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Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft pays searchers to use Live.com (tekwasp.com)

Submitted by spotplace
spotplace writes: Microsoft is being severely trounced by Google in the search market so it was expected that the Redmond company would do something exciting and innovative to pick up the interest of us, poor searchers, and put some heat over Google's dominance. But did Microsoft radically change their algorithm and quality of their search index? No. Microsoft lacks so much confident on the quality of their search engine, that they just started paying searchers to use Live.com.
Education

Submission + - Mayor of Birmingham, Al. Asks For OLPC Exception (al.com)

Submitted by
BhamGray
BhamGray writes: "Larry Langford, the new Mayor of Birmingham, Alabama, has asked the One Laptop Per Child organization to consider providing students in his City with laptops for the 2008 school year. The City of Birmingham would purchase the laptops through OLPC at a price of around $200 each. This would be a departure from the OLPC's "developing nations" target, but the organization's representatives are quoted in the article as having been persuaded by Mayor Langford to consider it."
Censorship

Submission + - Bush takes over federal science (pressesc.com)

Submitted by
amigoro
amigoro writes: "Through an Executive Order that gives political appointees final say regarding science-based federal agency regulations and the appointment of an anti-educationist to head the Office of Management and Budget, US President George W. Bush is attempting to insulate his administration from congressional accountability while effectively turning federal scientists into White House puppets, a group of scientists warned today."
The Courts

Submission + - Public Videotaping is Wiretapping?

Submitted by AtomicSnarl
AtomicSnarl writes: When the Carlisle, PA, police noticed their traffic stop was being videotaped, they arrested the video taper for felony wiretapping. From the story: 'Kelly is charged under a state law that bars the intentional interception or recording of anyone's oral conversation without their consent.'

Hasn't it already been settled about the 'expectations of privacy' in a public place? What of the next Rodney King tape? What about cell phone video with sound showing up on YouTube? Political Speeches where it's open to the public, but a 'no camera' policy? Newshound video sold to the local TV station — Will/can they then charge you with wiretapping for recording anyway?
Security

Submission + - Teens Face Expulsion After Fake "Snow Day"

Submitted by PennyLoafers
PennyLoafers writes: Two teenagers in Ohio face expulsion from school and legal trouble after posting a fake "snow day" cancellation notice on their school's web site. This story explains that while the students didn't hack the web page, they face charges of "unauthorized computer use by reason of records tampering" among other counts. While the students were certainly wrong to pull this kind of prank, are these charges justified?
Movies

Submission + - How do your store your movie collection?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: I finally went HD. I bought a new TV, new stereo, even upgraded my DVR to HD. Problem is, my DVD recorder isn't HD, and I'd rather keep things at my finger tips instead of burning everything to DVD. I'd like to capture HD content from my sat/cable system and import my DVDs so I can access everything from my couch. Ideally you could browse, search, and organize the collection, use imported DVDs (still browse the DVD menus to see things like extra features), and record HD content. And it needs to have the capacity for a reasonably sized collection (at least 200 DVDs). It doesn't need lots of bells and whistles. Importing and organizing can be complicated, but browsing and playing needs to be simple. Are there commercial solutions? How would you go about building such a system? Or would you just buy a HD DVD burner and another bookcase?
Microsoft

Journal Journal: MS copies feature, then patents it

Journal by jbgreer
Michael Kölling, a senior lecturer at the University of Kent and one of the developers of BlueJ, an educational development environment, realized last year that Microsoft had copied one of the BlueJ features into Visual Studio. Flattery, right? Well, recently he was informed that Microsoft has filed a patent describing the very same feature.

Michael's blog entry describing this here
Operating Systems

Submission + - Daylight Savings time change in 2007

Submitted by goDzi7la
goDzi7la writes: In the United States & Canada the start and end of daylight savings times are being changed in 2007. Daylight savings time will now start on March 11, 2007 (rather than early April) and will end on November 4, 2007 (rather than late October). I've begun going through all my machines to apply the patches, but I want to make sure I don't miss anything. So besides OS patches or fixes, what other sofware needs updating? I've seen that some versions of Java SDK & JRE need to be updated. Whadda bout stuff like PHP? Perl? Oracle? MySQL? Anybody have a good list of what things need to be updated? What about the ramifications of not updating certain things?
Programming

Boston Game Devs Make 8 Games in 36 Hours 52

Posted by Zonk from the much-better-than-american-idol dept.
Darius Kazemi writes "This past weekend, a bunch of Boston-area game developers got together and did a 36-hour Boston Game Jam, inspired by the Indie Game Jam. We made eight games in 36 hours based on the theme of 'shift' for platforms as diverse as PC, GBA, and cell phones. The games range from a surprisingly complex behavioral sim to a game where you have to squish your opponent in a 2D physics deathmatch. Most of the games are available for download right now, and some of them even include the source code. In days to come, we'll be adding developer diaries and other goodies."
Security

Submission + - How do you know your code is secure?

Submitted by
bvc
bvc writes: "Marucs Ranum says: "It's really hard to tell the difference between a program that works and one that just appears to work." Then he explains how he just found a buffer overflow in Firewall Toolkit (FWTK) code he wrote in 1994. Read the whole thing here. So how do you go about making sure your code is secure? Especially if you have to write in a language like C or C++?"
Announcements

Submission + - IEEE's Winners & Losers of 2006

Submitted by
eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes: "As far as technologies go, there are clear winners and clear losers. This month's IEEE Spectrum issue contains (in my opinion) an interesting list of winners and losers from 2006. Among the winners are a new radio technology, IP phone networks & memory technologies along with ethanol from sugarcane. Among the losers are tongue vision, LEDs in clothes, a flying car and (interestingly enough) ethanol from corn. I've seen some (if not all) of these technologies covered on Slashdot with some pretty heated debate on the amount of energy used versus the amount of energy consumed in biofuel production. Well, there's always 2007."

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