Famanoran - Slashdot User

Submission + - Korean software firm sues Microsoft .. (theregister.co.uk)

Submitted by

rs232

on Thursday October 25, 2007 @06:33AM

rs232 writes: "'Microsoft has been slapped with a lawsuit filed by Korean instant messaging program developer Digito.com .. the US software mammoth has been accused of causing a loss in sales revenue estimated at W30bn (US$1=W918) because the firm's Windows operating system comes pre-loaded with a media player and instant messaging'"

Submission + - Terrorists use Google Earth to target missiles (guardian.co.uk)

Submitted by

arikb

on Thursday October 25, 2007 @05:24AM

arikb writes: "Seems like terrorists are using Google Earth to target their missiles more accurately at civilian targets. "We obtain the details from Google Earth and check them against our maps of the city centre and sensitive areas," Khaled Jaabari, the group's commander in Gaza who is known as Abu Walid, told the Guardian""

Submission + - South Africa adopts ODF as a government standard (tectonic.co.za)

Submitted by ais523 on Thursday October 25, 2007 @05:20AM

ais523 writes: As reported by Tectonic, South Africa's new Mininimum Interoperability Standards for Information Systems in government (MIOS) explain the new rules for which data formats will be used by the government; according to that document, all people working for the South African government must be able to read OpenDocument Format documents by March, and the government aims to use one of its three approved document formats (UTF-8 or ASCII plain text, CSV, or ODF) for all its published documents by the end of 2008. A definition of 'open standard' is also included that appears to rule out OOXML at present (requiring 'multiple implementations', among other things that may also rule it out).

Submission + - Drugs That can Crush the Defenses of Tuberculosis

Submitted by PennySillin on Thursday October 25, 2007 @04:55AM

PennySillin writes: One of the reasons that tuberculosis is hard to defeat because it produces an enzyme that can destroy many antibiotics. To solve that problem, some doctors have turned to drugs that gum up the protective molecule — leaving the deadly bacterium defenseless. Several of these medications are already on the market to treat other infections, but until now, it was not clear how they work or which ones are best. Using an instrument called a mass spectrometer, researchers showed that the FDA-approved medication clavulanate becomes permanently bonded to BlaC, an enzyme that chops up antibiotics from the penicillin family. Enzyme kinetics experiments, tests that measure how quickly a protein does work and how effectively chemicals can bring it to a halt, showed that two other drugs, sulbactam and tazobactam, only have temporary effects.

Submission + - Naked-eye comet surprise (badastronomy.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 25, 2007 @01:40AM

An anonymous reader writes: Bad Astronomy is reporting that Comet 17P/Holmes, 220 million miles from the Sun, which Monday was a dim magnitude 17 (observable only by a few giant telescopes in remote locations) has overnight become magnitude 3 — easily visible to the naked eye. This is 400,000 times as bright. It's likely due to a sudden breakup of the comet after one too many trips around the sun. Pictures here.

Submission + - Father of WebSphere Leaves IBM For Microsoft

Submitted by jg21 on Monday January 15, 2007 @08:51PM

jg21 writes: .NET Developer's Journal is reporting that the "Father of WebSphere," Don Ferguson, has left IBM to join Microsoft CTO Ray Ozzie's office. Ozzie, who efforts to rebuild Microsoft have been discussed previously on Slashdot, is gaining a man who while at Blue championed were Web services, patterns, Web 2.0 and business-driven development, a potent combo for the future that Microsoft is trying to bring into being.

Submission + - Sun commits to Xen

Submitted by VirtualizationDork on Monday January 15, 2007 @06:43PM

VirtualizationDork writes: Sun Microsystems said publicly that it will include the open source Xen hypervisor in the next release of Solaris 10.

Alex Barrett has the story on SearchServerVirtualization.com.

Submission + - FBI Can Legally Check your Credit Report

Submitted by

Anonymous Coward

on Monday January 15, 2007 @06:25PM

Anonymous Coward writes: "Looks like the FBI can now legally pull your credit report to keep tabs on you, from the article: "The Defense Department of the United States has been checking the credit of Americans and foreigners alike due to suspected terrorism and espionage. However, when bank records and credit activity is checked, judge's approvals are bypassed, and subpoenas are not presented. Three or four decades ago (1960's to 1970's) this authority was brought to surface and the Pentagon, CIA and FBI had full use of this procedure. Since then, it has not been used. The Patriot Act re-affirmed that this measure could once again be taken up and used at will. Dick Cheney says, "It's perfectly legitimate activity. There's nothing wrong or illegal with it. It doesn't violate people's civil rights." Cheney also states, "The Defense Department gets involved because we've got hundreds of bases inside the United States that are potential terrorist targets."

Yikes! Thanks alot Patriot Act."

Mandatory DRM for Podcasts Proposed 432

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday January 15, 2007 @05:51PM from the good-idea-bad-idea dept.

Knytefall writes "Joe Biden, Dianne Feinstein, and two GOP senators are sponsoring a bill called the PERFORM Act that would require podcasts with music and satellite radio to be locked-up with music industry-approved DRM software. From the article: 'All audio services — Webcasters included — would be obligated to implement "reasonably available and economically reasonable" copy-protection technology aimed at preventing "music theft" and restricting automatic recording.'"

Submission + - Anti-virus software as malware?

Submitted by

Dr Dave

on Monday January 15, 2007 @05:49PM

Dr Dave writes: "After a recent, Fortune 100 client of mine was experiencing 50%-90% of developer CPU cycles during builds spent on virus checking, I've become sensitive to how these checkers operate and consume resources. In the past few months I've asked for refunds on a few of these products — the most recent one that cannot execute out-of-the-box without an "update" before even doing an initial scan. Asking for support requires downloading an .exe "chat program" and, of course, the product wants to install lots of components to "monitor" your system health.

My question is "at what point does security 'solution' software become malware?" I've felt we passed this point long ago, so only even consider scanning my system when I've had to download some software. I realize the risks of an unprotected system — I've done and published security research for much of the federal government — but I'm planning to not upgrade to Vista unless the security services can be turned off.

I'd rather keep my CPU cycles and my piece of mind at the expense of allowing scripts, exe's and Active X controls to run on my PC."

Submission + - PCI SIG releases PCIe 2.0

Submitted by

symbolset

on Monday January 15, 2007 @05:46PM

symbolset writes: "According to The Register PCI SIG has released version 2.0 of the PCI Express base specification.
The new released doubles the signalling rate from 2.5Gbps to 5Gbps. The upshot: a x16 connector can transfer data at up to around 16GBps.
The PCI-SIG release is here. The electromechanical specification is also due to be released shortly:
The companion PCI Express Card Electromechanical 2.0 specification is currently at revision 0.9, having completed its 60-day member review. The PCI-SIG anticipates that this specification too will be released in the near future.
"

Submission + - Is America really that bad?

Submitted by Fyz on Monday January 15, 2007 @05:10PM

Fyz writes: Being an avid reader of Slashdot and other internet-based media while living in Europe, it is easy to get the impression that the US is not a very nice place. Everyday, a steady stream of insane lawsuits, insane convictions, insane laws, insane rules and insane pundits dominate the news I get from the media. I'm planning a longer stay in the US to do some postgraduate studies in physics, in part because my instincts tell me that it can't possibly be as bad as the impression the news gives me. Basically, I'm hoping to get a reality check. So my questions are these: Isn't the feeling "on the ground" very much different than portrayed in discussion on this site? And are the many stories of peoples rights being trampled on something you can relate to, or are they rare extremes?

Sun Releases Fortran Replacement as OSS 233

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday January 15, 2007 @05:09PM from the going-backward-while-moving-forward dept.

sproketboy writes "Sun Microsystems has released an alpha version of a new programming language called Fortress to eventually replace Fortran for high performance scientific computing tasks. Fortress was designed specifically for multi-core processors and is published under the BSD license."

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