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Red Hat Software

Alan Cox Leaves Red Hat 163

Posted by CmdrTaco from the bet-wherever-he's-going-he'll-have-electricity-and-heat dept.
ruphus13 writes "Alan Cox — one of the lead Linux kernel developers at Red Hat — is leaving the company after 10 years and is heading to Intel, where he can focus on more low-level development tasks. Some are speculating whether this is indicative of a shift to a more 'application-centric' vision at Red Hat. From the article: 'Red Hat is integrating more application related, user- and enterprise-centric tools into its well-established "low-level," "core" development and support tools. It'd be more worrisome if Red Hat neglected to strike out in this direction. Cox was with Red Hat for ten years, and regardless of any suspected change of course within the company, that's a fair amount of time.'"
The Internet

Fairpoint Pledges To Violate Net Neutrality 249

Posted by timothy from the we'll-read-it-to-you-over-the-phone dept.
wytcld writes "Fairpoint Communications, which has taken over Verizon's landline business in Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont, has announced that on February 6, 'AOL, Yahoo! and MSN subscribers will continue to have access to content but will no longer be able to access their e-mail through the third-party Web site. Instead, Yahoo! and other third-party e-mail will be accessed directly at the MyFairPoint.net portal.' Since Verizon spun off its lines to Fairpoint in a maneuver that got debt off of Verizon's balance sheets by saddling Fairpoint with it, there was concern by the public service boards of the three states about how Fairpoint would deal with that debt. Fairpoint's profit plan: force all Webmail users through Fairpoint's portal, by blocking all direct access to Webmail portals other than its own. Will Fairpoint's own search engine portal be next? What can stop them?"
Games

Is the Gaming PC Dead? 417

Posted by Soulskill from the no-way-dude-check-out-my-$8000-alienware dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Rahul Sood, HP's CTO of gaming, argues that the days of a market that wants PCs running three $500 GPUs is history; he argues that it's really a tough or impossible sell. '... let's face it, high-end hardware has delivered diminishing returns in terms of value. This is why you don't see ridiculous offerings like Quad SLI and 2-kilowatt power supplies coming from our company.' But don't the ideas of customization and market pricing for components tend to undercut that? Is the gaming PC dead?"
Encryption

NIST Announces Round 1 Candidates For SHA-3 Competition 125

Posted by Soulskill from the time-to-pick-them-apart dept.
jd writes "NIST has announced the round 1 candidates for the Cryptographic Hash Algorithm Challenge. Of the 64 who submitted entries, 51 were accepted. Of those, in mere days, one has been definitely broken, and three others are believed to have been. At this rate, it won't take the couple of years NIST was reckoning to whittle down the field to just one or two. (In comparison, the European Union version, NESSIE, received just one cryptographic hash function for its contest. One has to wonder if NIST and the crypto experts are so concerned about being overwhelmed with work for this current contest, why they all but ignored the European effort. A self-inflicted wound might hurt, but it's still self-inflicted.) Popular wisdom has it that no product will have any support for any of these algorithms for years — if ever. Of course, popular wisdom is ignoring all Open Source projects that support cryptography (including the Linux kernel) which could add support for any of these tomorrow. Does it really matter if the algorithm is found to be flawed later on, if most of these packages support algorithms known to be flawed today? Wouldn't it just be geekier to have passwords in Blue Midnight Wish or SANDstorm rather than boring old MD5, even if it makes no practical difference whatsoever?"
Programming

Submission + - How to put out Open Source development ?

Submitted by
John Smith
John Smith writes: "I recently won some serious money in a lottery, and am now considering to put it to use by privately buying the development of an open source application. Since I have no programming skills at all, my only option here is to hire a company or individuals to develop the program for me. The thing that I would most be interested in, is the development of additional OpenOffice applications, like the equivalents of Microsoft Project, Microsoft Visio, and Intuit Quicken. However, I have no idea how to approach this, how to specify requirements, do code reviews, what prices to expect, and how to make sure that the end result gets integrated into the openoffice codebase. I was hoping that the Slashdot community could point me into the right direction ?"
Government

California Sec. of State Wants Open Source E-Voting Systems 112

Posted by Soulskill from the nowhere-to-go-but-up dept.
Lucas123 writes "California's Secretary of State, Debra Bowen, was among a group of e-voting experts at MIT yesterday who said the nation's electronic voting systems are still not secure and many run on faulty software. Among the suggestions offered to fix the problem: use open source software, stop delivering e-voting machines to polling places weeks in advance of an election, and keep a paper trail for auditing purposes. Bowen also believes that a ubiquitous Internet voting system could not work without the use of a national ID card system."
Software

Submission + - Specialized software for Historians ?

Submitted by lbalbalba
lbalbalba writes: I was considering to make an attempt to document (some parts of) world history, and was wondering what kind of software would be the most suitable for such a task. I'm assuming it would need at least features like timeline's with the option to mark significant historical areas or occurrences, document some genealogy, and list biographies of important historian figures. But even issues like economics, sociology, politics, psychology, anthropology, philosophy and linguistics come into play when dealing with historiography, as does the ability to include or reference sources. So far, I have been unable to find any software (open source or otherwise) that would be suitable for such a task. Also, this got me wondering about the existence of any kind of specialized software that is used by actual historians ?
Books

Submission + - Comics artist Mike Wieringo deceased

Submitted by lbalbalba
lbalbalba writes: Mike Wieringo, a well known comic books artist who's career includes work for renowned publishers such as Marvel and DC Comics, providing the drawings for well-known comic book characters such as Spider-Man, Superman, and the Fantastic Four, suffered a fatal heart attack on Sunday August 12th, passing away at the age of 44 [1963-2007].

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