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Penguinisto writes "According to a somewhat jaw-dropping story in The Register, it appears that Microsoft has performed a trifecta of geek-scaring feats: They have joined the Apache Software Foundation as a Platinum member(at $100K USD a year), submitted LGPL-licensed patches for ADOdb, and have pledged to expand their Open Specifications Promise by adding to the list more than 100 protocols for interoperability between its Windows Server and the Windows client. While I sincerely doubt they'll release Vista under a GPL license anytime soon, this is certainly an unexpected series of moves on their part, and could possibly lead to more OSS (as opposed to 'Shared Source') interactivity between what is arguably Linux' greatest adversary and the Open Source community." (We mentioned the announced support for the Apache Foundation earlier today, as well.)

The "Charity" is a front. It makes for-profit investments and has pledged not to review its investments for their ethical acceptability. Everything you need to know about the Gates foundation can be summed up by their response to Dark cloud over good works of Gates Foundation, an LA Times investigative article (I know, I was as shocked as you must be) which tells the story of the Gates Foundation's investment in big oil that is killing people in the places in which they claim to try to be saving them. This is my favorite paragraph:

The Gates Foundation has poured $218 million into polio and measles immunization and research worldwide, including in the Niger Delta. At the same time that the foundation is funding inoculations to protect health, The Times found, it has invested $423 million in Eni, Royal Dutch Shell, Exxon Mobil Corp., Chevron Corp. and Total of France â" the companies responsible for most of the flares blanketing the delta with pollution, beyond anything permitted in the United States or Europe.

Now, keep in mind that the Gates Foundation is not restricted to making holding investments, they are allowed to make them for profit. The profit ostensibly goes right back into charity, right? But here's the issue. As of January 2007 (when the article was published) they'd spent nearly twice as much on sucking oil out of the region (killing people in the process) than on actually helping anyone! And let's not get into what percentage of that money spent is actually applied effectively...

Bill Gates is not interested in helping anyone. Remember how the idea of a presidential bid for Gates was floated in the media? That was not a mistake. It was a test. It did not go over well; millions of the best-connected people on the planet certainly spoke their mind on the issue on every public forum they could find. Now, he is sitting on top of one of the largest fortunes on the planet, in charge of doling out money both to the greedy companies raping the land, and to help people who are being harmed by them. If you follow the money, though, you can see where priorities lie.

Gates has placed himself in a position of power which makes his former position at the top of Microsoft look like the elementary school yard bully on top of the pitcher's mound winning a game of king of the hill, and this is not a cause for celebration. He is not there to do good deeds.

QOS should work if you set it up properly.

No, it shouldn't. QoS only works on egress. You can't do any meaningful ingress QoS. All you can do is stop packets from coming past the router. That doesn't address the real problem which is that the ISP link is maxed out. In fact, if you start dropping TCP data that's in a lower priority queue than your UDP voice, it will cause even further issues as the sender will retransmit those lost TCP packets.

This picture got me thinking.

For all the things people dislike about Microsoft, even the stuff people sees as evil one should still acknowledge the contribution made by Bill Gates and Microsoft to the world as it is today. I am by no means a fan of Microsoft, yet had it not been for the visions of Bill Gates I sincerely doubt that computers would have gained the same traction in society as they have today.

I often seem to forget this when shouting my mouth off about how bad Microsofts software is or how evil Microsoft is. I will try to remember this the next time I get into a "how I hate Microsoft" frenzy.

Although your post is obviously a joke, Windows did a fantastic job of getting the PC into the lives of average people. This is something that Linux is only beginning to do, IMO.

Opera 9.5 supports browser sync. I'll have to add this to yet another thing Opera does better than firefox.

Yes, yes, I know trolling, but I couldn't resist it.

I'm in a corp in Eve Online, a heavy player v player orientated spaceship game.

With Eve, a hostile ship that is attacking you is displayed on screen, and also on the overview as a flashing red bar - the flashing red showing that the enemy ship has you targeted and is activating modules upon you with hostile intent.

One of the first things we do with newcomers to our corp/Eve is tell them to change the overview colour of a hostile ship from a flashing red to a solid green.

The change has had noticable effect. Before people would see the red and get an adrenaline boost, often resulting in them freezing for long enough to lose the battle. When seeing a solid green stating a metaphorical 'go go go!' as opposed to a red screaming 'Danger!' the newcomers perform better and freeze less often.

It'd be nice to see a "NSFW" (Not Suitable For Work) tag on the article. I clicked the link and I'm at work, and am now worried that large men with guns will appear. Saying "The following images may be disturbing" is too ambiguous.

Do you have any evidence to suggest that viewing child porn (or, more specifically, cg child porn) increases crimes against children?

That reminds me of Ken Thompson's argument that video game violence increases real-world violence.

Once again, Twitter, Slashdot's most maniacal anti-Microsoft troll, beats on the truthout.org dead horse. Of course, Twitter and Marc Ash are cut from the same cloth. They both believe that they are so noble, and their causes so righteous, that they can freely stoop to any depth, and engage in whatever underhanded behaviour they please.

Marc Ash was caught spamming totally unrelated Yahoo! Groups by joining and blasting emails through group addresses.

Twitter threadjacks a story, then shills his comment with three of his army of sockpuppets, including two accounts that are impostors of his critics.

And Slashdot does nothing.

Instead, Rob Malda posts this gem to the front page, claiming that Microsoft "prefers" Flash to Silverlight because Microsoft doesn't have some super-special-secret transmogrifier that could spontaneously transform each and every Flash animation on each and every web site Microsoft owns into Silverlight content, and didn't use it the very minute Silverlight 1.0 was released to the public.

Slashdot has turned reason and common sense and honesty against its own readers.

Delete your bookmarks, people. Redirect slashdot.org to 127.0.0.1 in your hosts file, in case you get the urge to go back. There's no point.

There are plenty of places where advocacy of Free and Open Source software is done without the community being exploited. Slashdot is no longer one of those places. Their hatred of Microsoft has become all-consuming, and they're proud of it. Time to leave them shouting into empty space.

An anonymous reader writes "The Registrar is reporting that the swashbuckling truth-seekers at Wikileaks.org published what they referred to as "the collected secret 'bibles' of Scientology," and three days later, church-friendly lawyers threatened the site with legal action if the documents weren't taken down. Calling them "Advanced Technology of the Scientology religion," the lawyers pointed out that the documents are copyrighted works registered to the Religious Technology Center (RIC), a church-related holding company. In an apparent effort to find out who leaked the Advanced Technology in the first place, the lawyers also urged Wikileaks to "preserve any and all documents pertaining to this matter...including, but not limited to, logs, data entry sheets, applications — electronic or otherwise, registrations forms, billings statements or invoices, computer print-outs, disks, hard drives, etc." Wikileaks did not remove the documents. But it did tell the world their veracity has been verified :-)"
http://theregister.co.uk/2008/04/08/church_of_scientology_contacts_wikileaks/

cptsexy writes "From the story, "Wikinews has learned that the Church of Scientology warned the documents leaking site Wikileaks.org that they are in violation of United States copyright laws after they published several documents related to the Church. Wikileaks has no intention of complying, and states that in response, they intend to publish thousands of Scientology documents next week. In the letter to Wikileaks, lawyers for the Church's Religious Technology Center (RTC), which oversees the use of the their logos, writings and religious content, states that the site "placed RTC's Advanced Technology works on Wikileaks.org's website without the authorization" of the Church.""

Pupils upload vid to slate-my-teacher cyberbully site

New research carried out for British newspapers and broadcasters has revealed conclusive evidence that wireless technologies are in fact a severe hazard to human health.

http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2008/04/01/teacher_head_explosion/

whitehartstag writes to mention that Microsoft has announced their new Hyper-V as feature-complete. Unfortunately the list of supported systems is disappointingly short. "No offense to SUSE Enterprise Server crowd, but only providing SUSE support in Hyper-V is a huge mistake. By not supporting Red Hat, Fedora, CentOS, and BSD, Microsoft is telling us Hyper-V is a Microsoft only technology. More Mt. Redmond, Microsoft center of the universe thinking. That's disappointing. Sure, if you are a Microsoft only shop, Hyper-V will be an option for virtualization. But so will VMware and XenServer. But if you run a mixed shop, Hyper-V won't solve your problems alone — you'll have to also add VMware or Xen to your virtualized data center portfolio. Or just go with VMware and Xen and forego Hyper-V."

An anonymous reader writes "A new web site has appeared containing a video which claims to expose Anonymous, the group behind the recent campaign against Scientology. The site Anonymous Exposed contains a video which shows the history of Anonymous actions from the POV of what seems to be pro-Scientology."