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Comment Re:Missing the point (Score 1) 220

by ozzee (#26644369) Attached to: Offline Gmail Launched

... So I'm curious and I genuinely would like to hear your opinion, what is so great about the GMail interface that I am potentially overlooking?

I thought he did. Anyway, these are some thoughts. It handles large numbers of emails much faster than TB. It puts all emails of a thread into one logical thread no matter what folder they're in so you see the whole context every time. It's search is fast. It has a "label" instead of "folder" model for organizing messages. It does not need "installing" ...
Programming

Subversion 1.5.0 Released 104

Posted by timothy from the sand-in-the-gastank dept.
Hyrum writes "The Subversion team is proud to announce the release of Subversion 1.5.0, a popular open source version control system. The first new feature release of Subversion in almost 2 years, 1.5.0 contains a number of new improvements and features. A detailed list of changes can be found in the release notes. Among the major new features included in this release is merge tracking—Subversion now keeps track of what changes have been merged where. Source code is available immediately, with various other packages available soon."
Software

Submission + - Microsoft settlement funds free FOSS computers (archive.org)

Submitted by
christian.einfeldt
christian.einfeldt writes: "The State of California sued Microsoft for Anti-trust violations, and now the proceeds of the settlement of that case are being used to fund the acquisition of computers for any school district in California. The terms of the settlement allow every school district in California to be reimbursed a set dollar amount for the purchase of computers with the software of their choice. It is clear from the way that the settlement was structured that Microsoft anticipated that school districts would mainly use the settlement to fund the acquisition of more Microsoft products, with a few Apple purchases sprinkled in here and there. But now that Free Open Source Software is being commercialized by hardware vendors such as Dell, System76, EmperorLinux, Zareason.com, and TechCollective.com, acquiring computers powered by Free Open Source Software is straightforward. In his Slashdot journal, Christian Einfeldt, a volunteer sys admin at a northern California public charter school details the step-by-step process for using Microsoft's money to pay for the Linux purchases of your school's choice."
Communications

Submission + - Swedish Government Surveillance - The Other Way! (gnuheter.com)

Submitted by
pawal
pawal writes: "With a list of Swedish government agencies and armed programming knowledge I decided to make a statement about the discussion about surveillance of the Internet in Sweden. I made a service called Creeper that I released in May this year. Anyone can use the service by linking a PNG-file on their homepage or blog, and my software will then match each request from the list of IP-addresses that I have collected. Now anybody surfing to the webpages that has this PNG is logged if the IP-address is a match. Already we have discovered government people being admins of Torrent-sites and surfing porn. There is a German version called Uberwach.de, and it would be great to see this service in other countries as well."
Republicans

Submission + - Global Warming Insanity (blogspot.com)

Submitted by Advocate123
Advocate123 writes: Al Gore has single-handedly destroyed a necessary facet of Science: the zealous questioning of scientific hypotheses. Not only does questioning assure accuracy, but it also elevates science itself to a field from which public policy can be based. However, Gore, comedian's wives, singers, and Leonardo DiCaprio publicly state that the debate is over regarding man-made global warming. As such, we should now make drastic changes that will undoubtedly place an insurmountable economic burden on us all.
The Courts

Submission + - Poll: Do you (Slashdotter) read Groklaw every day?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Some people read every day Slashdot AND http://www.groklaw.net/. Is this the standard or the exception? (I don't know how a poll is started on Slashdot. Maybe other Slashdot-relevant pages could be included in the poll. It would just be interesting to know what other pages a Slashdotter is also following (or is Slashdot everything you need to survive? ;-) Thanks for help.)
User Journal

Journal SPAM: Why hasn't Iran started by wiping its own Jews off the map? 7

Journal by Jeremiah Cornelius

In the meantime, the 25,000-strong Iranian Jewish community is the largest in the Middle East outside Israel and traces its roots back 3,000 years. As one of several non-Muslim minorities in Iran, Jews there suffer discrimination, but they are certainly no worse off than the one million Palestinian citizens of Israel - and far better off than Palestinians under Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza.
Software

Submission + - Bad file naming (piksels.com)

Submitted by
dizzybastard
dizzybastard writes: "logo.jpg
logoEDITED.jpg
logoEDITED_pink.jpg
logoEDITED_pink2.jpg
etc...
etc...
logoedited_pink2b_real_final2b.jpg

We've all been there before, why does no one do anything about it?"
Google

Submission + - Google fails to produce accurate results (somethingawful.com)

Submitted by
BondGamer
BondGamer writes: "For some reason Google hates SomethingAwful.com. In a recent article, SA administrator Richard "Lowtax" compares search results with Microsoft Live and Yahoo. SomethingAwful consistently takes the top spot on other search engines but does not appear at all in Google's results. Google will not explain what the issue is and only points to general web site optimizations."
Media

Submission + - Against perpetual copyright - Laurence Lessig's Wi

Submitted by Podcaster
Podcaster writes: In response to the recent NYT op-ed calling for the indefinate extension of copyright terms, the copyright reform community are crafting a reply over at Laurance Lessig's wiki.

Professor Lessig is the author of many books and serves on the board of the Free Software Foundation, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Public Library of Science and Public Knowledge.
Announcements

Submission + - BRST VS. APPLE patent case ruling issued

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Goto http://www.burst.com/ and look at the PDF on the top right about a decision being issued in the Markman hearing in the Apple case It's a slam dunk for Burst. Apple is gonna Lose big time!! Be the 1st to report this news for some reason no one has reported this all day.....
The Media

Submission + - Global Warming Railroading

Submitted by ozzee
ozzee writes: Does anyone else feel that the greenhouse gas emission "proof" is flimsy ? I thought it was plausible or a while but I have come to the realization that I am not convinced by any so called evidence yet. It seems like the whole issue is an excuse for governments to spend megabucks with their environmental chums at the expense of all of us. Don't get me wrong, I'm way for the decreased dependence on fossil fuels but let's call it what it is, money for the environmentalists.

An example of the environmental lobby gone wild is "contamination", check out the POEO Act for NSW Australia. If you want to build something that used to be a farm, you're going to need to get a contamination study. The study for a moderate sized property will cost you $A10K. OK, cool, we need to know if there are any problems. So the study finds a spec (literally a fibre 1mm long of asbestos) — you need a full assessment and a remediation plan — cost $A45K. So, now you start the remediation (which basically means moving big lumps of soil from one place to another at the cost of about $A500 /truck). OK cool, in all likeliness, no-one would ever be harmed by any asbestos on the site but by the time you're done you have spent over $A300K (and this is a small one). That $A300K would better have been spent on extra money for our hospitals where we can save real lives and not on this nonsense called the POEO act pushed through by the environmentalists.

I see the same coming here. There is going to be more legislation that will waste everyone's time and money and finally we are going to loose where it counts most — the PEOPLE.

So show me the evidence and keep your politics to yourself. Why are the glaciers melting on Mars ? Why is sunspot activity (all time record high activity being recorded) not related to global warming ? We need to make an Earth sized set of sunnies ?

I'm not convinced that this is not more about feel-good legislation money spinners that it is about saving the planet.
Security

Submission + - Man with golf club foils Electronic Vote Count

Submitted by Rachel
Rachel writes: Sitting here waiting for the early results of the Scottish election which happened today...

This was the first use of electronic counting machines in Scottish elections, and AFAIK they have *no* statistical check to see whether the votes reported as counted matched those actually counted.

Just after the polls closed, the politics program had on a bloke from the company supplying the technology saying how it had been fully tested, didn't need any checks through actual live usage, no, no, no, of course not, their testing was full and complete, etc...

Fast forward an hour, and they're reporting that the count has been held up in my local Edinburgh consituency because someone charged into one of the voting stations, attacked the ballot boxes with a golf club, and managed to cause some serious damage to many ballots (ripped up, crumpled, etc) And this is going to delay the count for some considerable time, whilst the electoral officers figure out what the right procedure is about sellotaping back torn-up ballot papers, and whether they can then be put through these "infallible" vote counting machines, and if not, what happens next ...

Wonder whether they tested for this event...
Google

Submission + - Google Buys DoubleClick

Submitted by
ewhac
ewhac writes: "The Associated Press is reporting that Google has struck a deal to acquire DoubleClick for $3.1 billion in cash. DoubleClick, one of the oldest advertising companies on the Web, has been long criticized for its questionable practices of using browser cookies to quietly track the browsing habits of users. It is unclear how this acquisition meshes with Google's mantra of, "Don't be evil.""

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