Red_Foreman - Slashdot User

Submission + - Trials for male Pill show no side-effects

Submitted by Blahbooboo3 on Monday October 30, 2006 @11:00AM

Blahbooboo3 writes: Men concerned about contraception may soon be able to use the male equivalent of the Pill, without the potential side-effects of a drug based on altering the balance of sex hormones. The Independent has a full write-up on the announcement. The drug, called Adjudin, works by disrupting the interaction that takes place in the testicles between immature sperm cells and the nurse cells responsible for nurturing sperm to maturity. The germ cells need to adhere to the nurse cells for sperm to properly develop, and the drug prevents this bond from forming. It looks like it will be a gel patch type of applicator.

Submission + - MacIntel 10.4.8 Nasty Little Rounding Bug

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 30, 2006 @10:57AM

An anonymous reader writes: Apparently Apple has introduced a rounding bug in some applications dependent on Rosetta. Actually it would appear that the int() causes a rounding up error on PPC applications running on Intel hardware on 10.4.8. While Apple has been relatively quiet about it, stories about about have been trickling out here, here, here (scroll down to known issues), here, and here. While it would appear to only affect only 4D derived applications, there is concern that it might be more widespread.

Galactic Traffic Patterns 81

Posted by Hemos on Monday October 30, 2006 @10:50AM

eldavojohn writes "Using Hubble, researchers have noticed traffic patterns of stars within our own galaxy. From the article, 'Researchers analyzed 47 Tucanae, the second largest cluster in the Milky Way's galactic neighborhood, and determined the cluster sorts out stars according to their masses. Due to the associated gravitational pull, heavier stars slow down and sink to the cluster's core, while lighter stars pick up speed and zip out to the cluster's periphery.' There is speculation that these movements of stars — although tiny — can have significant implications and possibly result in mass segregation."

Submission + - Red Hat defends support while buying back stock

Submitted by narramissic on Monday October 30, 2006 @10:49AM

narramissic writes: Following Oracle's announcement on Wednesday that it will offer support for Red Hat Linux for about half what Red Hat charges, Red Hat's board has decided to buy back some stock ($250 million in stock and $75 million in debt notes) in an effort to 'shore up its share price.' At the same time, Red Hat CEO Matthew Szulik said that 'Red Hat would not cut its support fees in response to Oracle's move.'

Submission + - Video iPod patent revealed

Submitted by mpitcavage on Monday October 30, 2006 @10:42AM

mpitcavage writes: Macrumors.com has posted this article detailing "a particularly revealing patent application from Apple that was published on October 26, 2006." The device changes the trademark clickwheel to a series of "areas" on the bezel. This supposedly solves the problem of fingerprints and smudges on the full screen by forcing two-handed operation.

Please Steve, just put the clickwheel on the back!

Submission + - Virgin starts, then cancels, viral marketing

Submitted by

solevita

on Monday October 30, 2006 @10:40AM

solevita writes: "The Register is reporting on the fate of a short lived viral marketing campaign by Virgin. The campaign was started as a challenge on B3ta.com, but ended after the results were deemed inappropriate by Virgin. Ironically, the campaign revolved around Virgin's new mantra of saying "yes" to everything. El Reg writes of B3ta.com:

"The site is famous for its slightly twisted humour — it recently published a book of sick jokes and runs sickipedia — a Web2.0 collection of offensive humour. Entries for Virgin's competition included doctored pictures of the Soham murder victims and an apparent snap of Richard Branson relieving himself over site founder Rob Manuel, wearing a toddler's pink dress and chained to a radiator.

The Guardian and The Inquirer are also running the story, whilst B3ta remains quiet on the matter. They have, coincidently, set their question of the week to the topic of not losing your virginity."

Submission + - Make Linux 'gorgeous,' Ubuntu leader says

Submitted by OSS_ilation on Monday October 30, 2006 @10:39AM

OSS_ilation writes: They say beauty is only skin deep, but when it comes to Linux and the free software movement, people like Mark Shuttleworth think looks have an important part to play. On his blog and an article on SearchOpenSource.com, Shuttleworth and a slew of open source end users say it's the look and feel of open source is also a matter of wider acceptance among enterprise players who are used to Windows, yet crave Mac OS X and the functionality of Linux. 'If we want the world to embrace free software, we have to make it beautiful,' Shuttleworth said. "We have to make it gorgeous. We have to make it easy on the eye. We have to make it take your friend's breath away.' With the early success of Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10, Shuttleworth and company may be onto something.

Submission + - Exporting data from OpenOffice.org's Base

Submitted by

Jane Walker

on Monday October 30, 2006 @10:28AM

Jane Walker writes: "There is no clear cut method for exporting data from OpenOffice 2.0's Base database. In this tip, an expert demonstrates how to bring table data into a Writer document and turn it into a spreadsheet or delimited text file."

Submission + - VoiceObjects On-Demand - build a phone app

Submitted by

voxtiger

on Monday October 30, 2006 @10:23AM

voxtiger writes: "http://sourcewire.com/releases/rel_display.php?rel id=27711&hilite= Vox Tiger and VoiceObjects Team to Deliver On-Demand Phone Application Development Environment Service Removes Barriers to Phone Application Creation, Testing SAN MATEO, Calif. & GLASGOW, Scotland — VoiceObjects, the phone application server company, and Vox Tiger, a provider of online phone application development services, today announced the launch of an on-demand phone application development environment, which allows developers to create sophisticated phone applications that run on VoiceObjects Server, the world's leading phone application server. Vox Tiger's on-demand provisioning frees developers from the cost and other burdens of purchasing, configuring and administering their own phone application servers and other technologies, allowing them to focus on phone application development. Similar application environments would cost more than US$5,000-$6,000 to build for the software and equipment alone. Vox Tiger subscriptions begin at just US$65.00 per month. More information about VoiceObjects Server is available at www.voiceobjects.com; more information about Vox Tiger is available at www.voxtiger.com. Vox Tiger provides each subscriber with a complete development environment, including: VoiceObjects Server for application execution and management Resource Server for storing the grammar, audio, and VoiceObjects XML files MySQL and Tomcat services for creating transactional applications A choice of IDEs, including the web-based VoiceObjects Desktop, the Eclipse-based VoiceObjects Studio, and the SpeechDraw Vox Tiger Edition Windows application "Vox Tiger provides the fastest, easiest and most cost-effective way for both novice and expert developers to create and test enterprise-class phone applications," said Gordon Suttie, chief executive officer of Vox Tiger. "Our on-demand provisioning completely eliminates the substantial up-front capital costs that have traditionally been associated with phone application development." Applications created in the Vox Tiger environment can be deployed by Vox Tiger, transferred to on-premise VoiceObjects Server installations, or hosted by third-party VoiceObjects hosting partners and can work with all VoiceXML-compliant media platforms. "Phone applications developed with Vox Tiger benefit from the full range of advantages that VoiceObjects Server provides," said Michael Codini, chief technology officer of VoiceObjects. "These applications are media-platform-independent, readily personalized for each caller, massively scalable, easily integrated into SOA environments, and capable of state-of-the-art multimedia interfaces." What is a Phone Application Server? All phone application servers, including VoiceObjects Server, have the following four capabilities and associated business benefits: The ability to dynamically generate VoiceXML to create personalized dialogs with each caller at call-time, using information in an organization's CRM or other databases. The resulting caller-specific conversations provide opportunities to up-sell and cross-sell and higher rates of customer satisfaction and service adoption. An application execution environment that supports remote management and monitoring of multimodal applications, online application maintenance for instant changes or rollbacks, and guaranteed high availability. Web services support for easy integration between an organization's phone-based self-service assets and its CRM, ERP, and other IT assets in service-oriented architecture (SOA) environments, dramatically reducing development time and cost. Support for multimodal phone applications that may include voice, video, graphics and text interfaces, allowing user-friendly interactive IVR applications that are unmatched in the phone-based self-service industry. About Vox Tiger Vox Tiger is revolutionizing voice application development with its innovative approach to rapid development, deployment, pricing and hosting. The company provides affordable access to high-end development tools to design, test and build voice applications and offer a comprehensive, integrated hosting environment for production. Vox Tiger offers an on-demand phone application development environment that eliminates price barriers and simplifies complexity. www.voxtiger.com About VoiceObjects VoiceObjects is the phone application server company. VoiceObjects works with carriers and enterprises around the world to deliver a personalized customer service experience to more than 500 million callers every year. VoiceObjects Server, the company's flagship product, supports phone-based applications at more than fifty leading companies, including Adobe, T-Mobile and Volkswagen Financial Services. VoiceObjects is privately held and headquartered in San Mateo, Calif. For more information, please contact (650) 288-0299 or visit www.voiceobjects.com. Contacts Prequent, Inc. (for VoiceObjects) Christian Danella, 408-275-6488 or 415-350-4830 (mobile) christian@prequent.com or Devonshire Marketing (for Vox Tiger) Vanessa Land, +44 (0) 870 242 7469"

Submission + - HP Says Open Source Can Be More Profitable

Submitted by

eldavojohn

on Monday October 30, 2006 @10:23AM

eldavojohn writes: "Recently, an HP exec has stated that some open source solutions can be more profitable than the proprietary competitor. This would be the first time I have seen a large company reveal that they are finding at least some of their open source contracts are more profitable. An HP CTO cited that open source allows them to provide a 'more complete solution' for customers — particularly with telecom and government contracts."

Sony Says Recall Strains Battery Production 28

Posted by Hemos on Monday October 30, 2006 @10:14AM from the we're-it-giving-all-she's-got-captain dept.

Sony said on Tuesday that a recall of up to 9.6 million of its personal computer batteries was overwhelming its production capacity. The stated reason for making the strain on production public has more to do with warning Wall Street that they may lose market share to other manufacturers then with any sort of PSA.

Submission + - Amsterdam goes back to voting pencil

Submitted by

PanMan

on Monday October 30, 2006 @10:10AM

PanMan writes: "Amsterdam (Netherlands) goes back to voting with a pencil, after the just introduced voting computers turned out to be vulnerable to listening in by scanner. The minister decided that voting should be private, and ordered one model not to be used in the upcoming, 22 November, elections.
Article (in Dutch): http://www.nu.nl/news/867286/11/Stemmachines_in_35 _gemeentes_afgekeurd.html
There recently has been much to do about the security of the dutch voting machines, after a group of hackers exposed their flaws. They can be found at http://www.wijvertrouwenstemcomputersniet.nl/Engli sh"

Submission + - What's wrong with software patents?

Submitted by

pieterh

on Monday October 30, 2006 @10:04AM

pieterh writes: "Too much of the software patent debate rests on dogma, emotion, and broad unprovable arguments such as "software patents are bad because ideas should not be property" (or the other extreme, "all property is good"). To provoke a more empirical approach, I've written an article that examines software patents in a new light. I define five criteria that let us judge any property system, then I show how these criteria work for software copyright, trademark, patents, and trade secrets. Using this model it's easy to explain why houses should be private, but streets should be shared, and it's easy to understand why copyright and trademarks work in the IT business, while software patents do not."

Bookmark HTML: The Next Generation (daniweb.com)

by billandad on Monday October 30, 2006 @09:54AM

Submission + - China Announces Internet Addiction Prevention

Submitted by

eldavojohn

on Monday October 30, 2006 @09:51AM

eldavojohn writes: "China has announced a technology to protect its youths from internet addiction. There are other sources online that estimate of the 15.4 million youths in China, 2 million are internet addicts. Given what I've read on Slashdot about farming in popularized games like World of Warcraft & Final Fantasy Online, I wouldn't doubt many of these children are attempting to earn money online. Of course, as with most things the Chinese government does, I must wonder if this is a true effort to protect the youths or to reduce the communication of young idealists speaking out against the government? China is second in internet use only to the United States, do we require the same sort of addiction prevention?"

Slashdot Top Deals