Please create an account to participate in the Slashdot moderation system

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror

Submission Summary: 0 pending, 89 declined, 38 accepted (127 total, 29.92% accepted)

Slashdot videos: Now with more Slashdot!

  • View

  • Discuss

  • Share

We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

Check out Videos
×

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

Submitted by David Gerard
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->

Submitted by David Gerard
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
Your Rights Online

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

Submitted by
David Gerard
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
Linux

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

Submitted by
David Gerard
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
Your Rights Online

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

Submitted by
David Gerard
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
Your Rights Online

+ - Why MegaUpload Was Really Shut Down->

Submitted by
David Gerard
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->

Submitted by
David Gerard
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
Google

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

Submitted by
David Gerard
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

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

Submitted by
David Gerard
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

+ - Google+ deleting account en masse->

Submitted by
David Gerard
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->

Submitted by
David Gerard
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
Programming

+ - The three types of IDE->

Submitted by
David Gerard
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

Ya'll hear about the geometer who went to the beach to catch some rays and became a tangent ?

Close