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TheRaven64 (641858)

TheRaven64
  (email not shown publicly)
http://theravensnest.org/
I am not a number I am a... What's that you say? 641858? Oh. Alright then...

TheRaven64 (641858)

  Apple Cuts Linux iPod Users Off[->] 2007-09-14 13:50 Will Fisher

Submitted by Will Fisher on Friday September 14 2007, @01:50PM
New iPods will no longer be able to work with Linux. iTunes now writes some kind of hash (SHA1, md5?) to the iPod database which new iPods check against. If this check fails then the iPod reports that it contains 0 songs. This appears to be protection against 3rd party applications writing out their own databases. We haven't found out how to generate our own valid hashes (but we do know the hash includes the database itself, and possibly the iPod serial number), and are looking for help.
http://ipodminusitunes.blogspot.com/2007/09/apple-cuts-us-off.html
+ -
 [+] , macbook

  Led Zepplin Effect[->] 2007-09-13 19:27 jd

Submitted by jd on Thursday September 13 2007, @07:27PM
jd writes "According to the web administrators handling the upcoming Led Zepplin reunion concert in tribute to Ahmet Ertegun, over twenty million people attempted to log onto the site to buy tickets. Those familiar with the Slashdot Effect can guess what happened next. The entire Pipex backbone, which supplied the website with connectivity, disintegrated. Not just one upstream pipe, mind you, the entire backbone frazzled under the impact. At the time of writing this, the site for booking the tickets is reachable. Geeks are warned in advance that there are no usage statistics or bandwidth consumption monitors on the websites."
http://music.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,,2168465,00.html
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 [+] submission, music

  Will robotics doom Chinese manufacturing? 2007-09-13 18:23 wytcld

Submitted by wytcld on Thursday September 13 2007, @06:23PM
wytcld writes "Sending manufacturing to China was brilliant. It weens the American worker from factory jobs. The next stage is fully robotic factories. Those won't be in China, since a robot costs the same in any market. They will be close to markets, to save transportation cost. All those Chinese workers will lose their factory jobs, while the American workers will have already transitioned to better professions. China is going to be severely hurt by this whole thing. America (and Japan) will come out supreme. Discuss."
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 [+] submission, meta, robot
Submitted by frik85 on Thursday September 13 2007, @05:49AM
frik85 writes "With yesterdays release, ReactOS got nearly 100% binary and API compatible with Win2003 (NT 5.2). And they are aiming for full Vista (NT 6) compatibility.
The ReactOS Win32 subsystem is in the beginning of a total overhaul to make it completely compatible with NT5 and it has had a positive impact on stability and compatibility with Win32 applications. As a generic result of these internal changes, the system feels a lot more stable in comparison to previous releases. ReactOS ships with a bunch of open source default drivers for various hardware devices and of course support for third party NT 5 drivers.
A download utility (unofficially called "ReactOS Package Manager") now contains a set of applications (opensource and shareware apps) which you can install right away in ReactOS with one click of a mouse. And those apps will actually work!
Fresh ReactOS screenshots say more than written words!"
http://www.reactos.org/en/news_page_37.html
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 [+] submission, os

  IBM joins OpenOffice.org community[->] 2007-09-10 06:57 Petrushka

Submitted by Petrushka on Monday September 10 2007, @06:57AM
In a press release today, with accompanying press FAQ, IBM announces a change in its relationship to the OpenOffice.org development community. The upshot is that they're making a long-term commitment to OOo; no organisation has paid off any other organisation for this; they're devoting about 35 of their developers in China to OOo; and they'll be contributing accessibility code from Lotus Notes to improve current support for assistive technologies. You may recall that an alleged shortage of assistive technologies that work with OOo has been one of the big criticisms levelled against the idea of governments standardising on the OpenDocument format, which is a file format that OOo and several other office suites support.
http://www.openoffice.org/press/ibm_press_release.html
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 [+] , linux, ibm
From feed by registerfeed on Monday September 10 2007, @06:32AM
Extends Eco Responsibility Initiative

Sun Microsystems has announced a comprehensive suite of programs and solutions to help customers design more energy-efficient, eco-responsible datacenters while saving money.


http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2007/09/10/sun_eco_innovation_intitiative/
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 [+] feed

  AMD and Novel develops open source graphic drivers[->] 2007-09-10 05:46 Damien Merenne

Submitted by Damien Merenne on Monday September 10 2007, @05:46AM
Damien Merenne writes "AMD officially stated that they will develop open source graphic drivers and that they will partner with Novel for doing so. Hardware specs for some ATI Radeon models and a development framework are expected to be released this week:

The week of September 10th, AMD plans to provide an open source information and development package supporting the ATI Radeon(TM) HD 2000 series as well as ATI Radeon(TM) X1000 series of graphics processing units (GPU) on Linux desktops. To accelerate this initiative, AMD partnered with Novell's SuSE Linux engineering team. The initial release includes source code and hardware specifications to engage the Open Source community for collaboration on 2D graphics drivers. Over the following months, AMD will work with the community to enable 2D, 3D and video playback acceleration to provide the best possible experience on the Linux desktop. This strategy complements and enhances AMD's existing support of the Linux community through its regularly released high performance Catalyst driver.
"
http://www.amd.com/us-en/Corporate/VirtualPressRoom/0,,51_104_543_15008~119372,00.html
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 [+] submission, linux, amd
Journal by chubs730 on Sunday September 09 2007, @07:20PM
With the advent of the firehose, I figured that Slashdot would continue to have the same types of news stories, just more often. I've also always enjoyed the comments on Slashdot that contained intelligent thoughts, as opposed to certain other sites of a similar design. Now I'm worried about the direction Slashdot is headed in. While it would seem the editors' jobs would be easier, cases of poor editing still abound, useless stories are promoted seemingly on a whim by the kdawson account, and even the beloved comment system is overloaded with new mods who seem to promote useless comments.

I'm curious as to how the Slashdot community overall feels about this, are you experiencing the same doubts as I am? Should something be done about this? Perhaps rules should be set in place so that one must be a member for a certain period of time before submitting stories to the firehose?

Submitted by MBCook on Sunday September 09 2007, @05:55PM
MBCook writes "Today the Washington Post printed an article titled "Ron Paul Takes the Ribbon in State Fair's GOP Straw Poll" in which they point out that not only did he win the Maryland straw poll by 43 votes, but how well his grass-roots campaign is run. The article quotes state Republican party vice-chair Chris Cavey: "The final vote showing Ron Paul won is a lesson for all campaigns of how grass-roots politics can make all the difference.""
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/08/AR2007090801653.html
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 [+] submission, politics, republicans

  AMD/ATI's opensource efforts revealed 2007-09-09 17:16 mattaw

Submitted by mattaw on Sunday September 09 2007, @05:16PM
mattaw writes "Phoronix have revealed in some detail the plan of AMD/ATI to support a community written Radeon opensource driver.

To whit, they are releasing specs and some example code under NDA and an opensource library that connects to the card's BIOS. They already have XOrg developers onboard and have also attracted Jerome Glisse who reverse engineered ATI cards to make the Avivio driver (incidentally probably killing that driver but the new ATI open driver will surely benefit from his excellent work).

While not completely open, this is pretty open for starters, HOWEVER I for one am not certain of things like support for hardware video decoding or extra on board hardware (TV-Out etc.).

Checkout the final comments: "The aim of this open-source driver is not to overtake the fglrx driver but rather is designed for those who just want a working desktop with 3D capabilities and basic video playback. This new driver is ideal for FOSS enthusiasts and those wishing to run the latest development kernels and versions of X.Org."

Still there is no argument that this is a brilliant result."
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 [+] submission, hardware, amd

  Science: Alex the African Grey Parrot Dies 2007-09-09 15:16

Posted by kdawson on Sunday September 09 2007, @03:16PM
from the teaching-us-how-to-communicate dept.
grrlscientist writes "Yesterday, I received the devastating news that Alex the African Grey parrot, who was both a study subject and colleague to Irene Pepperberg, died unexpectedly at 31 years of age. 'Even though Alex was a research animal, he was much more than that. This species of parrot generally lives to be 50-60 years old, so Alex was only middle-aged when he died. According to some reports I have read, it is possible that Alex might have succumbed to Aspergillosis, a fungal infection of the lungs that he has battled in the past. However, the cause of death will not be known until after a necropsy has been completed... Alex's veterinarian is returning from vacation to personally conduct this necrospy.'"
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 [+] story, science, education, deadparrot, piningforthefjords, beautifulplumage

  RIAA Complaint Dismissed as "Boilerplate" 2007-09-08 17:48 NewYorkCountryLawyer

Submitted by NewYorkCountryLawyer on Saturday September 08 2007, @05:48PM
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "The decision many lawyers had been expecting — that the RIAA's "boilerplate" complaint fails to state a claim for relief under the Copyright Act — has indeed come down, but from an unlikely source. While the legal community has been looking towards a Manhattan case, Elektra v. Barker, for guidance, a case in which amicus briefs had been submitted by various industry groups and the US Department of Justice (see case file, and from Warner v. Cassin, a similar motion in the same Court's Westchester division, the decision instead came from Senior District Court Judge Rudi M. Brewster of the US District Court for the Southern District of California, in a decision denying a default judgment (i.e. the defendant had not even appeared in the action). Judge Brewster not only denied the default judgment motion but dismissed the complaint for failure to state a claim. Echoing the words of Judge Karas at the oral argument in Barker , Judge Brewster held (pdf) that "Plaintiff here must present at least some facts to show the plausibility of their allegations of copyright infringement against the Defendant. However, other than the bare conclusory statement that on "information and belief" Defendant has downloaded, distributed and/or made available for distribution to the public copyrighted works, Plaintiffs have presented no facts that would indicate that this allegation is anything more than speculation. The complaint is simply a boilerplate listing of the elements of copyright infringement without any facts pertaining specifically to the instant Defendant. The Court therefore finds that the complaint fails to sufficiently state a claim upon which relief can be granted and entry of default judgment is not warranted.""
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 [+] submission, yro, court, finally
Submitted by theodp on Friday September 07 2007, @10:33PM
theodp writes "For the Chicago Public Schools, the good news was that 380,730 students showed up for the first day of class. The bad news was that a new $60 million computer information system that records attendance wasn't up to the task of counting them, forcing the staff to resort to old-school pen computing per the Disaster Recovery Plan."
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 [+] submission, education, slownewsday, funny
Submitted by speda1 on Friday September 07 2007, @05:21PM
speda1 writes "A large UK study found that intake of sugar and soft drinks is only weakly associated with obesity in children. Much stronger correlations were found for total caloric intake, activity levels, and high fat and protein intake."
http://www.fatlossnutrition.com/blog/item/185/
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 [+] submission, science, biotech

  X.org Foundation releases Xorg 7.3[->] 2007-09-07 13:17 srealm

Submitted by srealm on Friday September 07 2007, @01:17PM
srealm writes "Xorg has finally released their landmark release Xorg 7.3. This release includes major improvements such as both output (ie. monitor) AND input (ie. tablet) hot plugging (laptop users rejoice!). As well as such nifty things as DTrace for Solaris builds. Get it while its hot!"
http://www.x.org/wiki/Releases/7.3
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 [+] submission, it, xwindows

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