Comment Re:They also claim Windows supports Posix (Score 1) 627
Your simple program called fork() and it compiled on Visual Studio 2005???
--jeffk++
Comment Re:LEPs where are you? (Score 1) 55
Not only that, but I've designed products using a touch pad just like this back in 1989! It was a two-dimensional touch pad with a 68hc11 microcontroller in it which outputted MIDI to a synthesizer. The location of your touch determined the pitch and sound and the velocity of your touch determined the amplitude and the pressure afterwards determined the low frequency oscillator modulation. See a funny video of me playing it at http://www.turnercom.com/compositions-etc/Kit-100.html
--jeffk++
Comment Re:Oh great, there goes slashdot (Score 1) 437
FWIW, I am the author of the Internet Filter and have just blogged about all this.
Since I have added the denmark list to the internetfilter.com list, and the internetfilter.com list is transparent and publicly available, I have posted the new items on internetfilter.com.
--jeffk
Comment Re:Useful in a few situations (Score 2, Insightful) 224
most likely these 'spreadsheets' are referred to by their creators as "databases".
--jeffk
Comment Re:You are subject to laws of where you live (Score 4, Funny) 319
Maybe they could hold a book burning party
--jeffk++
Comment Re:Killing kernel.org server isn't very nice... (Score 4, Funny) 180
I'm sure kernel.org appreciates these links. Now instead of fixing the bug they're putting out fires in the data center...great job slashdot.
Well, maybe the kernel developers or bugzilla developers could use the practice in making a reliable scalable system out of the systems that they design.
--jeffk++
Submission + - Sears Web "Community" is a Spyware Install (ca.com)
Panaqqa writes: "After several weeks of security alerts from CA and denials by Sears, spyware security researcher Ben Edelman has joined the chorus accusing Sears of surreptitiously installing Comscore tracking software on the PCs of people who join the Sears "community". Kmart (owned by Sears) is apparently involved also. After installation, the software sends details of all online activities — including secure sites such as banking — directly to Comscore, despite the Sears website's assertion that it does not share collected data with anyone. Various technology blogs are likening this breach of online privacy to the recent Facebook Beacon fiasco."
Submission + - Effective spam filtering packages?
AndrewSchaefer writes: "Every few years I rebuild my Linux server and one of the things that I've never been happy with is spam filtering. Three years ago I used a combination of Amavis and SpamAssassin but found that a lot of spam continued to trickle through. One of the key features I'd like to take advantage of would be some of the online blacklist and confirmed spam databases. While spam is a problem I don't want to have to dedicate a lot of time to tweaking rules or downloading new rulesets to defeat new techniques. The other thing I'd like to try to get right is the user interface for administering mail filtering. I host several friends' email inboxes as well and don't want to have to deal with sorting through false positives for them. My ideal setup would include a way for individual users to flag messages as spam, view the messages tagged as spam, and whitelist senders without having to SSH in and run a script."
Submission + - Fixing the U.S. Patent System
An anonymous reader writes: For most of us, a billion dollars is a lot of money.
I use the phrase "for most of us" because, according to Alpha magazine (April 2007), last year three hedge fund managers each took home well in excess of $1 billion (yes, Billion with a "B").
Here's another number for you: in total, the top 25 earners on Alpha's list pulled in more than $14 billion in 2006, equivalent, the magazine reported, "to the GDP of Jordan or Uruguay."
In case you were wondering, the mega-earners were James Simons of Renaissance Technologies ($1.7 billion), Kenneth Griffin of Citadel Investment Group ($1.4 billion), and Edward Lampert of Sears Holdings ($1.3 billion).
For the rest of us, whose W-2 forms do not have a 10-digit number in the box labeled "income," the dollar amounts involved in two patent infringement cases over the past year seem astonishingly high. In February, a California jury ruled that Microsoft must pay Alcatel-Lucent $1.52 billion for infringing two MP3 audio compression patents in software added to Microsoft's Windows Media Player. (Microsoft plans to appeal the decision to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington state).
This action follows last year's $612.5 million settlement between Research in Motion (RIM) and NTP. To avert a possible court-ordered shutdown of its BlackBerry system, RIM paid the equivalent of a year's worth of revenue to the small Virginia-based patentholding firm, which had sued RIM claiming the BlackBerry infringed on several of its patents.
Stung by the scope of these awards, the high tech community has gone on the offensive in calling for reform of the U.S. patent process, which has long been criticized as stifling rather than promoting innovation while serving to elicit lawsuits that extort large settlements.
At the heart of the matter is the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), an agency commonly described as overwhelmed and unable to keep pace with new and developing technology. As of mid-2005, the average length of time it would take to reach a first action on the merits of a new application in the area of control circuits was 44 months, for computer security it was 39 months, and for medical instruments 46 to 54 months.
In all, there is an estimated backlog at USPTO of over 675,000 patent applications, a number that is expected to rise to nearly 800,000 by year's end. While funding for the USPTO has increased in recent years allowing the agency to hire 1,200 new people per year to its patent examiner corps, legislative changes are also needed.
Congress to the rescue?
http://www.electronicproducts.com/ShowPage.asp?Fil eName=FAMSUsPatent.July2007.html
Submission + - Slashdot is filtered in Iran !
Anonymous Coward writes: "It is a while that slashdot is filtered in Iran and other interesting and scientific sites are becoming banned one after another .People in Iran are used to see their favorite sites banned without any logical reason .
It seems that a robot which is sensitive to specific words is used to control the passing traffic without any human supervision and there are no places to complain about or no one is going to be responsible about it.
The main purpose of censorship was said to be stopping people's access to pornographic and political sites ,
The number of dedicated hosts in European countries are increased which are just used for VPN connections. In Iran, people simply know how to tunnel using softwares like VTUND and OpenVPN and where to buy VPN accounts .
What they are doing is hiding their head under snow and claiming nothing's going on."
Submission + - Alan Cox on Patent Law and GPLv3 (abclinuxu.cz)
tykev writes: "Linux kernel guru Alan Cox talks about kernel features, cooperation with hardware vendors, and software patents. From the interview: "I don't think [Microsoft's patent threats] are the biggest danger. As Microsoft has been finding out recently it is the patent trolls, and organisations with buried patents in interesting areas that are the biggest threat in the USA. The real answer to that problem, however, is to pull the USA back into line with the majority of the world which simply does not recognize patents on software but respects them as literary works subject to copyright law. Also therefore we have to make sure the continuing US attempts to spread bogus patent law into the EU are defeated.""
Submission + - Solar Panels to get Real Cheap Real Fast (ecogeek.org)
hankmt writes: "A worldwide shortage of silicon has kept prices of solar panels high. But as new technology comes to market and new silicon manufacturing plants go online all over the world, the market will have surplus of silicon and the price of solar panels will likely drop by over 40% in the next three years!"
Submission + - ECMAScript 4 Reference Implementation Released (ecmascript-lang.org)
mad.frog writes: "Dave Herman has posted a note on lambda-the-ultimate.org announcing that the first pre-release of the reference implementation of ECMAScript Edition 4 (a.k.a. JavaScript 2) is now available. Language geeks will be interested to find that the reference implementation of ECMAScript is being written in Standard ML, rather than pseudocode."
Submission + - Reporter Arrested for Asking a Question (lawbean.com)
Spamicles writes: "Manchester, NH — Freelance reporter Matt Lepacek, reporting for Infowars.com, was arrested for asking a question to one of Giuliani's staff members in a press conference. The press secretary identified the New York based reporter as having previously asked Giuliani about his prior knowledge of WTC building collapses and ordered his arrest."
Submission + - FSF GNU Emacs version 22.1 released
forkalsrud writes: Looks like a milestone was reached yesterday with the release of Emacs version 22.1.
As far as I can tell version 21 has been around since 2001, so this has been some time
in the making.
