Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Programming

Submission + - Why People Suck! (themarriedgeek.com)

Submitted by
cmwahlqu
cmwahlqu writes: "So why does it seem like people just suck. It seems like everyone that you meat now days can make a great impression but then ends up being strange, weird, or a back stabber. The answer that I have come up with to this question is, people are fake! So many people portray this image what they want to be, but end up being nothing like they want to be."
Music

Submission + - Woman sues Universal for youtube takedown notice (theage.com.au)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Age is reporting that a mother is sueing Universal after they demanded a video of her child dancing to a prince song be taken off youtube for copyright infringement. More here: http://www.theage.com.au/news/technology/lets-not- go-crazy/2007/07/25/1185339063767.html To quote the woman's lawyer "Universal's takedown notice doesn't even pass the laugh test,"
The Internet

Submission + - Test Whether ISPs Are Modifying Your Web Pages (washington.edu)

Submitted by csreis
csreis writes: Last month we learned that "Some ISPs are resorting to a new tactic to increase revenue: inserting advertisements into web pages requested by their end users." Have you wondered how often this is happening? And whether it's happened to you? The University of Washington security and privacy group and ICSI have created a measurement infrastructure to help answer these questions. Please come visit our site and help out with our experiments. In the process, we'll help you figure out if some "party in the middle" (like your ISP) might be modifying your web content in flight. We plan to share our overall results with the public.
The Courts

Submission + - Court convicts Skype for breaching GPL

Submitted by terber
terber writes: In Munich a German court once again upheld the GPL2 and convicted Skype (based in Luxembourg) of violating GPL by selling the Linux-based VoIP phone "SMCWSKP 100" without proper source code access. Skype later on added a flyer to the phones with an URL where to obtain the sources, but the court found this insufficient as this was in breach of GPL section 3. Plaintiff was once again Netfilter developer Harald Welte, who runs http://gpl-violations.org/. The decision is currently only available in German at http://www.ifross.de./ News source (German): www.golem.de/0707/53684.html
Upgrades

Submission + - Should You Switch to DDR3 Memory? (extremetech.com)

Submitted by
mikemuch
mikemuch writes: "DDR3 and the motherboards to support it are here. It offers double the throughput and lower power consumption than DDR2, but in its current form high latencies of CAS 8, among other things, hold it back from showing significant performance improvements over DDR2. ExtremeTech's Loyd Case has an introduction to DDR3 and benchmarks to support his claim that the technology is overpriced at present for what you get. From the article: 'Since DDR3 requires four samples per core clock cycle to be sent, that means that any data that's not relevant to the fetch is discarded. In other words, potentially more unneeded data may be delivered per clock cycle with a quad-pumped architecture.'"
Businesses

Submission + - Where have all the smart people gone? 1

Submitted by Coussie
Coussie writes: You've heard the expression lately, "where have all the bees gone?". Indicating that there is some environmental crisis on the horizon. I've come to a similiar conclusion about the business I work in, Information Technology. Ten years ago, when I started in this business most of the people I worked with were very intelligent, and in many cases gifted. Most were well educated and had graduated from tier 1 or tier 2 universities and specialized in an IT discipline, such as computer science or engineering. Today, I see very few people like that in IT. I've worked for mostly large fortune 500 companies in my career, and have worked for quite a few of them and have noticed this trend in recent years. In the company I work for now I am easily the only graduate of a tier 1 school on the entire floor. Most of the people I come in contact with have a military type background, are "legacy" employees that have been with the company since time began, or are people from other disciplines who simply "fell into" IT. Where have all the smart people gone? What does this say about our industry, if anything?
Software

Submission + - iPhone root password cracked in three days

Submitted by Dimentox
Dimentox writes: Builder.au reports that "The iPhone root password has been cracked, The information came from an an official Apple iPhone restore image (rename as a zip file and extract). The archive contains two .dmg disk images: a password encrypted system image and an unencrypted user image. By delving into the unencrypted image inquisitive hackers were able to discover that all iPhones ship with predefined passwords to the accounts 'mobile' and 'root', the last of which being the name of the privileged administration account on UNIX based systems..."
"The information came from an an official Apple iPhone restore image (rename as a zip file and extract). The archive contains two .dmg disk images: a password encrypted system image and an unencrypted user image. By delving into the unencrypted image inquisitive hackers were able to discover that all iPhones ship with predefined passwords to the accounts 'mobile' and 'root', the last of which being the name of the privileged administration account on UNIX based systems."
Networking

Submission + - IP address doomsday: 2011? (networkworld.com)

Submitted by
carusoj
carusoj writes: "The head of the American Registry of Internet Numbers (ARIN), John Curran, this week said we would run out of IP address space under IPv4 in 2011. According to a Network World article, he said that 68% of all available IPv4 addresses are gone and only 19% are available. The remaining 13% fall into a strange category of being unavailable, which means blocks of addresses that belong to a large company, a university or an ISP and are not used."
The Internet

Submission + - The Downward Spiral of Facebook (freeliberal.com)

Submitted by stry_cat
stry_cat writes: Facebook used to be the perfect networking website for campus groups, however as detailed here recent changes have increased spam and made it a much less effective tool.
Operating Systems

Submission + - What's using your memory?

Submitted by
gosand
gosand writes: "I have a pretty old system (Duron 1.33 with 768 MB of PC-133 RAM). One of these days I'll upgrade my system and I suspect I'll get more memory. But is there a need? I have Gkrellm running, so I see my memory usage. In the past, with an uptime of 150+ days, I've had several applications running at once (Ktorrent, GIMP, OpenOffice.org, K3b, Firefox) and still the memory usage has never gotten much over the halfway mark. I did recently upgrade from Kubuntu Edgy to Feisty, and it seems to use a little more memory. So what am I missing? Why do people have multiple gigs of memory on their systems? What is your memory usage, and what uses it? Do we all have lots of memory that is just not utilized?"
Linux Business

Submission + - Is Linux Splitting into Two Factions? (linspire.com)

Submitted by
AlexGr
AlexGr writes: "Good commentary by Kevin Carmony in his Linspire Letter blog: With the recent news of several Linux vendors entering into partnership agreements with Microsoft (Novell, Linspire, Xandros), there has been much debate recently about two factions of Linux forming. Saying that Linux is going to be torn in two, makes for good press and lively debates, but this is certainly nothing new for Linux. http://www.linspire.com/linspire_letter_archives.p hp?id=49"

Slashdot Top Deals

Today is a good day for information-gathering. Read someone else's mail file.

Close