Slashdot is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Microsoft

Submission + - Users, Web Developers Vent Over IE7's First Year (pcworld.com)

Submitted by outlando
outlando writes: After a year of IE7, Tony Chor at M$ has written a glowingly self-congratulatory entry in the IE blog. The comments, from various developers, designers and other industry professionals, tell a rather different story to the one outlined in the blog entry itself.
PC World's story is here: http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,140299/article.html

Unfortunately, PC World neglected to provide a link to the blog entry itself. You can find it at http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2007/11/30/the-first-year-of-ie7.aspx
Government

Submission + - Help me fight the swiss dmca. (no-dmca.ch)

Submitted by
pyalot
pyalot writes: "The swiss goverment has passed a law that would make it impossible to cirvumvent effective copy protection measures. I have created a page to inform and organize a resistance against this law. If we collect 50'000 signatures until the 24th of January however, we can force a national vote on this law. Help me in any way that you can fight this law. I was first made aware of this two days ago by this article on slashdot."
GNU is Not Unix

Submission + - GNU Affero GPL released

Submitted by
Brett Smith
Brett Smith writes: "The FSF just announced the final version of the GNU Affero GPL version 3. This is a new license, based on version 3 of the GNU General Public License with an additional term to allow users who interact with the licensed software over a network to receive the source for that program. This should help developers who are concerned about modifications being locked up in web services and other software run on servers."
Software

Submission + - CNet promotes major open source alternative apps (cnet.co.uk)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: CNet is running a massive article promoting open source applications as alternatives to major commercial products, in an aim to educate the average Joe on the advantages of open source. While uber-l337 open source aficionados will already using many of these, it's an admirable pitch to put the word out that open source is ready for mainstream adoption.
Bug

Submission + - Linus blasts GCC developers (lkml.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Linus blasted GCC developers on LKML today stating that "The gcc developers seem to have had a total disregard for what people want or need, and every time some code generation issue comes up, there's a lot of people on the list that do language-lawyering, rather than admit that there might be a problem." He also noted OpenBSD's efforts but regarded them as impractical, stating that "I think the OpenBSD people decided to actually do something about this, and I suspect it had *nothing* to do with license issues, and everything to do with these kinds of problems. I wish them all the luck, although personally I think LLVM is a much more interesting project." Read more on the LKML GCC flamewar here : http://lkml.org/lkml/2007/10/25/186
Software

Submission + - A new fun way of looking at server logfiles (fudgie.org) 1

Submitted by
Fudgie
Fudgie writes: "My boss claimed it was pretty much impossible to create an entertaining way to visualize server traffic and events in a short time frame, so of course I had to prove him wrong.

A weekend of neglecting my family produced a small ruby program which connects to your servers via SSH, grabs and parses data from Apaches access log and Ruby on Rails production log, and displays your traffic and statistics in real-time using a simple OpenGL interface (tested under Linux and Mac OS/X).

It's a bit hard to explain over text, so please have a look at http://www.fudgie.org/ for an example movie, and more information."
Programming

Submission + - Subversion 1.5 will have merge tracking (collab.net)

Submitted by
odiug
odiug writes: "Subversion, the hugely popular version control tool, will add Merge Tracking in 1.5, many developers have been waiting for this. In a post on Submerged (CollabNet's blog about Subversion) Guido Haarmans writes about the benefits of Merge Tracking and describes the new feature. Merge Tracking will support the following use cases:
  • Repeated merge: merge a branch into another branch this week, do it again next week. Subversion will remember what was already merged and only merge the new changes.
  • Automated merge with conflict resolution. Subversion can do most of your merges automatically, but merging inevitably involves conflicts that Subversion’s internal merge algorithm cannot resolve. If so, Subversion will ask the user to resolve the conflict manually.
  • Cherry picking: merge only one or a few changes on a branch, rather than all changes.
  • Record manual merge: sometimes users will merge something manually (copying code from one file to another by using an editor). Subversion 1.5 has functionality to explicitly add information about manual merges to the history database so its Merge Tracking information stays complete.
  • Rollback Merge: undo a merge. Merges are often not perfect and you may find out afterwards that something is broken. Subversion lets you undo the merge.
  • Merge auditing: merge data is automatically added to the commit log
"
The Internet

Submission + - Why we don't have a WWW for science (ft.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: James Boyle has an article in the Financial Times
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/39166e30-5a7f-11dc-9bcd- 0000779fd2ac.html
on recent legislative proposals to require open access to the articles that come out of NIH funded research.
"The World Wide web Was designed in a scientific laboratory to facilitate access to scientific knowledge. In every other area of life — commerce, social networking,pornography — it has been a smashing success. But in the world of science itself? With the virtues of an open web all around us, we have proceeded to build an endless set of walled gardens, something that looks a lot like Compuserv or Minitel and very little like a world wide web for science."

The links to the $21,000 journal subscription on Amazon and the $150 per page per student photocopying fee for a nanoscience journal are worth clicking on.
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft Fails to Gain Approval for OOXML (consortiuminfo.org)

Submitted by
Andy Updegrove
Andy Updegrove writes: "Microsoft's bid to gain approval for its OOXML specification in the first round of global voting has failed. I now have official confirmation of that fact, and expect to have final numbers soon. In the meantime, Microsoft has just issued a press release, putting the best spin it can on the results. That release is titled "Strong Global Support for Open XML as It Enters Final Phase of ISO Standards Process."The release focuses on the degree of participation (51 National Bodies), and level of "support" (74% of all qualified votes, without differentiating between P and O countries).It also refers to this level of support at "this preliminary stage of the process," and compares it "favorably" to the number of countries participating in the votes to consider ODF and PDF, but without mentioning percentage levels of support, which would include Observer as well as Participating member votes.The drama will now switch to the long run up to the February 25 — 29 Ballot Resolution Meeting, and to how much Microsoft will be willing to change in OOXML in order to convert a sufficient number of no votes to yeses, in order to finally gain approval, if it can, for its beleaguered specification."
Microsoft

Submission + - OOXML - MS press release on cnn.com (cnn.com)

Submitted by uss_valiant
uss_valiant writes: CNN reports "Today the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) released the results of the preliminary ballot to participating National Body members for the ISO/IEC DIS 29500 (Ecma 376 Office Open XML file formats) ratification process. The results show that 51 ISO members, representing 74 percent of all qualified votes, stated their support for ratification of Open XML."

Why does CNN Money read like a press release from Microsoft? Maybe because it is a press release by Microsoft.

The good news is that neither of the criteria have been met to ratify the standardization, no 2/3 P-votes majority and no 75% yes votes. But MS does its best to spin the news in their favor of course. The battle will continue and the final vote is scheduled for March 2008.
Microsoft

Submission + - ISO says "No" to Microsoft's OOXML standar (noooxml.org)

Submitted by qcomp
qcomp writes: The votes are in and Microsoft has lost for now, reports the FFII's campaign website OOXML. The 2/3 majority needed to proceed with the fast-track standarization has not been achieved. Now the standard will head to the ballot resolution meeting to address the hundreds of technical commentsa submitted along with the "no" (as well as some "yes" votes.
Privacy

Submission + - Sourceforge elbows in new privacy policy (sourceforge.net)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In an email a received from Sourceforge some hours ago, they announce their brand new privacy policy. Compared to their current privacy policy, this new document really lays out what they can do with your personal information. Here's an excerpt from the cookies section:

The ads appearing on SourceForge.net are delivered to visitors by DoubleClick, Inc. ("DoubleClick"), SourceForge's current third party web advertising partner. The third party advertising technology that SourceForge uses on SourceForge.net uses information derived from a user's visits to SourceForge.net to target advertising within this site. In addition, SourceForge's advertisers may use other third party advertising technology to target advertising on this site. In the course of serving advertisements to SourceForge.net, DoubleClick may place or recognize a unique cookie on a user's browser. Information about users' visits to SourceForge.net, such as the number of times users have viewed an ad (but not users' names, addresses, or other personally-identifiable information), are used to serve ads to visitors. As with other cookies, and consistent with SourceForge's policy on cookies stated above, the user may block or delete such cookies from the user's drive or memory. For more information about DoubleClick, DoubleClick's use of cookies, and how to "opt-out" of DoubleClick's email/information lists, please click here: http://www.doubleclick.net/us/corporate/privacy. SourceForge has no access or control over third party cookies.

That last part about their having no control over 3rd party cookies (emphasis mine), is not quite accurate: they don't have to choose to advertise with DoubleClick.

This from a do-gooder, community based web site! I thought as I read that passage. Now I realize this sort of thing (ad servers like DoubleClick snooping as you browse the web) is going on at a lot of sites, but shouldn't I expect better from Sourceforge? Or should we commend Sourceforge for coming clean with a clearer explanation of what their existing operating privacy policy is?
Microsoft

Submission + - Forget Sweden, another Scandal in Poland

Submitted by quest
quest writes: Due to ambiguities and procedural reservations that materialized recently during the works of KT-182 committee, companies Google, IBM plus the polish Foundation Of Free and Open Software" and part of members of KT-171 committee submitted a letter to the chairman of Polish Normalizing Committee (PKN) asking him to make PKN take neutral position in the voting over OOXML standarization in JTC.

On 9th August mr. Tomasz Schweitzer (deputy of The PKN chairman) informed the public opinion that KT 171 PKT is the basic committee in this case, but meantime KT 182 started it's own consultations in the matter of the project. KT 171 gave a negative opinion about the norm project with large majority of votes (82%).

For no obvious reason, the case was moved to KT 182, wchich during confidental voting decided to give a positive opinion about the norm project. Committee 182 also decided not to take (negative) votes of KT 171 under consideration. PKN till now has not explained why the project was reviewed by two committees or why the works were unexpectedly moved from one committee to another.

Nobody from PKN has also explained how is that possible that one committee has produced disapproval" opinion while the other approval" and only the opinion of the second is valid. The position of KT 182 is also completely incomprehensible as most of submitted opinions stated an objection to normalize OOXML.

All that incidents causes that Poland is not able to state clear and fair opinion in the case of OOXML specification. Polish Normalization Committee (PKN) has found itself in a situation where two technical committees voted differently, so companies, organization and private persons stated above believe that the proper decision is to abstain from voting.
Sci-Fi

Submission + - British Army deploys Thermobaric weapons

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The new 'super-weapon', which the British soldiers in Afghanistan are being supplied with, uses technology based on the "thermobaric" principle. It uses heat and pressure to kill people targeted across a wide air by sucking the air out of lungs and rupturing internal organs. The "enhanced blast" weapon uses similar technology that is seen in the US "bunker busting" bombs and the devastating bombs dropped by the Russians to destroy the Chechen capital, Grozny.
Movies

Submission + - Digital filmmaking is here ... (onfilm.co.nz)

Submitted by
psycho sparky
psycho sparky writes: "Late March 2007: three Americans attempt to leave the USA carrying two top secret devices codenamed "Boris" and "Natasha". Customs apprehend one at the border, but the others escape in a private jet to the South Pacific where an eccentric millionaire with an arsenal of WWI weapons awaits their arrival, eager to lay his hand on the "Mysterium" chip ...

Although this sounds like a James Bond plot, it's actually a pretty accurate (if melodramatically phrased) description of the real events.

The imminent release of the RED ONE camera will herald, many believe, a new way of making films and a new perception of the costs involved in filmmaking. In March the RED Digital Cinema Camera Company flew two of the alpha prototype cameras to Wellington, New Zealand, and Peter Jackson became the first filmmaker to put the camera through it's paces; two weeks later the finished film was shown to much acclaim at the NAB conference in Las Vegas. Yes, you read that correctly: "Peter Jackson, "two weeks" and "finished film" all in one sentence. ..."

Slashdot Top Deals

Living on Earth may be expensive, but it includes an annual free trip around the Sun.

Close