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Comment windows binary compatibility? (Score 1) 466

by loki_tiwaz (#33856506) Attached to: Indian Military Organization To Develop Its Own OS

there is several projects aimed at running windows binaries, one of them being an NT clone, dos clones already exist and can be made to run windows dll's on top for an olde worlde windows, and of course wine. i personally hope what it will involve is a bsd core running a customised and advanced wine fork, i mean, considering brazil and several other countries are going linux and open source it would be stupid of them to not collaborate with their fellow rising industrial stars like brazil who iirc are moving their government IT over to open source. a 99.9% binary compatible framework to run windows apps would be beneficial for everyone who is not NATO, indeed i can imagine some of the more client-agnostic big tech contractors who help build military stuff would love to be able to sell their windows-targeted software to someone else... brazil, india and russia at least would all be interested, china is too closed to alliances in any way but who knows, if india gets their project off the ground and achieve their goal.

remember, a lot of those windows programs are now partially developed by indians... if anyone can make a fully binary compatible windows environment, it's india. they've been doing so much of american-based multinational corporations' development already they have a rich developer skills base.
Social Networks

Submission + - 71% of 1.2 billion Twitter "tweets" are ignored (sysomos.com) 1

Submitted by destinyland
destinyland writes: 1.2 billion Twitter "tweets" were analyzed over two months by analytics company Sysomos, who concluded that a whopping 71% of them got no reaction whatsover — no online responses, and no Twitter "retweets". "Only a small number of users actually have the ability to engage on Twitter in a significant way," the researchers conclude, noting that just 6% of Twitter's status updates ever get retweeted (while 23% get a reply). And among those status updates, 85% have exactly one response, while only 1.53% of Twitter conversations are more than three levels deep — where a reply receives a response which then generates a second reply. "If a tweet is not retweeted in the first hour, it is very likely that it will not be retweeted," the researchers conclude, noting that 92% of all retweets only happen within the first hour (versus just 1.63% during the second hour). But one technology reporter suggests flaws in their sample of 1.2 billion public Twitter messages. "Presumably these don't include those made by people who only allow their tweets to be seen by selected users," the reporter argues, adding that the study overlooks the possibility of conversations continuing via Twitter's private "direct messages", or that follow-up conversation may occur privately via e-mail.
Science

Submission + - 90 Percent Of Human Being Not Human (sciencedaily.com)

Submitted by
drmattnd
drmattnd writes: "Scientists at the National Institutes of Health recently published an analysis of 178 genomes from microbes that live in or on the human body, and have plans to expand their reference collection to nearly a thousand genomes.

Dubbed the human microbiome, this set of fungi, bacteria, and viruses are known to outnumber human cells 10 to 1 and play a critical role in health and disease. According to Human Microbiome Project leader Francis S. Collins, M.D., Ph.D. "We are only at the very beginning of a fascinating voyage that will transform how we diagnose, treat and ultimately, prevent many health conditions."

Published in the May 21 issue of the journal Science, "this initial work lays the foundation for this ambitious project and is critical for understanding the role that the microbiome plays in human health and disease," says Collins."

Submission + - Windows 7 update installs stealth WAT 7

Submitted by unassimilatible
unassimilatible writes: A Windows 7 update released on 9/30, KB2158563, claims to "resolve issues caused by revised daylight saving time and time zone laws in several countries. This update enables your computer to automatically adjust the computer clock on the correct date in 2010." The part not mentioned by Microsoft is that KB2158563 is a Trojan, the stealth payload being a WAT (Windows Activation Technologies) update that sniffs out cracked versions of Windows 7, and declares them not genuine, complete with black screen. Looks like MS is up to its old tricks again.
Security

Submission + - Government Randomly X-Raying Citizens (counterpunch.org)

Submitted by shahidg
shahidg writes: You might want to think twice about going out the door from now on. Homeland Security is apparently now performing random x-rays on highways, border crossings and even city streets. The public can only hope that these random and uncontrolled doses of radiation being unknowingly administered on them will not cause any serious health effects.

Submission + - Plan to curb free software in EU (javier-carrete.com) 1

Submitted by bodski
bodski writes: "Wikileaks has posted a file showing a plan to curb the free software in Europe.
This file shows that Jonathan Zuck, president of Association for Competitive Technology (ACT) –an organization with close ties to Microsoft–, and founder of Americans for Technology Leadership, had influenced the change of working documents of the European Union.
That lobbies to exert pressure against the government institutions under their interests no doubt, and this document published by Wikileaks is clearly demonstrated.
The document in question is a work project developed by experts from the European Commission. This document has been modified by the ACT and Comptia organizations that have been percolating in several working groups."

Wikileaks link to file: http://wikileaks.org/wiki/European_Commission_OSS_Strategy_Draft,_Mar_2009?TB_iframe=1&width=1000&height=540
Scribd copy: http://www.scribd.com/doc/38773615/Towards-a-European-Software-Strategy

Submission + - GitFight compares user's GitHub contributions (bloople.net)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: When you're browsing GitHub, you often come across new and interesting projects and the people behind them — visiting their profile page shows you plenty of information about their projects. But what the profile doesn't tell you is how popular they, and their projects are as a whole — how known, trusted, and interesting they are.

But how to determine this? Gauging trust and quality is difficult for a computer to do.

GitHub users don't live in vacuums — they are linked to other users through followers and repo watchers, and of course repo forks. This social data can be used to estimate a user's quality and trustworthiness, and also their volume of output.

Git Fight! combines a user's GitHub data into a single score which you can use to compare users.

Submission + - Neural Responses Indicate Our Willingness to Help

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Witnessing a person from our own group or an outsider suffer pain causes neural responses in two very different regions of the brain. And, the specific region activated reveals whether or not we will help the person in need. Researchers at the University of Zurich studied the brain responses of soccer fans and now have neurobiological evidence for why we are most willing to help members of our own group.

Submission + - Amazon Quietly Censoring Bookcovers 1

Submitted by Nom du Keyboard
Nom du Keyboard writes: It seems that Amazon has embarked on a new policy of quiet bookcover censorship. It's possible that they were spooked by this hit piece in Slate, or there may be some other reason, but bookcovers featuring even tasteful nudity have been removed from the "All Departments" general search. Of course they never made this a public announcement; books just started disappearing from their general search without notice. Authors and publishers are being left with two choices: 1) Redo the cover to remove the nudity. 2) Have your title relegated to only Erotica searches for now. Their alleged excuse is that some minor might accidentally stumble upon an offending cover, but this seems to overlook the obvious fact that even with the cover changed Amazon is still selling the same unaltered content to that, or any other, purchaser. And is this only the first step for them? So far this hasn't apparently spread to other eTailers such as Fictionwise, making it possible to compare erotic titles on the two sites and see the Amazon required censorship in the changed cover art. So how do you feel about Amazon setting these rules for everyone?
Science

Submission + - Why Geim never patented graphene (nature.com)

Submitted by gbrumfiel
gbrumfiel writes: Andre Geim won this year's Nobel prize in physics for graphene, but he never patented it. In an interview with Nature News, he explains why

We considered patenting; we prepared a patent and it was nearly filed. Then I had an interaction with a big, multinational electronics company. I approached a guy at a conference and said, "We've got this patent coming up, would you be interested in sponsoring it over the years?" It's quite expensive to keep a patent alive for 20 years. The guy told me, "We are looking at graphene, and it might have a future in the long term. If after ten years we find it's really as good as it promises, we will put a hundred patent lawyers on it to write a hundred patents a day, and you will spend the rest of your life, and the gross domestic product of your little island, suing us." That's a direct quote.
Software

Submission + - OpenSearchServer 1.2 beta is available (sourceforge.net)

Submitted by ekeller
ekeller writes: OpenSearchServer unveils the 1.2 beta release. This new version add more than 40 new features: Index replication, n-grams filter and shingle filter (suggestion box, wrong spelling tolerance, automated topics generation), a database crawler supporting join queries and external files, an API and Web interface for monitoring and supervision, an audio parser with meta data extraction fro Torrent, MP3/MP4, OGG Vorbis, FLAC and WMA files.

Submission + - !@#$%Office in

Submitted by jjohn_h
jjohn_h writes: So it is official in the meantime: Oracle is not going to co-operate with The Document Foundation:

http://practical-tech.com/development/the-openoffice-fork-is-officially-here/#more-3153

That's fine, Oracle, good riddance. But how is the successor to OpenOffice going to survive with a name like !@#$%Office in the namespace of this universe? You can see, I even refuse to spell it out. The recent Slashdot discussion has certainly shown that everybody and his cat dislike the name.

So what can be done about it? Well, let's start a Slashdot contest for an appealing name to the product. And also let's ask The Document Foundation and have the bright guys who came up with that name explain what they are expecting from it.

It is urgent. Another couple of weeks and the chance for a new name to a real free office suite will have passed (free as in freedom). Yes, Slashdot, please, you can give me bad karma but let this post run.

Submission + - Smart Phones that Know Their Users by How They Wal

Submitted by mirgens
mirgens writes: Technology review has a short article on new work on doing gait analysis with the accelerometers built into many smart phones. The work was done at the Norwegian Information Security Laboratory ("Nislab"). The need for more security on mobile devices is increasing with new functionalities and features made available. To improve the device security Nislab proposed gait recognition as a protection mechanism — in other words, if somebody else walks away with your phone, it locks up. While previous work on gait recognition used video sources, for instance to identify people in airports or secure buildings, the Nislab researchers collected the gait data using a Google G1 phone containing the AK8976A embedded accelerometer.

Submission + - Should the Patent Authority be Outlawed

Submitted by previewlounge
previewlounge writes: Amazon patented the "one-click" purchase button .. or system ... or technique ...

Is this a methodology? Is this an intellectual property? If so, who cares? Amazon does, and so do hundreds of thousands of patent applicants applying for their own patents.

Facebook has patented the GPS-based social network function of "automatically locating web-based social network members".
Facebook did not develop GPS systems, and neither did Amazon develop the system of commerce, the system of purchasing at shops.
To purchase by clicking one button is common sense. To allow a patent on this, is (imho) an offense against society and commerce.

Where does common sense start and commercially enforceable "ownership" begin?

If a patent is granted, a wide range of implications accompany this; most importantly for general populations, the implications are financial ... and creative.

This Patent Authority who gives out these patents is supported by law, however if the general good of society is being compromised, should the systems and methods be allowed to be patented? Should the international network of Patent and Trademark Offices be outlawed?

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