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Comment Re:This is where Nokia missed the boat (Score 1) 129

by Bart Coppens (#35025484) Attached to: Android 3.0 Platform Preview and SDK Is Here
I don't know if the community actually has/had the opportunity to do all the required changes to the N900 even if they wanted to. For example, until PR1.2 which came out in Spring 2010, I couldn't even reload the credit on my phone's SIM because the N900's phone application (or modem stack) didn't bother to implement the required USSD support. The only thing the community *could* do was what it did: release a crappy homescreen applet that might or might not work. (I just swapped my SIM card into my old 20€ cellphone for which the N900 was a replacement...) Couldn't actually change the phone/modem software, because there's no source for it to edit. At least that's how I understood it, and which I found to be quite pathetic. (Which I think is such a shame, it could've been such a nice platform, and it mostly, but not quite, is too)

Comment Re:Hmm (Score 2, Interesting) 89

by Bart Coppens (#28325795) Attached to: 47th Mersenne Prime Confirmed
Actually, you can apparently use larger Mersenne Primes to improve results in totally different but very useful fields, like privacy-related schemes. For example, this paper http://eccc.hpi-web.de/eccc-reports/2006/TR06-127/index.html uses large Mersenne primes to get interesting results on Locally Decodable Codes and Private Information Retrieval Schemes...
Businesses

Viacom Wants Industry Wide Copyright Filter 248

Posted by Zonk from the putting-a-lid-on-free-speech dept.
slashqwerty writes "Unsatisfied with the proprietary copyright filter Google recently unveiled, Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman has called for an industry standard to filter copyrighted material. Mr. Dauman has the backing of Microsoft, Disney, and Universal. 'They reflect the fact that there ought to be a filtering system in place on the part of technology companies,' he noted. 'Most responsible companies have followed that path. What no one wants is a proprietary system that benefits one company. It is a big drain to a company like ours to have to deal with incompatible systems.' How would an industry standard impact freedom of speech and in particular censorship on the internet? How would it affect small, independent web sites?"
The Courts

Provider of Free Public Domain Music Shuts Down 242

Posted by Zonk from the why-do-people-hate-the-word-free-so-much dept.
Mark Rogers writes "The International Music Score Library Project has provided access to copies of many musical scores that are in the public domain. It has just been shut down due to a cease-and-desist letter sent to the site operator by a European Union music publisher (Universal Edition). A majority of the scores recently available at IMSLP were in the public domain worldwide. Other scores were not in the public domain in the United States or the EU (where copyright extends for 70 years after the composer's death), but were legal in Canada (where the site is hosted) and many other countries. The site's maintainers clearly labeled the copyright status of such scores and warned users to follow their respective country's copyright law. Apparently this wasn't enough for Universal Edition, who found it necessary to protect the interests of their (long-dead) composers and shut down a site that has proved useful to many students, professors, and other musicians worldwide."

Comment Re:Non-issue (Score 3, Informative) 239

by Bart Coppens (#20803941) Attached to: A Case Study In GPLv2 / GPLv3 Compatibility
Actually, the problem lies not with KDE. The core KDE Libraries are actually LGPL (parts even use some BSD license), which should be pretty compatible with the GPLv3. Just like many KDE programs are actually GPLv2+. The 'problem' is that as of yet, Qt has been licensed under GPLv2 only (and slightly more, they allow linking with a selection of other free software licenses as well, as far as I know). Which in turn makes all KDE applications linking with Qt GPLv2 at run-time. The obvious reason would be that Trolltech just does not really like giving the FSF full controll over their Qt software through their ability to modify future versions of the GPL at will.
Programming

Submission + - Intel updates compilers for multicore CPUs (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Threaded
Threaded writes: With multicore CPUs becoming the norm, Intel has announced major updates to its C++ and Fortran tools. The new compilers are Intel's first that are capable of doing thread-level optimization and auto-vectorization simultaneiously in a single pass. 'On the data parallelism side, the Intel C++ Compiler and Fortran Professional Editions both sport improved auto-vectorization features that can target Intel's new SSE4 extensions. For thread-level parallelism, the compilers support the use of Intel's Thread Building Blocks for automatic thread-level optimization that takes place simultaneously with auto-vectorization... Intel is encouraging the widespread use of its Intel Threading Tools as an interface to its multicore processors. As the company raises the core count with each generation of new products, it will get harder and harder for programmers to manage the complexity associated with all of that available parallelism. So the Thread Building Blocks are Intel's attempt to insert a stable layer of abstraction between the programmer and the processor so that code scales less painfully with the number of cores.'

Feed Understanding What Causes Rain (sciencedaily.com)

From feed by sdfeed
Weather models are not good at predicting rain. Particularly in hilly terrain, this can lead to great damage arising from late warnings of floods, or even none at all. From June 1 to September 1, 2007, Delft University of Technology is participating in a major international experiment in Germany's Black Forest, to learn more about what causes rain. Aircraft and an airship are to be used alongside ground-based observatories and satellites.
Mozilla

Looking Into Mozilla's Financial Success 129

Posted by CmdrTaco from the take-a-piece-of-that-action dept.
NewsCloud writes "'Thanks to the Google agreement, the Mozilla Foundation went from revenue of nearly $6 million in 2004 to more than $52 million the next year [similar revenue is expected in 2006]...In 2005, the foundation created a subsidiary, the for-profit Mozilla Corporation,...mainly to deal with the tax and other issues related to the Google contract...By creating a corporation to run the Firefox project, Mozilla was committing to be less transparent. In part, that is because Google insists on the secrecy of "its arrangement and agreements," said board member Mitch Kapor.' The NYT article compares this approach to Wikipedia's ongoing fundraisers and raises the issue of transparency in open source projects. i.e. should Firefox's 1,000 to 2,000 developers and 80,000 evangelists have full knowledge of how revenue is spent as well as the extent to which Google is able to influence strategy vs. other stakeholders."

Feed 307-Digit Number Factored (schneier.com)

From feed by bsfeed
We have a new factoring record: 307 digits. It's a special number, but the techniques can be generalized: Is the writing on the wall for 1024-bit encryption" "The answer to that question is an unqualified yes," says Lenstra. For the...

Comment GNU/Linux is still usefull after lockdown. (Score 2, Informative) 505

by XTerm89D (#4905367) Attached to: Aussie Uni Dumps Dual-Boot In Favor of Linux
That's the difference between a secured Unix system and a 'Windows policy editor lockdowned' system.

In windows you just have to close down all ways to do nasty things. End result : undestroyable but also completely useless pc. Nobody can do anything on it.

With a Unix system, students can't mess around anything BUT they can do whatever they want in their personal enviroment and a Unix box is still a usefull tool without root access.

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