David Gerard - Slashdot User

+ - LibreOffice 4.2: Under The Hood-> 0

Submitted by David Gerard on Thursday January 30, 2014 @06:42AM

David Gerard (12369) writes "LibreOffice 4.2 is out shortly. There's the usual release notes list of features, but Michael Meeks writes up what's been happening on the development side of the project."
Link to Original Source

+ - Elsevier going after authors sharing their own papers-> 2

Submitted by David Gerard on Friday December 06, 2013 @12:16PM

David Gerard (12369) writes "Elsevier, in final desperation mode, is going after authors sharing their own papers online. Academia.edu reported to several researchers that Elsevier "is currently upping the ante in its opposition to academics sharing their own papers online." This is the sound of a boycott biting. Repeat after me: "Elsevier delenda est.""
Link to Original Source

+ - How amateurs destroyed the professional music business-> 0

Submitted by David Gerard on Saturday September 14, 2013 @04:23AM

David Gerard (12369) writes "Here in the future, musicians and record companies complain they can't make a living any more. The problem isn’t piracy — it’s competition. There is too much music and too many musicians, and the amateurs are often good enough for the public. This is healthy for culture, not so much for aesthetics, and terrible for musicians."
Link to Original Source

+ - Internet Brands sues people for forking under CC by-sa-> 0

Submitted by

David Gerard

on Friday September 07, 2012 @10:10AM

David Gerard writes "Internet Brands bought Wikitravel.org in 2006, plastered it with ads and neglected it. After years, the Wikitravel community finally decided to fork under CC by-sa and move to Wikimedia. Internet Brands is now suing two of the unpaid volunteers for wanting to leave. The Wikimedia Foundation is seeking a declaratory judgement that you can actually fork a free-content project without permission. Internet Brands has a track record of scorched-earth litigation tactics."
Link to Original Source

+ - Nvidia loses huge order due to binary blob-> 0

Submitted by

David Gerard

on Saturday June 23, 2012 @11:50AM

David Gerard writes "Phoronix reports: The Chinese, who also developed the Loongson MIPS CPU, were looking to order at least ten million graphics processors. The problem is that the GeForce/Quadro driver from NVIDIA is only available for Linux x86 and x86_64 architectures, not MIPS or even ARM (only the Tegra driver is for ARMv7). NVIDIA refused to release the source-code to their high-performance feature-complete cross-platform driver to the Chinese, and it would cost them millions of dollars to port the code-base, so they went to AMD for their GPU order."
Link to Original Source

+ - Stuxnet/Flame/Duqu uses GPL code: release it!-> 0

Submitted by

David Gerard

on Tuesday June 05, 2012 @02:42PM

David Gerard writes "It seems the authors of Stuxnet/Duqu/Flame used the LZO library, which is straight-up GPL. And so, someone has asked the US government to release the code under the GPL. (Other code uses various permissive licenses. As works of the US
federal government, the rest is of course public domain.) Perhaps the author could enlist the SFLC to send a copyright notice to the US government..."
Link to Original Source

+ - Wikipedia dumps GoDaddy for MarkMonitor-> 0

Submitted by

David Gerard

on Monday February 13, 2012 @05:44PM

David Gerard writes "You were wondering when WIkipedia was going to dump GoDaddy over SOPA — it'll be over the coming week, and the new provider is MarkMonitor."
Link to Original Source

+ - Why MegaUpload Was Really Shut Down-> 0

Submitted by

David Gerard

on Tuesday January 24, 2012 @08:50AM

David Gerard writes "In December of 2011, just weeks before the takedown, Digital Music News reported on something new that the creators of Megaupload were about to unroll. Something that would rock the music industry to its core: MegaBox. MegaBox was going to be an alternative music store that was entirely cloud-based and offered artists a better money-making opportunity than they would get with any record label — "allowing artists to keep 90 percent of earnings.""
Link to Original Source

+ - ICANN takes on timezone database-> 0

Submitted by

David Gerard

on Sunday October 16, 2011 @05:08PM

David Gerard writes "ICANN has decided to be useful for something: it's taking on the timezone database. According to Astrolabe’s latest observations: "Conditions are confused and uncertain. Feelings run high. Perceptions are altered, leading to misunderstandings. Imagination, escapism, and gullibility are factors to contend with.""
Link to Original Source

+ - Schmidt: G+ "identity service", not social network-> 0

Submitted by

David Gerard

on Sunday August 28, 2011 @02:48AM

David Gerard writes "Eric Schmidt has revealed that Google+ is an identity service, and the "social network" bit is just bait. Schmidt says "G+ is completely optional," not mentioning that Google has admitted that deleting a G+ account will seriously downgrade your other Google services. As others have noted, Somewhere, there are two kids in a garage building a company whose motto will be "Don't be Google"."
Link to Original Source

+ - Google+: Don't Be Evil, Just Racist-> 0

Submitted by

David Gerard

on Monday July 25, 2011 @02:34AM

David Gerard writes "Google+'s pseudonym policy isn't just weird and capricious — it's now blatantly discriminatiory too. Hong Kong-based users are getting blocked for using the English form of their names — which is unlikely to be on any of the forms of ID Google+ claims to accept scans of. (Good thing no-one uses Photoshop or GIMP, hey.) Users consider this "a great disrespect to Hong Kong culture"."
Link to Original Source

+ - Google+ deleting account en masse-> 0

Submitted by

David Gerard

on Saturday July 23, 2011 @06:41PM

David Gerard writes ""Do, However, Be Stupid": In an attempt to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, Google+ is frightening off the geeky early adopters with a mass bonfire of accounts claimed to have fake names. As you might expect when your userbase goes beyond white male engineers inside a single dorporation, quite a lot of these people are indeed using their real names. Kirrily "Skud" Robert — whose account was shut six days after she stopped working at Google — is compiling a list of victims. Commenters hypothesise Google is using the AdSense detectors, and applying the customer service Google is famous for, i.e. none to speak of."
Link to Original Source

+ - UN: Digital Economy Act is human rights violation-> 0

Submitted by

David Gerard

on Thursday June 02, 2011 @08:06AM

David Gerard writes "The Open Rights Group reports that tomorrow, the United Nations Human Rights Commission will issue a report condemning the UK Digital Economy Act as a human rights violation. It "names the UK as violating Article 19 by allowing disconnection of Internet users in the Digital Economy Act.""
Link to Original Source

+ - The three types of IDE-> 0

Submitted by

David Gerard

on Saturday May 14, 2011 @08:51AM

David Gerard writes "MediaWiki developer Paul Houle explains (in the course of a discussion of integrated development environments for MediaWiki the three types of IDE: "1. IDEs that are actually useful for the languages that
they use. 2. Text editors. 3. People who use broken IDEs and (generally) don't realize their tools are broken.""
Link to Original Source

+ - iFixit's FBI GPS Tracker Teardown-> 0

Submitted by

David Gerard

on Monday May 09, 2011 @10:18AM

David Gerard writes "IFixit give us a fascinating peek inside an FBI car-tracking device. "The device was loaned to us by an unknown owner and is similar to the one Yasir Afifi found underneath his car.""
Link to Original Source