gebner - Slashdot User

Submission + - DOJ Doesn't Like the "Copyright Czar" Bill (yahoo.com)

Submitted by

sconeu

on Friday December 14, 2007 @03:05PM

sconeu writes: "Seems as if the DOJ is not particularly happy about HR 4729, the "Copyright Czar" bill.

The Deputy AG told Congress that the current structure works quite effectively. Of course, there's also the fact that there's some toe-stepping-on in this bill."

Submission + - 10 Years of Nmap (net-security.org)

Submitted by J0hn5 on Friday December 14, 2007 @02:58PM

J0hn5 writes: To celebrate the 10th anniversary of this powerful tool, Nmap 4.50 has been released. It is the first stable release in more than a year and the first major release since 4.00 two years ago. Also, here's a quick look at Zenmap, Nmap's official GUI that is a multi-platform free and open source application which aims to make Nmap easy for beginners to use while providing advanced features for experienced Nmap users. Frequently used scans can be saved as profiles to make them easy to run repeatedly.

Submission + - Amazon Launches SimpleDB Database Service (informationweek.com)

Submitted by

Dotnaught

on Friday December 14, 2007 @10:15AM

Dotnaught writes: "Amazon Web Services is getting a on-demand database called SimpleDB, upping the company's ante on its bet that it can sell on-demand computing. Adam Selipsky, VP of Product Management and Developer Relations describes it as a lightweight relational database that's ideal for storing metadata about objects or files such as those stored with Amazon's S3 service. Amazon's Alexa uses the service already. Sign-ups for the beta are being accepted on a first-come, first-serve basis."

30 Years of LucasFilm Staff Christmas Cards 72

Posted by CmdrTaco on Friday December 14, 2007 @10:07AM from the tis-the-season-to-blah-blah-blah dept.

An anonymous reader found that "For the last 30 years, Lucasfilm has created special holiday greeting cards for its employees and business partners. For the first time ever, we have compiled most of the Star Wars-themed Holiday Cards on one page." My favorite is 2005. That would make a cool poster or something.

Submission + - CompUSA Liquidation Has Started (tvtechguy.com)

Submitted by

Kirk Yuhnke

on Friday December 14, 2007 @10:06AM

Kirk Yuhnke writes: "CompUSA has started liquidating all of it's merchandise. I just stopped at a CompUSA store in Salt Lake City and everything in the store is between 5% to 20% off (iPods not included.) Sure, not an amazing deal (yet) but you can get a discount on those products that aren't typically on sale. Items like video games (no, they didn't have any Wiis.) Personally I didn't see anything that I "had to buy" but it's probably worth a trip for most gadget heads. Anyone find any killer deals at their local CompUSA?"

Submission + - That Which We Call Free (z505.com)

Submitted by

L505

on Friday December 14, 2007 @09:07AM

L505 writes: "GNU and FSF (Free Software Foundation) founder Richard Stallman posted a message on OpenBSD mailing lists. The subject was "real men don't attack straw men", and the email suggested that some of his comments were being misrepresented. He says, "one question particularly relevant for this list is why I don't recommend OpenBSD. It is not about what the system allows. (Any general purpose system allows doing anything at all.) It is about what the system suggests to the user." He also said that he knew of no non-free software included in the base OpenBSD system, but claimed there was non-free software in the ports collection, "if a collection of software contains (or suggests installation of) some non-free program, I do not recommend it." http://kerneltrap.org/OpenBSD/That_Which_We_Call_Free"

Submission + - Robots that bounce in bed (nytimes.com)

Submitted by

nem75

on Friday December 14, 2007 @08:41AM

nem75 writes: "The NY Times has a review of British AI researcher David Levy's book "Love and Sex with Robots". He claims that within a span of about 50 years the day will come, when people could actually fall in love with life-like robots and want to live with them instead of a human mate. While this may seem far fetched at first, he has some pretty interesting views on this. Like the sexual part being the easyest thing, what with brothels exclusively offering life-like sex dolls already existing in Japan and South Korea. The case he builds goes much further though, and certainly provides food for thought."

Submission + - Open source takes aim at high-cost math software (networkworld.com) 2

Submitted by

coondoggie

on Friday December 07, 2007 @11:20AM

coondoggie writes: "A new open source mathematics program is looking to push aside commercial software commonly used in mathematics education, in large government laboratories and in math-intensive research. The program's backers say the software, called Sage, can do anything from mapping a 12-dimensional object to calculating rainfall patterns under global warming. http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/22768"

Submission + - Half of observed global warming is spurious: study (nationalpost.com)

Submitted by

Sgs-Cruz

on Friday December 07, 2007 @11:17AM

Sgs-Cruz writes: "A study by Ross McKitrick and Patrick Michaels is in press in the December issue of the Journal of Geophysical Research. A non-technical summary can be found at McKitrick's web site at the University of Guelph.

The authors regress the observed temperature trends in rectangular "grid boxes" around the world against the spatial distribution of GDP, coal use, education level, and other economic variables and find a statistically significant correlation. (If the temperature measurements had been properly corrected for urban heating, etc., there should be no correlation.) They then use this relationship to estimate what the world temperature trend would be if the measurements were as good everywhere as they are in the United States and find that it reduces the post-1980 world trend from 0.30 to 0.17 degrees Celsius per decade.

With the world's leaders in Bali right now negotiating a post-Kyoto framework for reducing CO2 emissions, will this study make a splash, or will it have no impact on the existing consensus?"

Submission + - Iranian supercomputer from AMD parts (computerworld.com)

Submitted by jcatcw on Friday December 07, 2007 @11:13AM

jcatcw writes: Computerworld reports that a computing research center in Iran claims to have used Advanced Micro Devices Inc.'s Opteron processor to build the Middle Eastern country's most powerful supercomputer, despite federal antiterrorism trade sanctions that bar the sale of U.S.-made computer technology to the country. The Iranian High Performance Computing Research Center (IHPCRC), which is located at Tehran's Amirkabir University of Technology, says in an undated announcement on its Web site that it has assembled a Linux-based system with 216 Opteron processing cores. That's a relatively small supercomputer, with a claimed peak performance level of 860 billion floating-point operations per second, or gigaflops. But the research center said that the system, which will be used for weather forecasting and meteorological research, is the fastest built in Iran to date.

Submission + - XMonad 0.4 released

Submitted by Shachaf on Tuesday October 23, 2007 @11:47PM

Shachaf writes: XMonad, a tiling window manager written in under 1000 lines of Haskell, recently released version 0.4. New features include a rule system, user-specified workspace tags, and serialisable layouts, as well as many new extensions (the contrib library is several times the size of xmonad itself). See a guided tour or just get started; make sure to /join #xmonad on irc.freenode.net.

Submission + - A Comic Book Haskell Tutorial (lisperati.com)

Submitted by

smug_lisp_weenie

on Saturday September 29, 2007 @08:16AM

smug_lisp_weenie writes: "Here's a little Haskell Tutorial Comic I whipped up in honor of ICFP 2007- It teaches Haskell with some quick fun graphics and covers a lot of ground, but I think it's still an easy read... Enjoy!"

Submission + - ICFP Programming Contest about to start (icfpcontest.org)

Submitted by

mrchebas

on Wednesday July 18, 2007 @11:01AM

mrchebas writes: "The Tenth Annual ICFP Programming Contest is about to begin (countdown page)! As in the previous nine editions, you have 72 hours (starting July 20, 12:00 noon CEST) to show that your favorite programming language (or your team) is better than all others! The ICFP Programming Contest is organised as part of the International Conference on Functional Programming in the hopes of showing off functional programming, but contestants can use any language(s) they like. Previous winners have included Cilk, OCaml (3x), Haskell (3x), C++ and 2D. Previous problems have ranged from programming intelligent ants to cracking the secrets of an ancient civilization. This year's contest seems to have something to do with visitors from outer space."

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