GI Jones - Slashdot User

Submission + - SCO to be delisted from Nasdaq

Submitted by

Frosty Piss

on Tuesday May 15, 2007 @11:35AM

Frosty Piss writes: "SCO has six months to get its share price trading above $1 for a sustained period or it will be delisted from the Nasdaq stock exchange. SCO has been trading below $1 since March 13. It now has until October 22 to get above $1 for 10 consecutive days, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing. SCO's share price plunged below $1 in December 2006 after US District Judge Dale Kimball affirmed an earlier ruling limiting the SCO's claims against IBM to just 106 items of evidence. Just days later Novell filed a request for a partial summary judgment that could cripple SCO's already diminished breach of contract and copyright case against IBM. The company has avoided delisting once before, but perhaps SCO's days are numbered."

Submission + - YouTube, MySpace banned on DoD computers

Submitted by

vivaoporto

on Tuesday May 15, 2007 @11:27AM

vivaoporto writes: "The U.S. Department of Defense said it will block worldwide access to 13 websites including MySpace and YouTube Today from the unclassified defense Department Internet(NIPRNet), according to media reports.

The ban, which takes place immediately, actually was imposed in February and was not prompted by any event or study, according to Army Col. Gary Keck, a Defense Department spokesman. He confirmed that bandwidth was the issue and said the decision is "not about content."

The new policy takes effect as the military has, ironically, aggressively turned to YouTube as a means of broadcasting what it considers to be the more positive aspects of its work in Iraq and Afghanistan as a way of countering what it considers to be negative news coverage.

The sites blocked by the Defense Department: MySpace, YouTube, Metacafe, IFilm, StupidVideos, FileCabi, BlackPlanet, hi5, Photobucket, Pandora, MTV, 1.fm and Live365."

Submission + - NVIDIA will release Lost Planet benchmark tomorrow

Submitted by

crazyeyes

on Tuesday May 15, 2007 @11:05AM

crazyeyes writes: "Odd choice for Capcom to have NVIDIA release the Lost Planet benchmark on nZone.com, instead of their own website. Must speak wonders about the power of NVIDIA's TWIMTBP program. According to this editorial, NVIDIA will release the benchmark tomorrow. It will be one of the few DX10 benchmarks. Will be interesting to see how the NVIDIA 8800 cards run. ATI fans will probably want to avoid this benchmark. Apparently, it sucks on ATI cards ."

Submission + - Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about UWB

Submitted by

mikemuch

on Tuesday May 15, 2007 @11:03AM

mikemuch writes: "This in-depth treatise details the current state of broadband wireless, with a focus on the WiMedia implementation. Topics covered include the Physics of radio, legal issues, PHY, encryption, MAC rules, wireless USB, WiNet (internet protocols over wireless), and Bluetooth."

Submission + - The value of sponsored independent research?

Submitted by

PetManimal

on Tuesday May 15, 2007 @10:50AM

PetManimal writes: "IT 'whitepapers,' put out by corporations and organizations including Microsoft, IBM, and Red Hat, are in-depth reports used to promote technologies and products. There's no pretense of objectivity in these documents, but what about sponsored whitepapers that are produced by independent technology research companies? Computerworld's Don Tennant describes an IDC whitepaper called "Russia as Offshore Software Development Location: Should You Consider This Your Next Move?", which was sponsored by Russoft, the association of software development companies from Russia, Belarus and Ukraine. He says that the Russoft sponsorship is very obvious, but wonders about the value of these whitepapers, compared to ones that are written by the vendors themselves:

IDC is making it very clear what you're getting and is leaving it up to you to decide what it's worth. That, indeed, is my question. What are these white papers worth to you? There's no doubt that readers find value in white papers prepared by the vendors themselves, because many are downloaded from our Web site every day. Is it in that context that these vendor-sponsored IDC white papers are read, or do they carry some premium of neutrality in spite of the vendor sponsorship?
This ties into the larger question of the value, believability, and quality of other types of documentation produced by hardware, software, and services vendors — ad copy, press releases, manuals, etc. I know it's hard to generalize, but what are the rules of thumb you use when evaluating the trustworthiness and accuracy of such information?"

Submission + - The Acid Test: QA as a Bridge to a Game Career

Submitted by on Tuesday May 15, 2007 @10:44AM

An anonymous reader writes: Over at educational site Game Career Guide, there's a new article asking whether game testing is a good way to get into the game industry, and game tester Zachary Slater comments of the conundrum: "QA could be a worthwhile career path for console and computer games if only it were treated and respected as such... It isn't and probably won't be. Game developers and publishers seem to regard QA as an unfortunate expense required in the development process. It is a problem for anyone who wants to actually focus on it that they won't be respected for doing so. When you're asked, 'Where you want to be in five years?' the answer is rarely QA. People who do answer this question with QA are regarded as underachievers."

Submission + - James Gosling on Open Sourcing Java

Submitted by

eldavojohn

on Tuesday May 15, 2007 @10:42AM

eldavojohn writes: "James Gosling, the father of Java, gave an interesting interview at JavaOne in which he spoke about a lot of things including JavaFX & the recent events of Java becoming Open Source. What he had to say about the problems they were facing with the open source community(s): "One of the issues we've had with open-sourcing is that often people try to generalize the open-source community as this one big kumbaya happy family, but in fact it's a bunch of warring states. They all have their Great Wall of China and they lob stones back and forth.""

Microsoft Details FOSS Patent Breaches 576

Posted by Zonk on Tuesday May 15, 2007 @10:41AM from the just-a-little-bit-dangerous dept.

CptRevelation writes "Microsoft has released more detailed information on the patents supposedly in breach by the open-source community. Despite their accusations of infringement, they state they would rather do licensing deals instead of any legal action. 'Open-source programs step on 235 Microsoft patents, the company said. Free Linux software violates 42 patents. Graphical user interfaces, the way menus and windows look on the screen, breach 65. E-mail programs step on 15, and other programs touch 68 other patents, the company said. The patent figures were first reported by Fortune magazine. Microsoft also said Open Office, an open-source program supported in part by Sun Microsystems Inc., infringes on 45 patents. Sun declined to comment on the allegation.'"

Submission + - Virgin media offering faster, but are shaping

Submitted by

Anonymous Coward

on Tuesday May 15, 2007 @09:07AM

Anonymous Coward writes: "Virgin Media cuts broadband speeds for heavy downloaders

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/112273/virgin-media-cu ts-broadband-speeds-for-heavy-downloaders.html"

Submission + - Goolgle Indexes Links Found Only in Gmail?

Submitted by on Monday May 14, 2007 @05:13PM

An anonymous reader writes: Recently, I purchased a domain to use for a pro bono website I'm building for a local, annual event. I put up a placeholder site, pointed the domain at it, and mailed my contact at the organization (using my Gmail account) to tell her about the domain. This is the only place that the domain was ever mentioned — neither of us have mentioned it to anyone else or any any other website, and have sent no traffic there by any other means than typing the URL into our browsers or clicking on the links in the email. We didn't want anyone to see it yet, since it's not done (or even yet begun, for that matter). When I registered it (several weeks ago), numerous relevant Google keyword searches as well as an explicit search for the domain turned up no results. Now any of these searches brings up this site as the first hit.

From the Gmail Privacy Policy:

When you use Gmail, Google's servers automatically record certain information about your use of Gmail. Similar to other web services, Google records information such as account activity (including storage usage, number of log-ins), data displayed or clicked on (including UI elements, ads, links); and other log information (including browser type, IP-address, date and time of access, cookie ID, and referrer URL).
So my hypothesis is that Google gleaned address out of my email via its URL-tracking voodoo and then indexed it, and this possibility does seem covered by their privacy policy. But I still find this pretty disturbing: can't I email someone a URL without the whole world finding out about it? What if the contents of this site fell into what the broader Google Privacy FAQ classifes as "sensitive information"?

..information we know to be related to confidential medical information, racial or ethnic origins, political or religious beliefs or sexuality and tied to personal information.

Submission + - Gov't requests sex offender data from MySpace

Submitted by

athloi

on Monday May 14, 2007 @02:15PM

athloi writes: "Attorney generals from seven states sent a letter to MySpace.com on Monday, asking the social networking site to provide the names of registered sex offenders who use the site.

While no one wants to defend sex offenders, this could lead to account signups that require real identification so the provider is not subjected to subpoenas for sex offenders on a regular basis."

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