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Books

On the Economics of the Kindle 398

Posted by kdawson from the how-much-is-cool-worth dept.
perlow writes "Just how many books a year would you need to read before the cost of Amazon's Kindle is justified? The answer is not so cut-and-dried. If you're a college student and all of your texts were available on Kindle (possible but unlikely), you could recover the cost of the reader in a semester and a half. For consumers to break even with Kindle's cost in that time, they would have to be in the habit of buying and reading four new hardback books per month — if the convenience factor wasn't part of the equation. At two books per month, breakeven would be in three years." Here is the spreadsheet if you want to play with the numbers.
Linux Business

How Long Should an Open Source Project Support Users? 272

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the no-implied-support dept.
Ubuntu Kitten writes "Since October the community-generated database of cards known to work with Ndiswrapper has been down. This is apparently due to an on-going site redesign, but right now the usual URL simply directs to a stock Sourceforge page. Without the database, the software's usability is severely diminished but this raises an interesting question: Is an open source project obliged to provide support for its users? If so, for how long should the support last? Web servers cost money, especially for popular sites. While developers can sometimes find sponsorship, is it possible to get sponsorship simply for infrastructure and user services?"

Comment Re:Telecommute = Outsourced (Score 1) 393

by kevjava (#21427085) Attached to: AT&T Calls Telecommuters Back To the Cubicle
The solution to that problem is pretty simple (and yet at the same time, not simple at all): get a cleared job. If you work for the government and your job requires a clearance, then you have instantly guarded yourself with very good certainty from outsourcing.

Okay, you still can't telecommute, but you probably won't get outsourced.
NASA

Submission + - NASA is withholding pilot safety survey results

Submitted by
Ranten_N_Raven
Ranten_N_Raven writes: "According to Yahoo News, NASA did interviews of airline pilots in 2005 about safety issues. Can't be good news in it, because they have refused to release the results.

Anxious to avoid upsetting air travelers, NASA is withholding results from an unprecedented national survey of pilots that found safety problems like near collisions and runway interference occur far more frequently than the government previously recognized...A senior NASA official, associate administrator Thomas S. Luedtke, said revealing the findings could damage the public's confidence in airlines and affect airline profits.
But don't worry, now, it's being taken care of: NASA is ordering the contractor who did the interviews to 'purge all related data from their computers.'"
Software

Would You Install Pirated Software at Work? 848

Posted by Cliff from the questionable-PHB-ethics dept.
An anonymous reader asks: "I am an IT professional, and due to budget constraints, I have been told to install multiple copies of MS Office, despite offering to install OpenOffice, and other OpenSource Office products. Even though most of the uses are for people using Excel like a database, or formatting of text in cells, other programs are not tolerated. I have been over ruled by our controller, to my disagreement. I would never turn them in, but I am in tough place by knowing doing something illegal. I want to keep my job, but disagree with some of the decision making on this issue. Other than drafting a letter to the owners of the company on how I disagree with the policy, what else can I do?"
The Courts

Groklaw No Front for IBM 206

Posted by CowboyNeal from the killing-the-messenger dept.
A Groklaw Reader writes "After all the wild speculation SCO put forth about Pamela Jones, her alleged subpoena by SCO, and her recent vacation due to illness, we now have Stephen J. Vaughan-Nichols writing to say 'Yes, there is a PJ.' In his own words, he says, 'Let me address this directly. Yes, Pamela Jones is a real person. I've met her several times [...] I consider her a friend. She is not a front for anyone.' Hopefully, this statement will be enough to put those SCO-induced conspiracy theories to rest."
Censorship

Submission + - Ethics of proxy servers

Submitted by
Mav
Mav writes: "I was recently asked to host a website for free in return for a lot of advertising. After querying them about how they knew the site would produce traffic they stated the site was going to be running PHPProxy (an open source web proxy). The traffic was a result of him and his contacts (nearly one thousand of them) using the site to bypass his school's firewall in order to view their MySpace pages and get access to their MSN messengers. Given all the attention social networking sites have recently received and the various laws attempting to block or control access to them I feel guilty and unsure making this available. Are there legal implications that I need to worry about? Could I be held liable if one of the students got in trouble? Most importantly, what's the moral thing to do?"
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft blasts IBM in open letter

Submitted by carlmenezes
carlmenezes writes: Arstechnica has an article on Microsoft's open letter to IBM that adds fresh ammunition to the battle of words between those who support Microsoft's Open XML and OpenOffice.org's OpenDocument file formats. Microsoft has strong words for IBM, which it accuses of deliberately trying to sabotage Microsoft's attempt to get Open XML certified as a standard by the ECMA. In the letter, general managers Tom Robertson and Jean Paol write: "When ODF was under consideration, Microsoft made no effort to slow down the process because we recognized customers' interest in the standardization of document formats." In contrast, the authors charge that IBM "led a global campaign" urging that governments and other organizations demand that International Standards Organization (ISO) reject Open XML outright.
Could MS actually be getting a taste of their own medicine?
Mozilla

Submission + - Firefox flaw could let sites fake being "trust

Submitted by thirty-seven
thirty-seven writes: According to an article on the CBC website, a Firefox bug could be exploited to make it look like users are connected to a trusted site when they are not. Apparently, by exploiting a flaw in the way that Firefox manages data written to the browser's "location.hostname" DOM property, a site could manipulate the authentication cookies for trusted websites such as an online bank, thereby appearing trusted itself.
User Journal

Journal SPAM: BTW: Iranian Dates 5

Journal by Jeremiah Cornelius

Like every one in the known universe, Iran represents the date as day/month/year. Everyone, except the US who backwards talk do.

In Iran, it is the year 1385, and they don't use CE dates. Iran also rejects the Arab lunar calandar in favor of the Zoroastrian solar year, basing year zero on the hijira date 0 to define the beginning of the epoch.
Businesses

Submission + - Terror and Stock Market

Submitted by sas-dot
sas-dot writes: Terrorist attacks on vital institutions and installations often send stock indexes tumbling in the past. But the scenario is changing fast. Jihadi groups are now floating fictitious companies to manipulate stock markets to generate funds for their operations. India's National Security Advisor (NSA), M K Narayanan warned of similar developments in India citing isolated reports of companies that had come in from the Mumbai and Chennai stock exchanges , some of which were traced to terrorist outfits. IT companies / BPO's could be target and is not far fetching, considering what happen recently a BPO was supporting call services to drug laundering.
Biotech

Stem Cell Research Paper Recalled 112

Posted by CowboyNeal from the making-the-grade dept.
MattSparkes writes "One of the best-known stem cell papers describes adult cells that seemed to hold the same promise as embryonic stem cells. Now some of the data contained within the paper is being questioned, after staff at a consumer science magazine noticed errors. It shows how even peer-reviewed papers can sometimes 'slip through the net' and get to publication with inaccurate data."
Mozilla

Submission + - Over 27% of Firefox patches come from volunteers

Submitted by
dolphinling
dolphinling writes: "Everyone knows the Mozilla Corporation makes a lot of money and employs a lot of people now. Google has full-time employees working on Firefox too, as do a number of other places. Yet despite that, in the six months up to Firefox 2 "27% of the patches to Firefox and Gecko and other key projects were submitted by key volunteers, [and] those patches represent 24% of changes made to the source code". What's more, those numbers only counted contributers with 50 patches or more, so the actual numbers are probably quite a bit higher. It's good to see that even as Mozilla does so well in the business world, it can still keep its ties to the community so strong."
It's funny. Laugh.

Submission + - Amir Tofangsazan's laptop goes up for sale!

Submitted by
spikytom
spikytom writes: "Some of you might remember the story of Amir Tofangsazan, the idiot who sold someone (me) a broken laptop, only to have all the embarrasing photos and content he left on the hard drive posted up on a website when he refused to pay back the money. well, 3.8 million hits later, and i've decided to put the laptop and the website up on ebay, so someone else has the chance to be the proud owner of the world's most famous broken laptop. Here is the link!"

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