Doonga2007 - Slashdot User

Comment Good worm? I don't think so... (Score 1) 240

by Doonga2007 on Tuesday April 29, 2008 @09:40AM (#23237258) Attached to: Kraken Infiltration Revives "Friendly Worm" Debate

If you're running something on my pc without my permission, that's not a "good" worm. So don't worry about how to clean it off.. don't infect it in the first place no matter how good your intentions are.

Nimoy May Be the Star of the Next Trek Film? 248

Posted by Zonk on Friday August 31, 2007 @09:02PM from the anyone-but-shatner dept.

ajs writes "Moriarty, over on Ain't It Cool News is running a column about the upcoming J.J. Abrams Star Trek movie. In it, he discusses some theories about where the movie is going, but doesn't reveal his sources. He claims that Nimoy's Spock, not the younger versions of the original Trek trio, will be the primary star of the film; and that the movie will make some very substantial changes to the Trek lore in a way that is internally consistent with what went before, but opens up many more options for future franchise films or series. If he's right, there are some pretty substantial spoilers in the column." Obviously, as unverifiable speculation this should be taken with a grain of salt. Live long and prosper.

Lobbying Could Cause Legal Trouble for Microsoft 138

Posted by Zonk on Friday August 31, 2007 @05:00PM from the keep-it-above-board-maybe dept.

Rob Isn't Weird writes "In the wake of the exposure of Microsoft's attempt to buy Sweden's vote on OOXML and Sweden's annulment of that vote due to irregularities, IBM's Rob Weir points out that the fiasco could cause anti-trust worries for Microsoft. He quotes ALLIED TUBE & CONDUIT CORP. v. INDIAN HEAD, INC., 486 U.S. 492 (1988), which says 'What petitioner may not do (without exposing itself to possible antitrust liability for direct injuries) is bias the process by, as in this case, stacking the private standard-setting body with decision makers sharing their economic interest in restraining competition.'"

In Tests Opteron Shows Efficiency Edge Over Intel, Again 98

Posted by Zonk on Friday August 31, 2007 @04:12PM from the testy-testy dept.

Ted Samson writes "In their latest round of energy-efficiency tests between AMD Opteron and Intel Xeon, independent testing firm Neal Nelson and Associates find AMD still holds an edge, but it's certainly not cut-and-dried. Nelson put similarly equipped servers through another gauntlet of tests, swapping in different amounts of memory and varying transaction loads. In the end, he found that the more memory he installed on the servers, the better the Opteron performed compared to the Xeon. Additionally, at maximum throughput, the Intel system fared better, power-efficiency-wise, by 5.0 to 5.5 percent for calculation intensive workloads. For disk I/O intensive workloads, AMD delivered better power efficiency by 18.4 to 18.6 percent. And in idle states — that is, when servers were waiting for their next work load — AMD consistently creamed Intel."

KDE 4.0 Beta 1 Released 249

Posted by Zonk on Thursday August 02, 2007 @05:06PM from the and-they-are-just-giving-it-away-this-time dept.

dbhost writes "Along with this morning's cup of coffee and log reviews, I discovered that the KDE team is moving forward with a long awaited beta release of KDE 4.0 beta release of KDE 4.0. The most interesting item I found in the notes is that the file manager in KDE is being separated from Konqueror into a component called Dolphin. Also, according to the announcement, konsole has been treated to a number of improvements such as split view, and history highlighting."

Submission + - $500 million dollar piracy ring busted in China

Submitted by Blahbooboo3 on Tuesday July 24, 2007 @06:50PM

Blahbooboo3 writes: Reported by several news organizations, pirated software worth more than $500 million has been seized by authorities in China as part of a joint operation run by Chinese police and the FBI. Microsoft estimates that the software piracy of an international counterfeiting syndicate, over the past six years, cost the company at least $2 billion in lost software revenue. Microsoft said that key information in the investigation came from its Windows Genuine Advantage program, an antipiracy system that can check whether an OS is legit. It's generally accepted that Microsoft has done well out of software piracy: it helps products become widely used, and as the market matures, people start to pay for their software. And this has been a major factor in Windows beating Linux in China, as Bill Gates admits.

Wii Puts Japanese Television Under Pressure 98

Posted by Zonk on Monday July 23, 2007 @07:31PM from the must-not-see-teevee dept.

Knuckles writes "The Times reports that Japanese consumers have been 'abandoning television' in order to play with Nintendo's Wii. Recent figures from Japan's audience-tracking firms show that 'last week was the first in nearly two decades where no single show on any commercial station attracted more than a 9 per cent audience share ... According to one senior executive of the country's largest commercial television channel, Fuji TV, families who used to tune in to its colourful diet of soap operas, panel games and comedy variety shows may, instead, be drifting away and choosing to spend the same, economically-critical golden hour time playing on their Wii.'"

Submission + - Linspire/MS Agreement Useless to Users - Groklaw

Submitted by

Stephen Samuel

on Sunday July 22, 2007 @10:38PM

Stephen Samuel writes: "Groklaw host PJ has disected the 'patent peace' agreement between Linspire and Microsoft, and has determined that What Linspire Agreed To is next to useless for many users.

"You can't share the software with others, pass it on with the patent promise, modify your own copy, or even use it for an "unauthorized" purpose, whatever that means in a software context. You must pay Linspire for the software, but then the "covenant" says to use Linux, you must also pay Microsoft. That payment doesn't cover upgrades. Linspire said it was absorbing the initial fees, but I don't know about upgrades. New functionality means you lose your coverage or presumably must pay again."
The agreement also doesn't cover various games, 'business software', GPL V3 software, server software and various other types of software (from Linspire or elsewhere), including, "other excluded products". It also allows Microsoft to interrogate you a la their normal Window EULA. ... Oh, and Microsoft can change or drop the agreement any time they want to, so you're really only safe until Microsoft decides that they really want to sue you (at which point you will be unable to get upgrades or new software without exposing yourself to their patent claims).

See the article for full details. I'm going back to my Ubuntu system."

Submission + - RIAA Adds 23 Colleges to Hit List, Avoids Harvard

Submitted by

NewYorkCountryLawyer

on Sunday July 22, 2007 @10:37PM

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes: "The RIAA has added 23 new colleges and universities to its hit list, but omitted Harvard, apparently afraid of the reaction it's likely to get there, having been told by 2 Harvard law professors to take a hike."

Submission + - Timewarner DNS Hijacking

Submitted by

Exstatica

on Sunday July 22, 2007 @06:06PM

Exstatica writes: "It looks like Timewarner is taking botnets into their own hands. They've hijacked dns for a few irc servers. The latests being irc.vel.net, irc.mzima.net, and irc.nac.net all part of EFNet. Using ns1.sd.cox.net the lookup returns an ip for what looks to be a script that forces the user into a channel and issues a set of commands to clean the drones. There have been different reports of other irc networks being hijacked and other dns servers involved. Is this the right way to handle this? Is hijacking DNS illegal?"

Robot Unravels the Mystery of Walking 134

Posted by Zonk on Thursday July 12, 2007 @05:32PM from the ha-ha-i've-been-walking-for-years-now dept.

manchineel writes with a link to a BBC article on the lessons learned from a project in locomotive robotics. 'Runbot', as it is known, is the result of a modern technology combined with a 1930s physiology study into human locomotion. The study found that walking is largely an automatic process; we only engage our brains when we have to navigate around an obstacle or deal with rough terrain. "The basic walking steps of Runbot, which has been built by scientists co-operating across Europe, are controlled by reflex information received by peripheral sensors on the joints and feet of the robot, as well as an accelerometer which monitors the pitch of the machine. These sensors pass data on to local neural loops - the equivalent of local circuits - which analyse the information and make adjustments to the gait of the robot in real time."

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