MilenCent - Slashdot User

Comment Re:RTFS?? (Score 1) 904

by MilenCent on Monday April 13, 2009 @03:05PM (#27561039) Attached to: EFF Says Obama Warrantless Wiretap Defense Is Worse than Bush

Demonstratively false. I haven't heard anyone defend Obama for the wiretap issue.

Come to think of it, while there was a lot of love directed at Obama for a while there, I noticed no one shouting down people who disagreed with him.

Comment Re:Kill the GIL! (Score 1) 234

by MilenCent on Saturday March 28, 2009 @03:22AM (#27368437) Attached to: Project Aims For 5x Increase In Python Performance

Psyco is such a nice tool; add just a couple of lines of code, and suddenly 90% of Python programs become multiple times faster on Intel processors... assuming it's single-threaded, of course.

Psyco's been lagging a bit behind lately though, and little progress has been made on shortening that list of features it doesn't support. The main reason for this has been the developer going on to work on PyPy, a subset of Python in which a Python interpreter itself can be written. The ultimate goal appears to be another massive-speedup JIT compiler, although I'm not sure how it gets there from here.

Submission + - Windows 386 Promo Video

Submitted by

jordanlund

on Sunday January 21, 2007 @06:08AM

jordanlund writes: "Back in the late 80s I found myself selling hardware and software. Microsoft sent out a promotional video explaining the benefits of Windows 386.

A buddy of mine spared the tape from destruction and digitized it, I down sampled it to a form that could be posted online and the rest, as they say, is history.

Be warned, once you watch it you can't un-watch it. Around the 7 minute mark the production goes from stale corporate Mission Impossible knock off to something... else entirely.

Link to full video:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4915875929 930836239

Link to the 7 minute mark for the impatient:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4915875929 930836239#0h7m"

Submission + - Julie Amero Convicted by Malware

Submitted by

krasicki

on Saturday January 20, 2007 @11:08PM

krasicki writes: "Julie Amero, a substitute teacher in Norwich, CT has been convicted of a morals charge when the computer in her classroom began a cascade of porn pop-ups. This woman needs your help. Make your voices heard.

My blog is http://region19.blogspot.com./ Sunbelt Software's Alex Eckelberry is speaking out here http://www.boingboing.net/2007/01/13/teacher_faces _40_yea.html

Alternet has the most lucid piece; http://www.alternet.org/rights/46925/

This is a truly unbelievable story."

Submission + - Co-Inventor Of Electron Microscope Dies At 91

Submitted by

Arivia

on Saturday January 20, 2007 @09:35PM

Arivia writes: "James Hillier, co-inventor of the electron microscope, has died at the age of 91. He invented it with another student, Albert Prebus, at the University of Toronto in 1938."

Submission + - English Wikipedia adds nofollow

Submitted by

Althazzar

on Saturday January 20, 2007 @07:12PM

Althazzar writes: "After being hit by another surge of spam because of a new SEO contest, Wikipedia founder Jimbo Wales has ordered rel="nofollow" to be placed on all outbound links in the english part of Wikipedia to prevent SEO spam."

Submission + - Wii Opera Vulnerability

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 07, 2007 @02:42PM

An anonymous reader writes: The Wii seems to be susceptible to the same Opera SVG vulnerability as Windows and Linux as shown here. Right now it just crashes the system but hopefully this will yield a route for code execution and maybe eventually home brew software.

Submission + - Reading a DVD with VLC is illegal in France

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 07, 2007 @02:17PM

An anonymous reader writes: Starting December 31st 2006, reading a DVD protected with CSS (as most DVD are) is illegal in France when it is done with software allowing to circumvent the protection, such as VLC or mplayer which can both use the libdvdcss library. This Journal Officiel (where laws and executive orders are published) says that you may be fined 135 (around $180) for doing so. This includes watching any DVD that you have legally purchased.

How a Pulsar Gets Its Spin 63

Posted by Zonk on Friday January 05, 2007 @06:37PM from the how-the-pulsar-got-its-spin-back dept.

brian0918 writes "Until now, the assumption has been that the rapid spin of a pulsar comes from the spin of the original star. The problem was that this only explained the fastest observed pulsars. Now, researchers at Oak Ridge have shown that the spin of a pulsar is determined by the shock wave created when the star's massive iron core collapses. From the article: 'That shock wave is inherently unstable, and eventually becomes cigar-shaped instead of spherical. The instability creates two rotating flows — one in one direction directly below the shock wave and another, inner flow, that travels in the opposite direction and spins up the core. The asymmetrical flows establish a 'sloshing' motion that accounts for the pulsars' observed spin velocities from once every 15 to 300 milliseconds.'"

Submission + - The birth of vi

Submitted by

lanc

on Friday January 05, 2007 @06:00PM

lanc writes: "Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun, contributor to BSD Unix, the UltraSparc technology, NFS and even Java, tells the story in an article at TheRegister about how he wrote vi and what the motives were. In the interview he says:

"It was really hard to do because you've got to remember that I was trying to make it usable over a 300 baud modem. That's also the reason you have all these funny commands. It just barely worked to use a screen editor over a modem. It was just barely fast enough. A 1200 baud modem was an upgrade. 1200 baud now is pretty slow."

...and so my son begun The Holy Editor War."

A Case for Non-Net-Neutrality 345

Posted by Zonk on Friday January 05, 2007 @05:48PM from the i-like-my-internets-biased dept.

boyko.at.netqos writes "Network Performance Daily has an in-depth interview with Professor Christopher Yoo from Vanderbilt University Law School on his opposition to Net-Neutrality policies. While some might disagree with his opinions, he lays out the case for non-neutrality in an informed and informative manner. From the interview: 'Akamai is able to provide service with lower latency and higher quality service, because they distribute the content. This provides greater protection against DoS attacks. It's a local storage solution instead of creating additional bandwidth, and it's a really interesting solution. Here's the rub ... Akamai is a commercial service and is only available to people who are willing to pay for it. If CNN.com pays for it, and MSNBC.com does not, CNN.com will get better service.'"

Submission + - No more Fedora Core, Extras

Submitted by

netbuzz

on Friday January 05, 2007 @05:45PM

netbuzz writes: ""It's time to bite the bullet," says Red Hat engineer and Fedora Project board member Bill Nottingham. "Starting with Fedora 7, there is no more Core, and no more Extras;
there is only Fedora. One single repository, built in the community
on open source tools, assembled into whatever spins the Fedora community
desires." There are 28 new features being targeted for the release, which can be seen at http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/7/Features.

Finally, Nottingham says of Fedora 7: "Name TBD, but probably not 'Bride of Zod'."

http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2 007-January/msg00091.html"

Submission + - Nintendo Wii Remote + WowWee Robot = Hilarious!

Submitted by

robotsrule

on Friday January 05, 2007 @05:40PM

robotsrule writes: "The next version of Robosapien Dance Machine, the free open source program also known as Robodance, has support for the Nintendo Wii remote. A brand new video shows the upcoming release in action with a WowWee robot tickling Elmo. The video shows the creation of the script and how the Nintendo Wii remote smoothly interacts with the script. Also demonstrated is the use of voice commands to control a Roboreptile robot. Robodance requires a Windows PC and a supported infrared transmitter. It won the SourceForge Project Of The Month award for May 2005. The new version is expected to be released on February 1, 2007, or sooner."

Submission + - IBM Pimps PS3 as Cheap Cell Workstation

Submitted by Borland on Friday January 05, 2007 @05:20PM

Borland writes: IBM has a pretty nice how-to article on using the PS3 as a cheap Cell development workstation. This first article in the series goes over broad technical details & limitations, installation using Yellow Dog Linux, and ends with a brief mathematical "Hello World" program using the SPEs.

Deleting Online Predators Act - R.I.P. 132

Posted by Zonk on Friday January 05, 2007 @05:03PM from the myspace-just-a-little-bit-safer dept.

elearning 2.0 writes "It looks like the Deleting Online Predators Act (DOPA) has died a slow death. DOPA was proposed during the height of last year's moral panic around the issue of child safety and sites like MySpace. The legislation would have banned the use of commercial social networking websites in US schools and libraries which receive federal IT funding — therefore undermining much of the pioneering work being done by educators in the e-learning 2.0 space."

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