jpt9 - Slashdot User

Comcast Launches Broadband Meter 199

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday January 12 2010, @06:18PM
from the cap-and-do-not-trade dept.

nlawalker writes "Beginning on Tuesday, January 12, Comcast high-speed internet users in Washington state will have access to an online tool that displays their bandwidth usage for the most recent three calendar (not billing) months of usage, including the current month. Washington is the second market to receive access to the tool, following its introduction in Portland. 'For the fraction of less than 1 percent of our customers who are concerned about exceeding our excessive use threshold, we believe this meter will help them monitor and calibrate their usage,' said spokesman Steve Kipp. Perhaps those who aren't using 250GB a month should take it as a challenge."

EU Paves the Way For Three-Strikes Cut-Off Policy 272

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday October 22 2009, @11:25AM
from the no-internet-for-you dept.

Mark.JUK writes "The European Parliament has surrendered to pressure from Member States (especially France) by abandoning amendment 138, a provision adopted on two occasions by an 88% majority of the plenary assembly, and which aimed to protect citizens' right to Internet access. The move paves the way for an EU wide policy supporting arbitrary restrictions of Internet access. Under the original text any restriction of an individual could only be taken following a prior judicial ruling. The new update has completely removed this, meaning that governments now have legal grounds to force Internet providers (ISPs) into disconnecting their customers from the Internet (i.e. such as when 'suspected' of illegal p2p file sharing)."

Disney Close To Unveiling New "DVD Killer" 498

Posted by timothy on Wednesday October 21 2009, @02:37PM
from the plays-for-sure dept.

Uncle Rummy writes "The Wall Street Journal reports that Disney is close to releasing a new system that will sell permanent, multi-device access to digital media. The system, dubbed Keychest, is being positioned as an answer to consumer concerns about purchasing digital media that are locked to a small number of devices, and thus as a way to finally shift media sales from an ownership model to an access model. They claim that such a service would reduce the risk of losing access to content as a result of a single vendor going out of business, as purchased content would remain available from other vendors. However, they do not seem to have addressed the question of what happens to customers' access to purchased content if the Keychest service itself is discontinued."

MS Says All Sidekick Data Recovered, But Damage Done 279

Posted by timothy on Thursday October 15 2009, @01:58PM
from the small-favors dept.

nandemoari writes "T-Mobile is taking a huge financial hit in the fallout over the Sidekick data loss. But Microsoft, which bears at least part of the responsibility for the mistake, is paying the price with its reputation. As reported earlier this week, the phone network had to admit that some users' data had been permanently lost due to a problem with a server run by Microsoft-owned company Danger. The handset works by storing data such as contacts and appointments on a remote computer rather than on the phone itself. BBC news reports today that Microsoft has in fact recovered all data, but a minority are still affected (out of 1 million subscribers). Amidst this, Microsoft appears not to have suffered any financial damage. However, it seems certain that its relationship with T-Mobile will have taken a major knock. The software giant is also the target of some very bad publicity as critics question how on earth it failed to put in place adequate back-ups of the data. That could seriously damage the potential success of the firm's other 'cloud computing' plans, such as web-only editions of Office."

12M Digit Prime Number Sets Record, Nets $100,000 232

Posted by CmdrTaco on Thursday October 15 2009, @10:43AM
from the that's-a-lotta-bits dept.

coondoggie writes "A 12-million-digit prime number, the largest such number ever discovered, has landed a voluntary math research group a $100,000 prize from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). The number, known as a Mersenne prime, is the 45th known Mersenne prime, written shorthand as 2 to the power of 43,112,609, minus 1 . A Mersenne number is a positive integer that is one less than a power of two, the group stated. The computing project called the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) made the discovery on a computer at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Mathematics Department."

Collaborative Academic Writing Software? 328

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Friday March 13 2009, @03:12PM
from the but-shouldn't-academics-be-good-at-learning-new-things dept.

Thomas M Hughes writes "Despite its learning curve, LaTeX is pretty much the standard in academic writing. By abstracting out the substance from the content, it becomes possible to focus heavily on the writing, and then deal with formatting later. However, LaTeX is starting to show its age, specifically when it comes to collaborative work. One solution to this is to simply pair up LaTeX with version control software (such as Subversion) to allow multiple collaborators to work on the same document at one time. But adding Subversion to the mix only seems to increase the learning curve. Is there a way to combine the power of LaTeX with the power of Subversion without scaring off a non-technical writer? The closest I can approximate would be to have something like Lyx (to hide the learning curve of LaTeX) with integrated svn (to hide the learning curve of svn). However, this doesn't seem available. Google Docs is popular right now, but Docs has no support for LaTeX, citation management, or anything remotely resembling decent formatting options. Are there other choices out there?"

Read An Actual RIAA 'Pre-Litigation' Letter

Submitted by TCB on Friday March 02 2007, @10:45AM

TCB writes "As a follow-up to this week's "RIAA Announces New Campus Lawsuit Strategy," lolcollege has managed to secure one such pre-litigation letter and has it published for your viewing horror."

Huck Finn's Pa and the case for the public domain

Submitted by

DavidRothman

on Friday March 02 2007, @10:42AM

DavidRothman writes "Inspired by characters in the public domain, a new first novel delves into the twisted psyche of Huckleberry Finn's father. In praising Finn , by Jon Clinch, the Washington Post says that the author "relies on Twain's details, sometimes borrowing whole scenes and patches of dialogue... Clinch reimagines Finn in a strikingly original way, replacing Huck's voice with his own magisterial vision — one that's nothing short of revelatory." Time to question presidential candidates and others about their positions on the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act? Wouldn't creators, schools, libraries, and the rest of society be better off without it? More at TeleRead."

YouTube: the presidential election X Factor

Submitted by

coondoggie

on Friday March 02 2007, @10:34AM

coondoggie writes "YouTube this week announced You Choose '08, where voters can find the official and unofficial Web videos from a host of presidential candidates, including Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John McCain and John Edwards. Most of the videos are of the official variety but there are a fair number of the ones that the candidates would probably not like you to keep watching. For example, Sen. Hillary Clinton's off-key "Star-Spangled Banner", John Edwards prepping his hair for a TV appearance, John McCain sleeping (there's also a classic of Sen. Ted Kennedy sleeping during one of President George Bush's speeches and of course Howard Dean's rant that likely cost him the Democratic nomination in 2004). http://www.networkworld.com/community/?q=node/1199 3"

One Laptop Per Child Announces Free Music Project

Submitted by

One Laptop Per Child

on Friday March 02 2007, @10:34AM

One Laptop Per Child writes "Contact: freemusic@freeculture.org
Elizabeth Stark, Freeculture.org (917-628-6238)
Tim Hwang, Antenna Alliance (973-960-4955)

FreeCulture.org and One Laptop Per Child Launch the Free Music Project

New website will let Internet users upload and share freely licensed music from all countries and genres

Cambridge, Massachusetts, February 27, 2007 — Freeculture.org announces the launch of a new website, http://freemusic.freeculture.org/ dedicated to sharing great free music, encouraging artists to release music under free licenses, and providing access to recording and production time to artists releasing works under a free license. Users can upload music from their own computers or link to music on another website distributing freely licensed music. Songs uploaded can be streamed, downloaded and remixed into new creative works.

The Free Music Project will collect and record free music for children. Selected songs uploaded to the site will be included in the first music library shipping with laptops from One Laptop per Child (OLPC), a non-profit organization devoted to improving education that is producing low-cost, high-quality computers to distribute to children and teachers in the developing world.

"This is a groundbreaking opportunity to locate the best free music out there and share it with millions of people of all ages around the world," said Elizabeth Stark, board member of Freeculture.org and founder of the Free Culture group at Harvard. "Freely licensing recordings allows artists to gain extremely valuable global exposure through projects such as OLPC."

Freeculture.org will also work with creators and musicians to record and license songs for the project, in collaboration with the music recording project Antenna Alliance. The Free Music Project site will provide access to uploaded music, and includes community-oriented functionality such as tagging, forums, and ratings. "This project not only marks a milestone in the position of free music worldwide, but also opens a vast universe of possibilities for the development of an international community of artists and producers committed to free culture," said Tim Hwang, President of Antenna Alliance.

For more information:

FreeCulture.org is an international organization that promotes the creation of a thriving cultural commons, in part by encouraging the use of free licenses by artists and creators. (http://www.freeculture.org)

Antenna Alliance is a Boston-based recording label that records, promotes, and distributes freely licensed music online and across a nationwide network of radio stations. (http://www.antalliance.org)

One Laptop per Child (OLPC) is a non-profit organization created by Nicholas Negroponte and other faculty members from the MIT Media Lab to design, manufacture, and distribute laptop computers that are sufficiently inexpensive to provide every child in the world with access to knowledge and tools for learning and exploration. (http://www.laptop.org)"