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Comment Re:Too late! (Score 1) 184

by calcutta001 (#29477153) Attached to: Taking Free Software To the Streets

  Software Freedom Day 2009

Great idea telling us today...plenty of time to get the local effort organised!

This is not funny. I wish I had known about this so I could organize a local event.

Thanks for telling us so late. (sarcastic)

Comment I might get stoned for this. How About Novell ZAM (Score 1) 251

by calcutta001 (#28776239) Attached to: Best Tools For Network Inventory Management?

http://www.novell.com/products/zenworks/assetmanagement/

Features

Complete View of IT Assets
software license compliance
Elimination of manual tracking and inventory gathering
Change notification
custom reporting
Integrated Management
Automated discovery
Detailed software and hardware inventory
Software usage tracking
Contract management
The Courts

Submission + - Woman fined $1.9 million for 24 songs

Submitted by calcutta001
calcutta001 writes: Story Highlights
Federal jury finds Jammie Thomas-Rasset guilty of illegally downloading 24 songs
Minnesota wife, mom slapped with fine of $80,000 per song, for total of $1.9 million
Attorney says client shocked at fine, noting the songs costs 99 cents each
Spokeswoman for the Recording Industry Association of America lauds jury's finding

http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/06/18/minnesota.music.download.fine/index.html

Comment Eye for an Eye (Score 2, Insightful) 219

by calcutta001 (#21199825) Attached to: 22 Companies Sued Over Wi-Fi Patents
Some day soon, corporations will realize that they have to unite and collaborate better. I am glad that this is happening, Maybe this will be a unifying force that will promote cooperations like Open Invention Network and fight enemies like Microsoft, NTP and this little bugger.

There should be patent free open standards like IP that everyone can use and build on. What if google had to pay a fraction of a cent for every IP packet as royalty. Would it have taken off in it's infancy. Hell, would internet taken off ?
Software

Submission + - Cisco: voice-recognition next on acquisition menu? (networkworld.com)

Submitted by
Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward writes: "Cisco may be on the acquisition trail again this time hunting for voice recognition technology. The network giant has made 122 acquisitions since 1993. Barry O'Sullivan, head of Cisco's Voice Technology Group, told Reuters the company wants to add more sophisticated voice-recognition technology to its products aimed at helping office workers communicate more flexibly. He was not sure if the network equipment maker would develop such technology internally or through partnerships or acquisitions. In the past however Cisco hasn't been one to wait too long to jump on a technology it considers hot. http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/20279"
Software

Submission + - UK culture holding back open source

Submitted by Stony Stevenson
Stony Stevenson writes: Industry experts have identified cultural, as well as technical, factors affecting the take up of open source software in the UK. Many countries in the European Union are showing enthusiastic support for open source, while support in the US is less strong. Britain is one of the least open source friendly nations, however, bucking the trend in other EU states.

"Governments in continental Europe see open source as a way to change the playing field with the US," said John Powell, president of open source company Alfresco. "You can build local skills with open source, but with Microsoft's model all the changes in code are controlled from Seattle or India."
Moon

Submission + - NASA Claims China Will Beat US Back to the Moon (cnn.com)

Submitted by
eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes: "NASA's deadline for a return trip to the moon is 2020. But NASA Administrator Michael Griffin gave a lecture in Washington stating ' "I personally believe that China will be back on the moon before we are. I think when that happens, Americans will not like it. But they will just have to not like it." It sounds a bit like the taikonauts will arrive first."
Networking

Submission + - FiOS fails for 5th time in 7 months (networkworld.com)

Submitted by
Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward writes: "This time it was a cable cut, although who did the cutting is a mystery. Unfortunately for Verizon, this string of bad luck/incompetence has been tormenting the family of a journalist who's made it his business to chronicle FiOS-related mishaps wherever and to whomever they happen. And they seem to happen an awful lot. These disruptions have happened so frequently of late — this is at least our fifth major FiOS outage since mid-March — the details no longer matter. All I know for certain is that our TV, telephone and Internet services went dark yesterday afternoon (is that what they mean by triple play?) and only returned about 2:30 today after visits from two different Verizon techs. http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/20238"
Patents

Submission + - Court Limits Software Patents

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Techdirt has the scoop on how a recent court ruling may severely limit the scope of both software and business model patents. The court found that "The routine addition of modern electronics to an otherwise unpatentable invention" isn't enough to get over the "non-obvious" hurdle that every patent is supposed to clear. This is a huge step in the right direction and one of the first admissions from the court system that perhaps software and business model patents have gone too far.
Sci-Fi

Submission + - windows insecure. (novell.com)

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: How realistic is it to say that microsoft can, windows being a monolithic and insecure OS, shutdown all windows computers worldwide at any given day ?
Censorship

Submission + - YouTube DCMA takedowns a one-way street?

Submitted by
Bwooce
Bwooce writes: "A New Zealand user reports that the Entertainment Software Association have issued a DMCA takedown notice on his content involving the installation of a mod-chip on a Wii.

Irrespective of the content, which in this case seems hard to imagine being infringing, the real story here is that YouTube won't let him file a counter-claim as he is not a US resident.

Are we all a target of US laws without being able to respond to them? Are we all in a digital Gitmo?"
Linux Business

Submission + - Linux group calls Microsoft's bluff

Submitted by Stony Stevenson
Stony Stevenson writes: The head of the Open Invention Network (OIN) has dismissed Microsoft's claims that Linux violates over 200 of its patents. OIN chief executive Jerry Rosenthal said that Microsoft's assertions are simply an attempt to undermine the open source movement.

"The FUD is clear. If you have a patent that you are proud of, then disclose it," he said. "If your patent is a good patent then you are not worried about revealing it before going to court because you would be confident of success." Rosenthal believes that, if there are grounds for patent infringement, there would either be easy workarounds or the open source community would find 'prior art' which would invalidate the patent.
GUI

Submission + - Foundations of GTK+ Development (pm.org)

Submitted by
cyocum
cyocum writes: "When a developer begins the design process for a new open source GUI application, there are only two viable choices, Trolltech's Qt and GTK+. GUI applications are complicated to write and often complicated to understand. Into this space steps, Apress' "Foundations of GTK+ Development" by Andrew Krause, the developer of OpenLDev IDE built with GTK+ 2. From the first page, the reader is impressed with the scope and depth of the topics covered. Krause takes the reader from the first Hello World program to creating custom widgets in thirteen chapters. The layout of the page is clean and the code sections are clearly typeset with good variable names and structure making the intent of the code clear.

While the main purpose of the book is to provide a reference for the experienced GTK+ developer, the layout of the chapters emphasizes teaching the beginner the basic structures of a GTK+ program all the way to advanced topics such as developing custom widgets and the Glade GUI builder application. Many of the most important details, such as various enumerations, are placed appropriately in the appendices while those that are used are clearly detailed in the text.

As Krause focuses on the foundation of GTK+ development, all the examples are in C and the reader should be prepared with a good knowledge of C. While there are many different languages which have bindings for GTK+, which allow programmers to use their programming language of choice, the advantage of learning the C foundations of GTK+ is that the reader gets a clear understanding of how the library works "under the hood". The reader will appreciate how their chosen bindings interact with the base library.

Each chapter begins with a list of what a reader will learn and ends with a summary of the major points of the chapter followed by an exercise. These exercises are designed to be broad and leave much for the reader to do and learn with in the structure given by the exercise. If the reader becomes stuck the website has the appropriate sources to help the reader understand the structure being used within the program to achieve its ends.

Chapter 1 gives the history of the GTK+ project, X11, covers the installation of the details of the libraries involved in developing GTK+ applications. The exercise at the end of Chapter 1 has the reader verify the installation of the GTK+ libraries.

Chapter 2 is where the rubber hits the road as far as programming with GTK+ is concerned. The "Hello World" program gives the general structure of GTK+ development, which is maintained through out the following chapters. The widget hierarchy is discussed as well as how to cast objects properly ensuring correct pointer type to each particular function. All the signals and event handlers are discussed at a proper level of detail for a beginning chapter. If this were the only chapter, it would provide any programmer with enough detail to begin exploring the API and begin their own application.

Chapter 3 and 4 cover container widgets, which control layout and decorations, which allow different effects on widgets, and basic widgets (e.g. GtkToggleButton, GtkCheckButton, etc.). These are the basis for any good windowing toolkit and they are demonstrated ablely and with confidence by an author who is clearly comfortable with the toolkit and has no trouble articulating this to his reader.

Chapter 5 covers the different stock dialogs which come with GTK+, the About dialog, Information dialogs, and the FileChooser dialog, etc. While these are useful, building your own dialog boxes are left until later chapters but this chapter does give the reader a feel for how to use dialogs and where to place them in your program source for maximum readability.

Chapter 6 is an odd chapter as it covers GLib and is not related directly to GTK+ but it is necessary as some GTK+ functions return structures from this library. While it does give the reader a break from learning directly about GTK+, it seems oddly placed however as it needed to go somewhere and Chapter 6 is as good as any other chapter. This chapter is the longest chapter in the book and the author gives the reader a well deserved pat on the back at the end.

Chapter 7 and 8 are devoted to the most complicated but useful widgets, TextView and TreeView. The TextView widget allows many different operations for displaying text and the reader is introduced to many of the functions that would allow one to write a word processor. This chapter is helped heavily by the fact that the Krause is the developer of an application that uses this widget heavily. The use of the Pango library and the facilities for fonts are also covered in this chapter. In the next chapter, the reader is taken for a tour of the TreeView widget which mostly consists of creating different renderers for the different cells. The reader is given useful advice about which to use where and where to avoid using renderers which are called too often.

Chapter 9 describes how to build menus, toolbars, and popup menus both manually and with the XML based mark-up language which comes with GTK+. The reader is also introduced to the method for creating their own stock icons for the tool bars and menu items. This chapter basically completes the core development needs of an application programmer and if the book stopped here, it would be well worth purchasing. The reader should now be acquainted well enough with GTK+ to explore the API for needed functions and structures themselves. The XML demonstrated is a help as much of the code for this section is a tad boring and repetitive and the XML allows the reader to quickly create the required objects for the system.

Chapter 10 is another break from direct GTK+ development and the author has a few points about user interface design before showing the reader the Glade UI designer and libglade, which is necessary to use the interface builder. Much of a GTK+ application can be created from Glade but, as Krause rightly cautions the reader, there is still much development that needs to occur for the application to have the correct behavior. The XML created by Glade is similar to that used in the previous chapter but it covers much of what a developer would need in an application. While some may have wished that Glade was introduced earlier in the course of the book, Glade is an advanced topic and it is beneficial for the reader to understand how to create applications without Glade so that one could appreciate the design decisions when developing with GTK+.

Chapter 11 shows the reader how to create custom widgets within the toolkit from scratch which exposes in detail the inner workings of GTK+. Here Krause demonstrates using an IP input widget and a marquee widget. This chapter is quite long and involved and may take more than one read but it is well worth the exercise to understand more about the internals of the widgets that were introduced in earlier chapters.

Chapter 12 is a miscellaneous chapter with some interesting widgets that did not fit into the structure of the previous chapters including the helpful GtkPrintOperation. Chapter 13 gives you five applications built with the facilities of the previous chapters and the code for these can be obtained from the book's web site. The appendices follow and contain much information that is helpful when creating applications with GTK+.

For the beginner, this book is an invaluable resource for learning about GTK+. The content is substantive and concise while maintaining consistency throughout. The consistency, especially in the code sections, reinforces the information presented and code structure, which helps the beginner keep good coding style when writing for GTK+. The book remains tightly focused on presenting this sometimes daunting amount of information, which is one of the other great qualities of the book. For the expert, the table of contents, the appendices, and the index are the most important aspects of the book. These parts of the book are amply treated so that it is easy to use the book as a quick memory refresh. Overall, this book is a solid and dependable guide to a large windowing toolkit and should sit comfortably on any GUI application developer's desk."
Toys

Submission + - Book Review: The LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT Idea Book (desicritics.org)

Submitted by
aacool
aacool writes: "Lego Mindstorms Nxt have been a wonderful source of fun for hobbyists worldwide. The Idea book gives you many ways of exploring the platform. The LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT Idea Book: Design, Invent, and Build (No Starch Press) takes contributions from 11 authors and adopts a cookbook approach. The book briefly explains the basics to get you grounded in the material. But quickly thereafter, the book takes a leap to address intermediate builders. The assumption is that online resources will help bridge the gap. Its an approach that works.
What do slashdotters think of Mindstorms and Lego?"
Security

Submission + - Comparing OpenBSD vs. SELinux (kerneltrap.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: KernelTrap offers an interesting summary of a lengthy debate on OpenBSD's -misc mailing list comparing the security features built into OpenBSD versus the security offered by the Linux kernel's SELinux feature. The main arguments presented against SELinux centered around its complexity and the difficulty of defining a secure policy. 'The first thing people usually do with SELinux is turn it off', suggests the article, noting that the ease with which it can be turned off is another security shortcoming. By contrast, OpenBSD offers numerous security features that are always enabled with minimal overhead, including propolice stack protection, random library mappings, proactive privilege separation, W^X, and systrace.

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