vjl - Slashdot User

Comment My grandfather would be proud... (Score 4, Interesting) 226

by vjl on Wednesday September 05, 2012 @12:24PM (#41235967) Attached to: 35 Years Later, Voyager 1 Is Heading For the Stars

I wish my grandfather was still alive to see Voyager 1 still in operation. He worked on the batteries and electrical system on the Voyager probes, spending most of his adult life working at JPL. He would be thrilled to know that they were both still operating, exploring, and sending data back to earth. Impressive!

Comment But now... (Score 4, Insightful) 504

by vjl on Friday March 23, 2012 @01:45PM (#39453717) Attached to: Facebook: Legal Action Against Employers Asking For Your Password

...employers will just ask potential employees to accept their HR staff's friend request, as the article yesterday stated. But one could easily get around that by making sure the HR staff is in a Facebook list that has no access to a user's wall/timeline and other info. Still, seems like the employer wouldn't like that and they would find some way to get the employee to let HR in. :(

Comment Re:Android phone (Score 3, Informative) 171

by vjl on Tuesday January 24, 2012 @06:28PM (#38811953) Attached to: The Google+ Name Game Continues

A google account is not private, whereas an AppleID is. If you have to create a google account for an android phone, that means you have to have an account with some of your information made public [eg: your name]. An AppleID is private - it is used solely for billing purposes though you can expand it to include iCloud [a private-that-can-be-public service], and it can also be used for GameCenter, a public service. But by default an AppleID is private and no online profile of you is made, unlike what happens when you create a google account.

Comment Re:MySpace 3.0? (Score 1) 98

by vjl on Saturday September 24, 2011 @07:40PM (#37505124) Attached to: Facebook Unveils Timeline, Updated Open Graph

Actually, that is/was one of the nice things about Facebook - it didn't allow the horrible customizations to one's profile like MySpace did. But it *did* used to offer more customizations [none of them as bad as MySpace]. They have removed most of the ability to make profiles look non-standard, much to the frustration of some users [but not me!]. While their new ticker is not good, I do think that the FB devs are very aware that they don't want FB profiles to look as bad as MySpace ones have.

Comment Re:Yes (Score 1) 782

by vjl on Saturday August 01, 2009 @03:27PM (#28911099) Attached to: The Ethics of Selling GPLed Software For the iPhone

There are lots of GPL apps on the AppStore - the most well known is the Wordpress app. If source code is available on the developer's site, than things are good to go. Anyone can download, for free, the iPhone SDK. It costs nothing to download/install the SDK. It only costs $99/year if one wants to publish an app into the AppStore or run it on a physical iPhone rather than the software-based iPhone simulator.

The developers are doing the right thing, IMO. /vjl/

47th Mersenne Prime Confirmed 89

Posted by kdawson on Saturday June 13, 2009 @06:54PM from the that's-odd dept.

radiot88 writes to let us know that he heard a confirmation of the discovery of the 47th known Mersenne Prime on NPR's Science Friday (audio here). The new prime, 2^42,643,801 - 1, is actually smaller than the one discovered previously. It was "found by Odd Magnar Strindmo from Melhus, Norway. This prime is the second largest known prime number, a 'mere' 141,125 digits smaller than the Mersenne prime found last August. Odd is an IT professional whose computers have been working with GIMPS since 1996 testing over 1,400 candidates. This calculation took 29 days on a 3.0 GHz Intel Core2 processor. The prime was independently verified June 12th by Tony Reix of Bull SAS in Grenoble, France..."

Submission + - RIAA Directed to Pay $68,685.23 in Attorneys Fees

Submitted by

NewYorkCountryLawyer

on Monday July 16, 2007 @08:08PM

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes: "In Capitol v. Foster, in Oklahoma, the RIAA has been directed to pay the defendant $68,685.23 in attorneys fees. This is the first instance of which I am aware of the RIAA being ordered to pay the defendant attorneys fees. The judge in this case has previously criticized the RIAA's lawyers' motives as "questionable", and their legal theories as "marginal" (pdf). Although the judge had previously ordered the RIAA to turn over its own attorneys billing records, today's decision (pdf) made no mention of that the RIAA had spent in paying its own lawyers."

Open Library Project Takes Flight 126

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday July 16, 2007 @06:34PM from the alexandria-green-with-envy dept.

Aaron Swartz today announced the launch of the new Open Library project. The goal of the project is to produce the world's greatest library on the Internet free for anyone to use. Starting with the Internet Archive's book scanning project and organizing the insertion of new content via a wiki-type model the project seems to be off to a great start. The demo, source code, and mailing lists were all opened up today in hopes of drawing interest from the public at large.

Submission + - A Pilot on Airline Security (hotair.com)

Submitted by Paperweight on Monday July 16, 2007 @06:11PM

Paperweight writes: Dave Mackett, president of the Airline Pilots Security Alliance, recently wrote how unsafe and hole-ridden airline security still is, in spite of all the money being blown on it. There is simply no deployable technology that has a prayer of keeping a motivated, prepared terrorist out of the system. The US Transport Security Administration misses more than 90% of detectable weapons at passenger checkpoints even in their own tests. Until the mindset behind airline security is changed, using an airliner as a weapon of mass destruction is as easy today as ever.

Submission + - New tool to circumnavigate Microsoft DRM

Submitted by thefickler on Monday July 16, 2007 @05:27PM

thefickler writes: No one seems to really take much notice of Microsoft's Zune Marketplace, except for hackers that is, with "Divine Tao" announcing a new tool that gets around Microsoft's Windows Media DRM. Divine Tao, says his new tool uncovers "the individual keys from Microsoft's DRM blackbox components ("IBX"), up to version 11.0.6000.6324". Diving Tao also supplies an updated version of FairUse4WM (1.3Fix-2), a freeware utility that strips DRM from protected songs purchased from Zune Marketplace.

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