Comment Why doesn't he discuss the merits of SaaS? (Score 0) 319
I very much agree that SaaS is yet another strategic approach to controlling information and the software used to gather it. But it's hard to completely throw away such a useful abstraction. From a pragmatic view, SaaS is a convenient separation of concerns applied to both infrastructure and software.
Perhaps I missed it, but does RMS actually supply a solution to problems solved by SaaS? I noticed a few already in the threads here, but this basically characterizes most choices:
1. A completely decentralized approach, where everyone shares the software and information equally.
2. Every SaaS must run and share opensource code, as well as somehow opening sourcing the content (safely) as well.
3. Assume the worst about all endpoints, eventually empirically and/or contractually trust certain ones in a white list.
Calibre Version 1.0 Released After 7 Years of Development 193
Calibre is a feature-laden, open source e-book manager; many readers mentioned in light of the recently posted news about Barnes & Noble's Nook that they use Calibre to deal with their reading material. Reader Trashcan Romeo writes with some news on its new 1.0 release, summing it up thus: "The new version of the premier e-book management application boasts a completely re-written database backend and PDF output engine as well a new book-cover grid view."
Comment caffeine preferences, order by intensity (Score 1) 283
In ascending order of caffeine intensity, here are my preferences.
Green Ice Tea
Black Ice Tea
Iced Yerba Mate
Iced Coffee (cold brewed, to reduce toxicity)
Iced Red Eye (coffee with 1 shot of espresso) **** my personal favorite.
Iced Black Eye (coffee with 2 shots of espresso)
Iced Black Eye's puts me in a jittery state but sometimes I order them for the flavor. I once ordered this drink with a black eye before...it was awkward.
Green Ice Tea
Black Ice Tea
Iced Yerba Mate
Iced Coffee (cold brewed, to reduce toxicity)
Iced Red Eye (coffee with 1 shot of espresso) **** my personal favorite.
Iced Black Eye (coffee with 2 shots of espresso)
Iced Black Eye's puts me in a jittery state but sometimes I order them for the flavor. I once ordered this drink with a black eye before...it was awkward.
Adventures In Rooting: Running Jelly Bean On Last Year's Kindle Fire 41
concealment writes "Luckily, the Fire's low price and popularity relative to other Android tablets has made it a common target for Android's bustling open-source community, which has automated most of the sometimes-messy process of rooting and flashing your tablet. The Kindle Fire Utility boils the whole rooting process down to a couple of steps, and from there it's pretty easy to find pretty-stable Jelly Bean ROMs. A CyanogenMod-based version is actively maintained, but I prefer the older Hashcode ROM, which is very similar to the interface on the Nexus 7."
Ask Slashdot: Am I Too Old To Retrain? 418
Talcyon writes "I'm a 40-year-old developer, and it's become apparent that my .NET skillset is woefully out of date after five years of doing various bits of support. I tried the 'Management' thing last year, but that was a failure as I'm just not a people person, and a full-on development project this year has turned into a disaster area. I'm mainly a VB.NET person with skills from the .NET 2.0 era. Is that it? Do I give up a career in technology now? Or turn around and bury myself in a support role, sorting out issues with other people's/companies' software? I've been lurking around Slashdot for many years now, and this question occasionally comes up, but it pays to get the opinions of others. Do I retrain and get back up to speed, or am I too old?"
Comment TCP Fast Open (Score 4, Interesting) 143
Sounds like a great feature! From the article:
"Fast Open could result in speed improvements of between 4% and 41% in the page load times on popular web sites. In this version only the client-side has been merged."
"Fast Open could result in speed improvements of between 4% and 41% in the page load times on popular web sites. In this version only the client-side has been merged."
Salesforce CEO Benioff: Future Software Will Look Like Facebook 156
Nerval's Lobster writes "Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff is unapologetic about his love for Facebook. 'I think all software is going to look like Facebook,' he told media and analysts at the Dreamforce conference in San Francisco. 'Everyone is going to have to rewrite to have a feed-based platform.' If people can collaborate on tagging a photo, he added, they could easily do the same with a product or business problem. Even as Benioff touted his Facebook love, however, Salesforce is veering away from the Facebook model in one key way: whereas Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg felt his company focused too much on HTML5 for its mobile apps, choosing to focus instead on native-app development, Salesforce is embracing HTML5 for its Salesforce Touch app, which delivers Salesforce data such as Chatter feeds and contacts to a variety of mobile devices."
The Real Job Threat 990
NicknamesAreStupid writes "The NYTimes reports on a book by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew P. McAfee (MIT director-level staffers), Race Against the Machine, which suggests that the true threat to jobs is not outsourcing — it's the machine! Imagine the Terminator flipping burgers, cleaning your house, approving your loan, handling your IT questions, and doing your job faster, better, and more cheaply. Now that's an apocalypse with a twist — The Job Terminator."
Reader wjousts points out another of the authors' arguments: that IT advances have cost more jobs than they've created.
Comment Slashdot business model? (Score 1) 608
Advertisements on the web may be the most common way to turn a profit online, but it's certainly not the universe anyone really wanted except for advertising firms.
I would gladly pay $5 a month for wikipedia to exist without ads. In fact, I would almost always pay money rather than see ads for any service (as I eventually did on slashdot, incidentally). So perhaps wikipedia should adopt the slashdot model: No ads for special or paying members- everyone else gets non intrusive ads (by special, I mean long term members, frequent contributors, etc.). You could even adopt a system where contributors get "points" which allow them to not see ads.
Being Too Clean Can Make People Sick 333
An anonymous reader writes "Young people who are overexposed to antibacterial soaps containing triclosan may suffer more allergies, and exposure to higher levels of Bisphenol A among adults may negatively influence the immune system, a new University of Michigan School of Public Health study suggests (abstract, full paper [PDF]). Triclosan is a chemical compound widely used in products such as antibacterial soaps, toothpaste, pens, diaper bags and medical devices. Bisphenol A is found in many plastics and, for example, as a protective lining in food cans. Both of these chemicals are in a class of environmental toxicants called endocrine-disrupting compounds, which are believed to negatively impact human health by mimicking or affecting hormones."
Where Do I Go Now That Oracle Owns OpenOffice.org? 510
eldavojohn writes "So I noted that there was better support for my processor in the latest BIOS for my mainboard. After downloading the update, there was a .doc file containing flashing instructions. No matter, I have OpenOffice.org installed on this machine and just opened it up. And, as should be no surprise, there was an Oracle logo splash screen while OpenOffice.org 3.2 started up. At my job, I've had a less than favorable history with Oracle that I'm not going to get into — rather let's just say I never want anything to do with them again. Including installing any of their software on my machine. So I'm facing a dilemma. I've looked into the forked LIbreOffice but that's still in beta and I'm a little wary of depending on that. Has anyone used LibreOffice (it's installing as I type this) extensively? Does it handle complex Powerpoint files okay? Is there some alternative out there that I'm completely overlooking for open source? Can anyone convince me that there's no reason to fear the Oracle OpenOffice.org? Will it remain the de facto standard? Will it eventually lock me into a commitment with Oracle? If you get by without one of these heavyweight monster editors, what do you use and how do you handle doc, ppt, (etc.) extensions?"
Google Give Searchers 'Instant Previews' of Result Pages 252
First pressing 'Enter' was to much work... now actually clicking on the links and visiting the sites is to much, too... Google is testing instant previews, where you can see a miniature rendered view of the landing page without requiring you to click through and back-arrow.
1928 Time Traveler Caught On Film? 685
Many of you have submitted a story about Irish filmmaker George Clarke, who claims to have found a person using a cellphone in the "unused footage" section of the DVD The Circus, a Charlie Chaplin movie filmed in 1928. To me the bigger mystery is how someone who appears to be the offspring of Ram-Man and The Penguin got into a movie in the first place, especially if they were talking to a little metal box on set. Watch the video and decide for yourself.
Does A Company Deserve the Same Privacy Rights As You? 379
An anonymous reader writes "The Supreme Court has agreed to hear an important case to determine whether or not AT&T deserves 'personal privacy' rights. The company claimed that the FCC should not be allowed to distribute (under a Freedom of Information Act request) data it had collected concerning possible fraud and overbilling related to the e-rate program. The FCC argued that the information should be made public and that companies had no individual right to 'personal privacy,' the way individuals do. As it stands right now, the appeals court found that companies like AT&T do deserve personal privacy rights, and now the Supreme Court will take up that question as well. Given the results of earlier 'corporation rights' cases, such as Citizens United, at some point you wonder if the Supreme Court will also give companies the right to vote directly."
