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Toys

Submission + - Unusual PC upgrades (pcmag.com)

prostoalex writes: "For holiday season PC Magazine runs a list of somewhat unusual PC upgrades. They recommend Thermaltake MediaLAB A2331 for turning any PC into a media center, M-Audio FireWire 410 for basic stereo recording, Sunbeam 20 in 1 Superior Panel for increased connectivity and extra ports, Highpoint RocketRAID 2302 for extra eSATA ports and RAID backup, as well as a few other products. Any unusual upgrades Slashdot readers would recommend?"

Comment Re:It is a disease, and that's why it works! (Score 3, Interesting) 167

There's nothing wrong a viral idea, and there's nothing wrong with admitting that an idea is viral.
Your comment made me think of what first attracted me to the Free Software world. To any one who's discovered the elegant beauty of Darwin's evolutionary theory, there is an equal attractiveness in the way the GPL license is framed.
The very fact that the GPL attaches itself to the code its released under, and survives into the downstream modifications that are made to the code.. there are beautiful resemblances to the way successful life itself evolves.
I'm inclined to believe that licenses that are not viral (e.g. BSD) and depend on altruistic reasons to survive, are somehow doomed to extinction (i.e. will be swallowed by proprietary licenses that couldn't care less about perpetuating the BSD cause). In the long run, the GPL will emerge as the fitter license that made its way into the larger user base while retaining pefect copies of itself.
(Of course I'm neither a biologist nor a programmer, so apologies if I sound like I'm talking outta my ass.)
Supercomputing

Submission + - Folding@Home hits petaflop milestone (lockergnome.com)

knight17 writes: "Folding@Home, the Stanford University's ambitious distributed computing project aimed at unlocking the mysteries of protein folding has hit another great milestone. It is the first to achieve a petaflop mark by a distributed computing initiative. The lions share of the processing power is contributed by Sony's Playstation 3 game consoles. Current statistics on the project's home page show processing capacity at 1P Flops with 804T Flops from the PlayStation 3. A further 163T Flops are from Windows-based computers and 43T Flops from graphics processors."
Media

Submission + - groklaw crashed ..

rs232 writes: "The database server has crashed, an Ibiblio team is on its way to the datacenter. We will keep you informed in this space.

http://www.groklaw.net/"
Software

Submission + - What The New GPL Means For Enterprise IT (networkcomputing.com)

anonymous writes: "GPLv3 looks good for customers: It increases user protection from patents and lock-in, while clauses that could have affected Web services have been dropped. After two years of consultation, the Free Software Foundation has published version 3 of the GPL (GNU General Public License GPL), its first update in 16 years. Since then, GPL-licensed software has become a part of most enterprise IT installations (and a lot more besides), so its revision could have a major impact."
Privacy

Submission + - Keylogger Hardware Embedded in New Dell Laptop (virus.org.ua)

kendbluze writes: "Here's an EE who was doing a simple repair to a nearly-new Dell 600m laptop when he noticed something a bit curious. Turns out he found a hardware keylogger sitting between the keyboard and ethernet controllers! See what Homeland Security didn't have to say about it."
Sun Microsystems

Submission + - ZFS on Linux: It's alive! (linuxworld.com)

lymeca writes: LinuxWorld reports that Sun Microsystem's ZFS filesystem has been converted from its incanartion in OpenSolaris to a module capable of running in the Linux user-space filsystem project, FUSE. Because of the license incompatibilities with the Linux kernel, it has not yet been integrated for distribution within the kernel itself. This project, called ZFS on FUSE, aims to enable GNU/Linux users to use ZFS as a process in userspace, bypassing the legal barrier inherent in having the filesystem coded into the Linux kernel itself. Booting from a ZFS partition has been confirmed to work. The performance currently clocks in at about half as fast as XFS, but with all the success the NTFS-3g project has had creating a high performance FUSE implementation of the NTFS filesystem, there's hope that performance tweaking could yield a practical elimination of barriers for GNU/Linux users to make use of all that ZFS has to offer.
Businesses

Submission + - Jerry Yang becomes the new Yahoo CEO

indraneil writes: "Yahoo Inc. chairman Terry Semel stepped down as chief executive officer on Monday. This ends a year long rough patch as CEO, plagued by efforts of constant catching up with Google.
He had been the CEO for the last 6 years and will be replaced by co-founder Jerry Yang. Susan Decker has been named president.
He continues as a non executive chairman. Yahoo stocks picked up after the news was published.
NBC is covering this in greater detail."

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