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Submission + - Qualcomm retracts GitHub takedowns (phoronix.com)

Submitted by ndogg
ndogg writes: Qualcomm has reversed course on its DMCA takedown of 100+ GitHub repositories. Many of the repositories are back online, although the original takedown notice can still be found on GitHub's website.

Submission + - DistroWatch.com domain name suspended due to issue with domain registrar (zdnet.com)

Submitted by rriegs
rriegs writes: The popular DistroWatch Linux and BSD distribution tracking site has had its .com domain name suspended as a result of unspecified issues with its domain registrar, Doteasy. Founder Ladislav Bodnar reports:

As many of you noticed, the distrowatch.com domain name was suspended by the domain's registrar, Doteasy, last Sunday. I don't want to go into details about what exactly happened as it's a long and boring story. Suffice to say that I feel grossly aggrieved by the series of greedy and even malicious actions taken by Doteasy and as soon as I get this sorted out, I will be looking into transferring the distrowatch.com domain name to another registrar.

DistroWatch continues operations at its alternate domain name, distrowatch.org. Can anyone recommend a suitable, Linux- and BSD-friendly domain registrar to help get DistroWatch back online under its chosen URL?

Submission + - How Can the ACM Better Serve Professional Programmers?

Submitted by ChelleChelle2
ChelleChelle2 writes: The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) was founded in 1947. Today, it is considered one of the most prestigious scientific and educational computing societies in the world. For decades ACM membership was considered to be a mark of a professional; however, this is no longer the case. Many programmers today consider the ACM a purely academic institution of little use or relevance for professionals. In this article, Vinton Cerf—one of the “fathers of the internet” and a past president of the ACM—asks how can ACM “adapt its activities and offerings to increase the participation of professionals?” Is there anything the ACM can do to better serve professional programmers? Join in the conversation

Comment Battery not removeable? No HTC One M8 for me. (Score 1, Interesting) 702

A few days ago I was thinking of buying an HTC One M8 because the camera takes very clear close-ups. When I discovered that the battery cannot be removed, I decided I probably won't ever buy anything from HTC.

If a company engages in sneaky, tricky behavior, I try to avoid buy its products. The sneakiness and trickery I know about may be only part of the attempts to trick the customers.

Submission + - Airbus Patents Windowless Cockpit That Would Increase Pilots' Field of View (gizmag.com)

Submitted by Zothecula
Zothecula writes: Imagine showing up at the airport to catch your flight, looking at your plane, and noticing that instead of windows, the cockpit is now a smooth cone of aluminum. It may seem like the worst case of quality control in history, but Airbus argues that this could be the airliner of the future. In a new US patent application, the EU aircraft consortium outlines a new cockpit design that replaces the traditional cockpit with one that uses 3D view screens instead of conventional windows.

Submission + - Google shutting down Orkut (google.com)

Submitted by quarterbuck
quarterbuck writes: Google is shutting down its 10 year old social network Orkut . It was more popular outside the US than in US and was at a point the most popular website in India and Brazil. By 2012 Facebook had overtaken Orkut pretty much everywhere.
Google is allowing the users to take their data out, but the discussions are being shut down.

Submission + - Scribd, Oyster, and - Blloon?

Submitted by Nate the greatest
Nate the greatest writes: Tech startups like to keep secrets but some take the idea a little too far. Earlier this week a new ebook startup called Blloon revealed that they would be launching a Netflix-style ebook service later this summer. With a catalog of a million titles, Blloon is going to offer readers in the US and UK read on Android and iOS apps. But who, exactly, is behind Blloon? Reports from Germany said that it was txtr, a Berlin-based ebook company. Txtr denied the connection, but after being asked why txtr owned the German trademark for the term Blloon and the Blloon.de domain, txtr said that Blloon "emanates from txtr employees but Blloon is a separate company." I have heard of secretive companies, and I have heard of startup founders running several companies at once, but this is the first I have encountered a company which didn't want you to know that its founders were launching a new startup.Why do you suppose they were hiding the connection?

Submission + - beta still sucks, still getting pushed (slashdot.org) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Guys.

Beta has become toxic. It is not better than what you had, the fads aren't that interesting, the changes are if anything shinily counterproductive, you've pushed it so incessantly that you've made it hated, and it's reflecting back to you. You're *still* doggedly flogging this dead horse. Whadayawant, keep on it until your readership will lap it up while mumbling "braaaains"?

There are things you could be doing to improve slashdot, like making it less dependent on javascript to function, like making it function well also when javascript is unavailable and without requiring logging in for punishment, and things like that. Oh, and people with basic grasp of English for editors would be nice too. But beta, beta is not those things.

Let. It. Go.

Submission + - Democracy crusaders scrambling to cross crowd funding finish line 1

Submitted by SingleEntendre
SingleEntendre writes: Time is running out for the Mayday PAC to reach its latest crowd funding goal of $5M. The total currently stands at $4.5M. Led by Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Lessig, the Mayday PAC seeks to reduce the influence of money in US politics by 2016, primarily by identifying and supporting congressional candidates who share this vision. If phase 2 is successful, with matching funds the total raised will be $12M. A self-imposed deadline arrives at of midnight tonight, July 4th, Hawaii-Aleutian Standard Time (HAST).

Submission + - Famo.us: do we really need another JavaScript framework? (inspire.nl)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Front-end developer Jaroen Janssen has a post about Famo.us, "a custom built JavaScript 3D rendering and physics engine meant as a replacement for the standard layout engine of the browser." The engine effectively replaces a big chunk of HTML5 in order to render more efficiently by using technology based on WebGL. Janssen questions whether the world really needs another JavaScript framework: "Is it a bad thing that Famo.us replaces major parts of HTML5? To be honest, I’m not sure. As a Front-end developer I have to admit it makes me slightly uneasy to have to use a custom API instead of ‘standard’ HTML5. On the other hand, like almost everyone that makes web apps for a living, I have been terribly frustrated by some of HTML5 limitations, like slowness and browser incompatibilities. Either way, it might be a good thing to try a fundamentally different approach so I’m keeping an open mind for now. Famo.us chases another holy grail, namely the ‘write once, run anywhere’ dream. Instead of having to write different code for different platforms, like iOS and Android, developers can write one application that works and looks as good on all platforms, in theory anyway. This of course saves a huge amount of time and resources. Unfortunately, this idea is not without its problems and has never really worked very well with earlier attempts like Java-applets, Flash and Silverlight. In the end native applications have so far always been faster and slicker and I’m pretty sceptical Famo.us will be able to change this."

Submission + - Damian Conway On Perl 6 And The Philosophy Of Programming

Submitted by M-Saunders
M-Saunders writes: Perl 6 has been in development since 2000. So why, 14 years later, hasn't it been released yet? Linux Voice caught up with Damian Conway, one of the architects of Perl 6, to find out what's happening. "Perl 6 has all of the same features [as Perl 5] but with the rough edges knocked off of them", he says. Conway also talks about the UK's Year of Code project, and how to get more people interested in programming.

Submission + - Paul Graham: Hackers Embody American-Ness (paulgraham.com)

Submitted by destinyland
destinyland writes: Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham once argued that hackers embody "American-ness" more closely than any group, writing that "unruliness" is the essence of both hacking and the American character. Opposing a 2004 crackdown on civil liberties and copyright, he pointed out that in the end " Civil liberties make countries rich," and that hackers "see increasingly aggressive measures to protect 'intellectual property' as a threat to the intellectual freedom they need to do their job." In the online essay (later published in the O'Reilly book Hackers and Painters) Graham remembered how even Richard Feynman was breaking into safes with classified documents while working on the Manhattan Project. And he adds, "When you read what the founding fathers had to say for themselves, they sound more like hackers."

Submission + - People would rather be electrically shocked than left alone with their thoughts (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: How much do we hate being alone with our own thoughts? Enough to give ourselves an electric shock. In a new study, researchers recruited hundreds of people and made them sit in an empty room and just think for about 15 minutes. About half of the volunteers hated the experience. In a separate experiment, 67% of men and 25% of women chose to push a button and shock themselves rather than just sit there quietly and think. One of the study authors suggests that the results may be due to boredom and the trouble that we have controlling our thoughts. “I think [our] mind is built to engage in the world,” he says. “So when we don’t give it anything to focus on, it’s kind of hard to know what to do.”

Submission + - Tibetans inherited high-altitude gene from ancient human (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: A “superathlete” gene that helps Sherpas and other Tibetans breathe easy at high altitudes was inherited from an ancient species of human. That’s the conclusion of a new study, which finds that the gene variant came from people known as Denisovans, who went extinct soon after they mated with the ancestors of Europeans and Asians about 40,000 years ago. This is the first time a version of a gene acquired from interbreeding with another type of human has been shown to help modern humans adapt to their environment.

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