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Comment Re:UAW (Score 4, Insightful) 715

by apathy maybe (#26144323) Attached to: Tech Firms Oppose Union Organizing

Oh, and the company that pays them wouldn't drop them like that if it suited the bottom line?

The days of respecting and being loyal to the company have long gone, because the company doesn't respect, and certainly isn't loyal to, you.

The union, on the other hand, will tend to be loyal to their members, will fight for their rights, and so on. (Unions aren't perfect, but under a capitalism system, they are often better than nothing.)

----

More generally, it amazes me that so many "free market" types hate unions. But they don't have any trouble with corporations and so on colluding to keep wages down.

That's the trouble with those who want a perfectly free capitalist market (a contradiction in terms). The want to give all the power to the bosses, and screw the workers, even when joining together in a union is good for the workers interests. They don't like unions because they don't really want a free market, they want a bosses market.

Fuck that.
Data Storage

Build a Cheap Media-Reading PC? 255

Posted by kdawson from the chewing-gum-memory-sticks dept.
tsm_sf writes "A recent Slashdot article got me thinking about dead and dying media. I'd like to build a cheap PC with the goal of being able to read as many old formats as possible. Size and power consumption would be design considerations; priority of media formats would be primary. How would you approach such a project?"
Sun Microsystems

Mainframe OpenSolaris Now Available 135

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the better-late-than-never dept.
BBCWatcher writes "When Sun released Solaris to the open source community in the form of OpenSolaris, would anyone have guessed that it would soon wind up running on IBM System z mainframes? Amazingly, that milestone has now been achieved. Sine Nomine Associates is making its first release of OpenSolaris for System z available for free and public download. Source code is also available. OpenSolaris for System z requires a System z9 or z10 mainframe and z/VM, the hypervisor that's nearly universal to mainframe Linux installations. (The free, limited term z/VM Evaluation Edition is available for z10 machines.) Like Linux, OpenSolaris will run on reduced price IFL processors."
The Media

Jobs Rumor Debacle Besmirches Citizen Journalism 286

Posted by kdawson from the unverified-is-not-the-same-as-unfiltered dept.
On Friday someone posted a false rumor that Steve Jobs had suffered a heart attack on CNN's unverified citizen journalism site, iReport. Apple's stock price went vertical, losing 9% before Apple stepped in and denied the rumor; the stock then recovered most of its loss. The SEC is investigating. PCWorld looks at the hit taken by citizen journalism as a result of this incident. "[The] increasingly blurred line between journalism and rumor is a serious concern for Al Tompkins, the broadcast/online group leader at The Poynter Institute — a specialized school for journalists of all media forms. 'How could you possibly allow just anybody to post just anything under your [CNN] label unless you have blazing billboards that say, "None of this has been verified, we've not looked at any of this, we have no idea if this is true"?' he asks."
Censorship

IOC Trademarks Part of Canadian National Anthem 412

Posted by kdawson from the can't-say-that-eh dept.
gravis777 sends us to BoingBoing for news that the International Olympic Committee has trademarked a line from the Canadian National Anthem and is threatening to sue anyone who uses it. The line in question is "with glowing hearts." "The committee is so serious about protecting the Olympic brand it managed to get a landmark piece of legislation passed in the House of Commons last year that made using certain phrases related to the Games a violation of law. The list includes the number 2010 and the word 'winter,' phrases that normally couldn't be trademarked because they are so general."
Space

On Fourth Launch Attempt, SpaceX Falcon 1 Reaches Orbit 518

Posted by timothy from the pure-congratulations dept.
xp65 writes with the just-announced success of Elon Musk's SpaceX's long efforts to reach orbit with a privately-developed launching craft: "T+0:08:21 Falcon 1 reached orbital velocity, 5200 m/s Nominal Second stage cut off (SECO) — Falcon 1 has made history as the first privately developed liquid fueled launch vehicle to achieve earth orbit!" dbullard adds "This was a completely new vehicle — it's not using any previously developed hardware. All developed from scratch. No government supplied hardware, Russian engines, or old ICBM motors. My hat's off to the employees of Space X — all 550 of them. (Note — no 'cast of thousands,' just 550). They've got video of the entire launch."
Real Time Strategy (Games)

Submission + - Humans can still out bluff machines (hughpickens.com)

Submitted by
Pcol
Pcol writes: "The New York Times reports that in a poker game this week between man and machine, a program called Polaris fought a close match, but lost to two well-known professional poker players. Designing a poker playing algorithmn is a different and more difficult challenge for software designers than chess and checkers because of uncertainties introduced by the hidden cards held by each player and difficult-to-quantify risk-taking behaviors such as bluffing. The game-tree approach doesn't work in poker because in many situations there is no one best move and a top-notch player adapts his play over time, exploiting his opponent's behavior. Polaris build a series of "bots" that have differing personalities or styles of play, ranging from aggressive to passive. Researchers monitored the performance of three bots and then moved them in and out of the lineup like football players."
Encryption

Submission + - Implementing a Partial Serial Verification System (brandonstaggs.com)

Submitted by
Brandon
Brandon writes: "On BrandonStaggs.Com:

Most micro-ISVs use a serial number/registration code system to allow end users to unlock or activate their purchase. The problem most of us have run into is that a few days or weeks after our software is released, someone has developed a keygen, a crack, or has leaked a serial number across the internet.

There are several possible solutions to this problem. You could license a system like Armadillo/Software Passport or ASProtect, or you could distribute a separate full version as a download for your paying customers. Each option has advantages and disadvantages. What I am going to show you is a way to keep "rolling your own" license key system while making working cracks harder for crackers to produce, and working keygens a thing of the past.
"
PHP

Submission + - PHP 4 End of life announcement (php.net)

Submitted by
sveard
sveard writes: "The PHP development team hereby announces that support for PHP 4 will continue until the end of this year only. After 2007-12-31 there will be no more releases of PHP 4.4. We will continue to make critical security fixes available on a case-by-case basis until 2008-08-08. Please use the rest of this year to make your application suitable to run on PHP 5."
Patents

Submission + - Optimum Copyright period decided by maths!

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: So how long SHOULD a copyright be valid for? There are as many opinions here as there are humans. But a Cambridge student has stepped into the discussion with a dispassionately calculated estimate of the optimal period a copyright should be granted for. Here is ArsTechnica's take: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070712-rese arch-optimal-copyright-term-is-14-years.html, and here is the original paper for all you maths dudes out there: http://www.rufuspollock.org/economics/papers/optim al_copyright.pdf
SuSE

Submission + - Italian parliament bets house on SuSE Linux

Submitted by AnotherDaveB
AnotherDaveB writes: ITALY'S parliament is about to undertake Europe's largest governmental migration yet to open sauce. The IT department of the Italian parliament presented plans on Wednesday to begin migrating some 3500 desktop PCs, including those of its 630 MPs, away from Windows to SuSE Linux starting this September. The Camera dei deputati will also run SuSE on all of its two hundred servers.
Security

Submission + - Dangerous Java flaw threatens virtually everything (zdnet.com.au)

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: ZDNet is reporting that a java flaw discovered by Google's Security team is "as bad as it gets". Australia's Computer Emergency Response Team (AusCERT) analyst, Robert Lowe, warned that anyone using the Java Runtime Environment or Java Development Kit is at risk. "Delivery of exploits in this manner is attractive to attackers because even though the browser may be fully patched, some people neglect to also patch programs invoked by browsers to render specific types of content": said Lowe. AusCERT has issued an alert.
Software

Submission + - iPhone root password cracked in three days

Submitted by Dimentox
Dimentox writes: Builder.au reports that "The iPhone root password has been cracked, The information came from an an official Apple iPhone restore image (rename as a zip file and extract). The archive contains two .dmg disk images: a password encrypted system image and an unencrypted user image. By delving into the unencrypted image inquisitive hackers were able to discover that all iPhones ship with predefined passwords to the accounts 'mobile' and 'root', the last of which being the name of the privileged administration account on UNIX based systems..."
"The information came from an an official Apple iPhone restore image (rename as a zip file and extract). The archive contains two .dmg disk images: a password encrypted system image and an unencrypted user image. By delving into the unencrypted image inquisitive hackers were able to discover that all iPhones ship with predefined passwords to the accounts 'mobile' and 'root', the last of which being the name of the privileged administration account on UNIX based systems."

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