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Submission + - Pixar Releases Free Version of RenderMan

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: A year ago the animation studio Pixar promised its RenderMan animation and rendering suite to eventually become free for non-commercial use. This was originally scheduled to happen in the SIGGRAPH 2014 computer graphics conference, but things got delayed. Nevertheless, today Pixar is releasing the free version into wild. Free non-commercial RenderMan can be used for research, education, evaluation, plug-in development, and any personal projects that do not generate commercial profits. This version is fully featured, without a watermark or any kind of artificial limits. Featuring Pixar's new RIS technology, RenderMan delivers extremely fast global illumination and interactive shading and lighting for artists. The software is available for Mac, Linux and Windows. In conjunction with the release, Pixar has also launched a new RenderMan Community site where users can exchange knowledge and resources, showcase their own work, share assets such as shaders and scripts, and learn about RenderMan from tutorials.

Submission + - Finland To Fly "Open Skies" Surveillance Flight Over Russia (sputniknews.com)

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: Inspectors from Finland will conduct an observation flight on March 23-27 over the Russian territory within the framework of the Treaty on Open Skies. During the flight that will be conducted along the mutually agreed route, Russian specialists on board of the aircraft will ensure strict compliance with the agreed flight schedule and monitor the use of the equipment stipulated by the treaty. The flight will be conducted on a Swedish SAAB 340 observation aircraft that is not equipped with any weaponry. Both the plane and the equipment installed in it have been examined by the international inspection, including Russian specialists. The treaty on Open Skies is designed to enhance mutual understanding by allowing unarmed aerial surveillance flights over the territories of its 34 current member states.

Submission + - Finland's Education System Supersedes "Subjects" With "Topics" (independent.co.uk)

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: Finland is about to embark on one of the most radical education reform programmes ever undertaken by a nation state – scrapping traditional "teaching by subject" in favour of "teaching by topic". The motivation to do this is to prepare people better for working life. For instance, a teenager studying a vocational course might take "cafeteria services" lessons, which would include elements of maths, languages, writing skills and communication skills. More academic pupils would be taught cross-subject topics such as the European Union — which would merge elements of economics, history, languages and geography. There will also be a more collaborative teaching approach, with pupils working in smaller groups to solve problems while improving their communication skills.

Submission + - Chinese Vice Premier Says Rapid Growth Isn't What Economy Needs (bloomberg.com)

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: China doesn't need the rapid economic growth of the past and will instead focus on tasks including returning the blue to Beijing's skies, said Zhang Gaoli, a member of the seven-man Politburo Standing Committee, the nation’s top decision-making body. "It is both impossible and unnecessary to maintain the very high growth of the past. We've paid the price for that. It's not sustainable." China's growth has cooled as officials rein in local-government debt, crack down on graft and strengthen environmental laws after economic expansion averaged about 10% annually over 30 years. Premier Li Keqiang's targeted gain of about 7% in gross domestic product this year would be the smallest increase since 1990, and the growth rate is bound to slow even further. President Xi Jinping and other leaders describe the slowdown as a new normal and a higher quality of expansion. China's advantages have also weakened because labor costs have increased, Zhang reminded.

Comment Re:How are HTML5, CSS and JS not proprietary? (Score 2, Informative) 95

by BitZtream (#49308989) Attached to: South Korea Begins To Deprecate ActiveX

I've written many ActiveX controls, some for use in a browser, some not.

At no point was I required to sign or agree to a license to do so.

You can make ActiveX controls with any compiler that supports WIndows and will create DLLs with C++ calling conventions that match the MS style ... So pretty much all Of them.

ActiveX is no different than XPCOM ... Which is at the very core of Firefox, it's just a convention for generic, self describing plugins and is fully publicly documented.

The only insightful thing about your post is that slashdot has fallen to the point that this sort of ignorance is so commonplace that you got modded to +5

Submission + - South Korea Begins To Deprecate ActiveX

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: The reliance on proprietary technologies to deliver web services varies from country to country. South Korea's ActiveX problem has been in the news before. Yonhap brings us a short report that the government plans to finally start cleaning up this troublesome technology from public websites later this month, as Korea gears up to create a more friendly Internet environment. The country's online financial websites and shopping malls often use ActiveX to have their payments and identification programs securely downloaded to users' personal computers.

Submission + - Greenpeace co-founder: Why I am a Climate Change Skeptic (heartland.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Dr. Patrick Moore is the co-founder, chair, and chief scientist of Greenspirit Strategies I am skeptical humans are the main cause of climate change and that it will be catastrophic in the near future. There is no scientific proof of this hypothesis, yet we are told “the debate is over” and “the science is settled.”

My skepticism begins with the believers’ certainty they can predict the global climate with a computer model. The entire basis for the doomsday climate change scenario is the hypothesis increased atmospheric carbon dioxide due to fossil fuel emissions will heat the Earth to unlivable temperatures.

In fact, the Earth has been warming very gradually for 300 years, since the Little Ice Age ended, long before heavy use of fossil fuels. Prior to the Little Ice Age, during the Medieval Warm Period, Vikings colonized Greenland and Newfoundland, when it was warmer there than today. And during Roman times, it was warmer, long before fossil fuels revolutionized civilization.

Submission + - DuckDuckGo Donates $100,000 Among Four FOSS Projects

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: As the search engine company's annual habit, DuckDuckGo has chosen to advance four open source projects by donating them. The primary focus this year was to support FOSS projects that bring privacy tools to anyone who needs them. $25,000 goes to The Freedom of the Press Foundation to support SecureDrop, which is an whistleblower submission used to securely accept documents from anonymous sources. Electronic Frontier Foundation was given $25,000 to support PrivacyBadger, which is a browser add-on that stops advertisers and other third-party trackers from secretly tracking your surfing habits. Another $25,000 arrives at GPGTools to support GPG Suite, which is a software package for OS X that encrypts files or messages. Finally $25,000 was donated to Riseup to support Tails, which is a live operating system that aims at preserving your privacy and anonymity.

Submission + - OEMs Allowed To Lock Secure Boot In Windows 10 Computers (arstechnica.com) 1

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: Hardware that sports the "Designed for Windows 8" logo requires machines to support UEFI Secure Boot. When the feature is enabled, the core software components used to boot the machine are verified for correct cryptographic signatures, or the system refuses to boot. This is a desirable security feature, because it protects from malware sneaking into the boot process. However, it has an issue for alternative operating systems, because it's likely they won't have a signature that Secure Boot will authorize. No worries, because Microsoft also mandated that every system must have a UEFI configuraton setting to turn the protection off, allowing booting other operating systems. This situation is bound to change now. At its WinHEC hardware conference in Shenzhen, China, Microsoft said that the setting to allow Secure Boot to be turned off will become optional when Windows 10 arrives. Hardware can be "Designed for Windows 10", and offer no way to opt out of the Secure Boot lock down. The choice to provide the setting or not, will be up to the original equipment manufacturer.

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