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Linux 2.6.28 Promises Year-End Presents 305

Posted by timothy from the my-holiday-thanks-go-mostly-to-the-finnish-guy dept.
darthcamaro writes "Little penguins all around the world are waiting for Penguin-Master Linus Torvalds to deliver some Glogg inspired Xmas cheer in the form of the new 2.6.28 kernel. Among the innovations in 2.6.28 are ext4 as stable, wireless USB drivers, better KVM support and the GEM graphic memory management technology. 'We now have a proper memory manager for video memory, the GEM [Graphics Execution Manager] memory manager,' Greg Kroah-Hartman said. 'This gives Linux much better graphics performance than it previously had.'"
User Journal

Journal Journal: Cheaper by the dozen (Score:1, Troll) 3

Journal by mcgrew

by mcgrew (92797) * on Friday December 12, @12:47PM (#26093749) Journal

So boasting a stunning readership in the dozens

Not today!

"Why did you throw me to the wolves like that?"

Priceless! IMO she deserved it. She should have mentioned the kid's being disruptive in the first place, and not accused Helios of malfeasance.
Programming

Would You Add Easter Eggs To Software Produced At Work? 747

Posted by Soulskill from the throw-in-a-flight-sim dept.
Mr. Leinad writes "Do you add Easter Eggs to the software that is produced at the office? I mean, if you have complete control over the final product, do you spice it up with that little personal touch, which, as unlikely as it is that anyone will see, carries with it an 'I was here' signature? I've just finished the development of a large software product, and I have a couple of days left to try to add my own personal Easter Egg code, but given that the software is quite professional, I don't know if I should. What do you think? Should we developers sign our creations?"
Software

Adobe Releases C/C++ To Flash Compiler 216

Posted by samzenpus from the transmutations dept.
SnT2k writes "Adobe recently released the beta version of Alchemy which compiles C/C++ code into AS3 bytecode (which runs on AVM2) that can run on the Flash or Flex platform and boasts increased performance for computationally-intensive tasks (but still slower than native C/C++). It was demonstrated last year during the Chicago MAX 2007 to run Quake. A few months later it has been demonstrated to run a Python interpreter and Nintendo Emulator. One interesting tidbit is that the thing is built upon the open source LLVM Compiler Infrastructure."
Media

Monty Python Banks On the Long Tail Via YouTube 222

Posted by timothy from the finally-a-perfect-use-for-the-foot-icon dept.
JTRipper writes "Monty Python seems to have done the right thing. Instead of issuing take down notices of their videos on YouTube, they are doing it better themselves with their own YouTube channel. They are putting all their clips (including snips from their movies) up in a decent resolution, with the only caveat being a link to buying the movies and TV episodes from Amazon."

Press Favored Obama Throughout Campaign 1601

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the kudos-for-owning-up-to-it dept.
narcberry writes "After complaints of one-sided reporting, the Washington Post checked their own articles and agreed. Obama was clearly favored, throughout his campaign, in terms of more favorable articles, less criticism, better page real-estate, more pictures, and total disregard for problems such as his drug use. 'Stories and photos about Obama in the news pages outnumbered those devoted to McCain. Reporters, photographers and editors found the candidacy of Obama, the first African American major-party nominee, more newsworthy and historic. Journalists love the new; McCain, 25 years older than Obama, was already well known and had more scars from his longer career in politics. The number of Obama stories since Nov. 11 was 946, compared with McCain's 786. Both had hard-fought primary campaigns, but Obama's battle with Hillary Rodham Clinton was longer, and the numbers reflect that. McCain clinched the GOP nomination on March 4, three months before Obama won his. From June 4 to Election Day, the tally was Obama, 626 stories, and McCain, 584. Obama was on the front page 176 times, McCain, 144 times; 41 stories featured both.'"
Microsoft

Submission + - M$ Shakes Down Old Folks and Charities. (news.com.au)

Submitted by
twitter
twitter writes: "From the bait and switch dept.

MICROSOFT will charge the Australian Aged Care Industry IT Council $70 million over the next 18 months as it forces users to pay full commercial rates for previously discounted software. Is this M$'s way to make up for falling traditional software sales?

Aged care providers are shocked by Microsoft's decision to revoke their not-for-profit status, which gave them access to its products at a heavily discounted rate.

A Microsoft spokesman said a recent review had uncovered "a number of ineligible entities, including a range of commercial organisations, that were using Academic Volume Licensing programs" under the belief they qualified.

At least three projects were put on hold by Aged Care. Never trust important business to a software license that may be revoked at any time."
It's funny. Laugh.

Lame Duck Challenge Ends With Free Codeweavers Software For All 433

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the well-that-didn't-end-as-planned dept.
gzipped_tar writes to tell us that The Codeweavers "Great American Lame Duck Presidential Challenge" has ended in surprise and free software all day Tuesday (October 28, 2008) at the Codeweavers site. A while back Codeweavers gave President Bush a challenge to meet one of several goals before he left office. One of these goals was to lower gas prices in the Twin Cities below $2.79 a gallon, which has since transpired. "How was I to know that President Bush would take my challenge so seriously? And, give the man credit, I didn't think there was *any* way he could pull it off. But engineering a total market meltdown - wow - that was pure genius. I clearly underestimated the man. I'm ashamed that I goaded him into this and take full responsibility for the collapse of any savings you might have. Please accept our free software as my way of apologizing for the global calamity we now find ourselves embroiled in."
PHP

PHP Gets Namespace Separators, With a Twist 523

Posted by Soulskill from the or-maybe-more-of-a-slant dept.
jeevesbond writes "PHP is finally getting support for namespaces. However, after a couple hours of conversation, the developers picked '\' as the separator, instead of the more popular '::'. Fredrik Holmström points out some problems with this approach. The criteria for selection were ease of typing and parsing, how hard it was to make a typo, IDE compatibility, and the number of characters."

Comment Take it slow and step by step (Score 1) 295

by dysfunct (#24993405) Attached to: Server Optimization For Newbies?
First off, RTFM. CentOS is pretty much a RedHat clone, and their documentation is great and easy to understand.

Some general hints in no specific order:

- Go through all files in /etc/sysconfig, learn what they're doing and configure them as needed.
- Run chkconfig --list, find out what each and every one of those services do and enable/disable them as required.
- Don't plug in the network cable before you've done a rough setup of iptables. There's even a console based GUI for that.
- Never, never ever use easy passwords like root:root123, test:blah and similar. Believe me, if your sshd is accessible from the outside you *will* have a Brazilian script kiddie on it within minutes.
- After installing a service like apache or ntpd immediately find the config files and read through and try to understand all of them. Getting everything only half-working is of no use.
- Take your time and don't let anybody stress you about getting that server ready for production. Once there's stuff running on it any oversight will cost you.
- Do *not* optimize for performance. The server's probably fast enough as it is. Unless you know exactly what you're doing you'll probably only screw up and/or waste your time by optimizing a server that has a load of 0.02 anyway.
- Before moving to configure a different piece of software test everything as well as possible. Try logging in to your new ftpd as anonymous and start a warez archive. See if apache leaks configuration information. Use your mail server as anonymous relay.
- Learn whatever you can about the server itself. Install vendor-provided administration utilities and try to set up system event logging and notifications.
- Run yum update (or even upgrade) *before* going into production.
- Trust most default values of packages you've installed, but don't trust them blindly. If in doubt, read the man page or documentation.
- Most security stuff will be adequate out-of-the-box. Take precautions but don't be too paranoid. Trying to implement your own perfect security measures without knowing enough about the details, modifying perfectly good default PAM settings and similar will probably only decrease security.
- Don't forget why you're running a Linux distribution and not Linux From Scratch. Their packages, configuration subsystem, file paths, init scripts and so on are probably not according to the way you would have done it but customizing everything will only cause you tons of additional work down the road. Only customize when you have a good reason, no way around it or need to deploy your own setup to many servers.
- Last but not least, play with it as long as possible. Toying around and with and exploring a non-production server without breaking too much will teach you more real-life experience than any book could provide.

Physics Nerds Rap About the LHC 91

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the rock-you-in-the-head dept.
Engadget has pointed out a small band of people even we can consider nerdy that decided to cut loose and demo CERN's fancy new toy, the Large Hadron Collider. The resulting music video is certainly enough to "rock you in the head," and maybe even enough to cause a rip in space-time. Between Alpinekat and Dr Spatzo, I think my iPod just got a new entry.
Robotics

Ultra-Light Micro Air Vehicles 143

Posted by samzenpus from the eye-in-the-sky dept.
Roland Piquepaille writes "Dutch engineers have built the third generation of the DelFly autonomous air vehicle. The DelFly Micro made its first public flight earlier today in Delft. This micro air vehicle weighs only 3 grams and has a wingspan of 10 centimeters. This very small remote-controlled aircraft carries a 0.4 gram camera. The DelFly Micro, which looks like a dragonfly, can fly for 3 minutes at a maximum speed of 5 meters/second. It could be used for observation flights in difficult-to-reach or dangerous areas."
Space

Galaxy Zoo Produces a Rare Specimen 188

Posted by kdawson from the hanny's-voorwerp dept.
We discussed the Galaxy Zoo project soon after it launched last summer. Science News is now following developments about an odd celestial object that is fueling a lot of excitement among astronomers around the world. In August, a Dutch schoolteacher named Hanny, in the process of characterizing galaxy images, noticed a peculiar object and posted a query about it on the Galaxy Zoo blog. She called it a "Voorwerp," which Science News says is Dutch for "thing" but which Google translates as "subject." Hanny's Voorwerp emits mostly green light (the earlier report said blue). The best guess astronomers have now is that the Voorwerp is emitting "ghost light," i.e. it is "lit by the ultraviolet light and X-rays from a quasar that has vanished in the last 100,000 years," to quote astronomer Bill Keel. "As far as we can tell, it's an unprecedented thing," Keel added. Researchers are scrambling to book time on the Hubble and other major telescopes to get a closer look.

Voorwerp
The Courts

Submission + - RIAA assessed $107,834 in attorneys fees (blogspot.com) 2

Submitted by
NewYorkCountryLawyer
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes: "Tanya Andersen, the disabled single mom from Oregon who's been fighting the RIAA since 2005, has just been awarded $107,834 in attorneys fees against the record companies. This eclipses the $68,685 awarded in Capitol v. Foster and will no doubt inspire many more RIAA targets to fight back, and encourage many more lawyers to take these cases on. Jon Newton of p2pnet.net, who has been covering the Tanya Andersen case from Day 1, writes that "RIAA nemesis Tanya Andersen has achieved another milestone victory. She fought Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony BMG's RIAA to a standstill, forcing it to drop its spurious file sharing case against her, and now an Oregon court has awarded her close to $108,000 in fees and costs.....[L]awyers representing RIAA victims....[wi]ll be able to proceed with counterclaims bolstered by the knowledge they'll be paid their work.""
Censorship

Microsoft IM Blocking YouTube Links 364

Posted by kdawson from the walled-playground dept.
A number of readers are sending word that the blogosphere and Twittersphere are alight with reports of Microsoft's new block on messages containing YouTube URLs. Both MSN Messenger and Windows Live Messenger reportedly implement the block. One blogger sniffed the network to discover that such messages receive a NAK from Microsoft's servers. Microsoft has been blocking messages by keyword, as an anti-phishing measure, for some time, but *.youtube.com would not seem to provoke much worry about phishing. Instead, as B.E.T.A Daily speculates, "This block seems to be related to the recent launch of Messenger TV in 20 countries which allows for sharing video clips from MSN Video on Messenger." Hard to get away with in an arena where you don't enjoy a monopoly.

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