Comment A whistle blower, blows the whistle on himself (Score 1) 860
This is so meta.
Comment April Fools (Score 1) 1
Look at the calendar, it's:
April Fools
Submission + - 3D Printer of Firearms Arrested. Domain Names Seized (defensedistributed.com)
schwit1 writes: defensedistributed.com and defcad.org were seized today by the DOJ as part of a larger operation that also saw the arrest of unnamed individuals associated with the company. The charges are extensive and include violating weapons export laws, money laundering and copyright violations.
GNOME 3.8 Released Featuring New "Classic" Mode 267
Hot on the heels of the Gtk+ 3.8 release comes GNOME 3.8. There are a few general UI improvements, but the highlight for many is the new Classic mode that replaces fallback. Instead of using code based on the old GNOME panel, Classic emulates the feel of GNOME 2 through Shell extensions (just like Linux Mint's Cinnamon interface). From the release notes: "Classic mode is a new feature for those people who prefer a more traditional desktop experience. Built entirely from GNOME 3 technologies, it adds a number of features such as an application menu, a places menu and a window switcher along the bottom of the screen. Each of these features can be used individually or in combination with other GNOME extensions."
Google Pledges Not To Sue Any Open Source Projects Using Their Patents 153
sfcrazy writes "Google has announced the Open Patent Non-Assertion (OPN) Pledge. In the pledge Google says that they will not sue any user, distributor, or developer of Open Source software on specified patents, unless first attacked. Under this pledge, Google is starting off with 10 patents relating to MapReduce, a computing model for processing large data sets first developed at Google. Google says that over time they intend to expand the set of Google's patents covered by the pledge to other technologies."
This is in addition to the Open Invention Network, and their general work toward reforming the patent system. The patents covered in the OPN will be free to use in Free/Open Source software for the life of the patent, even if Google should transfer ownership to another party. Read the text of the pledge. It appears that interaction with non-copyleft licenses (MIT/BSD/Apache) is a bit weird: if you create a non-free fork it appears you are no longer covered under the pledge.
Comment Re:Banning Books Before They're Written (Score 1) 1174
Sorry, my comment title was an exaggeration. I know that no one is banning the book. I'm not even really criticizing the publisher, but rather the idea that art created by those we disagree with is undesirable. I can see the perspective, but it still rubs me the wrong way.
Comment Re:Banning Books Before They're Written (Score 1) 1174
I think a lot of the commenters are taking my exaggerated comment title a little too seriously. Obviously Card is still free to write, and his publisher is well within its rights not to publish Card's work. This is less a criticism of the publisher as it is of a cultural idea that we don't want art from those we disagree with. From a publisher's perspective it might be the smartest thing for them to have done. However, I personally find it laughable that someone might think they couldn't sell a comic book written by Orson Scott Card.
Comment Banning Books Before They're Written (Score 3, Insightful) 1174
Some of my favorite books are written by people who I disagree with. Just because someone hold a different opinion is no reason to prevent them from expressing art. Acceptance goes both ways.
Submission + - CloudFlare's Edge Routers go down taking 785,000 sites with them (techcrunch.com)
_0x783czar writes: "At close to 10:00 UTC today, CloudFlare ("a content delivery network and distributed domain name server service marketed as improving website performance and speed and providing security.") pushed an update which caused the edge routers in their network to crash. This outage in turn brought down all 785,000 websites which use CloudFlare's service, for nearly an hour. Sites including Wikileaks, 4Chan, and Imgur were among those directly affected.
Co-founder and CEO: Matthew Prince, hinted to TechCruch that the issue was caused by a flaw in the routers—which had to be compensated for by manually rebooting each one across the world. None of the servers were directly affected in any way, but each was rendered unreachable by the network outage. “This is a completely unacceptable event to us,” Prince said. “In our four years of life, this is our third significant outage.”
"CloudFlare generates so many pageviews that it would be the tenth website in the world." And as such this outage affected a significant portion of the internet, calling into question what if any significant backlash the company may face from its customers and the internet in general. Do the benefits of using such a service out weigh the risks, or do many sites even have a viable alternative?"
Co-founder and CEO: Matthew Prince, hinted to TechCruch that the issue was caused by a flaw in the routers—which had to be compensated for by manually rebooting each one across the world. None of the servers were directly affected in any way, but each was rendered unreachable by the network outage. “This is a completely unacceptable event to us,” Prince said. “In our four years of life, this is our third significant outage.”
"CloudFlare generates so many pageviews that it would be the tenth website in the world." And as such this outage affected a significant portion of the internet, calling into question what if any significant backlash the company may face from its customers and the internet in general. Do the benefits of using such a service out weigh the risks, or do many sites even have a viable alternative?"
Submission + - Curiosity Rover On Standby As NASA Addresses Computer Glitch (rawstory.com)
alancronin writes: NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity has been temporarily put into “safe mode,” as scientists monitoring from Earth try to fix a computer glitch, the US space agency said. Scientists switched to a backup computer Thursday so that they could troubleshoot the problem, said to be linked to a glitch in the original computer’s flash memory. “We switched computers to get to a standard state from which to begin restoring routine operations,” said Richard Cook of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the project manager for the Mars Science Laboratory Project, which built and operates Curiosity.
Submission + - Did Steve Jobs Pick The Wrong Tablet Size?
An anonymous reader writes: During the 2010 Christmas shopping season, Steve Jobs famously dissed the 7 inch tablets being rolled out by competitors, including Samsung's Galaxy, as being "tweeners: too big to compete with a smartphone and too small to compete with the [9.7 inch diagonal] iPad", adding that "the current crop of 7-inch tablets are going to be DOA — dead on arrival." A year later Jobs was dead, and the iPad Mini, with a 7.9 inch diagonal screen, was rolled out under his successor Tim Cook in October, 2012. Looking at industry-wide tablet sales numbers for January 2013, which show that the iPad Mini surprisingly outsold its larger sibling by a substantial margin (as did 7 inch Android tablets from competitors), Motley Fool's Evan Niu thinks that the 7.9 inch form factor was the correct size all alone, contrary to Jobs' pronoucements (which of course was partly marketing bluster — but he chose the larger size in the first place). Of course the Mini is cheaper, but not by much — $329 vs. $399 for the larger iPad, for the baseline model with WiFi only and 16KB storage. Had Apple introduced the iPad with the smaller size to begin with, Niu argues, competitors would have faced a much difficult task grabbing market share. While the Mini is currently available only with "Super VGA" resolution (1024x768), rumors are afloat that Minis with the Retina display (2048x1536) are close to production.
Submission + - Seagate to Cease Production of 7200rpm Laptop HDDs
jones_supa writes: 'We are going stop building our notebook 7200rpm hard disk drives at the end of 2013,' said David Burks, director of marketing and product management at Seagate Technology, during a conversation with X-bit labs. The mainstream market demand is expected shift to different products, such as hybrid drives. Users who need maximum performance and cares about battery life, have been choosing notebooks with SSDs for years now, whereas those who required capacity, performance and moderate price do not really care about actual performance. With the introduction of third-generation solid-state hybrid drives later this year, Seagate will position them for performance and capacity demanding end-users. The company will also continue to offer 5400rpm HDDs for value notebooks.
Submission + - Cisco looking to make things right with West Virginia (networkworld.com)
alphadogg writes: Cisco has offered to "take back" routers it sold to West Virginia if the state finds they are inappropriate for its needs, according to this post on wvgazette.com. http://wvgazette.com/News/201302280075?page=1 The offer is in response to a state auditor's finding http://www.legis.state.wv.us/Joint/PERD/perdrep/BTOP_2_2013.pdf that West Virginia wasted $8 million — and perhaps as much as $15 million — in acquiring 1,164 ISR model 3945 branch routers from Cisco in 2010 for $24 million in federal stimulus funds, or over $20,000 per router. The auditor found that hundreds of sites around the state — libraries, schools and State Police facilities — could have been just as suitably served with lower-end, less expensive routers. http://www.networkworld.com/news/2013/022513-west-virginia-cisco-router-267067.html?hpg1=bn
Submission + - Official: Playstation 4 will play used games (eurogamer.net)
An anonymous reader writes: Quenching some rumors 'Sony Worldwide Studios boss Shuhei Yoshida has told Eurogamer that PlayStation 4 will not block the use of second-hand games, contrary to various reports, speculation and even a Sony patent unearthed last month.'
Submission + - Kim Dotcom Plans White Label Version of Mega, Universities Get It For Free
An anonymous reader writes: Kim Dotcom made a very interesting announcement on Twitter this morning: Mega will soon offer white label versions of its service. Furthermore, he told TNW that his company “will provide this service for free” to universities. Dotcom told us he couldn’t offer too much detail, but he did say that he hasn’t partnered with any schools just yet. Mega has been approached “by one famous US university” recently, however, and the company concluded it “should offer them a tailored solution,” according to Dotcom. Yet this appears to strictly be a business decision. “We want to cooperate with universities all over the world,” Dotcom told TNW. “Their students are our potential future customers.”
