RussH - Slashdot User

Submission + - Xamarin: "Android Ported to C#" (xamarin.com)

Submitted by

Eirenarch

on Tuesday May 01, 2012 @05:38PM

Eirenarch writes: "Xamarin has just announced that they got the Java part of Android ported to C# via machine translation. The resulting OS called XobotOS is available on Github. They claim some serious performance gains over Dalvik. For them this is an experiment that they are not planning to focus on but they will be using some of the technologies in Mono for Android."

Submission + - Venus to Appear in Once-In-A-Lifetime Event (sciencedaily.com)

Submitted by revealingheart on Tuesday May 01, 2012 @05:06PM

revealingheart writes: ScienceDaily reports that on 5 and 6 June this year, millions of people around the world will be able to see Venus pass across the face of the Sun in what will be a once-in-a-lifetime experience. It will take Venus about six hours to complete its transit, appearing as a small black dot on the Sun's surface, in an event that will not happen again until 2117.

Transits of Venus occur only on the very rare occasions when Venus and Earth are in a line with the Sun. At other times Venus passes below or above the Sun because the two orbits are at a slight angle to each other. Transits occur in pairs separated by eight years, with the gap between pairs of transits alternating between 105.5 and 121.5 years — the last transit was in 2004.

"We are fortunate in that we are truly living in a golden period of planetary transits and it is one of which I hope astronomers can take full advantage," writes Jay M Pasachoff, an astronomer at Williams College, Massachusetts.

Submission + - Microsoft's Nook Deal: The Real Story (infoworld.com)

Submitted by

GMGruman

on Tuesday May 01, 2012 @05:00PM

GMGruman writes: "Microsoft's investment in Barnes & Noble to get a toehold in the e-reader market seems both obvious and minor. But Woody Leonhard recalls that the two companies were at each other's throats a few short months ago, so what's changed? As Leonhard traces, it turns out to be a guy we all thought Microsoft essentially fired last fall."

Submission + - IBM offers retirement with job guarantee through 2013 (computerworld.com)

Submitted by dcblogs on Tuesday May 01, 2012 @04:23PM

dcblogs writes: IBM is offering employees who are nearing retirement — and may be worried about a layoff — a one-time voluntary program that would ensure their employment through Dec. 31, 2013. The program, described in a letter addressed to IBM managers, "offers participants 70% of their pay for working 60% of their schedule." Participating employees would receive "the same benefits they do today, most at a full-time level, including health benefits and 401(k) Plus Plan automatic company contributions." IBM isn't offering the program in lieu of U.S. workforce cutbacks. In 2006, IBM employed about 127,000 in U.S. The Alliance@IBM, a CWA local, now estimates the U.S. workforce at around 95,000. How far IBM will go in cutting gets debate, including one radical estimate.

Submission + - British Government Prepares For Solar Storms (techweekeurope.co.uk)

Submitted by

judgecorp

on Tuesday May 01, 2012 @03:30PM

judgecorp writes: "The British Government has announced its plans to handle solar storms. The idea is to improve the resilience of infrastructure including satellite communications — which the government says will also be useful against the future possibility of electromagnetic pulse (EMP) weapons"

Submission + - IBM dumps Siebel in favour of open-source SugarCRM (computerworlduk.com)

Submitted by sweetpea86 on Tuesday May 01, 2012 @12:13PM

sweetpea86 writes: IBM is planning to replace its Siebel based customer relationship management products with software owned by open-source software-as-a-service (SaaS) vendor SugarCRM. This is the second major contract loss for Siebel, as HP recently revealed that it too would be replacing the platform with products provided by SaaS vendor Salesforce.com. However, the changes are perhaps unsurprising given that Siebel was bought by Oracle in 2005 for £3.5 billion.

Unreal Tournament 3 For Linux Is Officially Dead 190

Posted by Soulskill on Friday December 17, 2010 @07:34AM from the snuffing-out-long-fading-hopes dept.

ndogg writes "There is no longer any uncertainty surrounding the release of Unreal Tournament 3 for Linux. It's official: the port is now dead. No reasons were given, but no one should be waiting for it anymore, if anyone still was."

KDE 4.6 Beta 1 – a First Look 224

Posted by timothy on Saturday November 27, 2010 @09:03AM from the looking-sharp dept.

dmbkiwi writes "The first beta release of KDE SC 4.6 was released yesterday. OpenSUSE had packages up almost immediately, so being curious as to what's new, I've downloaded and upgraded to the new release. These are my impressions thus far."

Submission + - Boffins devise early-warning bot spotter (theregister.co.uk)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 07, 2010 @06:55PM

An anonymous reader writes: Researchers have devised a way to easily detect internet names generated by so-called domain-fluxing botnets, a method that could provide a first-alarm system of sorts that alerts admins of infections on their networks.

Submission + - Is Telstra violating the GPL? (delimiter.com.au)

Submitted by daria42 on Sunday November 07, 2010 @06:22PM

daria42 writes: Uh oh ... looks like Australia's largest telco Telstra hasn't exactly been paying attention to its responsibilities under the GNU GPL. Australian coder Angus Gratton has been investigating the company's branded T-Hub, T-Box and T-Touch products — all based on Linux, and all without any source code or GPL license attached. Naughty. However it's not as though Telstra is the only one to blame — the goods are manufactured by Sagem, Netgem and Huawei respectively.

Submission + - Nissan to Surround its Cars With Safety Bubbles (mobilesynergetics.com)

Submitted by __aajbyc7391 on Sunday November 07, 2010 @03:56PM

__aajbyc7391 writes: In addition to pioneering the world's first mass-marketed all-electric vehicle, Nissan has been busy developing advanced safety systems that reduce the risk of accidents by wrapping a virtual safety bubble around the car (check out the videos especially the first one). Nissan's collision-avoidance technologies encompass both active and passive safety features. The vehicle's on-board intelligent safety system categorizes potential risks into different phases of driving, and activates various barriers to provide multiple layers of protection depending on the type of approaching risk. Based on risk data collected, the car provides suitable safe-driving prompts to the driver to help avoid the risk, and also offers a succession of other safety features as the risk approaches or in case a crash occurs. Gives new meaning to 'leave the driving to us,' eh?

Submission + - TV Tropes Self-Censoring under Google Pressure (tvtropes.org) 1

Submitted by

mvdwege

on Sunday November 07, 2010 @11:18AM

mvdwege writes: "The popular wiki TV Tropes, a site dedicated to the discussion of various tropes, clichés and other common devices in fiction has suddenly decided to put various of its pages behind a 'possibly family-unsafe' content warning, apparently due to pressure by Google withdrawing its ads.

What puzzles me most is the content that is put behind this warning. TV Tropes features no explicit sexual content, and no explicit violence. It does of course discuss these things, as is its remit, but without actual explicit depictions. In fact, something as relatively innocuous as children being raised by two females, whatever the reason are put behind the content warning, even if the page itself doesn't take a stand on the issue, merely satisfying itself by describing the occurence of this in fiction."

Submission + - Open source viewfinder / tablet project (kickstarter.com)

Submitted by olafura on Sunday November 07, 2010 @10:05AM

olafura writes: This is a great project to raise money towards open source hardware design for a tablet computer that would be used for a viewfinder in the Apertus project. The kickstart project has already raised 1/4 of the money in only 5 days. This could run what ever other platform we could imagine like Android, Meego, Google Chrome OS or just plain Debian.

Submission + - Hulu, NBC, and other sites block Google TV (vortex.com)

Submitted by padarjohn on Saturday November 06, 2010 @09:08PM

padarjohn writes: Imagine the protests that would ensue if Internet services arbitrarily blocked video only to Internet Explorer or Firefox browsers! Or if Hulu and the other networks decided they'd refuse to stream video to HP and Dell computers because those manufacturers hadn't made deals with the services to the latter's liking.

Take This GUI and Shove It 617

Posted by Soulskill on Monday October 04, 2010 @07:07PM from the i-ain't-clickin'-here-no-more dept.

snydeq writes "Deep End's Paul Venezia speaks out against the overemphasis on GUIs in today's admin tools, saying that GUIs are fine and necessary in many cases, but only after a complete CLI is in place, and that they cannot interfere with the use of the CLI, only complement it. Otherwise, the GUI simply makes easy things easy and hard things much harder. He writes, 'If you have to make significant, identical changes to a bunch of Linux servers, is it easier to log into them one-by-one and run through a GUI or text-menu tool, or write a quick shell script that hits each box and either makes the changes or simply pulls down a few new config files and restarts some services? And it's not just about conservation of effort — it's also about accuracy. If you write a script, you're certain that the changes made will be identical on each box. If you're doing them all by hand, you aren't.'"

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