Submission + - GIMP Abandons SourceForge. Distributes via FTP Instead (gimp.org)

Submitted by Dangerous_Minds on Wednesday November 06, 2013 @08:00PM

Dangerous_Minds writes: GIMP, a free and open source altenernative to image manipulation software like Photoshop, recently announced that it will no longer be distributing their program through SourceForge. Citing some of the ads as reasons, they say that the tipping point was "the introduction of their own SourceForge Installer software, which bundles third-party offers with Free Software packages. We do not want to support this kind of behavior, and have thus decided to abandon SourceForge." The policy changes were reported back in August by Gluster. GIMP is now distributing their software via their own FTP page instead. Is Sourceforge becoming the next CNET?

Submission + - What Apple Does and Doesn't Know About You (vice.com)

Submitted by Daniel_Stuckey on Wednesday November 06, 2013 @06:52PM

Daniel_Stuckey writes: Tucked inside Apple's first-ever transparency report, published yesterday, was a not-so-subtle dig at the tech giant's competitors. "Our business does not depend on collecting personal data," Apple wrote. "We have no interest in amassing personal information about our customers." It's no secret that for social web companies like Google or Facebook, collecting, storing, and analyzing data about every aspect of your life translates into cold, hard cash—the more sensitive and personal, the better. But in the emerging post-NSA new world order, the unwritten privacy-for-cool services agreement that drives the internet ecosystem is making netizens increasingly uneasy.

Submission + - Chelyabinsk-sized asteroid impacts may be more common than we thought

Submitted by The Bad Astronomer on Wednesday November 06, 2013 @02:57PM

The Bad Astronomer writes: Using data from the Feb. 15, 2013 asteroid impact over Russia, scientists have determined that we may be hit by objects in this size range (10 — 50 meters across) more often than we previously thought, something like once every 20 years. They also found the Chelyabinsk asteroid was likely a single rock about 19 meters (60 feet) across, had a mass of 12,000 tons, and was criss-crossed with internal fractures which aided in its breakup as it rammed through the Earth's atmosphere.

Submission + - blekko donates search data to Comomn Crawl (blekko.com)

Submitted by Greg Lindahl on Tuesday December 18, 2012 @02:39PM

Greg Lindahl writes: blekko is donating search engine ranking data for 140 million domains and 22 billion urls to the Common Crawl Foundation. Common Crawl is a non-profit dedicated to making the greatest (yet messiest) dataset of our time, the web, available to everyone, including tinkerers, hackers, activists, and new companies. blekko's ranking data will initially be used to improve the quality of Common Crawl's 8 billion webpage public crawl of the web, and eventually will be directly available to the public.

Comment blekko has its own index (Score 1) 315

by Greg Lindahl on Wednesday December 21, 2011 @03:29PM (#38451870) Attached to: Senators Recommend FTC Perform Antitrust Investigation Of Google

https://blekko.com/ is an example of a competitor which has its own index.

Comment Re:Java has its uses (Score 1) 187

by Greg Lindahl on Sunday May 15, 2011 @02:53AM (#36131700) Attached to: Perl 5.14 Released

Perl has some nifty frameworks that can make you as productive as PHP for small web projects, and it also does large projects well.

But hey, if you're comfortable with PHP and Java, and want to pay to have your app completely rewritten, then more power to you.

Comment Re:Perl - the COBOL of scripting languages (Score 1) 187

by Greg Lindahl on Sunday May 15, 2011 @02:13AM (#36131550) Attached to: Perl 5.14 Released

New startups using perl, courtesy of Quora:

blekko
nabbr
selectablemedia.com
goba.mobi
socialflow.com
duckduckgo

Big companies writing lots of new perl, also courtesy of Quora:

Lokku (makers of Nestoria), BBC, LJ, IMDB, Salon.com, Typepad, Zappos, Craigslist, FriendFinder, Ticketmaster, Slashdot

I think you're really confused about the role Larry plays in the community. He's slowly creating a new language, which has little to do with perl 5. Perl 5 is actively maintained and has a large community of users.

Comment Re:Perl - the COBOL of scripting languages (Score 3, Interesting) 187

by Greg Lindahl on Sunday May 15, 2011 @02:02AM (#36131484) Attached to: Perl 5.14 Released

The new search engine blekko is written in perl - wrote our own NoSQL database in it, too. We found CPAN to be an awesome resource; we use 600 distros from CPAN, and only found a couple of bugs in them.

It's Java that's the new COBOL. (buh dum, ching!)

Comment Re:Yeah, now try hiring for it. (Score 1) 99

by Greg Lindahl on Saturday December 25, 2010 @05:32AM (#34664720) Attached to: 23 Years of Culture Hacking With Perl

Blekko's search engine and NoSQL database are written in Perl. We haven't had problems hiring experienced, smart Perl people, and we've also had no trouble getting experienced Python people to learn Perl.

Comment Re:Unneeded? (Score 2, Interesting) 133

by Greg Lindahl on Monday November 01, 2010 @01:09PM (#34091364) Attached to: Blekko Launches a Search Engine With Bias

How about searching for

industrial design colleges

On google, no actual colleges. On Blekko, it auto-slashtags it to industrial design /colleges, and 100% of the results are colleges.

Submission + - 2009 Darwin Award Winners announced (darwinawards.com)

Submitted by Greg Lindahl on Sunday January 03, 2010 @09:17PM

Greg Lindahl writes: From the woman who jumped in a swollen creek to rescue her drowning ... moped, to the man who hopped over the divider at the edge of the highway to take a leak, and plunged 65 feet to his death, 2009 was a year both exceptional and unexceptional for Darwin Award-worthy behavior!

Comment Google Groups paved the way (Score 1) 125

by Greg Lindahl on Monday September 14, 2009 @11:20PM (#29422145) Attached to: Google Wants To Ease News Browsing With Fast Flip

Years after producing a crappy UI for Google Groups, which was worse than the threaded text-based readers most people read Usenet with, Google finally gets a clue? Say it isn't so!

Comment Headline more accurate than article?! (Score 4, Funny) 633

by Greg Lindahl on Saturday April 18, 2009 @07:02PM (#27631097) Attached to: Antarctic Ice Is Growing, Not Melting Away, At Davis Station

This must be a first.

Submission + - Microsoft settlement funds free FOSS computers (archive.org)

Submitted by

christian.einfeldt

on Wednesday October 10, 2007 @12:25AM

christian.einfeldt writes: "The State of California sued Microsoft for Anti-trust violations, and now the proceeds of the settlement of that case are being used to fund the acquisition of computers for any school district in California. The terms of the settlement allow every school district in California to be reimbursed a set dollar amount for the purchase of computers with the software of their choice. It is clear from the way that the settlement was structured that Microsoft anticipated that school districts would mainly use the settlement to fund the acquisition of more Microsoft products, with a few Apple purchases sprinkled in here and there. But now that Free Open Source Software is being commercialized by hardware vendors such as Dell, System76, EmperorLinux, Zareason.com, and TechCollective.com, acquiring computers powered by Free Open Source Software is straightforward. In his Slashdot journal, Christian Einfeldt, a volunteer sys admin at a northern California public charter school details the step-by-step process for using Microsoft's money to pay for the Linux purchases of your school's choice."

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