Meshugga - Slashdot User

Comment Great idea. (Score 5, Interesting) 311

by Meshugga on Saturday February 16, 2013 @08:02PM (#42924699) Attached to: NetBSD To Support Kernel Development In Lua Scripting

I honestly think that this is a great idea. It's a novel approach to extending a kernel, especially considering NetBSD doesn't have that big of a market share and expressly focusses on supporting as many platforms as possible. Prototyping new features or certain drivers in a portable scripting language may give them a leg up in the functionality aspect of the race.

Also, LUA is super fast, small, easy to learn, concise and the C API/embedding it is straight forward.

You may knock it all you want, "because kernel land is C land", but after all bias being said and flamed, this may turn out to be a really fun, interesting and possibly very useful idea.

Comment Re:Finally! (Score 1) 274

by Meshugga on Sunday February 10, 2013 @06:43PM (#42853537) Attached to: GNU Hurd To Develop SATA, USB, Audio Support

There's been enough GNU hurt on the desktop.

Comment Re:I almost hope they do it... (Score 1) 171

by Meshugga on Sunday February 10, 2013 @11:59AM (#42850283) Attached to: Rapiscan's Backscatter Machines May End Up In US Federal Buildings

Wow ... that's all really ... retarded.

A Deep-Dive Look At Samsung's Galaxy Tab 10.1 264

Posted by timothy on Saturday June 11, 2011 @02:35PM from the pleasant-news-from-the-ongoing-future dept.

MojoKid writes "Samsung's Galaxy Tab 10.1 was announced way back in February this year just prior to Apple's iPad 2 launch. Shortly after, a Samsung VP noted the company was re-evaluating their Galaxy Tab line in the wake of Apple's strong iPad 2 showing in early March. Since then, the Galaxy Tab 10.1 has begun shipping and early reports show the Android 3.1 driven device to be slightly thinner than the iPad 2, lighter and with NVIDIA's 1GHz dual-core Tegra 2 processor under the hood, every bit as capable. With recent Honeycomb entrants in the 10-inch Android tablet market, like the Asus Transformer, Motorola Xoom and Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, the iPad 2 finally has solid competition in terms of both hardware and OS performance."

Happy 80th Birthday, William Shatner! 226

Posted by CmdrTaco on Tuesday March 22, 2011 @03:25PM from the say-the-other-guys-thing dept.

gregg writes "Today another geek legend celebrates a birthday. Best known for portraying Captain James T. Kirk, William Shatner has cemented himself into geek science fiction lore forever. Today he begins his ninth decade on this planet — yes, Captain Kirk is now 80 years old."

Canonical To Divert Money From GNOME 374

Posted by Soulskill on Friday February 25, 2011 @07:01PM from the and-now-nobody's-happy dept.

Julie188 writes "Canonical has reacted to backlash over its insane deal with Banshee by establishing a marginally better new deal. Banshee is a media/music player for Linux (and Windows and Mac) that supports music purchases via Amazon MP3. It will ship with Ubuntu 11.04. Amazon pays 10% to its affiliates — websites and software that send it business. Banshee had been donating its Amazon affiliate proceeds to GNOME. But Amazon's MP3 store competes with Canonical's MP3 store, Ubuntu One. So Canonical thought that it should help itself to 75% of the affiliate money from Banshee/Amazon sales and leave 25% for GNOME. The Banshee group said no thanks, we'll disable Amazon for Ubuntu users. Canonical is refusing to let Banshee disable Amazon. It has instead said it will contribute some money from Ubuntu One to GNOME but it still intends on keeping the lion's share for itself."

Firefox 4, A Huge Pile of Bugs 481

Posted by CmdrTaco on Wednesday January 19, 2011 @09:40AM from the software-is-hard dept.

surveyork writes "Firefox 4.0 beta 9 (AKA 'a huge pile of awesome') was released on January 14, 2011. Firefox 4's release schedule includes a beta 10 and a release candidate before the final launch in late February. However, one wonders if this schedule won't slip again, since there are still more than 100 'hardblocker' bugs, more than 60 bugs affecting Panorama alone and 10 bugs affecting the just-introduced Tabs-on-Titlebar. Some long-standing bugs won't be fixed in time for Firefox 4 final either (example, example). Many startup bugs are currently pending, although Firefox 4 starts much faster than Firefox 3.6. As a side note, it's unlikely that Firefox 4 final will pass the Acid3 test, despite this being a very popular demand amongst Firefox enthusiasts. Perhaps we'll have to wait until Firefox 4.1 to have this 'huge pile of bugs' (mostly) fixed."

Debian 6.0 To Feature a Completely Free Kernel 283

Posted by timothy on Thursday December 16, 2010 @05:07PM from the nothing-dirty dept.

dkd903 writes "The Debian Project has announced that the upcoming release — Debian 6.0 'Squeeze' — will have a completely free Linux kernel. This means that the Linux kernel which ships with Debian 6.0 will not have any non-free firmware. The Debian Project has been working on removing the non-free parts since the last two releases. With Squeeze, they are finally realizing that goal."

Considering a Fair Penalty For Illegal File-sharing 728

Posted by timothy on Friday November 05, 2010 @07:39PM from the if-there-is-such-a-thing dept.

An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt, following up on yesterday's announcement of the 1.5 million dollar verdict against Jammie Thomas: "This week a federal jury handed down the verdict in the third file-sharing trial against a Minnesota mother of four who has been fighting against the charges brought by the RIAA since 2005. Understandably, a lot of people are outraged by this verdict and while reading through comments about the fine on some online forums, I saw some interesting opinions on how these fines should be assessed. The point that $62,500 per song is excessively high seems to be something that everyone can agree on, but what actually is fair seems to be a big point of contention."

Is the ISS Really Worth $100 Billion? 503

Posted by Soulskill on Monday November 01, 2010 @05:43PM from the sure,-take-a-check? dept.

Ponca City writes "JR Minkel writes on Space.com that as NASA celebrates the 10th anniversary of astronauts living on the space station — and with construction essentially complete — the question remains: will the International Space Station ever really pay off scientifically? The space agency contends that the weightless environment provided by the station offers a unique way of unmasking processes of cell growth and chemistry that are hidden on Earth, but some critics don't see a zero gravity laboratory as filling a crucial scientific need. Gregory Petsko, a biochemist at Brandeis University, says the only basic science justification he has ever heard for the station is that protein molecules form superior crystals in the microgravity of space than they do on Earth and a best-case scenario, in terms of return on investment, would be if a space-grown crystal were used to design a blockbuster pharmaceutical drug that worked by precisely targeting one of those proteins. Naturally NASA sees things differently. 'I think those who are naysayers haven't given us a chance — haven't given us enough time to show what we can do. We're just now turning the path to be able to go full force on our science. In the past we had to fit it in around assembly, we didn't have the facilities available, and the crew was always busy.'"

UK To Track All Browsing, Email, and Phone Calls 286

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday October 20, 2010 @04:54PM from the that-about-covers-it dept.

Sara Chan writes "The UK government plans to introduce legislation that will allow the police to track every phone call, email, text message and website visit made by the public. The information will include who is contacting whom, when and where and which websites are visited, but not the content of the conversations or messages. Every communications provider will be required to store the information for at least a year."

US Monitoring Database Reaches Limit, Quits Tracking Felons and Parolees 270

Posted by timothy on Saturday October 09, 2010 @04:24AM from the paid-by-the-row dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Thousands of US sex offenders, prisoners on parole and other convicts were left unmonitored after an electronic tagging system shut down because of data overload. BI Incorporated, which runs the system, reached its data threshold — more than two billion records — on Tuesday. This left authorities across 49 states unaware of offenders' movement for about 12 hours." As the astonished submitter asks, "2 billion records?"

French ISP Refuses To Send Out Infringement Notices 302

Posted by timothy on Friday October 08, 2010 @02:19AM from the finest-bureaucratic-tradition dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Last month it was clear that French ISPs were not at all happy about the whole three strikes Hadopi process in France. Now that the 'notice' process has started, with Hadopi sending out notices to 10,000 people per day, it's hit a bit of a stumbling block. The French ISP named 'Free' has apparently figured out a bit of a loophole that allows it to not send out notices and protect its subscribers. Specifically, the law requires ISPs to reveal user info to Hadopi, but it does not require them to alert their users. But, the law does say that only users who are alerted by their ISP can be taken to court to be disconnected. In other words, even if Free is handing over user info, so long as it doesn't alert its users (which the law does not mandate), then those users cannot be kicked off the internet via Hadopi."

Astronaut Sues Dido For Album Cover 264

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday October 06, 2010 @10:40PM from the get-me-off-that-thing dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Astronaut Bruce McCandless is suing Dido for her album cover that uses a famous NASA photograph of a tiny, tiny, tiny McCandless floating in space. McCandless doesn't own the copyright on the photo, so he's claiming it's a violation of his publicity rights ... except that he's so tiny in the photo, it's not like anyone's going to recognize him."

How Can an Old-School Coder Regain His Chops? 565

Posted by timothy on Sunday August 01, 2010 @06:41PM from the just-eat-the-brain-of-someone-younger dept.

DonLab writes "I was a proficient software engineer in the 1980s, writing hundreds of thousands of lines of ALGOL, FORTRAN, COBOL, and Pascal programs, as well as working in 370 and 8080 assembly language & pre-relational DBMS systems. My hands-on programming career ended when I became a freelance analyst and designer, ultimately retiring young in the early '90s. Now I'd like to reenter the field, but I'm finding that I know nothing about today's post-C languages, programming tools, and computing environments. I wouldn't know where to start learning C++, PHP, Java, HTML5, or PERL, much less how to choose one over the other for a particular application. Can I be the only pre-GUI software designer or hobbyist searching for a way to update his skills for Windows, iOS, or Android?"

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