PAPPP - Slashdot User

Microsoft Promises Not To Sue Moonlight 2.0 Users 233

Posted by timothy on Thursday December 17, 2009 @02:48PM from the even-the-stars-above dept.

darthcamaro writes "Moonlight 2.0, Novell's open source implementation of the Microsoft media framework, is now available and comes with a new patent promise from Microsoft. Any Linux user can use it now without worrying about being sued: '"A really important change in how the community and individuals will see and use Moonlight is a change and extension to the patent covenant that Microsoft provides to Novell and its end users," Brian Goldfarb, director of Web and user experience platforms at Microsoft, told InternetNews.com. "We're now increasing the reach of the agreement — Microsoft's commitment not to sue Novell or Novell's customers now extends to redistributors."'"

Chrome OS, Present and Future 132

Posted by kdawson on Sunday November 29, 2009 @07:53PM from the ooh-shiny dept.

Many readers are submitting stories related to Google Chrome OS. ruphus13 points out a GigaOm opinion piece about how, if users end up rejecting its current cloud-only focus, the nascent OS may succeed as a netbook secondary operating system alongside Windows (in company with secondaries based on other Linux flavors, including Android). Engadget reviews a Chrome OS on a USB key setup that is claimed to offer eye-opening performance compared to running under virtualization. And an anonymous reader notes the 0.1 beta release of ChromeShell, which installs a "Chrome OS-like" environment that boots to the Chrome browser in ~3 seconds; users can switch to Windows later as desired.

Choosing a Personal Printer For the Long Haul 557

Posted by CmdrTaco on Thursday October 01, 2009 @10:17AM from the i-thought-they-were-disposable-now dept.

The Optimizer writes "After 16 years of service, my laser printer, a NEC Silentwriter 95, is finally wearing its internals out, and I need to find a replacement. It's printed over 30,000 pages and survived a half-dozen long-distance moves without giving me any trouble. I believe it's done so well for two reasons. First, it's sturdily built and hails from an era when every fraction of a penny didn't have to be cost-cut out of manufacturing. The other reason was its software. Since it supported postscript Level II, it wasn't bound to a specific operating system or hardware platform, so long as a basic postscript level 2 driver was available. A new color laser printer with postscript 3 seems like a logical replacement, and numerous inexpensive printers are available. I'd rather get a smaller, personal-size printer than a heavy workgroup printer. Most of all, I would like it to still be usable and running well with Windows 9, OS X 11, and whatever else we will be using in 2020. Can anyone recommend a brand or series of printers that is built to last and isn't going to be completely dependent on OS specific proprietary drivers?"

Comment Accessibility != Scalability (Score 4, Insightful) 757

by PAPPP on Thursday September 24, 2009 @05:01PM (#29533357) Attached to: Shuttleworth Suggests 1-Way Valve For User Experience Testing

The idea that an interface can be entirely judged by how well a user handles it in the first few minutes of exposure is, in my opinion, one of the bigger *problems* with UI design of late. A quality interface should both be immediately accessible, and SCALE WELL TO MORE ADVANCED USE CASES. In my experience, Gnome, OS X, and the bundled native applications that come with each currently fail miserably at the latter. The former head of Apple's UI team makes a pretty good case for this being a problem here, although the article focuses specifically on a facet of the OS X design philosophy which causes scalability issues, rather than the problem in general. To borrow a line from the article: "The beginner today will be the expert of tomorrow. The user with 200 photos today will be the user with 2000 a year from now. The user with 10 songs today will be the user with 100 songs six months from now. The user with one or two extra apps on the iPhone will be the user with 100 apps three months from now."

iPhone Straining AT&T Network 551

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday September 03, 2009 @07:57AM from the got-an-app-for-that dept.

dangle writes "More than 20 million other smartphone users are on the AT&T network, but other phones do not drain the network the way the nine million iPhone users do. Because the average iPhone owner can use 10 times the network capacity used by the average smartphone user, dropped calls, spotty service, delayed text and voice messages and glacial download speeds are the result as AT&T's cellular network strains to meet the demand. AT&T says that the majority of the nearly $18 billion it will spend this year on its networks will be diverted into upgrades and expansions to meet the surging demands on the 3G network."

Draconian DRM Revealed In Windows 7 1127

Posted by kdawson on Monday February 16, 2009 @10:18PM from the just-who-did-you-think-owns-your-machine dept.

TechForensics writes "A few days' testing of Windows 7 has already disclosed some draconian DRM, some of it unrelated to media files. A legitimate copy of Photoshop CS4 stopped functioning after we clobbered a nagging registration screen by replacing a DLL with a hacked version. With regard to media files, the days of capturing an audio program on your PC seem to be over (if the program originated on that PC). The inputs of your sound card are severely degraded in software if the card is also playing an audio program (tested here with Grooveshark). This may be the tip of the iceberg. Being in bed with the RIAA is bad enough, but locking your own files away from you is a tactic so outrageous it may kill the OS for many persons. Many users will not want to experiment with a second sound card or computer just to record from online sources, or boot up under a Linux that supports ntfs-3g just to control their files." Read on for more details of this user's findings.

Comment Re:Problems with Chrom in the x64 version (Score 3, Interesting) 785

by PAPPP on Monday January 12, 2009 @09:23PM (#26426061) Attached to: In-Depth With the Windows 7 Public Beta

I didn't have any luck with daemon tools under Windows 7 (32bit), but SlySoft Virtual Clonedrive (free, http://www.slysoft.com/en/virtual-clonedrive.html ) works fine for me. On a more general note, Windows 7 is making it not a chore to leave my usual Linux/XFCE environment, so they must have done something right.

What Programming Language For Linux Development? 997

Posted by kdawson on Saturday December 06, 2008 @07:46PM from the let-slip-the-dogs dept.

k33l0r writes "Recently I've been thinking about developing (or learning to develop) for Linux. I'm an IT university student but my degree program focuses almost exclusively on Microsoft tools (Visual Studio, C#, ASP.NET, etc.) which is why I would like to expand my repertoire on my own. Personally I'm quite comfortable in a Linux environment, but have never programmed for it. Over the years I've developed a healthy fear of everything Java and I'm not too sure of what I think of Python's use of indentation to delimit blocks. The question that remains is: what language and tools should I be using?"

Race and Racism In Video Games 371

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday December 02, 2008 @10:20PM from the token-hobbit-among-orcs dept.

SlappingOysters writes "Racism in video games has been a key topic of discussion in the game industry this year, thanks in large part to the controversy surrounding the Resident Evil 5 launch trailer. In this article, GamePlayer speaks to developers, publishers, activists and journalists about the issue to get various perspectives and insights into how the video game industry is moving forward on the topic of racism. A related piece also has interviews with Sue Clark from the UK's Classification Board and Dr. Griseldis Kirsch, a lecturer in Contemporary Japanese Studies, about how racism in video games is viewed by the BBFC and Japan respectively."

18% of Consumers Can't Tell HD From SD 603

Posted by timothy on Thursday November 27, 2008 @09:35PM from the paying-the-old-standard-a-compliment dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Thinking about upgrading to an HDTV this holiday season? The prices might be great, but some people won't be appreciating the technology as much as everyone else. A report by Leichtman Research Group is claiming that 18% of consumers who are watching standard definition channels on a HDTV think that the feed is in hi-def." (Here's the original story at PC World.)

Researchers Calculate Capacity of a Steganographic Channel 114

Posted by timothy on Tuesday November 04, 2008 @11:32AM from the intentionally-not-left-blank dept.

KentuckyFC writes "Steganography is the art of hiding a message in such a way that only the sender and receiver realize it is there. (By contrast, cryptography disguises the content of a message but makes no attempt to hide it.) The central problem for steganographers is how much data can be hidden without being detected. But the complexity of this problem has meant it has been largely ignored. Now two computer scientists (one working for Google) have made a major theoretical breakthrough by tackling the problem in the same way that the electrical engineer Claude Shannon calculated the capacity of an ordinary communications channel in the 1940s. In Shannon's theory, a transmission is considered successful if the decoder properly determines which message the encoder has sent. In the stego-channel, a transmission is successful if the decoder properly determines the sent message without anybody else detecting its presence (abstract). Studying a stego-channel in this way leads to some counter-intuitive results: for example, in certain circumstances, doubling the number of algorithms looking for hidden data can increase the capacity of the steganographic channel"

E17, Slimmed Down For Cell Phones 166

Posted by timothy on Thursday October 16, 2008 @05:19PM from the durned-amazing-looking dept.

twitter writes "Want to run Enlightenment on your cell phone? The Rasterman's recent efforts bring E17 to Open Moko FreeRunner and Treo 650: 'According to the Rasterman, when used with his updated illume stack and new Elementary widget set, E17 can now run in just 32MB of RAM, on an ARM9 processor clocked at 317MHz. To prove it, he is distributing a Linux kernel and E17/Illume/Elementary stack for Palm's Treo650. The stack can be launched from PalmOS without touching the device's flash storage, he says.' While Microsoft fumbles with limited 'instant on,' GNU/Linux rules the embedded world and that's the only thing going in the IT market right now."

Comment Re:Flaw in School Focus, too (Score 1) 888

by hobbesmaster on Saturday October 11, 2008 @02:52PM (#25340965) Attached to: How US Schools' Culture Stifles Math Achievement

The word you are looking for is innumerate, and that word is in dictionaries of "official" English.

Algorithms Can Make You Pretty 288

Posted by timothy on Thursday October 09, 2008 @06:48PM from the too-late-for-me dept.

caffeinemessiah writes "The New York Times has an interesting story on a new algorithm by researchers from Tel Aviv University that modifies a facial picture of a person to conform to standards of attractiveness. Based on a digital library of pictures of people who have been judged 'attractive,' the algorithm finds the nearest match and modifies an input picture so it conforms to the 'attractive' person's proportions. The trick, however, is that the resultant pictures are still recognizable as the original person. Here's a quick link to a representative picture of the process. Note that this is a machine-learning approach to picture modification, not a characterization of beauty, and could just as easily be used to make a person less attractive." Note: As reader Trent Waddington points out, the underlying research was mentioned in an earlier story as well.

Senator Questions Rise In US Texting Prices 592

Posted by kdawson on Wednesday September 10, 2008 @05:45PM from the competition-what-competition dept.

vimm writes "Senator Herb Kohl (D-Wis.) has started an inquiry on the rising prices of text messaging (up 100% since 2005) that has occurred almost in sync with the consolidation of 6 major carriers down to 4. In a letter sent to Verizon Wireless, AT&T, Sprint Nextel, and T-Mobile, Kohl said the increase 'does not appear to be justified by rising costs in delivering text messages.'"

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