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Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft blasts IBM in open letter

Submitted by carlmenezes
carlmenezes writes: Arstechnica has an article on Microsoft's open letter to IBM that adds fresh ammunition to the battle of words between those who support Microsoft's Open XML and OpenOffice.org's OpenDocument file formats. Microsoft has strong words for IBM, which it accuses of deliberately trying to sabotage Microsoft's attempt to get Open XML certified as a standard by the ECMA. In the letter, general managers Tom Robertson and Jean Paol write: "When ODF was under consideration, Microsoft made no effort to slow down the process because we recognized customers' interest in the standardization of document formats." In contrast, the authors charge that IBM "led a global campaign" urging that governments and other organizations demand that International Standards Organization (ISO) reject Open XML outright.
Could MS actually be getting a taste of their own medicine?
Censorship

Submission + - Avoidance of the e-word in medical research

Submitted by Ra Zen
Ra Zen writes: An essay published in this week's PloS Biology (http://biology.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request =get-document&doi=10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.0050030) highlights the non-use of the word "evolution" in medical journal articles dealing with antimicrobial resistance. From the article, "the increase in resistance of human pathogens to antimicrobial agents is one of the best-documented examples of evolution in action... In spite of the importance of antimicrobial resistance, we show that the actual word 'evolution' is rarely used in the papers describing this research." The authors go on to show that the use of the word evolution in research articles is directly correlated to the use of the word in popular media describing those findings. This has created a minor stir among the Intelligent Design crowd, who regard this as "pro-evolutionary propaganda," as evidenced by the post on William Dembski's (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Dembski) blog Uncommon Descent (http://www.uncommondescent.com/archives/2072).
User Journal

Journal SPAM: '...something I have never witnessed before on this scale' 14

Journal by Jeremiah Cornelius

Carl Bernstein:

"Nixon's relationship to the press was consistent with his relationship to many institutions and people. He saw himself as a victim. We now understand the psyche of Richard Nixon, that his was a self-destructive act and presidency.
The Internet

Submission + - Wikipedia is not failing

Submitted by gadfium
gadfium writes: Wikipedia is not failing is a reply to the essay "Wikipedia is failing" covered by Slashdot a couple of days ago. The essay evaluates Wikipedia's success or failure according to the criteria of overall size, organization, ease of navigation, breadth of coverage, depth of coverage, timeliness, readability, biases, and reliability in comparison to existing encyclopedias, especially Britannica.
Software

Submission + - Benchmark: VirtualBox vs. Qemu vs. VMware-player

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: Recently InnoTek, a company from southern Germany, released their virtualization software "VirtualBox" under GPL. Due this piece of software is based on qemu I thought about performing a benchmark to compare those two open source vmware competitors. As some people requested, I added the VMware-Player to this article to make a direct comparison of those 2 opensource projects with this freeware tool. Full article here
Censorship

Submission + - Google censors blog posts for NZ Government

Submitted by ESarge
ESarge writes: Google has removed some posts from a blog at the request of the New Zealand Government. The blog, CYFSWatch, purports to name and shame the actions of social workers working for Child, Youth & Family Service (CYFS), the national child protection agency. The blog has been controversial because it asks people to post addresses and personal details of individual social workers. For editor only: I suggest that the URL not be posted. The blog is at http://cyfswatch.blogspot.com/. Actual post is at http://cyfswatch.blogspot.com/2007/02/google-moves -on-behalf-of-new-zealand.html. This is being reported on Radio New Zealand National — the equivalent of NPR.
Media

Submission + - Scientific Journals Say Access Equals Censorship

Submitted by
bcrowell
bcrowell writes: "Nature is reporting on e-mails leaked from the Association of American Publishers, which considers itself "under siege" because of NIH and congressional efforts to get all NIH-funded scientific papers posted for free on PubMed Central. The AAP has hired a PR firm, which is advising them to spread the message that "Public access equals government censorship," and that traditional for-profit print publishing is the same thing as peer peer review."
Windows

Inside the Windows Vista Kernel 298

Posted by kdawson from the deep-tech dept.
Reader trparky recommends an article on Technet (which, be warned, is rather chaotically formatted). Mark Russinovich, whose company Winternals Software was recently bought by Microsoft, has published the first of a series of articles on what's new in the Vista kernel. Russinovich writes: "In this issue, I'll look at changes in the areas of processes and threads, and in I/O. Future installments will cover memory management, startup and shutdown, reliability and recovery, and security. The scope of this article comprises changes to the Windows Vista kernel only, specifically Ntoskrnl.exe and its closely associated components. Please remember that there are many other significant changes in Windows Vista that fall outside the kernel proper and therefore won't be covered."
Software

Submission + - Ubuntu Studio revealed

Submitted by
lukeknipe
lukeknipe writes: "Ubuntu announces the April release of the Ubuntu Studio. An exceptionally ambitious project, it is described by Ubuntu as a "multimedia editing flavor of Ubuntu for the Linux audio, video, and graphic enthusiast or professional who is already familiar with the Ubuntu-Gnome environment.""
Software

Submission + - Language Tools

Submitted by creolophus
creolophus writes: I am a college student and I am looking for language tools which will help me with my writing, by giving me useful feedback (on my grammar, usage, etc). I will be writing mostly English prose with very little technical content.

So far, I have been using only Microsoft Word's spelling and grammar checkers, and they don't provide any feedback.

Do you know (or) have you been using any such tools?
Math

Submission + - Your web browser, now a graphing calculator

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Taking advantage of the vector graphics features offered by the latest browsers, a recently created website called FooPlot turns your web browser into a function plotter (in 2-D and 3-D), offering a few basic graphing calculator features with a promise for further developments and integration with popular online spreadsheet applications. Gaining popularity in an educational context both in high schools and universities, this is another great example of the potential of the Internet to become the application platform of the future.

As an added extra, FooPlot also permits functions to be tacked onto the URL: http://fooplot.com/x^2+2x+1.
KDE

Submission + - KDE on Windows

Submitted by
AlanS2002
AlanS2002 writes: "This week's KDE Commit Digest tells about an installer for KDE on Windows and the problems the developers encountered setting up a working environment for KDE to run on. Many screenshots included, showing the first applications (such as Konqueror) running natively."

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UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things. -- Doug Gwyn

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