mrRay720 - Slashdot User

Submission + - Attacking feminism: why should a geek care?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 20, 2007 @06:21AM

An anonymous reader writes: In a recent article, Author Michael Reed challenges some of the accepted arguments on the subject of Women In IT.

The article begins with an outline of the some of the basic issues and then moves onto a criticism of two recent tech articles on this subject. In the article, he provides some arguments against the use of affirmative action.

The two articles under discussion are:
SCALE 5x: Women in Open Source

The hidden engineering gender gap

Submission + - You are not Free

Submitted by

JAB Creations

on Tuesday February 20, 2007 @06:01AM

JAB Creations writes: "There is no law that requires you to pay income tax. The Supreme court ruled taxes as only profits and only corporates make profits yet citizens paid nearly one trillion in taxes compared to corporate American's quarter of a trillion dollars in taxes at the value of four cents to the dollar. This is not about tax evasion but about your rights to life, liberty, and freedom. In 2008 you will not be able to buy food, clothing, or obtain shelter without having your every move and financial transaction monitored and that includes the not for long anonymity of cash. The government that should be answering to the people is answering only to the private institution of the Federal Reserve (private bank) under which who's ownership is unknown. Sound crazy? Once you watch the video, do some research, and connect the dots then you'll understand why people who live in the woods have lots of guns."

Submission + - Australia Outlaws Incandescent Lightbulb

Submitted by

passthecrackpipe

on Tuesday February 20, 2007 @05:05AM

passthecrackpipe writes: "The Australian Government is planning on making the incandescent ligtbulb a thing of the past. In three years time, standard lightbulbs will no longer be available for sale in the shops in Australia (expect a roaring grey market) and everybody will be forced to switch to more energy efficient Fluorescent bulbs. In this move to try and curb emissions, the incandescent bulb — which converts the majority of used energy to heat rather then light — will be phased out. Environmental groups have given this plan a lukewarm reception. They feel Australia should sign on to the Kyoto protocol first. (Article in Dutch). A similar plan was created together with Phillips, one of the worlds largest lighting manufacturers. What do other slashdotters think? Is this a move in the right direction? Will this boost the development of better fluorescent bulbs? Improve the design and lower the costs of LED lightbulbs? Will this plan make a big difference to the environment at all?"

Submission + - UK taps 439,000 phones and emails; wants 645 more

Submitted by JPMH on Tuesday February 20, 2007 @04:50AM

JPMH writes: With the largest density of CCTV cameras in the world, and an increasing network of automatic number-plate recognition cameras on main roads, Britain has long been a pioneer for the surveillance society. Now new official figures reveal that UK agencies monitored 439,000 telephones and email addresses in a 15 month period between 2005 and 2006. The Interception of Communications Commissioner is seeking the right for agencies to be allowed to monitor the communications of Members of Parliament as well, something which has been forbidden since the 1960s. It must be that it is bringing their numbers down: on the law of averages they should be monitoring at least 5 of the MPs.

Submission + - Ubuntu losing server credibility?

Submitted by

kripkenstein

on Tuesday February 20, 2007 @02:46AM

kripkenstein writes: "A seemingly minor change in Ubuntu Edgy — making /bin/sh point to dash instead of bash — has caused a lot of breakage. Ubuntu stand by their decision to use the faster dash, which complies with standards but not with existing practice. However, as can be seen by the numerous comments on the bug report, many opportunities for Ubuntu to be deployed in server settings appear to have been lost. For example, one comment states

I have already moved away from [Ubuntu], stopped deploying it on server systems. I am glad this [happened] before i started using it on production servers here at work.
Ubuntu is a popular desktop OS among Linux users, but is the decision to use dash costing it its credibility in the server arena?"

Submission + - AMD Athlon 64 6000+ Launched And Tested

Submitted by Spinnerbait on Tuesday February 20, 2007 @01:26AM

Spinnerbait writes: AMD officially launched their next speed bump in the Athlon 64 product line, in the form of a new 3GHz part branded the Athlon 64 6000+. This new dual-core Athlon 64 sports 1MB of on-chip cache per core and is designed for AMD's Socket AM2 platform. This chip is still built on AMD's 90nm fab node and is comprised of some 227 million transistors. It also carries a thermal power profile of about 125Watts. Unfortunately, in all the benchmarks seen here, it was still unable to catch Intel's Core 2 Duo E6700 chip at 2.66GHz.

Submission + - hard drives that are used often, last longer?

Submitted by tora201 on Tuesday February 20, 2007 @01:14AM

tora201 writes: The BBC reports that Google engineers have surprisingly discovered that the impact of heavy use and high temperatures on hard disk drive failure may be overstated. From the article: "Google employs its own file system to organise the storage of data, using inexpensive commercially available hard drives rather than bespoke systems. Hard drives less than three years old and used a lot are less likely to fail than similarly aged hard drives that are used infrequently, according to the report."

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