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Comment Re:Source for that ..? (Score 3, Interesting) 622

by roscocoltran (#29889193) Attached to: French Branch of Scientology Is Convicted of Fraud
This is the most important part of the jugement. When you ask the parliament who wrote that little part of the text that saved scientology's butt 2 weeks before the jugement was made public, what is the answer of the parliament ? What is the answer of the party who proposed the law ? --> "they don't know". They don't know who wrote the lines who saved the scientlogy business. The representative admitted that they didn't understood the text they voted and it was only after an association fighting the scientology analyzed the text that they found out that the scientology couldn't be banned anymore. How lucky isn't it ? Note that Tom Cruise visited France and Sarkozy 3 years ago, when Sarkozy was the french minister of the cult. Friendship has some advantages.
Microsoft

Microsoft Releases Linux Device Drivers As GPL 362

Posted by timothy from the could-easily-be-world's-largest-open-source-distributor dept.
mjasay writes "Microsoft used to call the GPL 'anti-American.' Now, as Microsoft releases Hyper-V Linux Integration Components (LinuxIC) under the GPL (version 2), apparently Microsoft calls the GPL 'ally.' Of course, there was little chance the device drivers would be accepted into the Linux kernel base unless open source, but the news suggests a shift for Microsoft. It also reflects Microsoft's continued interest in undermining its virtualization competition through low prices, and may suggests concern that it must open up if it wants to fend off insurgent virtualization strategies from Red Hat (KVM), Novell (XEN), and others in the open-source camp. Microsoft said the move demonstrates its interest in using open source in three key areas: 1) Make its software development processes more efficient, 2) product evangelism, and 3) using open source to reduce marketing and sales costs or to try out new features that highlight parts of the platform customers haven't seen before."
Programming

Twitter On Scala 324

Posted by kdawson from the going-off-the-rails dept.
machaut writes "Twitter, one of the highest profile Ruby on Rails-backed websites on the Internet, has in the past year started replacing some of their Ruby infrastructure with an emerging language called Scala, developed by Martin Odersky at Switzerland's École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. Although they still prefer Ruby on Rails for user-facing web applications, Twitter's developers have started replacing Ruby daemon servers with Scala alternatives, and plan eventually to serve API requests, which comprise the majority of their traffic, with Scala instead of Ruby. This week several articles have appeared that discuss this shift at Twitter. A technical interview with three Twitter developers was published on Artima. One of those developers, Alex Payne, Twitter's API lead, gave a talk on this subject at the Web 2.0 Expo this week, which was covered by Technology Review and The Register."

Exchange Comes To Linux As OpenChange 249

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the native-not-emulated dept.
joesmart writes to tell us that new work on OpenChange and KDE seeks to bridge the gap between groupware compatibility and open source. KDE developer Brad Hards spoke at the Linux.conf.au conference and said the goal of OpenChange is to implement the Microsoft Exchange protocols as they are used by Outlook. "OpenChange has client and server-side libraries for Exchange integration and relies heavily on code developed for Samba 4. It is open source software licensed under the GPL version 3. Hards said more work is being done on the client side and 'we have code for the server,' but estimates another 12 months of development is required to produce an OpenChange server ready for production."
Programming

Time to Get Good At Functional Programming? 620

Posted by Soulskill from the dysfunctional-programming-on-the-way-out dept.
prone2tech writes "From an article at Dr. Dobb's: Chipmakers have essentially said that the job of enforcing Moore's Law is now a software problem. They will concentrate on putting more and more cores on a die, and it's up to the software industry to recraft software to take advantage of the parallel-processing capabilities of the new chips. As is argued in this article, this means becoming proficient in parallel functional programming. The bad news? Getting good at functional programming is hard, harder than moving from iterative Pascal or Basic or C coding to object-oriented development. It's an exaggeration but a useful one: When you move to FP, all your algorithms break.'"
Programming

California Can't Perform Pay Cut Because of COBOL 1139

Posted by kdawson from the handwaving-only-gets-you-so-far dept.
beezzie writes "Last week, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger ordered a pay cut, to minimum wage of $6.55/hr, for 200,000 state workers — because a state budget hadn't been approved yet. The state controller, who has opposed the pay cut on principle and legal grounds, now says the pay cut isn't even feasible because the state's payroll systems are so antiquated. He says it would take six months to go to minimum wage, and nine months more to restore salaries once a budget is passed. The system is based on COBOL, according to the Sacramento Bee, and the state hasn't yet found the funds or resources, in ten years of trying, to upgrade it." The article quotes a consultant on how hard it is to find COBOL programmers; he says you usually have to draw them out of retirement. Problem is, if there were any such folks on the employment rolls in California, Gov. Schwarzenegger fired them all last week, too.
Handhelds

Man Claims iPod Set His Pants Aflame 270

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the lighter-and-gasoline-in-his-pocket-had-nothing-to-do-with-it dept.
alphadogg writes to mention that an Atlanta man is claiming an iPod Nano actually caught fire in his pants creating flames that lasted 15 seconds and reached up as far as his chest. Apple hasn't responded to the claims yet other than sending him a packet to return the iPod.

BioShock Review 439

Posted by Zonk from the somewhere-across-the-sea-somewhere-waiting-for-me dept.
BioShock, the moody drama-driven FPS for the Xbox 360 and PC, was released last month to rave reviews from the major gaming news sites. Since then the internet has been ablaze with outcry about the game's high rating scores. It's hard to understand why. The work of Ken Levine and Irrational Games on the spiritual successor to System Shock 2 is sublime. It's incredibly atmospheric, the game's story is well written and compellingly told, and the first-person shooter gameplay is a respectable, tightly crafted experience. It's a really, really good game. I'll tell you now: it's a 5/5. So why all the angst? Why the backlash? Read on for my review of BioShock, and a few comments on the dangers of 'merely' being a good game.
Security

Word Vulnerability Compromised US State Dept. 207

Posted by samzenpus from the you've-got-a-virus dept.
hf256 writes "Apparently hackers using an undisclosed (at the time) vulnerability compromised the State Departments network using a Word document sent as an email attachment. Investigators found multiple instances of infection, informed Microsoft, then had to sever internet connectivity to avoid leaking too much data!"

Is KDE 4.0 the Holy Grail of Desktops? 511

Posted by CmdrTaco from the what-does-that-make-gnome-then dept.
An anonymous reader writes "With KDE 4.0 being expected some time this year, expectation runs high in the linux/unix users camp and the media read a lot between the lines of what the KDE developers say and do. In some ways KDE will provide a standard as to how a desktop should look and behave. This interesting article wonders whether KDE 4.0 will become the complete desktop which will meet the needs of a wide cross section of computer users. One of the common complaints that some Linux users have over KDE is that it is too cluttered. And by addressing this need without putting off the power users, the KDE developers could make it an all in one Desktop. Keep in mind that KDE 4.0 is based on Qt 4.0 and so can be easily ported to Windows and other OSes too which makes this thought doubly relevant."

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