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Bug

Some Windows Apps Make GRUB 2 Unbootable 429

Posted by timothy from the windows-is-to-boot-out-not-up dept.
KwahAG writes "Colin Watson, one of the Ubuntu developers, published in his blog information about Windows applications making GRUB 2 unbootable. Users of dual-boot Windows/Linux installations may face the problem, which boils down to particular Windows applications (Colin does not name them, but users point at least to HP ProtectTools, PC Angel, Adobe Flexnet) blindly overwriting hard disk content between the MBR and the first partition destroying information already stored there, in this particular case — the 'core image' of GRUB 2 (GRand Unified Bootloader) making the system unbootable."
Hardware Hacking

Submission + - Networked Christmas Tree Controlled by Twitter (dangerousprototypes.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: What's Twitter good for? How about crowd sourcing control of your Christmas tree. Dangerous Prototypes built an open source, networked Christmas tree that you can control from Twitter. Send a color or hexadecimal color code to @tweet_tree, then watch the color change on the live video stream. This project is based on an updated version of the open source business card size web server covered previously.

Submission + - US Patent Office Tightens Software Patents (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A decision from a key panel at the Patent Office builds on last year's Bilski decision to place new limits on software patents. Just running some algorithm on a PC and claiming that you've built a patentable "machine" may not work any more.

Submission + - How do I determine a fair salary? (glassdoor.com) 2

Submitted by lawpoop
lawpoop writes: After looking at a few salary sites, it seems that I'm very underpaid in my current position. I'm thinking about striking out on the job hunt, but I have a question. Can I trust information from salary.com, glassdoor, and the like? They might have an interest in me thinking I'm underpaid; I'm more likely to use their services ( which doesn't apply to glassdoor, but might be subject to similar gaming). Also, doesn't not having the exact skillset for the job posting affect the salary you ask for? A lot of what I'm seeing these days has specific tools and libraries. If I don't have that specific set, will I be able to justify the salary for a more general job description?

I couldn't submit this ask without a link. Link is not necessary; mods please remove!
Microsoft

Submission + - Cygwin 1.7 Released 1

Submitted by jensend
jensend writes: The 1.7 branch of Cygwin, the Unix-like environment for Windows, has reached stable status after about 3 1/2 years of effort. Among many other changes, this release drops support for Windows 9x. Since the NT API and NT-based versions of Windows are more capable and somewhat less of a mismatch with POSIX (for instance, they include a security model), this has allowed for code path simplifications, better performance (particularly noticeable with pipe I/O), better security, and better POSIX compatibility.

Comment Re:ext is on MSWindows but not widely known (Score 3, Insightful) 181

by Sterling Christensen (#30399412) Attached to: Microsoft Expands exFAT Multimedia Licensing

That driver has a serious user-unfriendly limitation: No support for inodes larger than 128 bytes.

This means Linux users can't use GUI tools to format a USB stick (or a harddisk partition for sharing files with Windows) - they must use the command line and figure out how to persuade mkfs.ext2 not to default to 256 byte inodes. And this probably after learning of this limitation the hard way. Easy enough for you and me, but definitely not user friendly.

Also, this still leaves Windows users unable to format as ext2. A crashy driver is not enough.

That brings me to the third problem: I have yet to see a stable IFS (Installable FileSystem) driver for Windows. In my experience, perfectly stable Windows installations start crashing when an IFS driver is installed and in use. I suspect this part of Windows needs more debugging, or the API needs to be better documented, or both.

exFAT may be a patent encumbered extension to a lame filesystem, but the ext2 drivers for Windows are a lousy counter proposal.
Intel

Submission + - SPAM: Intel promotes app store model for netbooks

Submitted by
alphadogg
alphadogg writes: "Intel on Tuesday took a step in bringing application stores to netbooks, announcing a program that will help developers build applications for mobile devices. The chip maker's Atom Developer Program will help developers optimize and port existing programs for use on mobile devices based on the Atom processor, said Intel CEO Paul Otellini in a keynote speech at the Intel Developer Conference in San Francisco. The program will also provide tools and software development kits to write applications that could be sold through app stores, he said. The developer program will initially offer tools to write programs for netbooks based on the Atom chip. Later on, the company will extend the program for application development around mobile devices with smaller screens, like smartphones and mobile Internet devices."
Link to Original Source
Government

We Were Smarter About Copyright Law 100 Years Ago 152

Posted by kdawson from the intelligent-debate dept.
An anonymous reader writes "James Boyle has a blog post comparing the recording industry's arguments in 1909 to those of 2009, with some lovely Google book links to the originals. Favorite quote: 'Many and numerous classes of public benefactors continue ceaselessly to pour forth their flood of useful ideas, adding to the common stock of knowledge. No one regards it as immoral or unethical to use these ideas and their authors do not suffer themselves to be paraded by sordid interests before legislative committees uttering bombastic speeches about their rights and representing themselves as the objects of "theft" and "piracy."' Industry flaks were more impressive 100 years ago. In that debate the recording industry was the upstart, battling the entrenched power of the publishers of musical scores. Also check out the cameo appearance by John Philip Sousa, comparing sound recordings to slavery. Ironically, among the subjects mentioned as clearly not the subject of property rights were business methods and seed varieties." Boyle concludes: "...one looks back at these transcripts and compares them to today's hearings — with vacuous rantings from celebrities and the bloviation of bad economics and worse legal theory from one industry representative after another — it is hard not to feel a sense of nostalgia. In 1900, it appears, we were better at understanding that copyright was a law that regulated technology, a law with constitutional restraints, that property rights were not absolute and that the public would not automatically be served by extending rights out to infinity."

Comment Re:Weird (Score 4, Informative) 338

by Sterling Christensen (#28549791) Attached to: Firefox 3.5 Benchmarked, Close To Original Chrome
Firefox now shows the tab bar even when you only have 1 page open. What you're probably used to is the tab bar being hidden when only 1 page is open.

If you follow SecondaryOak's suggestion, you can close the tab and the whole Firefox window will disappear - because it's going from displaying 1 page to displaying 0 pages.

But I'm guessing that's NOT what you want - you don't really want to "close" the tab, you just want to hide it like you're used to.

So go to about:config and double click browser.tabs.autoHide to change it.
Data Storage

Windows 7 Hard Drive and SSD Performance Analyzed 248

Posted by timothy from the but-compared-to-the-old-one dept.
bigwophh writes "Despite the fact that Windows 7 is based on many of the same core elements as Vista, Microsoft claims it is a different sort of animal and that it should be looked at in a fresh, new light, especially in terms of performance. With that in mind, this article looks at how various types of disks perform under Windows 7, both the traditional platter-based variety and newer solid state disks. Disk performance between Vista and Win7 is compared using a hard drive and an SSD. SSD performance with and without TRIM enabled is tested. Application performance is also tested on a variety of drives. Looking at the performance data, it seems MS has succeeded in improving Windows 7 disk performance, particularly with regard to solid state drives."

Comment Re:Options (Score 1) 222

by Sterling Christensen (#25737115) Attached to: Mars Rover "Spirit" In Danger

4. Spend the remaining energy teaching the rover to do the Hammer Dance with it's eight independently swiveling wheels. If you got to go down, go down doing the Hammer Dance that's what I always say which is maybe why nobody sits with me in the cafeteria.

Or we could teach it Daisy Bell

Or give it a frisbee and have it dance to Put On Your Sunday Clothes.
Transportation

"Roadable Aircraft" Moving Towards Launch 186

Posted by kdawson from the move-over-bob-cummings dept.
We discussed Terrafugia's plans for what they don't like to call a "flying car" — rather a "roadable aircraft" — last spring. The Boston Globe has an update on Massachusetts-based Terrafugia and its fight to get airborne in these parlous times. "The last serious attempt to bring a car-airplane hybrid to market was the Aerocar, in 1949. According to Carl Dietrich, chief executive of Terrafugia, that company built six prototypes. It needed 500 orders in order to gear up for mass production, but it never got there... 'It can be hard to explain the value of this to non-pilots,' Dietrich says, 'but when you're a pilot, the problems of high costs, limited mobility on the ground, and weather sensitivity are in your face, all the time.' The company says more than 50 of the vehicles have been pre-ordered. The target price is $198,000."
Software

Submission + - Slutbot passes turning test. (roughtype.com)

Submitted by
dotancohen
dotancohen writes: "
Russian crooks have unleashed an artificial intelligence, called CyberLover, that poses as a would-be paramour in sex chat rooms, enticing randy gentlemen to reveal personal information that can then be put to criminal use. Amazingly, the slutbot appears to be successful in convincing targets that it's a real person.
Even CmdrTaco hasn't yet convinced me that [it||he] is a real person. I can't wait to get scammed by this thing."

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