David Gerard - Slashdot User

Submission + - Why MegaUpload Was Really Shut Down (google.com)

Submitted by

David Gerard

on Tuesday January 24, 2012 @09:50AM

David Gerard writes: "In December of 2011, just weeks before the takedown, Digital Music News reported on something new that the creators of Megaupload were about to unroll. Something that would rock the music industry to its core: MegaBox. MegaBox was going to be an alternative music store that was entirely cloud-based and offered artists a better money-making opportunity than they would get with any record label — "allowing artists to keep 90 percent of earnings.""

Submission + - ICANN takes on timezone database (domainincite.com)

Submitted by

David Gerard

on Sunday October 16, 2011 @06:08PM

David Gerard writes: "ICANN has decided to be useful for something: it's taking on the timezone database. According to Astrolabe’s latest observations: "Conditions are confused and uncertain. Feelings run high. Perceptions are altered, leading to misunderstandings. Imagination, escapism, and gullibility are factors to contend with.""

Submission + - Schmidt: G+ "identity service", not social network (google.com)

Submitted by

David Gerard

on Sunday August 28, 2011 @03:48AM

David Gerard writes: "Eric Schmidt has revealed that Google+ is an identity service, and the "social network" bit is just bait. Schmidt says "G+ is completely optional," not mentioning that Google has admitted that deleting a G+ account will seriously downgrade your other Google services. As others have noted, Somewhere, there are two kids in a garage building a company whose motto will be "Don't be Google"."

Submission + - Google+: Don't Be Evil, Just Racist (google.com)

Submitted by

David Gerard

on Monday July 25, 2011 @03:34AM

David Gerard writes: "Google+'s pseudonym policy isn't just weird and capricious — it's now blatantly discriminatiory too. Hong Kong-based users are getting blocked for using the English form of their names — which is unlikely to be on any of the forms of ID Google+ claims to accept scans of. (Good thing no-one uses Photoshop or GIMP, hey.) Users consider this "a great disrespect to Hong Kong culture"."

Submission + - Google+ deleting account en masse (zdnet.com)

Submitted by

David Gerard

on Saturday July 23, 2011 @07:41PM

David Gerard writes: ""Do, However, Be Stupid": In an attempt to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, Google+ is frightening off the geeky early adopters with a mass bonfire of accounts claimed to have fake names. As you might expect when your userbase goes beyond white male engineers inside a single dorporation, quite a lot of these people are indeed using their real names. Kirrily "Skud" Robert — whose account was shut six days after she stopped working at Google — is compiling a list of victims. Commenters hypothesise Google is using the AdSense detectors, and applying the customer service Google is famous for, i.e. none to speak of."

Submission + - UN: Digital Economy Act is human rights violation (openrightsgroup.org)

Submitted by

David Gerard

on Thursday June 02, 2011 @09:06AM

David Gerard writes: "The Open Rights Group reports that tomorrow, the United Nations Human Rights Commission will issue a report condemning the UK Digital Economy Act as a human rights violation. It "names the UK as violating Article 19 by allowing disconnection of Internet users in the Digital Economy Act.""

Submission + - The three types of IDE (wikimedia.org)

Submitted by

David Gerard

on Saturday May 14, 2011 @09:51AM

David Gerard writes: "MediaWiki developer Paul Houle explains (in the course of a discussion of integrated development environments for MediaWiki the three types of IDE: "1. IDEs that are actually useful for the languages that
they use. 2. Text editors. 3. People who use broken IDEs and (generally) don't realize their tools are broken.""

Submission + - iFixit's FBI GPS Tracker Teardown (ifixit.com)

Submitted by

David Gerard

on Monday May 09, 2011 @11:18AM

David Gerard writes: "IFixit give us a fascinating peek inside an FBI car-tracking device. "The device was loaned to us by an unknown owner and is similar to the one Yasir Afifi found underneath his car.""

Submission + - Washington Post: attack Wikileaks with military

Submitted by

David Gerard

on Wednesday August 04, 2010 @05:47AM

David Gerard writes: "The old media is feeling the heat. The Washington Post has just run an op-ed from far-right US security hawk Marc Thiessen demanding that military strikes be called in upon Wikileaks. I bet the RIAA wish they'd thought of that one."

Submission + - Wine 1.2 released (winehq.org)

Submitted by

David Gerard

on Friday July 16, 2010 @04:39PM

David Gerard writes: "Stuck with that one Windows app you can't get rid of? Rejoice — Wine 1.2 is officially released! Apart from running pretty much any Windows application on Unix better than 1.0 (from 2008), major new features include 64-bit support, bi-directional text and translation into thirty languages. And, of course, DirectX 9 is well-supported and DirectX 10 is getting better. Packages should hit the distros over the weekend, or you can get the source now.wi"

Submission + - Wine 1.2 released (winehq.org)

Submitted by

David Gerard

on Friday July 16, 2010 @04:38PM

David Gerard writes: "Stuck with that one Windows app you can't get rid of? Rejoice — Wine 1.2 is officially released! Apart from running pretty much any Windows application on Unix better than 1.0 (from 2008), major new features include 64-bit support, bi-directional text and translation into thirty languages. And, of course, DirectX 9 is well-supported and DirectX 10 is getting better. Packages should hit the distros over the weekend, or you can get the source now."

Submission + - Times UK paywall a miserable failure (newser.com)

Submitted by

David Gerard

on Thursday July 15, 2010 @12:38PM

David Gerard writes: "As part of his war against free, Rupert Murdoch put the Times and Sunday Times of London behind a paywall. Michael Wolff of Newser asks how that's working out for him. You can guess: miserable failure. "Not only is nobody subscribing to the website, but subscribers to the paper itselfâ€Â”who have free access to the siteâ€Â”are not going beyond the registration page. Itâ€Âs an empty world." Not that this wasn't entirely predictable."

Submission + - NVidia "nv" driver is dead

Submitted by

David Gerard

on Friday March 26, 2010 @04:58PM

David Gerard writes: "NVidia has announced to Xorg that the nv driver is officially dead. It will likely continue to work on existing GPUs, but not on new ones. The nouveau driver was strangely not mentioned, particularly not in the context of nouveau going into Linux 2.6.33."

Submission + - Verified: Chinese Government attacked Google (arstechnica.com) 1

Submitted by

David Gerard

on Thursday January 14, 2010 @01:02PM

David Gerard writes: "ArsTechnica reports that Verisign iDefense researchers have identified the command servers used to attack Google and Adobe — and that they were operated by the Chinese Government. 'Citing sources in the defense contracting and intelligence consulting community, the iDefense report unambiguously declares that the Chinese government was, in fact, behind the effort. The report also says that the malicious code was deployed in PDF files that were crafted to exploit a vulnerability in Adobe's software.'"

Submission + - Programmers Need To Learn Statistics (zedshaw.com) 2

Submitted by

David Gerard

on Saturday January 09, 2010 @05:05PM

David Gerard writes: "Zed Shaw writes an impassioned plea to programmers: Programmers Need To Learn Statistics Or I Will Kill Them All. "I go insane when I hear programmers talking about statistics like they know shit when it’s clearly obvious they do not. I’ve been studying it for years and years and still don’t think I know anything. This article is my call for all programmers to finally learn enough about statistics to at least know they don’t know shit. I have no idea why, but their confidence in their lacking knowledge is only surpassed by their lack of confidence in their personal appearance.""

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