Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Linux

Submission + - Shuttleworth: Chrome nearly replaced FF in Ubuntu (networkworld.com)

Submitted by
jbrodkin
jbrodkin writes: "Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth is a big fan of Google Chrome, and says the browser could replace the standard Firefox in future versions of Ubuntu Linux. "We looked at it closely in the last cycle and the decision was to stick with Firefox," he says. But the work that Google is doing with Chrome OS — essentially the Chrome browser on top of Linux — is potentially leading to a future in which "Chrome on Ubuntu and Chrome on Linux is a better experience than Chrome on any other platform [i.e. Windows and Mac]." In a wide-ranging interview, Shuttleworth also discussed why he spent $20 million to become a space tourist but doesn't own a smartphone, controversies over Linux and Unity, the future of Ubuntu tablets, and says the move toward putting personal data in the cloud is "a little scary.""
Government

Submission + - LulzSec Hacks The US Senate (itworld.com)

Submitted by
jfruhlinger
jfruhlinger writes: "LulzSec might not be as famous as Anonymous — they're really best known for hacking sites they like, to prove a point about security — but they may have just raised their profile significantly, posting what appears to be data taken from an internally facing server at the U.S. Senate. However, they fun-loving group might find that the Senate reacts a lot more harshly to intrusions than, say, PBS did."
Idle

Submission + - Richard Dreyfuss Reads the iTunes EULA (cnet.com)

Submitted by jjoelc
jjoelc writes: CNET recruited Academy Award winning actor Richard Dreyfuss to provide a dramatic (and hilarious) reading of Apple's End User License Agreement for iTunes.
Windows

Submission + - Microsoft to dump .Net for HTML5/JavaScript? (i-programmer.info)

Submitted by joelholdsworth
joelholdsworth writes: Microsoft seem to be set on adopting HTML5 and JavaScript as its main application development tools for Windows 8 — is this the end of .NET?" "Microsoft developers feel left in the dark and very angry at the way they are being treated. You only have to browse the Microsoft forums to discover how strong the feeling is: forum post 1, forum post 2 and an open letter.

Submission + - Netherlands to introduce net neutrality (tweakers.net)

Submitted by
sheean.nl
sheean.nl writes: "Dutch tech news site Tweakers.net reports that the Netherlands will get a legal guarantee on net neutrality, as far as the minister of economics Verhagen (CDA, Christian Democrats) is concerned. Verhagen will almost fully accept a motion of the opposition parties, although the coalition members are not yet fully convinced.

If accepted, the Netherlands would become the second country after Chili to guarantee net neutrality."
Security

Submission + - Security Service Accidentally Makes Web 60% Faster (thenextweb.com)

Submitted by EastDakota
EastDakota writes: CloudFlare was originally conceived by the team behind the open source communityProject Honey Pot as an easy way to protect any website from hackers and spammers. The concern from the beginning was that it would add latency. It was quite a surprise when the free service launched 8 months ago and ended up speeding up websites by 60%.
DRM

Submission + - DRM is counterproductive (techrepublic.com)

Submitted by dwreid
dwreid writes: It's interesting to see a mainstream technical site such as TechRepublic call out that DRM provides no benefit but does increase costs and punish legitimate customers.
Privacy

Submission + - Checkpoint of the future coming soon to airports (yahoo.com)

Submitted by
cultiv8
cultiv8 writes: "Eye scanners and futuristic security tunnels may be standard in airports soon as the airline industry seeks to maintain safety while reducing the hassles of boarding a plane that deter some people from flying.

The International Air Transport Association unveiled a mock-up Tuesday in Singapore of what it dubbed the "Checkpoint of the Future," where passengers separated by security risk would walk through one of three high-tech, 20-foot-long (6.1-meters-long) tunnels that can quickly scan shoes and carry-on luggage and check for liquids and explosives.

In the IATA prototype, passengers would be categorized based on the results of a government risk assessment that is put into a chip in a passenger's passport or other identification. An eye scan would then match the passenger to the passport."
GNU is Not Unix

Submission + - GPL'd Linux supported H.264 capture card (bluecherrydvr.com)

Submitted by azop
azop writes: Almost a year ago Slashdot covered the story of a MPEG-4 multiple input capture card with a GPL Video4Linux licensed driver (http://linux.slashdot.org/story/10/06/17/1929230/Bluecherry-Releases-GPLd-MPEG-4-Driver). Earlier this year Ben Collins added H.264 support into the solo6x10 Video4Linux2 GPL driver (https://github.com/bluecherrydvr/solo6x10/commit/7fac80bba138d2e0d01f76c6a7eb7174409ec5a7). The H.264 PCIe cards are finally released and shipping to customers (http://www.bluecherrydvr.com/2011/05/multi-input-h-264-linux-supported-encoder-cards/). The new cards support faster frame rates and sport a PCIe interface. The driver is available for forkin' on Github (https://github.com/bluecherrydvr/solo6x10).
Graphics

Submission + - What Makes a Photograph Memorable?

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Anne Trafton writes in MIT News that next time you go on vacation, you may want to think twice before shooting hundreds of photos of that scenic mountain or lake because researchers have developed a computer algorithm that can rank images based on memorability and found that in general, images with people in them are the most memorable, followed by images of human-scale space — such as the produce aisle of a grocery store — and close-ups of objects. Least memorable are natural landscapes. Researchers built a collection of about 10,000 images of all kinds for the study — interior-design photos, nature scenes, streetscapes and others and human subjects who participated through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk program were told to indicate, by pressing a key on their keyboard, when an image appeared that they had already seen. The researchers then used machine-learning techniques to create a computational model that analyzed the images and their memorability as rated by humans by analyzing various statistics — such as color, or the distribution of edges — and correlated them with the image’s memorability. “There has been a lot of work in trying to understand what makes an image interesting, or appealing, or what makes people like a particular image," says Alexei Efros at Carnegie Mellon University. “What [the MIT researchers] did was basically approach the problem from a very scientific point of view and say that one thing we can measure is memorability.” Researchers believe the algorithm may be useful to graphic designers, photo editors, or anyone trying to decide which of their vacation photos to post on Facebook (PDF)."
Science

Submission + - New sensor x-rays forests, creates 3D species maps (mongabay.com) 2

Submitted by Damien1972
Damien1972 writes: A new airplane-based remote-sensing and analysis system will enable scientists to catalog tree species as they create three-dimensional maps of tropical forests. The system uses the most advanced airborne imaging spectrometer ever developed to detect small changes in forest canopy structure from selective logging and distinguish between plant species.
Google

Submission + - Google Discontinues Support for IE7, Firefox 3.5 (conceivablytech.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: If you insist on using IE7, Firefox 3.5 or Safari 3, you won't be able to use Google Docs anymore as of August 1. Google said that it is dropping support for those browsers as they do not support HTML5 and "don't have the chops" to deliver a modern app experience.

Slashdot Top Deals

What is research but a blind date with knowledge? -- Will Harvey

Close