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OS X

Apple OS X 10.5.6 Update Breaks Some MacBook Pros 313

Posted by Soulskill from the somebody-just-got-fired dept.
Newscloud writes "As PC Mag reported last week, Apple OS X 10.5.6 can break some MacBook Pros leaving some users (like me) with a dead backlit black screen after the Apple logo appears. While I initially thought I had a hardware failure, it turns out that there is a fix as long as you have an external display, keyboard and mouse. The problem only appears on the second restart, so if you sleep your MacBook a lot as I do, you might not realize the problem is related to the OS update you did the week before. The problem was related to older, incompatible firmware that Software Update wasn't flagging before the upgrade. This definitely gives weight to the argument for waiting a bit to run software upgrades."
Republicans

Karl Rove's IT Guru Dies In Small Plane Crash 377

Posted by kdawson from the discuss-among-yourselves dept.
A dozen readers have submitted the story of the death in a plane crash of Mike Connell, Karl Rove's IT adviser, the man who set up and ran the gwb43.com mail server, and an important figure in GOP tech circles since 1997. The closest thing to straight reporting to be found in a mainstream media outlet is a piece from KDKA in Pittsburgh giving a detailed backgrounder on Connell's work for Rove, two generations of the Bush family, and many GOP congressmen and committees. CBSNews.com is now mirroring the KDKA reporting. Almost all the early media coverage comes from the left and some of it is frankly conspiratorial. Among the milder pieces (although it could not be called balanced) is this interview with Mark Crispin Miller, NYU professor and author of two books about the 2004 election in Ohio. Connell was compelled to testify on the day before the US election in a lawsuit involving Ohio election irregularities in 2004. Connell, an experienced pilot, died on Sunday when his plane crashed two miles short of the runway of Akron-Canton Airport in Ohio.
Communications

Extended Gmail Outage Frustrates Admins 430

Posted by timothy from the pulling-out-doesn't-sound-manly dept.
CWmike writes "A prolonged, ongoing Gmail outage has some Google Apps administrators pulling their hair out as their end users, including high-ranking executives, complain loudly while they wait for service to be restored. At about 5 p.m. US Eastern on Wednesday, Google announced that the company was aware of the problem preventing Gmail users from logging into their accounts and that it expected to fix it by 9 p.m. on Thursday. Google offered no explanation of the problem or why it would take it so long to solve the problem, a '502' error when trying to access Gmail. Google said the bug is affecting 'a small number of users,' but that is little comfort for Google Apps administrators. Admin Bill W. posted a desperate message on the forum Thursday morning, saying his company's CEO is steaming about being locked out of his e-mail account since around 4 p.m. on Wednesday. It's not the first Gmail outage. So, will this one prompt calls for a service-level agreement for paying customers? And a more immediate question: Why no Gears for offline Gmail access at very least, Google?"
Mozilla

Mozilla Demanding Firefox Display EULA In Ubuntu 785

Posted by kdawson from the branding-vs.-freedom dept.
TRS-80 writes "Users of the upcoming Ubuntu release, Intrepid Ibex, are being confronted with an EULA the first time they launch Firefox. Mark Shuttleworth says 'Mozilla Corp asked that this be added in order for us to continue to call the browser Firefox... I would not consider an EULA as a best practice. It's unfortunate that Mozilla feels this is absolutely necessary' and notes there's an unbranded 'abrowser' package available. Many of the comments say Ubuntu should ditch Firefox as this makes it clear it's not Free Software, hence unsuitable for Ubuntu main, and just ship Iceweasel or Epiphany, the GNOME browser." A few comments take Canonical to task for agreeing to Mozilla's demand to display an EULA without consulting the community.
Earth

Insects May Have Had a Hand In Dinosaur Extinction 270

Posted by CmdrTaco from the so-did-my-cooking dept.
eldavojohn writes "Everyone's got their favorite theories of Dinosaur extinction, but new speculation is rampant in a book that gives cause to believe it may have been disease-carrying insects. Due to the length of their slow and eventual extinction (the 'K-T Boundary'), it is argued that this would more likely be attributed to the spread of disease and the rise of parasitic insects like ticks or biting flies. Are our immune systems the only reason any animals survived?"
Graphics

Microsoft Releases Photosynth 247

Posted by kdawson from the look-at-me-i'm-flying dept.
Spy Hunter writes "Photosynth has graduated from a 'tech preview' to a complete service. Now you can upload your own photos and have them automatically transformed into a 'synth': a 3D fly-through reconstruction of your home, your vacation, or anything else you can take pictures of. Learn more about Photosynth at the official blog, see what Walt Mossberg has to say about it, or just go try it out right now." According to Mossberg, Photosynth works on PCs using IE or Firefox, but not yet on Macs. We've been discussing Photosynth since its introduction.
Software

Submission + - Adobe, can we please have a 64-bit Flash player? (zdnet.com)

Submitted by
InvisiBill
InvisiBill writes: "In Dear Adobe, can we please have a 64-bit Flash player?, Ed Bott blogs about how Adobe has yet to release Flash for x64. He mentions that the Adobe TechNote instructing you to use a 32-bit browser so that you can use the 32-bit plugin hasn't been updated since February and that people have been asking for a 64-bit plugin for over a year. Why Won't Macromedia Release 64-bit Flash? was posted here almost three years ago, in October 2005 (and mentions that the above TechNote was posted in September 2005). It's been two years since an Adobe engineer blogged that it required a lot of work, not just a recompile. There is talk that Flash 10 will support x64, but it doesn't as of Beta 2.

With the increasing number of x64 users, I wonder when Adobe will decide the market segment is valuable enough to warrant a build of Flash. If you too would like to see Flash for x64, you can ask for it on the Adobe Feature Request page."

Comment Re:People will move to Apple. (Score 1) 695

by pshuke (#24405675) Attached to: Windows Is Dead – Long Live Midori?
My grandparents are dead, so I can't really speak for them (insert bad bsd joke here), but I know my mother has no problems clicking on the wifi icon in ubuntu. Really, while wifi can be nuisance in some distributions, ubuntu has come a long way. Even a generic acer laptop which one of my neighbors uses, complete with a (reputedly horrible) broadcom wnic, worked out of the box on. While I'm sure there are still some black spots on the linux wifi map, you have to be pretty unlucky to get something which doesn't work out of the box on said distribution. And if you want to eliminate luck as a factor, you can spend five minutes extra the next time you buy a computer, and make sure you get one with atheros or intel chipsets.

While Apple hardware may be excellent, their macbook line is still overpriced by $3-400 compared to a similarly spec-ed Lenovo. This I believe, is the biggest rationale for not choosing apple. If you can get a similar or better non-Apple computer for less price than an Apple, why would you go with the Apple? Especially if all you do is play solitaire and flash games, which you can do on ubuntu just as well as on osx (easier according to my mother, as the dock confused her).

On a side note, as I'm sure some will suggest installing OSX on non-Apple PC's. When I recently installed 10.5.* on my T60, the wifi (iwl3945) refused to work. I don't think the drivers were ready. On the other hand, ubuntu immediately recognized the card and configured it; so I can only assume that the whole OSX "just works" experience only applies to Apple produced PC's.
The Internet

US ISPs Announce Anti-Child-Porn Agreement 613

Posted by timothy from the little-timmy's-law-against-all-things-that-are-bad dept.
An anonymous reader writes "It seems that ISPs have gathered together with 45 attorney generals and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) to form an agreement to crush child pornography. What does that mean? Probably the same as it meant for RoadRunner, Sprint, AT&T and Verizon customers — the end of the newsgroups." Here's the back-patting press-release from the various parties who signed on (the National Cable & Telecommunications Association, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and the National Association of Attorneys General), though the actual text of the agreement does not seem to have been made public.
Programming

Submission + - should 'lvalue' and 'rvalue' be renamed?

Submitted by spir0
spir0 writes: One thing that bugs me whenever I read a programming book is the use of the terms lvalue and rvalue to refer to an assignment of data into a variable of some description. lvalue means left value, and rvalue means right value. It seems to be pretty well embedded into programmers' psyches that this terminology is not only standard, but correct.

Looking at a simple C example in which a = b = c = 1; it can be said that a is the leftmost value, and 1 is the rightmost value. b and c are middle values. But do we call them mvalues? No. From the parsed perspective, (a = (b = (c = 1))); each piece has a left and right value. Which is fine.

But I firmly believe that this terminology is blatantly wrong. The lvalue is not actually a "value." It's a container that holds a value. rvalue *is* a value. But it's the only one, and doesn't need to be qualified as being on the right-hand side.

I propose new names for these items. lvalue could be renamed to target, and rvalue could be renamed to just value or data. I believe these more properly define the attributes of a variable/array and the data it receives. I thought about destination and source, but those are more appropriate to data moves, not assignments.

I know this will generate some, uh... debate, but I've got tough skin (and a monitor) to protect me. :)

So, as Johnny Storm would say, Flame on!
The Internet

Submission + - EU moving against Freedom on the Internet

Submitted by gmueckl
gmueckl writes: The European Parliament is currently preparing a new law for governmental reglementation of telecommunication. This wouldn't be news except that it is to be voted upon in the Committee on Industry, Research and Energy and Committee on Internal Market and Consumer Protection next Monday (7 July) and some MEPs have proposed amendmends with far-reaching effects on topics covering anything from privacy to piracy. The French and British proposals to cut off copyright offenders from the Internet are making a return here, as is an attempt to abolish Net Neutrality and a proposal to make ISPs and content providers work more closely together fighting in the fight against piracy (which also seems include a provision that allows passing on the identity and personal data on potential copyright offenders to copyright holders). One proposed amendmend even goes so far to suggest that the definition of spyware should be altered in a way that trojans which try to detect copyright violations would be legal. And these seem to be just the top of the ice berg. La Quadrature du Net has more information on this and a call to action (in English, French and German). Heise has also picked up on this story as well as ORF Futurezone (both are in German). The broad scope of these amendmends and the fact that they pop up at the last minute make all of this very, very scary.
Wine

Submission + - Wine 1.0 Released 1

Submitted by pshuke
pshuke writes: After 15 years of development, Wine version 1.0 has been released. Wine is an Open Source implementation of the Windows API on top of X, OpenGL, and Unix. While perfect windows compatibility has not yet been achieved, full support for Photoshop CS2, Excel Viewer 2003, Word Viewer 2003 and PowerPoint Viewer 2003 have been among the goals prior to the release. For further information about supported applications, head over to the appdb. Get it (source) while it's hot.
Programming

Havok Releases Free Version For PC Developers 86

Posted by kdawson from the let-slip-the-dogs-of-physics dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Havok has released the free version of its widely-used physics and animation engine (but without source code), including tools that integrate with Autodesk 3ds Max and Maya. Developers may use Havok for free for non-commercial games, middleware, and academic projects. Here are the SDK and tools."
Red Hat Software

Submission + - Fedora 9 Released

Submitted by pshuke
pshuke writes: Fedora 9 has officially been released to the public. Highlights include the usual updates to desktop software, notably the inclusion of kde4, as well as an update to kernel 2.6.25 with support for ext4. Grab the dvd while it's hot, in the form of torrents: i386, 64 bit; or contribute to smoking their servers by direct download.

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