Bright Apollo - Slashdot User

Windows 7 To Be Released Next Year? 561

Posted by Zonk on Tuesday January 22, 2008 @09:40AM from the that's-mighty-fast dept.

KrispySausage writes "A recently-released roadmap for the next major Window release — Windows 7 — indicates that Microsoft is planning to release the new operating system in the second half of 2009, rather than the anticipated release date of some time in 2010. This quickly-approaching release date would seem to be at least partially verified by news of a milestone build available for review by an anonymous third party." We've previously discussed the upcoming new OS version, as well as its danger to Vista.

Microsoft Unveils Virtualization Strategy 141

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday January 22, 2008 @05:28AM from the getting-all-hyper dept.

billstewart writes "The Wall Street Journal reports that Microsoft will be announcing a virtualization strategy on Tuesday. Of course there's plenty of focus on the competition with VMware, including the obligatory reference to Microsoft's entry into the browser wars prior to cutting off Netscape's air supply. The pieces of the picture will include: an alliance with Citrix Systems, owners of XenSource; acquisition of privately held Calista Technologies of San Jose, which has software that speeds up the performance of applications running in a virtualized environment; and lower price for Windows Vista used on virtualized computers. Microsoft also reversed its earlier position and will now allow the Home Basic and Home Premium versions of Vista to run under virtualization. The company confirmed its plans to deliver its Hyper-V hypervisor within six months of the launch of Windows Server 2008 (betas available now), which is expected this quarter."

IBM Won't Open-Source OS/2 394

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday January 22, 2008 @02:02AM from the big-blue-meanies dept.

wikinerd writes "Following an online petition in November 2007 by members of an OS/2 online community to open-source OS/2, IBM answered by sending a letter via FedEx making it clear that OS/2 is going to remain closed-source, citing business, technical, and legal reasons. An earlier petition in 2005 that had attracted over 11,000 signatures met a similar response. Both petition letters to IBM Corp. can be viewed at the OS2World.com library. The End of Support period for OS/2 passed by in December 2006, and the given IBM's response the future for OS/2 doesn't look bright, unless re-implementation projects such as Voyager or osFree attract the necessary critical mass of operating system developers."

Open Source DRM Solutions? 369

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday January 22, 2008 @12:28AM from the using-the-force-for-good dept.

Feint writes "I'm working on an business platform for inter-company collaboration based on an open source software stack. As part of that platform I would like to integrate some sort of digital rights management for the documents in the system. The vast majority of articles about DRM are focused how good or evil it is to apply DRM to digital music or video. I haven't seen many articles address open source solutions for protecting business data like CAD / MS Office / PDF / etc. documents, which is a real need in business today. Can the Slashdot readership suggest some open source DRM offerings other than the Sun DReaM initiative, which hasn't had a release since Jan. 2007?"

Maryland Scraps Diebold Voting System 209

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday January 21, 2008 @05:42PM from the long-overdue dept.

beadfulthings writes "After eight years and some $65 million, the state of Maryland is taking its first steps to return to an accountable, paper-ballot based voting system. Governor Martin O'Malley has announced an initial outlay of $6.5 million towards the $20 million cost of an optical system which will scan and tally the votes while the paper ballots are retained as a backup. The new (or old) system is expected to be in place by 2010 — or four years before the state finishes paying off the bill for the touch-screen system."

Spore, Call of Duty 4 Confirmed for OSX 125

Posted by Zonk on Wednesday January 16, 2008 @03:30PM from the we'll-make-gamers-out-of-you-yet dept.

1up is reporting that, along with the big announcements from yesterday's MacWorld event, the welcome news trickles down that OSX will be getting some more games. The much-delayed Spore has been confirmed for the platform, as has the hit FPS title Call of Duty 4. "In Spore's case, the magic of cross-platform portability is achieved through the use of a special software layer supplied by Toronto-based TransGaming Technologies. This software is capable of interpreting hardware calls to Windows DirectX into Mac-capable instructions. Through use of this technology, Electronic Arts (and others) seem hopeful about bringing even more games to mac in the coming months."

How Much is Your Right to Vote Worth? 857

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday November 15, 2007 @08:56AM from the how-much-are-you-offering dept.

Attila Dimedici writes "Two thirds of the students at NYU would give up their right to vote in the next election for a full scholarship. Some would be satisfied with an ipod. A few would be willing to give up the right for the rest of their lives for one million dollars."

Submission + - AMD Radeon RV670 Preview and Benchmarks (firingsquad.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 15, 2007 @08:43AM

An anonymous reader writes: AMD's RV670 GPU is finally here in the form of the Radeon HD 3800 series. The Radeon 3870 and 3850 feature 320 stream processors, DirectX 10.1 and PCI Express 2.0 support, as well as 4-Way CrossFire. FiringSquad takes these two new boards and compares them with NVIDIA's latest lineup such as the GeForce 8800 Ultra and GeForce 8800 GT using the latest benchmarks.

Submission + - Apple's options for nixing open source iPhone use

Submitted by BobB on Friday September 21, 2007 @09:05AM

BobB writes: Although Apple's Steve Jobs has declared war on iPhone hackers, no one knows for certain how he plans to stop them. One of the options open to Apple is to file lawsuits against hackers under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which was passed in 1998 to ban the use of any devices that can be used to circumvent digital rights management systems. http://www.networkworld.com/news/2007/092007-apple-stop-open-source-iphone.html

Submission + - Antarctic ice sheet melt accelerating 1

Submitted by OriginalArlen on Friday September 21, 2007 @09:00AM

OriginalArlen writes: The rapidly diminishing extent of Arctic sea-ice has been widely covered here and elsewhere. Now NASA scientists using satellite data have published a paper in 'Science' demonstrating increased melting around the margins (mostly) of the Antarctic ice sheet. This is potentially much more serious, as the margins act as barriers, preventing the much larger land-borne ice-sheets sliding off the continent into the sea — causing a catastrophic 4-6m rise in sea-levels.

Submission + - Hobbits from Flores older than man (news.com.au)

Submitted by microphobe on Friday September 21, 2007 @08:47AM

microphobe writes: According to an article in the Australian today, New evidence has been brought forward supporting the theory of a "hobbit" like race of the human species that lived on the Indonesian island of Flores, in addition to this that they predate the common ancestor of Neanderthals and Man. http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,22455206-30417,00.html

Submission + - Revolutionary New Algorithm for Photo Editing (prweb.com)

Submitted by

Zach Stevens

on Tuesday July 10, 2007 @01:46PM

Zach Stevens writes: "A UC Berkeley PhD student and another who graduated with his bachelors in Computer Science have developed a revolutionary new online photo editing suite called PhotoFlexer. The program uses a new statistical approach to locate pixels and modify images with the help of a proprietary new algorithm designed by the team of two. The program just had it's press launch and it's already making waves in the industry. It works as a standalone app and a Facebook plugin. Our growth is already dwarfing that of our largest competitor — Picnik. We've had more users in our few days of release than has our competitor. If you're interested in writing a piece on FotoFlexer and the new technology behind it, please email me at Zach@arborlabs.com, or call me at (909) 717-3732 and I can give you a lot more information and set you up with a bunch of graphics, examples of our work, etc. Thanks."

Submission + - Project "Cloverfield" Trailer Released

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 10, 2007 @01:42PM

An anonymous reader writes: The enigmatic trailer shown in theaters preceding Transformers has been released. The movie, only known by its code name "Cloverfield," features a farewell party in New York city that is quickly interrupted by an earthquake. After a fiery explosion on the city's skyline, it is apparent that the culprit is some sort of malicious creature, although it remains offscreen. To further fuel hype and eerie feelings, the film is given no title. Little is known other than it is produced by J.J. Abrams and will be released 1-18-08; there wasn't even a record of it on imdb before last week. Equally puzzling is the film's website, and its alleged connection to the even more puzzling ethanhaaswasright.com. Fan speculation has ranged from an alien invasion to a Cthulhu adaptation.

Submission + - Spammers haven't solved CAPTCHA after all

Submitted by on Tuesday July 10, 2007 @01:40PM

An anonymous reader writes: According to New Scientist's Technology blog, spammers probably haven't figured out how to defeat CAPTCHAs at all, despite recent reports suggesting they had. It seems that the Trojan program credited with creates free email accounts by 'overcoming' CAPTCAs actually just copies each CAPTCHA and sends it off somewhere else for processing. The CAPTCHA is indeed solved, but the process may well be done done manually. And at least one CAPTCHA expert things the speed with which it works — 500 accounts an hour — suggests a person is doing it.

Submission + - World eBook Fair hits 3/4 million free books (worldebookfair.com)

Submitted by

gbn

on Tuesday July 10, 2007 @01:34PM

gbn writes: "This might be the biggest single assembly of free electronic content ever. Last year there were 1/2 million free eBooks. This year from July 4 — August 4 there are 3/4 million free eBooks, from collections including the Internet Archive, Digital Pulp Publishing, and of course Project Gutenberg. Mostly in PDF format, these titles are free to download, share, print, read, etc. The average public only has about 10,000 books. The World eBook Fair is your opportunity to have your own personal library, on your computer. Browse and download from over 125 collections at worldebookfair.com/"

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