heikkile - Slashdot User

Submission + - SPAM: NASA's Hubble telescope snaps gargantuan galaxy

Submitted by

coondoggie

on Wednesday February 06, 2008 @10:54AM

coondoggie writes: "NASA today said its Hubble Space Telescope has captured a new image what it calls a giant cosmic fossil. The fossil is actually a galaxy, dubbed NGC 1132 which is the aftermath of an enormous multi-galactic pile-up, where the carnage of collision after collision has built up a brilliant but fuzzy giant elliptical galaxy far outshining typical galaxies. NGC 1132, together with the small dwarf galaxies surrounding it, are dubbed a 'fossil group" as they are most likely the remains of a group of galaxies that merged together in the recent past, NASA said. [spam URL stripped]"
Link to Original Source

Submission + - Mystery Company recruiting puzzle solved! 1

Submitted by

srealm

on Sunday December 23, 2007 @02:46PM

srealm writes: "Less than 24 hours from posting, the Mystery Company job posting has been cracked! With the collaboration of people at the Google Group setup specifically for cracking this puzzle, the three 'challenges' have been solved, and the company un-masked as N-Brain, Inc in Boulder, CO. The date in question is the release date for their flagship UNA product, meant to promote collaborative development."

Submission + - Stallman shifting his focus to social movements (earthweb.com)

Submitted by

christian.einfeldt

on Sunday December 23, 2007 @03:09AM

christian.einfeldt writes: "Free Software visionary Richard Stallman seems to be shifting his fundamental message in subtle but significant ways. He has always talked about the importance of freedom in cyberspace, but he recently seems to have been changing his message slightly to place greater emphasis on the links between social movements and Free Software as a way of connecting the Free Software movement with other current social movements. He still talks about the 'four freedoms' of Free Software, but the new emphasis seems to signal an interest in appealing more to human interests, and a little bit less on geeky ethical issues as seen in this new interview of 19 December 2007, where he cites the success of social movements in Kerala, India, in persuading the local government to migrate to free code as an example of Free Software as social phenomenon."

Submission + - Electricity Rules Universe Not Gravity (jamesphogan.com)

Submitted by

Anonymous Coward

on Sunday December 23, 2007 @12:02AM

Anonymous Coward writes: "http://www.jamesphogan.com/demostuff/Eglin/FTCE.pdf What's being suggested here is that, far from being isolated, passive accumulations of mass revolving under their own inertia after being spun up by some unexplained source, galaxies are active components in enormous cosmic power circuits. They're not flywheels, but homopolar motors. A major problem for the gravity-driven model of galaxies is that they don't rotate the way they should. With the amount of observed mass and the velocities measured out to the rim, they ought to be flying apart. But if they are primarily electrical in nature, the forces involved are easily able to do the job, and there's no need to postulate 90% of the universe as consisting of unseen dark matter" to hold them together. Inventing unobservables to hold up failed predictions is usually a sign of a theory in trouble."

Submission + - Musicians Now Have Options says David Byrne

Submitted by

Hugh Pickens

on Saturday December 22, 2007 @09:51PM

Hugh Pickens writes: "Former Talking Head David Byrne has seen the music business from both sides first as an artist then running his own record label, Luaka Bop, and says the future of music as a career is wide open. In an article in Wired, Byrne identifies six different distribution models now available to musicians. At one end of the scale is the 360, or equity, deal, where every aspect of the artist's career is handled by producers, promoters, marketing people, and managers. At the other end of the scale is the self-distribution model, where the music is self-produced, self-written, self-played, and self-marketed. Between these two extremes are four other models offering different levels of artist control. "No single model will work for everyone," says Bryne. "There's room for all of us. In the recent past, it often seemed like all or nothing, but maybe now we won't be forced to choose.""

Submission + - Microsoft finally bows to EU antitrust measures

Submitted by Rogue Pat on Monday October 22, 2007 @08:38AM

Rogue Pat writes: From the Reuters press article: "Microsoft ended three years of resistance on Monday and finally agreed to comply with a landmark 2004 antitrust decision by the European Commission."

From other news sources: Competitors will be able to buy interface protocols for 10.000 Euro to make their software work better with Windows. Moreover, Microsoft won't appeal the 500 million Euro fine any further.

Submission + - Security, or coverup of FBI embarrassment (patterico.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 22, 2007 @06:39AM

An anonymous reader writes: Did you ever wonder what our government wants to keep secret — and what courts allow them to keep secret? ...

I have found, read, and excerpted below the portion that the Second Circuit tried to take back. My judgment is that the material was sealed, not to protect anyone from harm, but to protect the government from embarrassment. ...

The other thing you notice is, I believe, far more significant — which is why I put it in bold type. Namely, you have an FBI agent who admits that he threatened to ensure that a suspect's family would be tortured by a foreign government. Somehow, I think that's the reason the information was submitted under seal.

Submission + - Free Software Compulsory in India - Good & Iro (softpedia.com)

Submitted by

ami.one

on Thursday September 20, 2007 @03:31AM

ami.one writes: "Free software in India is from now on mandatory for IT practicals of SSLC (Secondary School Leaving Certificate) examination planned for March 2008.

The situation is at least ironic: by making compulsory the use of software that should be free, the government is annulling the students' freedom of choice; still, at the same time, the measure (namely using free, open source software) also means a lot of money will be saved by these schools.

Orders making free software compulsory have been issued by the Director of Public Instruction (DPI), considering Linux Operating System should be used for IT education in 8th, 9th, and 10th standards. The DPI will also start various programs to popularize the free software. Until last year, schools had to choose between free software and the Windows operating system.

For the 10th standard, fully Linux-based text books have been prepared, while for the 8th and 9th standard more books have been provided. These books were prepared by SCERT (State Council Educational Research and Training) and Free Software Foundation of India under the guidance of IT@school project.

Introductory lectures will be delivered in school assemblies across the country on Monday, and after them a pledge will follow. Outlines for the lectures and pledge circulate in schools. The DPI has started organizing competitions for the students mainly in the digital art area.

A digital painting competition for students of 8th standard will be conducted using the applications TUX paint, XPaint and GIMP, with the subject "My school and surrounding" , and a presentation contest will be held for the students of 9th and 10th standard with the topic "IT and its benefits to the common man", using Open Office Impress. Both competitions will have a duration of one hour and a half.

The prize winning paintings will be compiled at the State level and then uploaded on the website www.education.kerala.gov.in."

Submission + - Australia cracked US combat aircraft codes (news.com.au)

Submitted by SpamSlapper on Thursday September 20, 2007 @03:20AM

SpamSlapper writes: FORMER defence minister Kim Beazley has told how Australia cracked top-secret American combat aircraft codes to enable the shooting down of enemy aircraft in the 1980s. The radar on Australia's Hornets could not identify most potentially hostile aircraft in the region, but dispite many requests, the codes were not provided, so "In the end we spied on them and we extracted the codes ourselves". The Americans knew what the Australians were doing and were intrigued by the progress they made.

Submission + - IEEE Required Patent Disclosure

Submitted by Marc on Thursday July 26, 2007 @04:05AM

Marc writes: The Institute reports that the IEEE Standards Association has updated their standards policy to require that "members of an IEEE standards development project reveal any knowledge they may have of patents they or their employer hold on intellectual property being considered for inclusion in the standard." In addition to this "anyone in a standards working group is "encouraged to inform the working group chair" if he or she is aware of any patented intellectual property held by others".

Submission + - The REAL smallest WebServer and FtpClient (ftpmicro.com)

Submitted by

emcelettronica

on Tuesday July 03, 2007 @04:54AM

emcelettronica writes: "FTPmicro is a small web-server, as big as a DIP40 package, based on the PIC18F67J60. This chip is an 8-bit PICmicro with an integrated 10BaseT Ethernet controller. Despite the small dimensions, the board has some interesting peripherals, like a microSD card slot, a TC1047 temperature sensor, and many analog and digital I/O pins. But even more important is the software that can be performed on this device. Using the Microchip TCP/IP stack, suited for this particular hardware, it is possible to have, in few minutes, a working HTTP and UDP server with DHCP client. FTPMicro doesn't need any external component: loading the compiled software in the PIC and powering the device at 5V is all you need. It also has a comfortable connector for the ICD2 programmer/debugger by Microchip. Thanks to the SD memory, a large number of files can be saved, and they will be available to the HTTP server. In this way, you can store a complete web-site, with both static (HTML) and dynamic (CGI) pages. By reading data in real-time and sending commands, it is possible to control any hardware. In the FTPmicro site, You can found free Source Code and Example in AHAH"

Submission + - Open source friendly employee agreement?

Submitted by bmarklein on Tuesday July 03, 2007 @04:22AM

bmarklein writes: I'm a startup founder & first-time CEO with an engineering background. I'm working with a law firm and they've given me their standard "Employee Proprietary Information and Inventions Agreement". Anyone who does work for the company will have to sign this. It's absolutely necessary to have an agreement like this to make it clear that the company has legal rights to the work performed by an employee, but the version I have, like every other one I've seen in the past, seems overreaching to me. It defines an "invention" as almost anything one might have created, and then lays claim to all inventions conceived while employed by the company.

I plan on looking for engineers who have made significant open source contributions. I'd like to make clear that they're free to continue working on open source projects. Has anyone seen language in an agreement like this that attempts to do this? I plan on asking my attorney but I suspect they may not have something on hand, so examples would be very helpful.

Submission + - What mail server and setup do you run?

Submitted by

dmayle

on Tuesday June 19, 2007 @05:42AM

dmayle writes: "I've been recently undergoing a deluge of spam on my personal mail server (serves me and my family), and I believe this to be the cause of some lost mails (Overloaded SpamAssassin). I've decided that it's time to migrate to a new server to take into account best practices, and I was wondering what the users of slashdot are using for mail? I'm currently running an aging Qmail setup with Dovecot for IMAPS, Roundcube for webmail, and Clamd and SpamAssassin for content filtering. I've published SPF records, but it doesn't seem to be any help, and I get hundreds of false bounce messages per day. Does it make any sense to implement DKIM/DomainKeys? So far, for my new setup, I've been wavering between Postfix and Exim as the MTA, keeping Dovecot and Roundcube, but switching to DSPAM for my spam filtering. What are you folks running on your mail servers, and how do you handle the spam deluge? I've heard about greylisting, but since I don't control my SMTP backup servers, I'm worried about that not working. What do you folks think?

P.S. Performance is an issue, as this will be running on a virtual server, so personally I don't plan to run Scalix or Zimbra. I've done my homework, and a lot of research, I'd just like to know what everyone here is using, or if I've missed some options, thanks."

Submission + - Keylogger Hardware Embedded in New Dell Laptop (virus.org.ua)

Submitted by

kendbluze

on Tuesday June 19, 2007 @02:39AM

kendbluze writes: "Here's an EE who was doing a simple repair to a nearly-new Dell 600m laptop when he noticed something a bit curious. Turns out he found a hardware keylogger sitting between the keyboard and ethernet controllers! See what Homeland Security didn't have to say about it."

Submission + - History of MECC and Oregon Trail

Submitted by Gammu on Tuesday June 12, 2007 @12:46AM

Gammu writes: For the past thirty years, many children have been raised with a heavy diet MECC games like Oregon Trail, Odell Lake and Lemonade Stand. These products weren't developed by a major game developer. Rather, they were developed by the state of Minnesota for use in their schools. What began as an initiative to get Minnesota students ready for the micro-computer age turned into a multi-million dollar a year business whose products are still used in US schools even a decade after MECC was sold off to another developer. Read about the history of MECC (and especially Oregon Trail) at Silicon User.

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