TALlama - Slashdot User

Submission + - The Swedish OOXML vote as been declared invalid! (os2world.com)

Submitted by

Landreth

on Thursday August 30, 2007 @03:58PM

Landreth writes: "The Swedish Standards Institute has tonight issued a press release, according to OS2 World, where they declared this weeks earlier vote regarding OOXML as invalid and by that Sweden don't have any official position regarding OOXML any more.

According to the press release (Swedish) issued by SIS, Swedish Standards Institute tonight (the pdf document is created 18:05) the SIS board has declared this weeks earlier OOXML vote as invalid due to that one of the participating companies has voted two times where the SIS rules clearly says that each company can only cast one vote each."

Submission + - NASA Employees fight invasive background check (iht.com)

Submitted by

Electron Barrage

on Thursday August 30, 2007 @03:47PM

Electron Barrage writes: "Longtime JPL scientists, many of whom do not work on classified materials, including rover drivers and Apollo veterans, sued NASA, Caltech, and the Department of Commerce today to fight highly invasive background checks, which include financial information, any and all retail business transactions, and even sexual orientation."

Submission + - 10 Plane Crashes That Changed Aviation (popularmechanics.com)

Submitted by

longacre

on Thursday August 30, 2007 @02:18PM

longacre writes: "Americans practically take safe commercial flight for granted these days: out of over 50 million takeoffs over the past five years, there has been only one fatal crash (Comair flight 5191). It wasn't always this way... much of the technology that makes air travel so extraordinarily safe today has come as a direct result of fatal accidents of the past. Popular Mechanics lists eight crashes and two emergency landings whose influence is felt — for the good — each time you step on a plane."

Submission + - Algorithm Rates Trustworthiness of Wikipedia Pages

Submitted by paleshadows on Thursday August 30, 2007 @11:57AM

paleshadows writes: Researchers at UCSC developed a tool that measures the trustworthiness of each wikipedia page. Roughly speaking, the algorithm analyzes the entire 7-year user-editing-history and utilzes the longevity of the content to learn which contributors are the most reliable: If your contribution lasts, you gain "reputation", whereas if it's edited out, your reputation falls. The trustworthiness of a newly inserted text is a function of the reputation of all its authors, a heuristic that turned out to be successful in identifying poor content. The interested reader can take a look at this demo (random page with white/orange background marking trusted/untrusted text, respectively; note "random page" link at the left for more demo pages), this presentation (pdf), and this paper (pdf).

Submission + - Obtaining the spec for Office's Binary Formats (microsoft.com)

Submitted by

mastropiero

on Thursday August 30, 2007 @08:40AM

mastropiero writes: "During the discussion about the vote of certain country in the september ballot for Microsoft's infamous OOXML, a Microsoft-apologist linked us to an article in Microsft's knowledge base that specifies a process to obtain the specifications for Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and Drawing. It apparently comes with a covenant not to sue implementors and you also need to register in order to obtain the specs."

Submission + - In 3 weeks iPhone has 1% market, Motorola down 2% (emediawire.com)

Submitted by

pete.com

on Friday August 03, 2007 @01:13PM

pete.com writes: "The latest ChangeWave consumer cell phone survey — completed July 20, 2007 — shows a virtual upheaval occurring among cell phone manufacturers and service providers as a result of Apple's (AAPL) entry into the space. Although iPhone sales are still in their nascent stages, the effects on cell phone manufacturers are already beginning to take shape — and no company is bearing the brunt of this more than Motorola (MOT). While it still leads all other manufacturers in terms of current market share (31%), Motorola has dropped 2-percentage points since a previous ChangeWave survey in April to its lowest level in more than a year. http://www.emediawire.com/releases/2007/8/emw54418 5.htm"

Submission + - Brain electrodes help man speak again (yahoo.com)

Submitted by on Friday August 03, 2007 @07:27AM

An anonymous reader writes: "He was beaten and left for dead one night in a robbery while walking home in 1999. His skull was crushed and his brain severely damaged. The doctor said if he pulled through at all, he'd be a vegetable for the rest of his life." "Researchers chose him for an experimental attempt to rev up his brain by placing electrodes in it."

Submission + - BitTorrent 6.0 beta closed source, Windows only

Submitted by makomk on Friday August 03, 2007 @06:42AM

makomk writes: The BitTorrent (Mainline) 6.0 beta has been released, and it's a rebranded version of uTorrent. Unfortunately, it's also closed source and Windows-only. (Apparently, BitTorrent Inc always planned that the next version of Mainline would be closed-source, even before they decided to base it on uTorrent.) It also comes with a mysterious content delivery system called BitTorrent DNA, which appears to consist of a single invisible background task, dna.exe.

Does the original, open source BitTorrent client have a future, or is it time for its users to switch to one of the many other BitTorrent clients?

Submission + - Sony bales out of DSLR market

Submitted by

clickclickdrone

on Friday August 03, 2007 @05:42AM

clickclickdrone writes: "Having had trouble pulling market share away from Canon and Nikon, it seems Sony have called it a day in the DSLR market. http://stock-photo.blogspot.com/2007/08/sony-bails -out-of-dslr-market.html"

Submission + - New FingerprintingTechnique to Reveal Race and Sex (telegraph.co.uk) 1

Submitted by

Tech.Luver

on Friday August 03, 2007 @05:07AM

Tech.Luver writes: "Telegraph reports, " A new fingerprinting technique that can identify the race and sex, and possibly the diet of suspects has been developed. Scientists have shown that using a gelatine-based gel and high-tech chemical analysis can provide significant clues to a person?s identity even if police do not hold existing fingerprint records. ""

Submission + - Mobile 'phone use gender affected (smh.com.au)

Submitted by

Petra_von_Kant

on Thursday August 02, 2007 @06:14PM

Petra_von_Kant writes: "BEWARE the chatty female driver having relationship troubles.

Research has found that while speeding is a weakness for young men, emotional phone conversations behind the wheel make women drive badly.

Macquarie University research found women were more likely to be distracted while talking on a mobile phone in the car, but less likely to be distracted by passengers.

The researchers then looked at how drivers handled different types of conversations. They asked male and female drivers a simple cognitive question — "What did you do last Tuesday?" — and then to discuss a moral dilemma."

Submission + - Russian Subs Seek Glory at North Pole (forbes.com)

Submitted by PatPending on Thursday August 02, 2007 @06:04PM

PatPending writes: MOSCOW — Two small manned Russian submarines completed a voyage of 2 1/2 miles to the Arctic shelf below the North Pole Thursday, planting a titanium capsule on the Arctic Ocean floor to symbolically claim what could be vast energy reserves beneath the seabed. The dive was part serious scientific expedition and part political theater. But it could mark the start of a fierce legal scramble for control of the sea bed among nations that border the Arctic, including Russia, the U.S., Canada, Norway and Denmark, through its territory Greenland.

Submission + - Office 2008 for Mac delayed until January 2008

Submitted by

thefickler

on Thursday August 02, 2007 @05:06PM

thefickler writes: "Microsoft has announced that Office 2008 for Mac, originally slated for a 2007 release, will now be released in January 2008. No specific reasons were pinpointed in the announcement other than the software was not meeting its quality checkpoints in June and July of this year. Surprise, surprise."

Submission + - a real telemarketer filter

Submitted by hate-those-telemarketers on Thursday August 02, 2007 @02:08PM

hate-those-telemarketers writes: I just had one of those telemarketers call me despite being on the do-not-call list. There's still organizations that don't need to adhere to that list. Having googled the caller-id I came accross http://www.whocalled.us/ that seems to be a very comprehensive database of annoying caller-id's calling. What's even better is that in the "about" tab there's a script for asterisk to check all calls against that database. This is like a IP-list for spammers only for real telephony. Fantastic. I've implemented this and now I wish I weren't on the do-not-call list to see telemarketers deal with the very annoying Telemarket torture script that can be found on this site: http://www.voip-info.org/wiki/view/Asterisk+Telema rketer+Torture woo-hoo!!!

Submission + - Microsoft delays Office 2008 for Mac until mid-Jan (appleinsider.com)

Submitted by i_hate_robots on Thursday August 02, 2007 @02:00PM

i_hate_robots writes: AppleInsider is reporting that Microsoft's Macintosh Business Unit (Mac BU) said Thursday that the release of Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac has been pushed back from the second half of 2007 until mid-January. The Redmond-based firm now anticipates showing a final version of the software at the Macworld trade show and conference in January, with global availability to commence in the first quarter of 2008. "This was a business decision based on the Mac BU's commitment to deliver a high-quality product," said Mac BU General Manager Craig Eisler. "Our number one priority is to deliver quality software to our customers and partners, and in order to achieve this we are shifting availability."

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