DrDNA - Slashdot User

Comment Re:Weird (Score 1) 316

by DrDNA on Wednesday October 01, 2008 @03:33PM (#25223469) Attached to: AIDS Virus Now Estimated To Be 100 Years Old

What they mean when they say the AIDS virus is 100 years old is that it was transmitted from apes (chimpanzees) to humans 100 years ago. The chimpanzee virus it came from is called SIV-cpz. It, in turn, evolved from other, related viruses. So it didn't just form out of whole cloth. It evolved from something related.

DOJ Opposes Extending DOJ Copyright Authority 141

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday September 25, 2008 @07:57AM from the not-our-problem dept.

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "The White House has opposed the bipartisan bill that would create copyright cops on the grounds that it would cause the Department of Justice to end up 'serving as pro bono lawyers for private copyright holders.' And while they do occasionally prosecute criminal copyright infringement, they have no intention of dabbling with civil cases because, 'taxpayer-supported department lawyers would pursue lawsuits for copyright holders, with monetary recovery going to industry.' At this rate, the discovery of winged suiformes would appear to be imminent."

Senate Judiciary Committee Approves Copyright Cops 483

Posted by kdawson on Friday September 12, 2008 @08:54AM from the keystone-of-the-law dept.

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "The Senate Judiciary Committee has approved the EIPA (the Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights Act of 2008), which would create copyright cops. And these cops would take over the RIAA's War on Sharing by filing civil lawsuits and using civil forfeiture laws to take any and all computers engaged in infringement. Worse, they would even seize computers (such as servers or database farms) that house the data of innocent people, and these people would not have any right to get their data back. At best the 'virtual bystanders' who happened to have data on a computer used for infringement could get a protective order saying that no one should go rummaging through their stuff. Perhaps the only good thing in the bill is that they've excluded DMCA circumvention from the list of grounds for seizure. So while the Senators believe this is needed to combat foreign copyright infringement cartels, it's entirely likely that innocent people will be harmed by this law."

Microsoft Concedes Vista Launch Problems 594

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday September 10, 2008 @09:48PM from the who's-to-blame dept.

notdagreatbrain writes "Maximum PC just posted a lengthy feature looking back at the myriad problems that went into Microsoft's 6 billion dollar failure of the Vista launch. Aside from running benchmarks comparing Vista at launch how its performing now, they also found a Microsoft exec who was willing to speak frankly about Vista. The Microsoft source blamed bad drivers from GPU companies and printer companies for the majority of Vista's early stability problems and described User Account Control as poorly implemented but defended it as necessary for the continued health of the Windows platform. He assailed OEM system builders for including bad, buggy, or just plain useless apps on their machines in exchange for a few bucks on the back end. Finally he conceded that Apple appeals to more and more consumers because the hardware is slick, the price is OK, and Apple doesn't annoy its customers (or allow third parties to)."

Why Is the Internet So Infuriatingly Slow? 812

Posted by timothy on Sunday September 07, 2008 @07:32AM from the because-of-slate dept.

Anti-Globalism writes "The major ISPs all tell a similar story: A mere 5 percent of their customers are using around 50 percent of the bandwidth, sometimes more, during peak hours. While these 'power users' are sharing three-gig movies and playing online games, poor granny is twiddling her thumbs waiting for Ancestry.com to load."

Next Generation SSDs Delayed Due To Vista 600

Posted by kdawson on Wednesday July 23, 2008 @02:42AM from the favorite-whipping-boy dept.

PoliTech notes in a journal entry that "Vista is the gift that just keeps on giving." "Speaking during SanDisk's second-quarter earnings conference call, Chairman and [CEO] Eli Harari said that Windows Vista will present a special challenge for solid state drive makers. 'As soon as you get into Vista applications in notebook and desktop, you start running into very demanding applications because Vista is not optimized for flash memory solid state disk,' he said... 'The next generation controllers need to basically compensate for Vista shortfalls,' he said. 'Unfortunately, (SSDs) performance in the Vista environment falls short of what the market really needs and that is why we need to develop the next generation, which we'll start sampling end of this year, early next year.' Harari said this challenge alone is putting SanDisk behind schedule. "We have very good internal controller technology... That said, I'd say that we are now behind because we did not fully understand, frankly, the limitations in the Vista environment.'"

Is Anyone Using the Google Web Toolkit? 470

Posted by kdawson on Wednesday July 23, 2008 @12:52AM from the seemed-like-a-good-idea dept.

eldavojohn writes "After seeing some applications from Google and participating in the Google Codejam (which seems to be built using the GWT), I kind of expected to see websites spring up left and right based off the GWT. Well, it's been a year and a half since they open sourced it and I have to admit that I am more than a little disappointed by its low profile in the UI community. I've been trolling their blog and have seen a few books out on it. But the one thing I'm not seeing is its use outside of Google. I've worked through the examples and tutorials at home and though I've been impressed with the speed, I am disturbed by the actual result — a whole ton of generated Javascript. But this is the first UI technology I've found where I can write in the native language of the server (Java) to generate and unit-test the UI code. Aside from Google's use and the games of Ryan Dewsbury like KDice & GPokr, does anyone know of major sites using the GWT? If you don't and you've used it yourself, why isn't it taking off? Is it too immature? Is it a solution to a problem that already has too many solutions? Is it fundamentally lacking in some way?"

Slashdot Top Deals