xonker - Slashdot User

Comment Re:What's really interesting... (Score 1) 374

by xonker on Friday February 25, 2011 @08:55PM (#35319360) Attached to: Canonical To Divert Money From GNOME

Really not what the original article says - have you read it?

From TFA:

In fact, Burt says that the Banshee team had unanimously opted to turn off the Amazon store when given the choice, but now "Canonical came up with their own plan: essentially the option we rejected."

Further, Burt doesn't seem pleased with the way Canonical has handled the situation. "Canonical offering us options and then going back on them when we didn't pick their preferred one was not reasonable." Lorentz says he agrees "wholeheartedly" with Burt's response.

Some who commented on the original report suggested that the Banshee team had made a mistake in choosing to turn off the store rather than taking the 25% cut. Burt says, "it is possible that GNOME will do better financially with this arrangement than if Canonical disabled the Amazon store. GNOME would do 4x better than that if our upstream code shipped unmodified, as it does in other Linux distributions.

Comment Re:Flamebait (Score 1) 374

by xonker on Friday February 25, 2011 @08:52PM (#35319340) Attached to: Canonical To Divert Money From GNOME

Don't depend on the summary or the commenter's summary - RTFA. It is *not* a win/win - and the Banshee devs do not characterize it as such.

Comment Re:Flamebait (Score 2) 374

by xonker on Friday February 25, 2011 @08:50PM (#35319312) Attached to: Canonical To Divert Money From GNOME

Did you RTFA? The maintainers they asked were *not* happy with the decision and the maintainers have *gone on record* as saying it's "unreasonable" - I know that one of the OMGUbuntu folks has been going around saying he's a Banshee contributor (he is, but not one of the maintainers) and trying to characterize it as everything is OK - but that is NOT the case.

Submission + - Shift to Cloud and IT Job Losses (techtarget.com)

Submitted by

rsmiller510

on Monday February 21, 2011 @09:40AM

rsmiller510 writes: "A couple of gloomy jobs reports are enough to depress any IT Pro, but it's more likely a short-term lag as jobs shift and move with the changing computing landscape."

Submission + - Canonical disables Amazon MP3 store in Banshee (networkworld.com)

Submitted by polar_bear` on Tuesday February 15, 2011 @08:09PM

polar_bear` writes: Banshee contributors were happy to have it chosen as the default music player in Ubuntu 11.04. The joy may be short-lived, though. Canonical approached the team with a choice: give us 75% of Amazon affiliate fees, or we disable the Amazon Store in Banshee to avoid competing with Ubuntu One. The Banshee store was on track to raise $10K for the GNOME Foundation in 2011.

Submission + - Indexing the Social Signal: Search & Social Me (oreilly.com)

Submitted by blackbearnh on Tuesday February 15, 2011 @07:59PM

blackbearnh writes: Search engines have gotten pretty good at indexing the semi-static web, but new information sources such as Twitter and Facebook are starting to change the game. How do you find the meaningful tweets about protests in Egypt, when they're being drowned out by a thousand times as many retweets, not to mention stuff about Justin Bieber.

Social Media guru Charlene Li thinks that finding search value in 140 character tweets requires an entirely new approach to ranking the value of information, and in a new interview, she talks about why PageRank doesn't work for this kind of real-time information, as well as how the increasing searchability of social media is changing how people use it. "With PageRank, the more links that came into a piece of content the more meaningful and important it was. That works in a static web, and it tends to lean toward things that have better longevity. When things are coming in real-time, how do you determine whether content is important or relevant to a particular search query? How do you understand the social signal and all of the metadata that surrounds it? There's very little metadata associated with a 140-character tweet."

Submission + - E-Book Lending Stands Up To Corporate Mongering (publishingperspectives.com)

Submitted by phmadore on Monday February 14, 2011 @12:36PM

phmadore writes: Publishing Perspectives is talking today about the rise of e-book lending, which, one would hope, will lead to a rise in questioning exactly how far one's digital rights extend. Although the articles are mostly talking about the authorized lending programs through Kindle and Nook ("The mechanics are simple: ebook owners sign up and list books that they want to allow others to borrow. When someone borrows one of the ebooks you have listed, you earn a credit. Credits can also be purchased for as little as $1.99 from eBook Fling."), we have to ask ourselves why we are suddenly paying publishers more for less. In the case of iBooks, you can't even transfer your books to another device, let alone another user, but then at least the prices are somewhat controlled. In the case of sites like BooksOnBoard, you've got ridiculously out of control prices with a greatly decreased cost of delivery. It's not all bad, don't get me wrong: Kobo offers competitive that never leave me feeling ripped off or stuck with an inferior product. Still, I can't help but think: digital rights management, sure! Where are my rights, as a consumer, and who is managing them? I wouldn't mind selling the rights back to the publisher or store for in-store credit; I also wouldn't be terribly bothered if they got a reasonable cut off the resale of the product to someone else. What I won't like is if they never allow it or continue to make it impossible for me to sell what's rightfully mine! This is not software we're talking about and copyright has been very clear on it for decades: not only can I legally re-sell a CD, but I can burn a copy and give it to my mother if I please, or even burn a copy and give it to my mother and THEN re-sell it. Anyways, WTF /.?

Submission + - Egypt, Offshoring and the Cloud (cioupdate.com)

Submitted by rsmiller510 on Monday February 14, 2011 @12:25PM

rsmiller510 writes: If Egypt can shut off the internet, what does it mean for global outsourcing? It might not be a good sign

Submission + - Terrorist attack in Moscow (corriere.it)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 24, 2011 @10:42AM

An anonymous reader writes: It was bound to happen... terrorists are starting to blow up the airports, instead of planes.
More damage with way less hassle.

Will the airport security theater finally be fixed, or will they just make it worse?

PS: I fully condemn any sort of violence, and I am not happy at all to see these kind of news.

Submission + - Price-Fixing Lawsuit Comes Back to Bite Record Cos (internetevolution.com)

Submitted by rsmiller510 on Monday January 24, 2011 @09:41AM

rsmiller510 writes: Can you think of an industry that deserves a bit of grief more than the record companies? Their latest problem stems from a decade old law suit accusing them of price fixing.

Submission + - Pardus 2011, Independent Distro Releases Latest an (ostatic.com)

Submitted by Thinkcloud on Monday January 24, 2011 @05:28AM

Thinkcloud writes: Funded by the Scientific & Technological Research Council of Turkey, the distro is big in all Turkish Government sectors including the Armed forces and Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Naturally, it’s a distro to watch out for, specially because, for some reason, it remains hugely underused.

Submission + - Volume 4A of Knuth's TAOCP Finally In Print (informit.com) 1

Submitted by

jantangring

on Monday January 24, 2011 @04:39AM

jantangring writes: "It's been 28 years since Volume 3 of Donald Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming was published. The book series is a classic work of computer science in spite of the fact that still more than half of the seven volume series is still to be finalized. In 1992 Donald Knuth retired to medieval monkness in order to finish his work. After many long years in draft volume 4A now in print and you can get it in a boxed set if you don't mind admitting that you don't already own the first thee volumes. They won't be checking if you read it."

Submission + - MS Asks Google to Delay Fuzzer Tool (computerworld.com)

Submitted by eldavojohn on Monday January 03, 2011 @10:06AM

eldavojohn writes: Polish Google security white hat Michal Zalewski has announced concerns that one of a hundred vulnerabilities his fuzzer tool found in IE is well known to third party hackers in China. His simple explanation provides an interesting counter argument to Microsoft's usual request that security problems not be released until they can slowly investigate them. From the article, 'Microsoft asked Zalewski to delay cross_fuzz's release, but he declined, in part because of his fear the IE vulnerability was already being explored by Chinese hackers, but also because the company's security experts had not responded to information he provided.' You can read about and download cross_fuzz for your own use.

Submission + - Can IT Give Users a Consumer Experience? (itworld.com)

Submitted by rsmiller510 on Monday January 03, 2011 @09:59AM

rsmiller510 writes: As user expectations change from consumer and mobile applications, should IT give users what they want and simplify software?

Submission + - Linux hacker announces Parallel Programming book (livejournal.com)

Submitted by Josh Triplett on Monday January 03, 2011 @08:10AM

Josh Triplett writes: Linux kernel hacker and parallel programming guru Paul McKenney announced his book-in-progress, Is Parallel Programming Hard, And, If So, What Can You Do About It?. It currently has a good combination of "documentation nobody else ever bothered to write" on many forms of synchronization and concurrency, from the simple to the cutting edge, with a bit of a peek beyond. It has a ways to go before it could become a publishable book, but by the standards of software documentation it represents one of the best references I've seen.

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