twicepending - Slashdot User

Submission + - Math Geek Software Smackdown (wired.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 08, 2007 @06:43AM

An anonymous reader writes: A movement is afoot among some mathematicians in academia to make the switch from expensive, closed-source calculation software to free, open-source alternatives. In early January, thousands of mathematicians will gather in San Diego for the joint meeting of the American Mathematical Society and the Mathematical Association of America. In the exhibition hall, Stein has paid the first-timers' rate of $400 to rent a booth alongside those of the major mathematical software companies, where he and students will hand out DVDs with copies of Sage.

Submission + - GMail integrates AIM chat (blogspot.com)

Submitted by

LeandroTLZ

on Wednesday December 05, 2007 @01:51AM

LeandroTLZ writes: "Google has started to roll out support for AOL Instant Messenger from within the GMail interface, running alongside the Jabber (Google Talk) network:

Today we are happy to tell you about a new feature we've started to roll out which will enable you to sign into your AIM account and chat with your AIM buddies right inside Gmail. When you log in to AIM through Gmail chat, your AOL buddies will appear in your chat list with friends from your Google Talk network, and you will see the yellow "running man" logo to the right of your AIM friends' screen names. To your AIM friends it will look like you are logged in to AIM as usual.
"

Submission + - Eee PC as Portable Security Device (enterprisenetworkingplanet.com)

Submitted by

stoolpigeon

on Tuesday December 04, 2007 @11:09AM

stoolpigeon writes: "Enterprise Network planet has a nice article on using Ubuntu to turn an Asus Eeepc into an ultra portable security device. This article may be of use to any aspiring Eee pc owner who would like to run ubuntu rather than what comes bundled with the machine. Full steps are given for installing ubuntu and getting the wireless to work with ndiswrapper.

Asus is reporting high demand on the machine and have also said they will be providing a windows version of the machine by the end of this year. (Which would have to be pretty soon if they are going to hit that deadline.) Adding this option may further fuel adoption of the device. I'll be curious to see if there is a difference in the price between the two OS options or if the lower priced of the two Eee pc models is capable of running windows."

Submission + - First Evidence of Another Universe? 2

Submitted by blamanj on Sunday November 25, 2007 @10:37PM

blamanj writes: Three months ago, astronomers announced the discovery of a large hole at the edge of our universe. Now, Dr. Laura Mersini-Houghton thinks she knows what that means. (Subscription req'd at New Scientist site, there's also an overview here.) According to string theory, there are many universes besides our own. Her team says that smaller universes are positioned at the edge of our universe, and because of gravitational interactions, they can be observed, and they're willing to make a prediction. The recently discovered void is in the northern hemisphere. They contend another one will be found in the southern hemisphere.

Submission + - New Government, New Network?

Submitted by

renegadesx

on Sunday November 25, 2007 @09:56PM

renegadesx writes: "Australia has a new government lead by Kevin Rudd and the center-left Labor party in a landslide victory Saturday night. For months Mr Rudd has promised if elected he intends on bringing Australia up-to-date broadband capacity in establishing a Fiber to the Node (FTTN) infastructure nation wide.

What challenges await the new PM in establishing this? Telstra, who of course want to retain their monopoly over Australia's infastructure. Can Rudd and Telstra play nice in the interests of bringing Australia out of the stone age of DSL capabilities?

Time will tell, the Howard Government and Telstra did not get along at all. http://www.itwire.com.au/content/view/15505/1086/"

Submission + - WinXP under Parallels "bypasses" activatio 1

Submitted by

crystalattice

on Tuesday November 20, 2007 @04:00PM

crystalattice writes: "Since my bought a new Macbook Pro a few weeks back, I've installed Parallels to create virtual OS environments. Naturally I created a Windows virtual machine so I can run my old PC games again. When I first built my PC many years ago, I had activated this installation of XP on it. I decided to reuse this XP disc for my Macbook VM. Surprisingly it worked. I was able to activate the same XP disc on a virtual machine with no errors or any other problems. According to MS, I shouldn't be able to do this because it's a brand new machine; the hardware is completely different from my old PC. At a minimum I should have been required to call MS support and have someone activate it that way, which is what I expected to do. Is anyone aware of MS not checking on "true" activation anymore? Does this mean that people can create as many VMs as they want and distribute them, a la VMWare Player?"

Submission + - Supreme Court To Rule on Second Amendment (dcguncase.com)

Submitted by

djmoore

on Tuesday November 20, 2007 @02:56PM

djmoore writes: "The Supreme Court has granted cert in District of Columbia v. Heller. This is the first case examining the Second Amendment to reach SCOTUS since the much-misunderstood Miller case in 1939. The SCOTUS asks the question,[PDF] "Whether the following provisions, D.C. Code 7-2502.02(a)(4), 22-4504(a), and 7-2507.02, violate the Second Amendment rights of individuals who are not affiliated with any state-regulated militia, but who wish to keep handguns and other firearms for private use in their homes?" Some links to background information on this case and the Second Amendment can be found here. Oral arguments will likely be heard in March or April.

Roughly speaking, the question is, does an enumerated "right of the people" have as much weight as, say, the unenumerated right to an abortion? Or does the 2nd Amendment, uniquely in the Constitution, use the phrase "the people" to grant coercive power to the state?

Mandatory Geek Link: Eric S. Raymond's "Ethics From the Barrel of a Gun"."

Submission + - Microsoft Demands Patent for Saying 'Goodbye' 7

Submitted by

theodp

on Thursday November 01, 2007 @05:16AM

theodp writes: "Demonstrating its commitment to high-quality U.S. patents, Microsoft has submitted a just-published patent application to the USPTO for Automatic Goodbye Messages. By automatically sending messages like 'Have a great afternoon!', 'Sorry, I have got to go!', 'Have a terrific day!', 'Ciao, Harry!', or even a simple 'Bye!' at the end of an IM session, Microsoft explains, one avoids insulting a converser with whom a conversation is ended. Hopefully the USPTO will give this one the quick buh-bye it deserves."

Submission + - Vista not as ready for modern desktop as Linux? 1

Submitted by

Pr0xY

on Wednesday October 31, 2007 @11:06PM

Pr0xY writes: "Recently I purchased my new "gaming rig." So I decided to just go for and loaded up a new Dell XPS 720 with the works. Among other things, I got 4GB of RAM. To my (and many others according to google) surprise, x86 Vista only reports 3 and change GB of RAM.
I do some systems programming, so I had a clue as to what was going on, my first reaction was "PAE must not be enabled." Here's what's going on. With traditional paging, there is 4GB of physical address space available to a 32-bit x86 processor. This includes memory mapped devices, for example, your shiny new video card with 768 Megs of RAM takes up that much space of physical RAM your system can use. The solution is to use either PAE or PSE36, both provide up to 64GB of physical memory to a 32-bit x86 system. The limit of what you can map into memory at a time is still 4GB, but this allows motherboards to relocate the RAM that got displaced by hardware above the 4GB and still be usable.
However, it turns out that first of all, Vista automatically enables PAE if you want DEP since it is necessary for the NX bit. And in addition to that, Microsoft deliberately doesn't use RAM above the 4GB mark even with PAE for "compatibility reasons." The main issue being that DMA can't touch RAM higher than 4GB on x86. Microsoft could have easily had a special pool for this "high memory" in order to make some use of it when you know it's safe. This isn't impractical as the server editions of Windows are in fact able to use upwards of 4GB on 32-bit systems as well.
Linux has no issue using all 4GB of my RAM once I build my kernel with PAE support. Microsoft also claims that they support 4GB of RAM in their documentation. All in all, I find this whole thing to be a bit deceptive on Microsoft's part. Microsoft's solution: "Get Vista x86-64""

Submission + - Fossil of New Whale Specis Rescued by Amateurs (theworldlink.com)

Submitted by

Kreigh

on Wednesday October 31, 2007 @10:44PM

Kreigh writes: "A team of amateur fossil hunters and rockhounds discovered a fossil whale in the tidal zone of Coos Bay, OR. Preliminary study indicates a new genus and species of whale in this probably eight million year old fossil. They rescued the eight foot long fossil from the rock in the Bay and plan on preparing it for exhibit at a Museum. You can find additional pictures here if you scroll down the page to the 'NARG Fossil Point Whale Skull Search & Rescue' link."

Submission + - BBC tech head: "BBC not in bed with Bill Gates (tech.co.uk) 1

Submitted by whoever57 on Wednesday October 31, 2007 @05:36PM

whoever57 writes: According to the BBC's head of technology, there are only a small number of Linux visitors to the BBC's website and this is the reason that the BBC's iPlayer only supports Windows XP Why he expects a large number of Linux based visitors to his site when the media downloads are Windows XP only is not clear. He also thinks that "Launching a software service to every platform simultaneously would have been launch suicide", despite the example of many major sites that support Linux (even if this is through the closed source flash player). How the small number of Linux visitors could cause "suicide" is not explained. Most software processes envisage launching to a select group first, then working out the bugs, then making it available to the largest group.

Submission + - Viacom Wants Industry Wide Copyright Filter (pcworld.com)

Submitted by slashqwerty on Sunday October 21, 2007 @01:30AM

slashqwerty writes: Unsatisfied with the proprietary copyright filter Google recently unveiled, Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman has called for an industry standard to filter copyrighted material. Mr. Dauman has the backing of Microsoft, Disney, and Universal. "They reflect the fact that there ought to be a filtering system in place on the part of technology companies," he noted. "Most responsible companies have followed that path. What no one wants is a proprietary system that benefits one company. It is a big drain to a company like ours to have to deal with incompatible systems." How would an industry standard impact freedom of speech and in particular censorship on the internet? How would it affect small, independent web sites?

Slashdot 10-Year Anniversary Charity Auction for the EFF 327

Posted by CmdrTaco on Monday October 15, 2007 @01:02PM from the time-for-fall-cleaning dept.

As part of our 10-Year anniversary, we've decided to have a little charity auction, with the cash going to the EFF. The items currently up for bidding are 'Triton' (the big old tower case from the first x86 used to host Slashdot from Feb 11 1998 through much of 1999... picture is attached to the story if you're curious). A low numbered UID (3 or maybe 2 digits!) so you can win those stupid low UID pissing match threads. Your URL plugged in the story where we announce the auction winners. Oh the fame! The Slashdot Grab Bag: We're putting stuff around the office in a box- random t-shirts, hats, even an old Nokia NGage. The mystery box could contain anything that we stuff in the box before the contest ends... there's a picture of what we have so far attached. A copy of the watchmen trade paperback singed in Hemos's 1999 house fire. An @slashdot.org email alias (tasteful names only ;) The auctions will be running for like 10 days, and we'll post the results when they come up.

Submission + - Canadian penny to cost Toronto $47,680 4

Submitted by owlgorithm on Tuesday October 09, 2007 @12:31AM

owlgorithm writes: The Royal Canadian Mint is demanding the city of Toronto pay $47,680 for using a picture of a Canadian penny in campaign advertisements for setting aside money for municipalities. The mint is also seeking compensation for the city's use of the phrase "one cent" in the campaign.

Submission + - HP Linux credit on new Compaq laptop

Submitted by OTDR on Thursday October 04, 2007 @08:07PM

OTDR writes: Looking for a first laptop for my son, the HP/Compaq V6500Z caught my attention for its combination of features and price. Unfortunately when I went through the online custom configuration process on HP's Online Store there were no options to select any OS other than Vista. I'd already decided to use Fedora 7, KDE, & Open Office and wished not to have to purchase two pieces of software I didn't want and would never use (Vista & MS Works). Unfortunately, that was the only way to complete the purchase, it was late, I was tired, so I just went ahead and did it.

The laptop arrived today and as I unpacked it I thought more and more of the waste — so I called the support number on the card packed in the box before I broke any of the inner packing seals. I explained to the first rep very politely I was inquiring about possible options for returning the OS for refund or credit as (a) I never wanted to buy it and (b) had no need or plan to use it. Rep One transferred me to Rep Two in pre-sales support to whom I made the same polite request. Rep Two apologized about being unable to help being in pre-sales but transferred me to Rep Three. I explained again to Rep Three that, as I had no need or intended use for Vista a refund, or at least a credit of some sort usable at the HP Online Store, seemed reasonable to ask for. I was pleasantly surprised when asked, "What were you interested in purchasing with your credit?" In the end, within less than 10 minutes we politely negotiated a $70 credit (fair enough) which I used to pick up an 80GB pocket drive. The rep was even kind enough to point out that if we added a $19 memory stick I'd qualify for free shipping and save $11 (so I got a memstick for $8 to boot).

Now here's the catch — Rep Three did explain that installation of any operating system other than the pre-configured Vista would void the 1-yr warranty on the computer, a gamble I said I would take. I've seen this discussed before on Slashdot but really don't fault HP. Wacked-out power & thermal management can wreak havoc on hardware. So long as I get through first boot I think I'll be OK. I didn't have high expectations (or any really) of having any recourse getting rid of Vista but the HP reps were pleasant to deal with and the entire process took less than 15 minutes. In the end, I spent $38 dollars (after tax) but got a fair shake on a couple of useful items, which was better than paying for something I'd never use. Kudos to HP and I hope it's not overly optimistic to see this as perhaps the leading edge of greater acceptance of the non-MS community.

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