21147642
submission
Roblimo writes:
Ladies and gentlemen, Bennet Haselton:
20180276
submission
Roblimo writes:
If you were hoping for a government shutdown, it looks like you are going to be disappointed. In a last-hour cliffhanger, Democrats and Republicans managed to agree with each other enough to keep the government funded for the rest of the current fiscal year. Since the budget bill that finally passed was a compromise, no one is happy with it. So it goes. That's how things work in a representative government.
19858552
submission
Roblimo writes:
Yes, we know tablets like the iPad are the wave of the future and that PCs and laptops are dead. But some of us see tablets as laptops with their keyboards missing and a few hundred bucks tacked onto the price.
18061714
submission
Roblimo writes:
Every year, an increasing percentage of my income comes from video shooting and editing. I also help friends, neighbors, and various business associates learn to shoot and edit their own videos. This article describes my five favorite entry-level Windows video editing programs, with a brief run-down of each one's strengths and weaknesses. While I wrote this for people doing business-type videos, this information is also valuable if you want to edit your family's holiday videos. (Free registration required to view.)
16688850
submission
Roblimo writes:
Wow. They sent press releases out about this, and we're happy for them. But isn't Git easy to install and use — for free, even if your project is proprietary and secret, not Open Source and public? Whatever. Some people seem to feel better about proprietary software than about FOSS, so I suppose this business story is news. Sort of. At least the featured company, Atlassian, has free versions of its repository for FOSS and small-scale proprietary developers. Which is sort of nice.
15661826
submission
Roblimo writes:
Bing and Mapquest both use output from OpenStreetMap.org (OSM). Mapquest supports the project with money for equipment and access to the code they've written to integrate OSM's work with their display. Bing? They just take from the project and do nothing for it in return. This may be okay in a legal sense, but it is a seriously nekulturny way to behave. Even so, having Microsoft's Bing as a reference might help the project's founder make money. They've put a lot of work into this project, and it's doing a lot of people a lot of good, so they certainly deserve some sort of payback, either direct or indirect. They have a few ideas about how they might legitimately earn a few bucks from their project while remaining free software purists. Do you have any ideas, yourself, about how they might turn a few bucks from OSM?
15357936
submission
Roblimo writes:
I had a dream. In it, I was CEO of a large telecommunications company that was also a major broadband Internet provider and all five members of the FCC were stabbing me with pitchforks and yelling in my ear that my company would be treated as a common carrier, not as a special entity they couldn't regulate. That's when I woke up...
13725480
submission
Roblimo writes:
You couldn't make this up. You wouldn't *want* to make this up: phone spam after you post on Craigslist. The article includes a genuine phone spam robocall I got after I advertised on Craigslist in Florida for a video production service salesperson. I had to get several of these calls before I believed they were real enough for me to actually record one, but they're real, all right. Is Satan behind this idea or is it just an extraordinarily greedy company? If we all yell, 'MOMMY, MAKE IT STOP!' loud enough, will they go away?
13451038
submission
Roblimo writes:
'In response to concerns about cell phone radiation and brain cancer, cell phone manufacturers will publish information about the radiation they produce, even though there is no clear link between radiation and brain cancer, and the radiation figure is only one component,' writes Sharon Fisher in PCWorld.
13274240
submission
Roblimo writes:
Geek.net, the parent company of SourceForge.net, Slashdot.org, ThinkGeek.com, Geek.com, freshmeat.net, and ohloh.net, has told employees that it will be closing freshmeat.net and ohloh.net. This information has not yet been released to the public, but we've heard it from more than one Geek.net employee. The company also reportedly laid off 25% of its staff this week. After the story was posted at devx.com, a Geek.net Vice President emailed this response to its author: 'If you're asking whether or not the sites are for sale, the answer is no. However, we are looking to create better ways for our community to interact with the information on these sites, likely through SourceForge.'
13002798
submission
Roblimo writes:
Zappa's Dinah-Moe Hummm is totally about Linux, at least in spirit, while the song Montana, with its talk of zirconium-encrusted tweezers and dental floss, "is obviously about Mac users." Not only that: In the early 70s Zappa wrote a song called Penguin in Bondage, an obvious foretelling of the anti-Linux lawsuits and threats from SCO, Microsoft, and other evildoers. Zappa was also a heavy user of the Synclavier, an electronic music-machine that was a precursor to today's "studio on a computer" recording and sound editing software. According to the article on DevX, today Zappa would no doubt be using Linux and Ardour for most of his recording and composition.
