Slashdot

Television is 100% non essential, regardless of the quality. If we're going to roll around in consumerism, we may as well go the full mile.

Personally, I think we're due for at least a full year of international loss of all electricity. As we stand now, I think people would literally go crazy and start killing each other if computers, the internet, video games, television, etc. all became inaccessible. People are so dependant on the things we have now. Sigh.

But... but... HP and Dell scored top marks from Greenpeace. Clearly the packaging was needed to protect the license papers which means you'd kill more tree for more paper if they are damaged.

[This also show that Greenpeace ranking is irrelevant]

C++ compiler licences

lol... paying for a C++ compiler. You're funny, I like you.

I know, seriously! And how you can blame the makers of a game that merely simulates reality? What, next some lawyer's going to be telling me I can't kill hookers instead of paying them in real life?

Titus Germanicus writes "If you're thinking about open sourcing a project in the near future, Mozilla might be the perfect blueprint to follow. At last week's Mesh 2008 conference in Canada, Mike Shaver, chief technology evangelist and founding member at Mozilla, and John Resig, a JavaScript evangelist at Mozilla — two of the key figures behind the success of Mozilla's Firefox Web browser — listed inclusivity and transparency as two of the top cornerstones of any community-built project. Shaver said in this interview that because the Web is intended for everybody, the level same openness should be shared with Firefox's open source contributors."

ClarkMills writes "Hi all.

This may be old news, regardless over the weekend I wrote up my observations on the digital mechanical locks that are around:

http://c.mills.ctru.auckland.ac.nz/DigiMechLock/

It was a bit of an excuse to play with YouTube also! :)

Cheers... Clark"

CableNinja writes "Just in time for Valentine's Day, Fashion4Nerds.com has surveyed over 30 young women to figure out what makes nerds notoriously poor dressers. Follow these 10 simple fashion rules to drastically improve your chances with the ladies."

philos writes "According to SANS ISC, there's a vulnerability in Solaris 10 and 11 telnet that allows anyone to remotely connect as any account, including root, without authentication. Remote access can be gained with nothing more than a telnet client. More information and a Snort signature can be found at riosec.com. Worse, this is almost identical to a bug in AIX and Linux rlogin from way back in 1994."

Hello Kitty writes "Computerworld is covering issues with various XP games crashing or crawling under Vista. The problems lie with DirectX 10 — and according to a number of interviews with the usual suspects, it's not looking too good for decent first-person shooter support for a while, maybe even next year. Of course, one of the quotes in the artcle sums it up for a lot of us: "You installed Vista. You deserve your problems. Heh.""

schwaang writes "The recent announcement by Linux Kernel Developer Greg Kroah-Hartman that "the Linux kernel community is offering all companies free Linux driver development" seems to have stirred up some interest as well as some questions (see the Slashdot discussion about the announcement here).

Greg K-H addresses some of the Slashdotters' questions and maybe even raises a few more in a new Free Linux Driver Development FAQ on his blog. An excerpt:

Q: Are companies really going to do this?
A: Yes, already we have received a number of serious queries from companies about producing Linux drivers for their devices. More information will be available later when details are firmed up.

"

Jeremy Kister writes "Errata Security reports of critical finding in Sun Solaris 10, which allows remote root login via telnet. From the article:

..if you pass a "-fusername" as an argument to the -l option you get full access to the OS as the user specified.

"

n3hat writes "Reuters reports that the next Space Shuttle mission may have to be deferred if it gets too close to the New Year because the onboard computers do not handle the changing of the date in the same way as the ground computers. From the article: '"The shuttle computers were never envisioned to fly through a year-end changeover," space shuttle program manager Wayne Hale told a briefing. The problem, according to Hale, is that the shuttle's computers do not reset to day one, as ground-based systems that support shuttle navigation do. Instead, after December 31, the 365th day of the year, shuttle computers figure January 1 is just day 366."

Theovon writes, "It's only been two days since the announcement of the official release of Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft), and the fallout has been very interesting to watch. By and large, fresh installs of Edgy tend to go well. Many people report improved performance over Dapper, improved stability, better device support, etc. A good showing. But what I find really interesting is the debacle that it has been for people who wanted to do an 'upgrade' from Dapper (6.06). Installing OS upgrades has historically been fraught with problems, but previous Ubuntu releases, many other Linux distros, and MacOS X have done surprisingly well in the recent past. But not Edgy." Read on for the rest of Theovon's detailed report.