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Ubuntu

Submission + - Valve Releases Half-Life (Beta) For Linux (linuxgamecast.com)

Athens101 writes: "Yesterday Valve released Half-Life (beta) for the Steam Linux client. "We have released Half-Life 1 in Beta form on Linux (and OS X). Please report any issues you see on our github issues page. "

About:
Half-Life is a science fiction first-person shooter video game developed by Valve Corporation, the company’s debut product and the first in the Half-Life series. First released in 1998 by Sierra Studios for Windows PCs, the game was also released for the PlayStation 2.[2] In Half-Life, players assume the role of Dr. Gordon Freeman, a theoretical physicist who must fight his way out of a secret underground research facility whose research and experiments into teleportation technology have gone disastrously wrong."

Piracy

Submission + - Antigua applies to WTO for permission to run 'pirate' website (bbc.co.uk)

another random user writes: Antigua is seeking permission to run a website that sells music, movies and software — but ignores copyright law. The Caribbean island is due to appear before the World Trade Organization (WTO) on 28 January seeking permission to run the site.

The decision to set up the site is the end point of a long-running dispute with the US over gambling. The US has objected to Antigua's plan saying it amounted to official "piracy" of intellectual property.

Antigua went to the WTO after the US moved to stop American citizens using gambling services, including web-based betting shops and casinos, run from the Caribbean country. Antigua claims that action deprived it of billions of dollars in revenue.

The WTO agreed with Antigua and dismissed a US appeal against its ruling. However, because the US took no action to lift the controls on cross-border gambling Antigua filed an application to recoup its lost cash by other means.

It sought permission to sell movies, music, games and software via a store that would be able to ignore global agreements on copyright and trademark controls, reports filesharing news site TorrentFreak. It wanted to be able to sell up to $3.4bn of those goods before having to make copyright payments.

The WTO rejected that figure, but said Antigua could sell $21m annually via the store before it had to consider paying copyright fees. The US is believed to have offered to pay Antigua $500,000 annually as compensation for the lost revenue.

Submission + - Steve Jobs movie clip historically inaccurate, says Woz (networkworld.com) 1

An anonymous reader writes: Yesterday saw the first clip from the upcoming Steve Jobs biopic starring Ashton Kutcher as Jobs and Josh Gad as Steve Wozniak. The full film will be premiering at the Sundance Film Festival later today and is set for a wider theatrical release in April.

After seeing the clip, Woz chimed in and noted that the event depicted therein was completely false and never happened.

"Totally wrong. Personalities and where the ideas of computers affecting society did not come from Jobs. They inspired me and were widely spoken at the Homebrew Computer Club. Steve came back from Oregon and came to a club meeting and didn't start talking about this great social impact. His idea was to make a $20 PC board and sell it for $40 to help people at the club build the computer I'd given away. Steve came from selling surplus parts at HalTed he always saw a way to make a quick buck off my designs (this was the 5th time).

The lofty talk came much further down the line.

I never looked like a professional. We were both kids. Our relationship was so different than what was portrayed. I'm embarrassed but if the movie is fun and entertaining, all the better. Anyone who reads my book iWoz can get a clearer picture."

Google

Submission + - Thousands of Publicly Addressable Printers Searchable on Google (port3000.co.uk)

Jeremiah Cornelius writes: Blogger Adam Howard, at Port3000, has a post about Google's exposure of thousands of publicly accessible printers. "A quick, well crafted Google search returns "About 86,800 results" for publically accessible HP printers." He continues, "There's something interesting about being able to print to a random location around the world, with no idea of the consequence." He also warns about these printers as a possible beachhead for deeper network intrusion and exploitation. With many of the HP printers in question containing a web listener and a highly vulnerable and unpatched JVM, I agree that this is not an exotic idea. In the meanwhile? I have an important memo for all Starbucks employees. ;-)
Microsoft

Submission + - Does Microsoft have the best app store for open source developers? (infoworld.com) 2

WebMink writes: "Microsoft seems to have been in combat against the GNU GPL throughout the history of free and open source software. But that may be changing. They have recently updated the terms of use for software developers in their Windows Phone app store to allow any OSI-approved open source license — even the GPL. They include extraordinarily broad language that gives the open source license priority over their own license terms, saying:

if your Application or In-App Product includes FOSS, your license terms may conflict with the limitations set forth in Section 3 of the Standard Application License Terms, but only to the extent required by the FOSS that you use

Could it be that the most open source friendly app stores will be the ones run my Microsoft?"

GNOME

Submission + - Fedora proposal to support FreeBSD kernel and Cinnamon by default (fedoraproject.org)

An anonymous reader writes: Following the controversial changes pushed by the Red Hat backed Gnome Foundation and the systemd project on Fedora, some members of the community decided to rebel against it by proposing 2 changes to bring back the stability and productivity to users. The first one is about using Cinnamon by default, a Gnome 3 fork aiming at providing a more productive desktop environment, based on the Gnome stack. Cinnamon is already offered by Mint, one of of the most used and popular Linux desktop distribution and is present since Fedora 17 as a option. But the 2nd proposal is much more controversial. based on the rise of Debian, Gentoo or Arch Linux port on Freebsd, a group of developers propose to port the user space of Fedora to FreeBSD, and offer FreeBSD kernel as a option, citing features like ZFS as a justification. Of course, this also bring into questions the limitation of systemd and many others tools.

Comment Re:Elementary education (Score 1) 263

This. There are open source textbook projects that float around somewhere, but the one I've seen seem to focus on collegiate level general education texts. Writing for younger learners isn't as simple as putting the information together. There's a big component in using information from studies of childhood development and learning theory that shapes the presentation in quality elementary school texts. This is something that takes resources, but if a group can be found it would probably be one of the causes with the potential to have a broad impact.

Comment Re:What's the point? (Score 2) 221

They kind of do. There is this powerful tool known as the Orange book with all approved medications including generics listed with separate entries for each dosage. There is a lot of information out there. Even if you just count the free stuff. The thing is a good portion of it is only really accessible in a useful way to professionals, because the body is a complex system. You pharmacist, the guy who checks your prescriptions for dangers and counsels you on proper drug therapy has at least four years of professional education. Saying any given normal adult should have to accept all of the responsibility for themselves is opening the door for abuse.

Look at statins. There are dangers popping up now that didn't appear in a statistically significant way during the original trials that only had thousands of participants. Now, with post market surveillance more of them can be identified. On the flip side, there are benefits of statins being explored that weren't conceivable during per-approval trials.

Comment Re:vaporware (Score 1) 286

I had a second generation Acer Aspire One and moved to a Lenovo X120e. The SSD I was using in the Acer survived the move and is still stable. If I'd ever moved my video collection from DVDs and streaming I'd run into space trouble, but I can live within the 128 gigs the SSD leaves me with plenty of comfort.

My three big concerns are battery life, time to wake, and time to launch new applications. I spend a lot of time moving around campus and every second faster the laptop wakes up is more time I have before I have to get my A game on. The biggest speed difference I've noticed with the SSD is using Adobe Lightroom, but its still nice to bring up Firefox, Word, and Power Point faster.

The thing I love about the E-350 is how well it sleeps. I don't hibernate or use virtual memory due to the write cycle lifespan limit on SSDs, but damn AMD fusion sleeps well. Being a graduate student I've seen my current setup against student's, classmate's, and faculty's setups (overwhelmingly MacBook Airs and iPads this year). It is competitive against anything anyone else in the classroom uses. When the warranty on the SSD quits I might be scared, but right now I am enjoying it.

Right now I feel more limited by the E-350's ability to only use single channel DDR3. My documents are backed up on a form of media and my documents live somewhere in the cloud. It feels like I have the best of the mobile and desktop worlds for the tasks I need the notebook for. This would change though if I needed to edit video or compile code on the mobile.

Comment Re:Ah, central planning. (Score 1) 611

The Department of Defense has believed in the tremendous margin of safety not having that additional methyl group confers. Chemically that extra methyl group confers a greater stuctural similarity to epinephrine upon methamphetamine, while not having that extra methyl group makes plain old amphetamine and dexamphetamine more similar to dopamine and norepinephrine. The way the rest of the molecule is shaped, that extra methyl group being in that location is a big difference. It's the difference between Paul Erdos and Faces of Meth. Between your stealth bomber crew flying 36 hours uninterrupted or the 2 billion dollar plane crashing halfway because the flight crew killed each other in a Lord of the Flies reenactment.

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