dysprosia - Slashdot User

Submission + - Kevin Rudd wins Australian Election (abc.net.au)

Submitted by

gunny01

on Saturday November 24, 2007 @06:06PM

gunny01 writes: "Kevin Rudd, the head of the Australian Labor Party, has defeated the Liberal Party incumbent John Howard in Saturday's federal election, with a 5.8% swing. This ends Howard's eleven year term in office, and it also appears at this stage that he has lost his seat. If this turns out to be correct, Peter Costello will be the Opposition leader in the new government.

Rudd, among other things, has promised to scrap the current governments unpopular industrial relations reforms and give Australians access to access to 100Mbs broadband and free laptops to every senior school student."

Submission + - Sky's botched Google migration (blogspot.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 24, 2007 @04:00PM

An anonymous reader writes: Rupert Murdoch-owned British ISP Sky is migrating their customers to the Google Apps platform, and the customer experience is terrible. Their 1m customers were told that they need to change their client settings to enable SMTP Authentication and other settings on a certain date — but not to do it before then or their e-mail would break; but if you don't do it on the date your e-mail will also break. Oh, and if you're a POP user you also need to enable that manually in the 'Skoogle' interface, as seemingly they chose not to run a system-wide command to allow it for all users. In addition, if you want help then you're pretty much on your own. One user has made 7 support calls and still not been able to access his e-mail since the migration. Hardly surprising that the story has made the papers with their helpdesk in meltdown. It does make you wonder why they simply didn't put proxy servers in place to proxy the new service by modifying the old settings in the network and give their customers time to switch over without their e-mail breaking in the meantime. Or even a simple ActiveX tool to help out the less technical users. Apparently the move is all about a greater customer experience for their users. An interesting way of showing it.

Submission + - Open-Source Warfare (ieee.org)

Submitted by

spencerh

on Friday November 23, 2007 @08:43PM

spencerh writes: "'As events are making painfully clear, Robb says, warfare is being transformed from a closed, state-sponsored affair to one where the means and the know-how to do battle are readily found on the Internet and at your local RadioShack. This open global access to increasingly powerful technological tools, he says, is in effect allowing "small groups to...declare war on nations."'. Open-Source Warfare."

Submission + - Researchers blast Vista Service Pack 1

Submitted by Stony Stevenson on Thursday November 22, 2007 @04:47PM

Stony Stevenson writes: A group of researchers has described Microsoft's upcoming Windows Vista Service Pack 1 as a "performance dud". Researchers from the EXO Performance Network claimed that a series of in-house benchmark tests showed that users hoping to receive a speed boost from the update will be disappointed. "After extensive testing of Release To Manufacture and SP1-patched versions of Vista it seems clear that the hoped-for performance fixes that Microsoft has been hinting at have not materialised," the group said.

Submission + - Patent for delivering a baby via giant centrifuge

Submitted by Malorkus on Monday January 29, 2007 @03:58AM

Malorkus writes: The patent Apparatus for Facilitating the Birth of a Child by Centrifugal Force found by Thingamababy describes

A machine that rotates muscularly under-equipped women at high speed until centrifugal forces eject their babies for them...When the infant is successfully ejected from the mother, a pocket-shaped reception net catches the infant.
Diagrams of the device are included. This is prior art showing that ridiculous patents existed at least as early as 1965.

Submission + - Microsoft retracts Patent

Submitted by

Anonymous Coward

on Sunday January 28, 2007 @10:26PM

Anonymous Coward writes: "Here is something you don't see very often, if ever, and it was done by Microsoft, nonetheless: they have retracted a patent application. The story was first brought to light by Slashdot on Saturday. Today, Jane Prey of Microsoft announced on the SIGCSE (Special Interest in Computer Science Education) mailing list: "Many thanks to the members of the community that brought this to my attention — and here's the latest. The patent application was a mistake and one that should not have happened. To fix this, Microsoft will be removing the patent application. Our sincere apologies to Michael Kölling and the BlueJ community. Jane Prey.""

Submission + - NIDA "vandalizes" their wikipedia entry

Submitted by

on Friday January 26, 2007 @07:40PM

An anonymous reader writes: Not really censorship, but more like spreading of propaganda, Politico reports That the Drug War Warriors at NIDA (National Institute on Drug Abuse) tried to alter their wikipedia entry, trying to remove anti drugwar sentiment and outside links. Wikipedia categorized the changes as vandalism and reverted the entry to original. NIDA tried again, this time more gradually....

Submission + - Art Imitates Math

Submitted by

drDugan

on Sunday January 21, 2007 @04:03AM

drDugan writes: "http://bp0.blogger.com/_151Bi4ZK2YE/Ra82EnddyOI/AA AAAAAABIw/GBsAr6TLhio/s400/TuppersFormula.gif

http://mathworld.wolfram.com/TuppersSelf-Referenti alFormula.html

A mathematical formula that maps the cartesian plane to boolean, and creates a picture of the formula.

Math->Art->Math. Wow."

Submission + - WikiSeek Search Engine is Live

Submitted by

* * Beatles-Beatles

on Tuesday January 16, 2007 @07:20AM

* * Beatles-Beatles writes: "The contents of Wikiseek are restricted to Wikipedia pages and only those sites which are referenced within Wikipedia, making it an authoritative source of information less subject to spam and SEO schemes.

Wikiseek utilizes Searchme's category refinement technology, providing suggested search refinements based on user tagging and categorization within Wikipedia, making results more relevant than conventional search engines.
http://www.wikiseek.com/

."

Submission + - Sealand bought by a Kazakh writer?

Submitted by

rm

on Tuesday January 16, 2007 @05:03AM

rm writes: "According to Russian-language news site CentrAsia (translation), a Kazakh writer Daniyar Ashimbaev, with support from unnamed Kazakh company, on 10-th January, had purchased Principality of Sealand. He plans to move to live there, despite that only 3 of 16 living rooms of Sealand's only platform are left intact after recent fire. Daniyar says his sponsors helped him to buy Sealand as an advertisement venture, and soon their trademark signs will be placed on billboards on top of Sealand's platform. The writer also said that he hopes to make Sealand a forepost of Kazakh culture on the west, and make Kazakh and Russian the official state languages of Sealand."

Submission + - Where does Google's Hardware go to die ?

Submitted by

Anonymous Coward

on Tuesday January 16, 2007 @02:36AM

Anonymous Coward writes: "I was talking with a co-worker today about how Google is so big, and how they make such great use of commodity hardware to do their business, and one of the topics that came up is where does Google's old hardware go ? Google has been around for many years now, and they have more machines than any sane person would own, and they are continually expanding. At some stage they must have to push out old equipment, either when it starts entering into its MTBF limits or it's been depreciated down. Searching (using Google of course) wasn't particularly fruitful. Has anyone seen where Google's hardware goes when it dies ?"

Submission + - Fluendo selling legal proprietary codecs for Linux

Submitted by

amitti

on Tuesday January 16, 2007 @12:19AM

amitti writes: "Ars Technica reports that Fluendo is now selling legal media codecs for Linux for Windows Media, MPEG2, MPEG4, VC-1, MP3, and others. "Fluendo's codecs could potentially provide better integration for streaming Windows Media playback in Linux web browsers as well as through GStreamer-based desktop applications like Totem." I'm not certain that this will catch on, but this may be a great help to those folks for don't run i386. Most of their codecs are available for both i386, x86_64, PPC and Sparc."

Submission + - Pirate Bay and Sealand negotiating

Submitted by

Kawahee

on Monday January 15, 2007 @07:09AM

Kawahee writes: "Coming off previous /. coverage of The Pirate Bay's intentions to purchase Sealand following it being put up for sale, The Pirate Bay has revealed on it's website www.buysealand.com that it has entered into negotiations with Sealand. From the post:

The Government of Sealand has initiated negotiation. Tomorrow, the ACFI and Government of Sealand will sit down in the SMTP chambers of the Internets to discuss the future of the micronation.
— We welcome the request and hopefully we can settle on a price. But knowing how hard non-kopimistic people can be to negotiate with, we will go with Plan B if they're not willing to meet our demands, press officer of ACFI says.
BuySealand.com is also now sporting a donation meter, and as of the 15th of January it stands at USD $13,714."

Submission + - Apple Bullies Bloggers (again)

Submitted by Macthorpe on Monday January 15, 2007 @05:32AM

Macthorpe writes: Everyone, of course, having heard of Apple's lawsuit against Think Secret and numerous other minor actions against other blogs, TechCrunch have reported that Apple has been bullying bloggers yet again in the wake of their iPhone announcement. Apparently, some enterprising individuals have seen fit to create a Windows Mobile skin that directly imitates the iPhone layout, but in addition to pursuing the creators of the skin, Apple have been leaning on the bloggers to stop reporting on it.

Submission + - Review a T2000 and get it for free?

Submitted by

xxRamielxx

on Sunday January 14, 2007 @11:19PM

xxRamielxx writes: "A while back, Sun was holding an event where you would sign up for the Try and Buy program. Then you would write a descriptive blog entry that their marketing department felt was good enough you would get to keep the system free of charge. I was wondering if they were still holding this program. Any information would be nice, thanks!"

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