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Submission + - How to build a better developer community (outercurve.org)

Submitted by dp619
dp619 writes: Ubuntu community manager Jono Bacon (of GitHub fame) and the OuterCurve Foundation have shared a blog postwith suggestions including how to choose an open source license, why governance processes should be simple, how to establish codes of conduct, why a community helps software evolve, and how to structure a project to provide an easy on ramp to participate. The overarching theme of the post is that the dynamic aspects of software development are lost if a project doesn’t fully embrace open source; communities don’t just automatically form around a license. A added benefit is that companies that consume open source can contribute back to the commons and gain from collaborative development.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Literature for memory management?

Submitted by keepsimple
keepsimple writes: I am working on a new database system that needs its own memory management sub-system. I started with simple fixed-block memory management and working on an improvement. While I went back to my old books and googled the web, I felt that there must be some newly published methods and results in recent years in the area of memory management. Can you guys recommend some books or papers that cover the state-of-art in memory management?
Software

Submission + - Adobe demands 7000 years a day from humankind (theregister.co.uk)

Submitted by oyenamit
oyenamit writes: When was the last time you actually read and understood the EULA before installing a software? Never? You are not in a club of one. Unless you are a legal eagle, it would be almost impossible to fully understand what you are agreeing to.

Consider this: The Adobe Flash installer has a EULA that is 3500 words long. Adobe claims that the software is downloaded eight million times a day. If each person takes 10 minutes to read (and understand!) the entire text, they would consume over 1,522 years in just one day. If we put that into man-hours: an 8hr day, 240 working days in a year, that becomes 6944 years in a day. Turn that into a 50-year working life and that's 138 lifetimes a day!

This article at The Register deconstructs the text that we all blindly agree to by clicking the "I have read and understood the..." checkbox.
Space

Submission + - NASA's $2.5bn Curiosity rover: An Apple PowerBook on wheels (theregister.co.uk)

Submitted by oyenamit
oyenamit writes: On Sunday, Aug 5, the Mars Science Laboratory, a.k.a. Curiosity landed on Mars to investigate whether the red planet was ever habitable to microbial life. The $2.5 billion, car-sized rover landed on our neighboring world after an eight-month journey from Earth, and is designed to operate for at least two years.

For its nuclear-powered life-hunting tank, NASA chose a 200MHz PowerPC 750 CPU specifically hardened to withstand radiation and space flight. TheRegister provides a breakdown of the technical specifications of the rover (pic included).
Censorship

Submission + - Airtel: An Indian ISP Penalized For Blocking a Torrent Site

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: India's Department of Telecom has instructed ISPs to block popular torrent trackers like the Pirate Bay and IsoHunt. Recently, consumer forum penalises Airtel for blocking torrent sites and deficiency in providing Internet access when it blocked torrent sites earlier this year, following a Madras High Court Order received by Copyright Labs. The opponents are directed to pay Rs. 20,000/- to the complainant for committing deficiency in service and thereby causing mental agony to the complainant. Further the opponents are directed to pay Rs.2,000/- towards litigation charges to the complainant. A copy of the Court’s order is available here.
Chrome

Submission + - Google Chrome set to become world's No. 1 browser for May

Submitted by oyenamit
oyenamit writes: In what could turn out to be a major tipping point, PCWorld reports that Google Chrome is about to grab the top browser spot for a full month for the first time from Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Based on the statistics provided by StatCounter, Chrome's 32.5% share has just about managed to elbow past Internet Explorer's 32.1% till 28th May.

However, there might be more than what meets the eye. StatCounter's numbers are way off when compared with those provided by rival metrics company Net Applications. For example, Net Applications cites data that shows Chrome far behind IE, with April's numbers putting Chrome at 18.9% and IE at 54.1%, or almost three times larger.

In related stories earlier this month, Chrome was already reported to be on its way to becoming the most used browser in the world and Microsoft rebutting these claims by arguing about invisible tabs in Chrome.
Piracy

Submission + - Pirate Bay Ready For IP Address Whac-A-Mole

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: Last week The Pirate Bay added a new IP address which allows users to circumvent the many court-ordered blockades against the site. While this proved to be quite effective, the Hollywood backed anti-piracy group BREIN has already been to court to demand a block against this new address. But that won't deter The Pirate Bay, who say they are fully prepared for an extended game of whac-a-mole using the hundreds of IP addresses they have available. Courts all around the world have ordered Internet providers to block subscriber access to the torrent site, and the end is still not in sight.
Security

Submission + - French election internet voting system compromized by client side code injection (scribd.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: More than 700.000 french foreign nationals are right now using internet voting for this year parliament election. An on-line paper (http://www.scribd.com/doc/94990325, in french) has been recently posted which explain how to change the elector choice before the vote is cast by hand-crafted code injection in the "secure" client java code, after the voter's computer has been compromised. The change may stay undetected by the voter if the attacker decide so. A video (https://vimeo.com/42935480) show some scary screenshots.

Comment Re:We do it at our store for $65 plus tax. (Score 3, Informative) 474

by oyenamit (#40058925) Attached to: MS Will Remove OEM 'Crapware' For $99
Go to hp.com and navigate to the Support and Drivers section and then to Drivers and Software section. Search for your printer product number. You would be presented with a page that lists all the available downloads for your printer. Look for the section Driver. If you are lucky (like this page), the download under this section should be in 10-30 MB range. If so, it includes just the driver and nothing else (no installer etc). You will have to manually initiate installation of your printer and point to this package when prompted for the driver files.

In case you are not so lucky (like this page), there will be no option to download a driver only package. Instead, you will have to download the full software. Nevertheless, it should not be difficult to locate the actual driver in this package by searching for .INF files. After that, just manually initiate installation of the printer.

I don't know how much the concept of universal drivers has caught on, but HP provides drivers which can print to a variety of different physical printer devices. So, instead of downloading a different driver each for your different printers, you just install one HP Universal Printer Driver. This driver can print to all of your printers. It reduces maintenance effort since you need to update only 1 driver. Universal drivers are especially useful in office environments.

I am not sure where the drivers marked "IT professionals only" come from.
Privacy

Submission + - Twitter Implements Do Not Track (threatpost.com)

Submitted by Trailrunner7
Trailrunner7 writes: Twitter has implemented the Do Not Track header on its site, giving users the option of telling the site that they do not want to be tracked across other sites on the Web. The implementation is being done through the DNT technology in the Firefox browser.

Firefox, like other major browsers, allows users to enable the DNT option, which uses an HTTP header to inform sites that they don't want sites to set cookies that enable persistent tracking across the Web. Sites need to choose to respect that particular header in order to make Do Not Track work on their pages, and that's the change that Twitter has made.

"When you turn on DNT in your browser, we stop collecting the information that allows us to tailor Twitter based on your recent visits to websites that have integrated our buttons or widgets. Specifically, we remove from your browser the unique cookie that links your browser to visits to websites in the Twitter ecosystem. We then cannot provide tailored suggestions for you," Twitter said.
Censorship

Submission + - Indian ISPs selectively blocking websites (thehindu.com)

Submitted by neosaurus
neosaurus writes: There was a kerfuffle on the internets in the last few days with a UK judge ordering the Pirate Bay to be blocked. This has already been happening in India for quite a while now with ISPs blocking file sharing sites as well as video sharing sites like DailyMotion.

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