photos for personal use only)? Am I assumed guilty of trying to profit from the concert because I have a semi-professional camera?

If it is the "LAW" then that is fine (or at least the end of the line), but if it is merely a common misconception that you can be prohibited from bringing in your camera but it is actually illegal to enact such a prohibition, I would be interested in that. Especially where is the line drawn between what I consider professional and what is not? What was "professional" five years ago is now common at Wal-Mart for under $200.

Looking for feedback and ideas on a way to bring in my own personal property that I consider amateur while it may be considered professional by others.

Thank you for your time,
wduffee

Submission + - Multiformat Listening Test at 64kbps 1

Submitted by

prospective_user

on Thursday August 02, 2007 @08:09PM

prospective_user writes: "Do you think you have good ears? Think again.

The community at Hydrogenaudio has prepared a Public Listening Test for comparison of the most popular audio codecs (AAC, Vorbis, and Microsoft's WMA included) in a battle to see how they stand at compressing audio at 64kbps.

Many of the participants right now have expressed their surprise at being unable to determine which is the original and which is the compressed version of 18 samples covering a vast amount of musical styles.

The results of this test (and other that are conducted at Hydrogenaudio) will be used by the developers of the codecs to further improve the "transparency" and let this kind of test be even harder.

Everyone is invited to participate and show how good your listening is!"

Slashdot Top Deals