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Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft Surface bears striking resemblance to Bu (blorge.com)

Submitted by
secretsather
secretsather writes: "http://tech.blorge.com/Structure:%20/2007/05/31/mi crosoft-surface-bears-striking-resemblance-to-bump top/

Microsoft Surface bears striking resemblance to Bumptop

By now, you've probably already heard of Microsoft's former 'top secret' project, known as Surface, which is a table-shaped computer that boasts a 30 touch screen for interactive 'touch' computing. It's certainly a great idea, but everyone seems to be missing the fact that this technology has been done before, in a prototype known as Bumptop.

The YouTube video (shown above) of Bumptop was added just a little under 1 year ago, and has since become the #1 watched video with over 1.8 million views to date.

The Microsoft Surface video (shown above) looks exactly like Bumptop, despite being a bit more polished.

Microsoft claims its idea for Surface came about in 2001, but oddly enough, no one from Microsoft, or anywhere else for that matter had mentioned this technology in the past. The idea is being played off as a 'top secret' project from Microsoft, justifying the delay in the announcement.

So was Surface dreamed up after Bumptop? Would you put it past Microsoft to copy someone else's technology, fabricate a history for it, and 1 year later release its 'future computing interface?'

The cards are on the table; you decide."
Mozilla

Submission + - Firefox 3 0.5a to be Released Tomorrow

Submitted by
dteichman2
dteichman2 writes: "According to the Firefox 3 Schedule (page down at time of writing, Google cache), the code was frozen last night and the official release announcement for Gran Paradiso alpha 5 will take place tomorrow. Of course, since the code's frozen, it's all ready to go for you bleeding-edgers (Mozilla pub FTP). At first glance, it seems relatively stable... just don't click an extension link twice."
Technology (Apple)

Submission + - Music Listening Tests: 128kbps vs. 256kbps AAC (maximumpc.com)

Submitted by notthatwillsmith
notthatwillsmith writes: Maximum PC did double-blind testing with ten listeners in order to determine whether or not normal people could discern the quality difference between the new 256kbps iTunes Plus files and the old, DRM-laden 128kbps tracks. But wait, there's more! To add an extra twist, we also tested Apple's default iPod earbuds vs. an expensive pair of Shure buds to see how much of an impact earbud quality had on the detection rate. The results were not at all what we expected.
Google

Submission + - AdSense Disabling Arbitrage Accounts by June 1st

Submitted by
shird
shird writes: "Reports of google trying to clean up its search results by cracking down on dubious Web sites that contain little content but lots of ads, sometimes known as "Made for AdSense" (MFA) sites, have been reaching the media. The Jensense blog reports "Numerous AdSense publishers have been receiving emails from Google the past couple of days stating that their use of their AdSense account is an unsuitable business model and that accounts would be disabled as of June 1st, giving publishers about two weeks notice to prepare for the loss of the AdSense accounts." Google regularly bans and rejects AdSense accounts in violation of the TOS, however this change appears to be affecting a much larger quantity of MFA sites profiting from the imbalance of AdWords costs vs AdSense profits. Currently being discussed over at WebMasterWorld."
Democrats

Submission + - Obama's Massive MySpace Martyr

Submitted by DoTheRightThingBarack
DoTheRightThingBarack writes: This is unbelievable. Obama's campaign staff has been successful is killing-off the biggest political fansite on MySpace. The fansite is going to be deleted this morning! 160,000 friends, gone! The crazy thing is, the fansite had been in support of Obama. How smart is that?! For a political candidate to kill-off their biggest fansite?!?! Have any other political campaigns been dumb enough to shoot themselves in the foot like this? (mirror link) More info is available on techPresident, Technorati, and Joe Anthony's site.
Security

IE Devs Criticize Bank Security Vulnerabilities 214

Posted by Zonk from the i-tend-to-like-that-little-lock-icon dept.
mrcaseyj writes "A post on the IE blog criticizes some banks for no longer using secure connections for entire login pages and only encrypting the password as it goes back to the bank. This prevents simple password sniffing but doesn't prevent a man in the middle attack from replacing the unsecured login page with one that has disabled encryption. This is especially a problem if you are using an unencrypted wireless connection such as at a coffee shop, because hackers can easily use the airpwn package to intercept the login page and steal your password. An easy remedy for when a secure page isn't available is to enter a bad username and password which usually brings up a secure page telling you to try again. But can you really trust your money to a bank that doesn't even offer the option of a secure login page?"
Businesses

Submission + - GPL Integration forcing Product Switch

Submitted by
g8orade
g8orade writes: "The company where I work has in the past couple of years started using BestPractical's Request Tracker (RT) to manage all kinds of internal work processes, and a few that involve clients, that we used to handle with email, and we have adopted Twiki as our internal online documentation platform.

We are a shipping services outsourcing company running a custom program built on/with Oracle internally, with some screens available to our clients and suppliers that allow them to track and perform error resolution.

Because we would like to integrate RT and Twiki's features with our internal ERP system, we are considering dropping both in favor of Atlassian's offerings, Confluence and Jira. Atlassian would sell us perpetual / development rights and we would not incur any GPL liability to our internal code. (Offering some of our ERP functions to our clients through the web is where we run into the "distribution" problem of having to make our code GPL).

I recognize this is just the GPL in action, if my company doesn't share its proprietary ERP oriented code with the world why should we have the benefits of value from Twiki and RT being delivered to our clients as part our offering?

My question to Slashdot readers is, has your company run into this issue, using a GPL product for a while, but then when you want to integrate with proprietary code that you "distribute" electing to buy a similar closed source product to avoid losing ownership of your own? What did you do?

What would happen if someone wanted to integrate Great Plains Accounting into Compiere, or SugarCRM into SAP / JD Edwards ERP?"
Windows

Vista vs. XP Game Stability and Performance 114

Posted by Zonk from the going-for-both-not-quite-getting-there dept.
boyko.at.netqos writes "HardOCP does a side-by side comparison with a battery of games to check stability and framerates in Windows XP and Windows Vista. In addition to the lowered framerates in Vista, they had stability issues in Need for Speed: Carbon and Prey. From the article: 'For some titles, especially Company of Heroes and Need for Speed, we saw dramatic framerate discrepancies. What's more, both of these titles have recently released patches! Other titles showed a slight, but essentially negligible difference, such as BF2142, World of Warcraft, and Prey. Really, there was only one instance where Vista was able to pick up a few more frames than XP — World of Warcraft at greater than 90fps, where the human eye can't even see the difference. To see this overall trend against Vista is very interesting and makes us wonder as to the cause.'"
Republicans

Submission + - 2004 vote count manipulated on GOP servers

Submitted by
hugecabbage
hugecabbage writes: "The Free Press published an interesting article stating that not only did the Republicans alter the actual Ohio vote count during the 2004 presidential election, they also controlled how the tallies of those manipulated votes were disseminated over the web, affecting media and public perception of the returns as they occurred. FTA: 'There is more than ample documentation to show that on Election Night 2004, Ohio's "official" Secretary of State website — which gave the world the presidential election results — was redirected from an Ohio government server to a group of servers that contain scores of Republican web sites, including the secret White House e-mail accounts that have emerged in the scandal surrounding Attorney General Alberto Gonzales's firing of eight federal prosecutors.'"

Feed Review: Photoshop CS3 (macworld.com)

From feed by macworldfeed
Photoshop CS3 packs refinements and additions that will please digital imagers of every kind. There's room for some interface polish here and there, but CS3 is also the most refined version of Photoshop yet.
The Internet

Submission + - succinct definition of the internet?

Submitted by magnamous
magnamous writes: Ever since Senator Ted Stevens used the phrase "series of tubes" to describe his understanding of the Internet, I've noticed several stories and comments on Slashdot referencing how silly that is, the latest one being this one. Although I agree that that description is rather silly, each time I've found myself trying to come up with a succinct layman's definition of what the Internet is, and I come up short. Wikipedia has a gargantuan page describing the Internet, and Google's definitions offer pretty good descriptions of what the Internet is in a functional sense (with some throwing in terms that the layman wouldn't understand, or take the time to understand), but not really a good description of what it "is" in the physical sense that I think Sen. Stevens was trying to get at. What are your suggestions for a succinct layman's definition of the Internet?

I know some would say that laypeople should take the time to learn the technical, more accurate meaning of what the Internet is. The problem is that they won't. We all know laypeople. I live with two of them. When you start talking about "TCP/IP" or "DNS," or if you get far enough to start describing those terms, their eyes glaze over. That's what makes them laypeople — they don't care about the subject enough to learn about it in-depth; if they did, they'd be computer enthusiasts. So please keep in mind that, in order for this discussion to be useful, "succinct" and "layman's" are essential parts to any definition of the Internet given here. Also keep in mind that "succinct" doesn't necessarily mean one sentence; a relatively short paragraph would be fine, too — the main goal is to come up with something that physically describes the Internet which laypeople actually understand.
Music

Submission + - RIAA Sultans of Spin poll final results

Submitted by
newtley
newtley writes: "Raw data from p2pnet's Sultans of Spin RIAA survey are now available online for free under a Creative Commons license 3.0. "Have the RIAA sue 'em all lawsuits persuaded you to stop sharing?" — asked one of the questions. <I>NO !!!</I>, shouted 1,013 of the 1,077 responses. Data are in a compressed zip file and can be used in an Access database. The zip also includes a Visual FoxPro version, and a text version for Excel, although the long "comment" fields will be lost when importing the data into Excel."

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