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Perl

Linux, Apache, Perl, X10, Webcams... and Christmas Lights 30

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the blinkenlights dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Clement Moore writes

'Twas the night before Christmas,
and while not a creature was stirring (not even an optical mouse),
/.'ers were posting & moderating with squeals of delight.
When out on the Internet there arose such a clatter,
I sprang from my keyboard to see what was the matter.
I knew in a moment it must be Alek's Controllable Christmas Lights Webcam.
But remembered in previous years it was a hoax - /. said damn.
And then, in a twinkling, I realize Alek has done it for real — W'OH!
With 20,000 lights plus giant inflatable Elmo, Frosty, Santa, SpongeBob, and Homer Simpson — D'OH!
The X10 controls and 3 live webcams provide such clarity,
that it has raised over $70,000 for Celiac charity.
'Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!'"
Android

Samsung Appeals Apple's Injunction Against Galaxy Nexus 217

Posted by samzenpus from the the-circle-is-complete dept.
It will come as no surprise that Samsung has filed an appeal in response to the injunction granted to Apple against the Galaxy Nexus phone in the U.S.. From the article: "The motion, filed with the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, seeks a stay of the injunction for the duration of the appeal. U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh ordered the preliminary injunction on Friday, granting a motion Apple made in February that alleged Samsung infringed on several of its patents. The injunction, which would keep the Samsung device from being sold in stores in the U.S., can go into effect as soon as Apple posts a bond of nearly $96 million."
Open Source

Evaluating the Harmful Effects of Closed Source Software 490

Posted by Soulskill from the probably-causes-cancer dept.
New submitter Drinking Bleach writes "Eric Raymond, coiner of the term 'open source' and co-founder of the Open Source Initiative, writes in detail about how to evaluate the effects of running any particular piece of closed source software and details the possible harms of doing so. Ranking limited firmware as the least kind of harm to full operating systems as potentially the greatest harms, he details his reasoning for all of them. Likewise, Richard Stallman, founder of GNU and the Free Software Foundation, writes about a much more limited scope, Nonfree DRM'd games on GNU/Linux, in which he takes the firm stance that non-free software is unethical in all cases but concedes that running non-free games on a free operating system is much more desirable than running them on a non-free operating system itself (such as Microsoft Windows or Apple Mac OS X)."

Comment Re:Profit! (Score 1) 159

by El Lobo (#39597621) Attached to: Larry Page Issues Public Update On Google Changes

And more... I'll tell you a thing Larry. Stop trying to stick G+ up our ...

Yesterday I was checking my AdSense account. On the first page I got a "reminder" this BIG: Have you already gotten a G+ account? That will help you maximize your ads profits, blah blah... Yes Larry I already HAVE one G+ account (that I have used once or twice to just check it out and see what its greatness is). Didn't see the greatness anywhere.

Oh and stop bothering me with it on my Analytics account as well.
Software

Ask Slashdot: It's World Backup Day; How Do You Back Up? 304

Posted by timothy from the hope-and-luck dept.
MrSeb writes "Today is World Backup Day! The premise is that you back up your computers on March 31, so that you're not an April Fool if your hard drive crashes tomorrow. How do Slashdot users back up? RAID? Multiple RAIDs? If you're in LA, on a fault line, do you keep a redundant copy of your data in another geographic region?"
The Military

Tensions Over Hormuz Raise Ugly Possibilities For War 969

Posted by timothy from the good-time-to-be-ex-navy dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "The high stakes standoff between Iran and the U.S. over the Strait of Hormuz, the passageway for one-fifth of the world's oil, escalated this week as Iran's navy claimed to have recorded video of a U.S. aircraft carrier entering the Port of Oman and the deputy chief of Iran's Revolutionary Guard Hossein Salami rejected U.S. claims that it could prevent Iran from closing the strait. To drive the point home, Iran has started a 10-day naval exercise in the Persian Gulf to show off how it could use small speedboats and a barrage of missiles to combat America's naval armada while in a report for the Naval War College, U.S. Navy Commander Daniel Dolan wrote that Iran has acquired 'thousands of sea mines, wake homing torpedoes, hundreds of advanced cruise missiles (PDF) and possibly more than one thousand small Fast Attack Craft and Fast Inshore Attack Craft.'" (Read more, below.)

Comment Re:KDE ripoff? (Score 2, Insightful) 241

by El Lobo (#38433408) Attached to: New Qt Based Desktop Environment

And say what you want about Windows: Windows interface is to this moment unsurpassed in it's functionality and simplicity (at leat the classical 95/2000 on which KDE is based). OSXs finder with all it's annoyances and ,,so shiny/no content,, is, unfortunately gaining terrain with copycats (god save us).
Firefox

Firefox 9 Released, JavaScript Performance Greatly Improved 330

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the and-they-say-functional-programming-is-useless dept.
MrSeb writes "Firefox 9 is now available — but unlike its previous rapid release forebears where not a lot changed, a huge feature has landed with the new version: the JavaScript engine now has type inference enabled. This simple switch has resulted in a 20-30% JS execution speed increase (PDF), putting JaegerMonkey back in line with Chrome's V8 engine, and even pulling ahead in some cases. If you switched away from Firefox to IE or Chrome for improved JS performance, now is probably the time to give Firefox another shot."

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