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Submission + - BlackBerry Reportedly Prepping to Slash Workforce by 40 Percent (slashdot.org)

Nerval's Lobster writes: BlackBerry is preparing to slice up to 40 percent of its workforce by the end of 2013, according to anonymous sources speaking to The Wall Street Journal. The layoffs will reportedly shrink the company’s overall operations and affect every department. A BlackBerry spokesperson refused to comment on the matter to the Journal. BlackBerry bet the company on the success of its new BlackBerry 10 operating system, but its first two “hero” devices running the software—the Z10 and Q10—failed to make much of an impact when they arrived on the market earlier this year. On Sept. 18, BlackBerry also unveiled the larger Z30, which runs an updated version of BlackBerry 10 and features a five-inch AMOLED touchscreen and larger battery. Once a dominant player in the mobile-device space, BlackBerry seemed helpless to respond as Google Android and Apple iOS slowly but surely chewed away its market-share over several quarters. As corporations adopted BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) policies, a flood of personal iPhones and Android devices helped displace BlackBerry as a mainstay of executives and office workers.

Comment Re:Embarrasing (Score 5, Informative) 181

I've found that by going into about:config and changing browser.download.useToolkitUI to true will restore the original download manager. There is one bug I've noticed by using the old download manager is that the title of its window will clear out leaving it a titleless window after all downloads are completed. Closing and reopening the downloads window will cause the title to be restored. A warning though that this key might fail to work in the next release or so. Just like the status bar fiasco.

You'll also need to customize the toolbar in order to remove the new downloads icon though. Also the "new" download manager is still accessible via History menu &> Show All History after making the above configuration change.
Google

Google Pledges Not To Sue Any Open Source Projects Using Their Patents 153

sfcrazy writes "Google has announced the Open Patent Non-Assertion (OPN) Pledge. In the pledge Google says that they will not sue any user, distributor, or developer of Open Source software on specified patents, unless first attacked. Under this pledge, Google is starting off with 10 patents relating to MapReduce, a computing model for processing large data sets first developed at Google. Google says that over time they intend to expand the set of Google's patents covered by the pledge to other technologies." This is in addition to the Open Invention Network, and their general work toward reforming the patent system. The patents covered in the OPN will be free to use in Free/Open Source software for the life of the patent, even if Google should transfer ownership to another party. Read the text of the pledge. It appears that interaction with non-copyleft licenses (MIT/BSD/Apache) is a bit weird: if you create a non-free fork it appears you are no longer covered under the pledge.
Science

Interviews: James Randi Answers Your Questions 217

A while ago you had the chance to ask James Randi, the founder of The James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF), about exposing hucksters, frauds, and fakers. Below you'll find his answers to your questions. In addition to his writings below, Randi was nice enough to sit down and talk to us about his life and his foundation. Keep an eye out for those videos coming soon.
Open Source

The FreeBSD Foundation Is Soliciting Project Proposals 58

Professor_Quail writes "Following a successful 2012 fundraising campaign, the FreeBSD Foundation is soliciting the submission of project proposals for funded development grants. Proposals may be related to any of the major subsystems or infrastructure within the FreeBSD operating system, and will be evaluated based on desirability, technical merit, and cost-effectiveness. The proposal process is open to all developers (including non-FreeBSD committers), and the deadline for submitting a proposal is April 26th, 2013." The foundation is currently funding a few other projects, including UEFI booting support.
Patents

Uniloc Patent Case Against Rackspace Tossed for Bogus Patents 76

netbuzz writes "A federal judge in Texas, presiding over a district notorious for favoring patent trolls, has summarily dismissed all claims relating to a case brought by Uniloc USA against Rackspace for [Linux] allegedly infringing upon [Uniloc's] patents. Red Hat defended Rackspace in the matter and issued a press release saying: 'In dismissing the case, Chief Judge Leonard Davis found that Uniloc's claim was unpatentable under Supreme Court case law that prohibits the patenting of mathematical algorithms. This is the first reported instance in which the Eastern District of Texas has granted an early motion to dismiss finding a patent invalid because it claimed unpatentable subject matter.'" You can't patent floating point math after all.

Comment Re:Gift horse = Mouth (Score 2) 104

Well, the GPL gives you the right to modify anything as long as you license it under the GPL and include the license, and that would include the copyright notices.

The GPL gives nobody such rights to remove/move copyright notices. You only have the right to append your name and year to such a notice when you contribute changes to the work. Original copyright notices must be left alone as Kjella mentioned for United States in USC 17506(d), and it is required in the GPL as mentioned on the FAQ: I want to get credit for my work. I want people to know what I wrote. Can I still get credit if I use the GPL?.

Otherwise we'd have a problem with something like the BSD advertising clause.

The classic BSD license is incompatible with the GPL as only the so called revised or new BSD licenses that removed the advertising clause are compatible with the GPL as stated in the FAQ: Why is the original BSD license incompatible with the GPL?. So now would you please stop making assumptions and actually read the license you so carelessly claim it allows people to do things it clearly does not.

Comment SunTrust (Score 1) 667

Funny how I see all the rage about Bank of America charging $5/month to use debit cards, but what about raging against banks such as SunTrust who wants to charge both $5/month for debit card usage and $7/month on banking accounts that have less than a required minimum that were forcefully converted from Free Checking to Standard Checking for a total of a $12/month fee charges and that would be $144 taken each year out of the poor's checking accounts. SunTrust also decided to cancel the monthly debit card usage fee for now, but they're still going to charge us poor folks who can't manage to keep at least $500 in the account a $7 fee each month.

Yeah, that seems so fair to charge the poor to have a checking account...

Comment Re:Lua? (Score 1) 425

Python being the poorer choice because it is not designed to be an extension (scripting) language.

Well somebody needs to tell CCP of Eve-Online they're doing it wrong, same goes for Stackless Python project, and the authors who wrote the official Python documentation that they were wrong to document Embedding Python in Another Application. Because batrick on Slashdot said it wasn't designed for that...

Comment Re:This reminds me... (Score 2) 106

You're thinking of the Psychic Mode plugin that comes with Pidgin of which is also used by the Bot Sentry plugin to filter out spam messages. I remember the first time I got Bot Sentry working and noticed that it pretty much eliminated the spam problem coming from both ICQ and MSN networks, but the first time I saw "You feel a disturbance in the force" a week later kind of freaked me out as I didn't realize that was Psychic Mode's default behavior.

Comment Re:What about a Linux port? (Score 1) 84

do you remember a company that ported some Windows games into Linux in late '90? Many nerds bought that games (I was one of them) ...

Loki Games, indeed I do remember them, and they ported one of my favorite games of all time Tribes 2 to Linux. Back in 2003 when I was using Redhat 9 majority of the time instead of Windows 2000 I wanted to play that game natively in Linux (WINE wasn't that great back then for games) and couldn't find anybody who sold it, until Tux Games made an announcement they received a limited resupply from a warehouse that wanted to get rid of the existing stock of them.

I think I spent $74 USD total on the game and ~$16 of it was for shipping for a game that was going for just $20 at the local CompUSA (remember them?) that was only the Windows version in a jewel disc. Tribes 2 updater for Linux seemed to work much better than the Windows variant except for the very last update that was done by GarageGames, that required a reinstall and manually applying the final update directly for whatever reason. Ah, those were the good old days. Sadly the Linux port of Tribes 2 of course no longer works since the master servers were shutdown in Nov, 2008 and the game is hard coded to only work with the old WON master servers for authentication purposes, and TribesNext is currently Windows only.

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