Forgot your password?

Close
typodupeerror
Space

Nexus S Phone Floats to Edge of Space->

Submitted by reillymj
reillymj writes "A bunch of Google engineers and grad students gathered in California's Central Valley to to launch the Nexus S phone to the edge of space using weather balloons. While up there, the phones ran Google Map, SkyMaps, and a bunch of other apps, to see how the phones would fare in a freezing cold, near vacuum. The stunt was just for fun — the latest in a recent fad of launching DIY smartphone 'stratellites' — but one of the Nexus S product managers hinted that big G is talking with a European space contractor about building small "commodity" satellites around the phone's core processing unit."
Link to Original Source
The Internet

Why I'm Posting Bail Money for Julian Assange-> 3

Submitted by digitaldc
digitaldc writes "Yesterday, in the Westminster Magistrates Court in London, the lawyers for WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange presented to the judge a document from me stating that I have put up $20,000 of my own money to help bail Mr. Assange out of jail.

Furthermore, I (Michael Moore) am publicly offering the assistance of my website, my servers, my domain names and anything else I can do to keep WikiLeaks alive and thriving as it continues its work to expose the crimes that were concocted in secret and carried out in our name and with our tax dollars."
Link to Original Source
Businesses

Leaked Letter — BSA Pressures Europe To Kill Open Standards 156

Posted by Soulskill
from the open-and-shut-investigation dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The Business Software Alliance is trying to kill open standards. Free Software Foundation Europe has gotten hold of a letter in which the BSA tries to bully the European Commission into removing the last traces of support for open standards from its IT recommendations to the public sector. FSFE published the BSA's letter (PDF), and picked apart its arguments one by one."
Sci-Fi

Ridley Scott Returns to PKD 99

Posted by timothy
from the hard-to-get-right dept.
Krau Ming quotes from a report at Sneakpeek.ca "Ridley Scott's Scott Free Productions will produce a 4-hour TV adaptation of author Phlip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle, based on a script by Howard Brenton. The original 1962 novel was a science fiction 'alternate history' that won a sci fi Hugo book award in 1963. Premise of the book, about daily life under totalitarian Fascist imperialism, occurs in 1962, fourteen years after the end of the Second World War in 1948. The victorious Axis Powers, Japan and Germany, conduct intrigues against each other in North America, specifically in the former US, which surrendered to them, after the Axis conquered Eurasia and destroyed the populaces of Africa." Adds Krau Ming: "Hopefully this will fall in the category of well-done PKD adaptations (though I'll leave it up to the slashdotters to determine which of the previous movies should be categorized as such)."

Comment: Re:WE have a problem (Score 1) 138

by Bob Esponja (#32467856) Attached to: Visual Network Simulator To Teach Basic Networking?
Use proprietary technology isn't the problem by self. Teach at schools proprietary technologies as the only way to learn is the real problem. In my country (Spain) Tech Enterprises uses schools like academies to perpetuate their products and the result is monopolies and the end, monopoly=abuse Teach at public schools, for example, only "cisco IOS" or "CDP" is good for Cisco, but is bad for kids and other rival companies. Kids grow-up, finds jobs in companies and buy tools and tech to work. What company has better position to sold their products? Right! Cisco. You Know. In your example. The problem isn't USE ink-pens with proprietary tech.The real problem is TEACH that the only way to learn is using ink-pens and hide the existence of pencils. Spain public education is a disaster (80% of people or more goes to public education). Few government investments. Teachers don't have recyclables courses to be up-to-date, and IT tech are always moving so fast. Companies knows this problem and tries to get profit for this situation. Simulators are tools right. But proprietary simulators aren't neutrals. They are always telling you if you uses my proprietary protocol you will have better solution less problems, etc. Actually in Spain the big problem in tech education isn't Cisco. Would be, but we have a biggest problem and is called Microsoft. ;-)
Canada

Free Software Wins Court Battle in Quebec 172

Posted by kdawson
from the one-judge-not-bought dept.
courteaudotbiz writes "In a court battle in the province of Quebec, Canada, initiated more than two years ago, free software activists Savoir Faire Linux (translated 'Linux know-how') won the right to submit offers (Google translation; original French version) when the government takes public requests for submissions to replace its desktop operating systems and office suites. This opens the possibility in the future of replacing Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office in favor of Linux and OpenOffice.org, or any other operating system and office productivity suite. In his judgment, the magistrate said that the government acted illegally when it discarded the proposal of Savoir Faire Linux for replacing Windows XP with a Linux distribution."
Piracy

Estimating Game Piracy More Accurately 459

Posted by Soulskill
from the arrrrbitrary-numbers dept.
An anonymous reader tips a post up at the Wolfire blog that attempts to pin down a reasonable figure for the amount of sales a game company loses due to piracy. We've commonly heard claims of piracy rates as high as 80-90%, but that clearly doesn't translate directly into lost sales. The article explains a better metric: going on a per-pirate basis rather than a per-download basis. Quoting: "iPhone game developers have also found that around 80% of their users are running pirated copies of their game (using jailbroken phones). This immediately struck me as odd — I suspected that most iPhone users had never even heard of 'jailbreaking.' I did a bit more research and found that my intuition was correct — only 5% of iPhones in the US are jailbroken. World-wide, the jailbreak statistics are highest in poor countries — but, unsurprisingly, iPhones are also much less common there. The highest estimate I've seen is that 10% of worldwide iPhones are jailbroken. Given that there are so few jailbroken phones, how can we explain that 80% of game copies are pirated? The answer is simple — the average pirate downloads a lot more games than the average customer buys. This means that even though games see that 80% of their copies are pirated, only 10% of their potential customers are pirates, which means they are losing at most 10% of their sales."

Comment: Re:Recycle your computer (Score 1) 347

by Bob Esponja (#29339077) Attached to: Running Old Desktops Headless?
Hi: It has a boot prompt called uboot (like a BIOS). You can get this console via mini-USB serial port. It's runs after SO and you can configure many things there like boot order, partitons, tftp/bootp servers etc. I'm from Spain and I spend the sending cost because is more efficient than some PC running 24h day Regards

Power is the finest token of affection.