LarsG - Slashdot User

Submission + - SFWA goes Viacom on Scribd. 1

Submitted by LarsG on Friday August 31, 2007 @11:13AM

LarsG writes: After the 'webscabs' debacle, one would think that Science Writers and Fantasy Writers from America (SFWA) would be a bit more careful in the future. But no such luck. On behalf of their members they've send DMCA takedown notices to Scribd. And as was the case with Viacom/YouTube DMCA dragnet'ing, they managed to send notices take down stuff they shouldn't have. The list was apparently compiled by a simple grep for "Asimov" and "Silverberg". Here's Doctorow's take on the situation

Submission + - Intel reveals single-thread acceleration

Submitted by

SlinkySausage

on Monday April 16, 2007 @04:30AM

SlinkySausage writes: "Even though Intel is probably the industry's biggest proponent of multi-core computing and threaded programming, it today announced a single thread acceleration technology at IDF Beijing. Mobility chief Mooly Eden revealed a type of single-core overclocking built in to its upcoming Santa Rosa platform. It seems like a tacit admission from Intel that multi-threaded apps haven't caught up with the availability of multi-core CPUs. Intel also foreshadowed a major announcement tomorrow around Universal Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) — the replacement for BIOS that has so far only been used in Intel Macs. "We have been working with Microsoft," Intel hinted."

Submission + - How single-pixel camera work

Submitted by S3D on Monday April 16, 2007 @02:52AM

S3D writes: Terence Tao explain in his blog how single-pixel camera work. The explanation is long and detailed. The central idea is to use analog of hash function to distinguish dominantwavelets of the image.

"Market Share" "Installed Base" and Consumer Electronics 264

Posted by CmdrTaco on Sunday March 18, 2007 @10:12AM from the something-to-think-about dept.

redrum writes "Analysts and reporters like to talk about market share statistics, but the conclusions they draw are often misleading, RDM reports. Market Share Myth 2007: iPod vs Zune and Mac vs PC takes a look at how numbers are used to paint grossly inaccurate portrayals of the market share of the Zune among iPods, and alternatively the Mac among PCs. A follow up article, Market Share vs Installed Base: iPod vs Zune, Mac vs PC demonstrates how the conventional wisdom of market share reporting can be turned upside down by simply comparing what vendors actually sell. An eye opening, in depth look at the real numbers behind PCs, music players, and console games."

Submission + - Number 10 responds to Software Patents Petition

Submitted by jdh41 on Tuesday February 27, 2007 @05:05AM

jdh41 writes: The Prime Minister's Office has responded to the 2,215 signature petition to make software patents clearly unenforceable. It seems to be a positive response, hiding a do nothing action plan.

Submission + - British government confirms software unpatentable

Submitted by

oneandoneis2

on Tuesday February 27, 2007 @04:57AM

oneandoneis2 writes: "In response to a request on the British government's e-petition website, which asked for the government to make it clear that software patents were not enforceable in this country, a statement has now been issued that does just that:

"The Government remains committed to its policy that no patents should exist for inventions which make advances lying solely in the field of software."
"

Avoiding the Word "Evolution" 895

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday February 27, 2007 @04:45AM from the can't-say-that-wait-two-years dept.

jakosc tips us to a disturbing article in PloS Biology on the avoidance of the word "Evolution" in scientific papers and grants. From the paper: "In spite of the importance of antimicrobial resistance, we show that the actual word 'evolution' is rarely used in the papers describing this research. Instead, antimicrobial resistance is said to 'emerge,' 'arise,' or 'spread' rather than 'evolve.' Moreover, we show that the failure to use the word 'evolution' by the scientific community may have a direct impact on the public perception of the importance of evolutionary biology in our everyday lives... It has been repeatedly rumored (and reiterated by one of the reviewers of this article) that both the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation have in the past actively discouraged the use of the word 'evolution' in titles or abstracts of proposals so as to avoid controversy."

Submission + - New KDE 4 preview shows progress

Submitted by Verunks on Tuesday February 27, 2007 @04:27AM

Verunks writes: On Friday, the KDE Project released the third in a series of development previews for the upcoming KDE 4.0 release. Dubbed "Kludge," the 3.80.3 release includes the Sonnet language library, the new Dolphin file manager, and the Solid hardware library. Linux.com has done an overview of this new KDE 4 preview.

Submission + - Rainbow Tables for Download - Free!

Submitted by

Tristan Gamilis

on Tuesday February 27, 2007 @04:13AM

Tristan Gamilis writes: "Rainbow Tables are well and good, but for those of us with single cores and less than 10 years to sit and wait for them to generate, they are more than a little beyond reach.

Enter Free Rainbow Tables.com
Nearing their first Terabyte of tables, and all for free — No strings attached.

The tables are generated by their community using DistrRTgen, a distributed Rainbow Tables Generator. Breaking tables down into parts, the program then assigns the parts to the many users running the DistrRTgen client. The parts are completed and uploaded back to the server where they are compiled, compressed, and made available for download to anyone and everyone with a hash that needs cracking.

Progress can be followed, as well as User Stats.

The site is currently focusing on NTLM tables to give Windows Vista a warm welcome!"

Submission + - SCOX Goes Sub-Dollar

Submitted by

GreyPoopon

on Friday December 08, 2006 @04:40PM

GreyPoopon writes: "It appears that things are about the get very interesting for SCO Group. With less than thirty minutes left in trading, SCOX appears set to close below the one-dollar mark for the first time. This is no big surprise after last Friday's devastation, but it's a great way to end the week. The question is, if SCO gets delisted by NASDAQ, what happens with the court case?"

Submission + - Got Earthlink? Got Mail? No, They Lost it.

Submitted by

LandGator

on Friday December 08, 2006 @05:37AM

LandGator writes: "Robert X. Cringely, doyen compu-columnist for PBS, reports on a hidden e-mail problem at Earthlink: They're losing up to 9 messages out of 10, found as a result of a friend's testing.

He sent messages from other accounts to his Earthlink address, to his aliased Blackberry address, and to his Gmail account. For every 10 messages sent, 1-2 arrived in his Earthlink mailbox, 1-2 (not necessarily the SAME 1-2) on his Blackberry, and all 10 arrived with Gmail.
Swimming upstream through Earthlink customer support, my buddy finally found a technical contact who freely acknowledged the problem. Since June, he was told, Earthlink's mail system has been so overloaded that some users have been missing up to 90 percent of their incoming e-mail. It isn't bounced back to senders; it just disappears. And Earthlink hasn't mentioned the problem to these affected customers unless they complain. (Emphasis mine.)

Gee, you don't suppose they expect we actually want the e-mail service we paid for, eh?"

Submission + - DNS All Over the Place

Submitted by

Juha Holkkola

on Friday December 08, 2006 @04:53AM

Juha Holkkola writes: "On November 15, SANS published 2006 annual update of the Top-20 Internet Security Attack Targets (www.sans.org/top20/). Each year, some of the most security conscious organizations all over the world help SANS in compiling this list based on severe vulnerabilities that have been discovered during the last 12 months or so. If any network service or product that has made this list has been more or less safe for more than 12 months, it gets dropped out. What strikes me the most with SANS's Top-20 is that DNS and BIND have made the list every single year since SANS started publishing it in 2000. That's every year for seven years now. And so, one would imagine that the networking community would finally like to do something to address the associated security problems, DNS being one of the most critical TCP/IP services and all. As some information security experts have recently pointed out, network administrators often shun away from interfering DNS as that could potentially have dire implications on functioning networks. I guess what they mean by this is that as DNS is one of the few applications that dates back to the pre-firewall-era of Internet, managing and securing DNS is like having a pet dinosaur. It's really not that cute and you'd really prefer not to touch it at all. Pet talk aside, perhaps the time has come to take the bull by the horns? While DNS and plain BIND may be somewhat cumbersome to secure and to manage, there are also more advanced options out there that make protecting and managing DNS servers a walk in the park."

Submission + - UK Copyright fight intensifies

Submitted by tnmc on Friday December 08, 2006 @04:38AM

tnmc writes: Ok, it's The Sun (a Rupert Murdoch tabloid), but the article is unbelievable: http://www.thesun.co.uk/article/0,,2-2006560780,00 .html "TOP musicians this week joined forces in a bid to tighten copyright law. They want to extend the legal protection on songs they have recorded. This copyright is currently just 50 years and allows them to receive royalties whenever their song is played. Once it's out of copyright — as will soon happen to early songs by the likes of The Beatles and Rolling Stones — they get nothing. And crime gangs could then churn out low-quality copies of Cliff Richard recordings to fund other activities, such as drug-running."

Submission + - TVTome Replacement Up and Running.

Submitted by

Mara Wadens

on Friday December 08, 2006 @02:07AM

Mara Wadens writes: "Remember good ol' TVTome.com? It used to be a great site, and the number one source for tv info online- mostly due to the fact that their was no competition (no counting epguides, which was basically a sister site). In 2005, TVTome was bought out by C|Net, and got a whole new look, and even a new URL. This left many users abandoned, not being able to switch all their info and hardwork to the new site. Many members left, furious with the changes C|Net made. One member decided to make his own site- TVRage.com. "Rage" being the anger former TVTome members felt towards C|Net. Word spread, and many members from TVTome made the switch to the newer site, and added their work they contributed, and hastily contributed information. One year after all this, TVRage has become what TVTome was in it's 3rd or 4th year. With a bright future a head, TVRage proves to a simpler, faster, and more convenient alternative to the slow, and sometimes buggy TV.com."

Sony Adds PS3 Support to Linux Kernel 181

Posted by Zonk on Thursday December 07, 2006 @07:47PM from the tux-i-want-you-to-meet-your-new-friend dept.

mu22le writes "A few Sony patches to the Linux kernel have just been merged in the mainline tree, to be included in the 2.6.20 release. The patches add 'core platform support for the PS3 game console and other devices using the PS3 hypervisor.'" From the Linux Devices article: "Linux gained generic support for the Cell processor, on which the PS3 is based, with the 2.6.13 release in June of 2005. The new Sony-contributed patches to the 2.6.20 kernel appear to add machine-specific support for technology such as the PS3's memory architecture, DMA (direct memory access) model, and SMP (symmetric multiprocessing) model. A Yellow Dog Linux (YDL) distribution has been available for the PS3 since October, thanks to a development deal between Sony and YDL publisher TerraSoft. However, YDL so far has not been bundled with early PS3 shipments, despite earlier indications from Sony Entertainment's CEO, Ken Kuturagi."

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